There are those who believe that one should never have \u201cwomen-only\u201d lists of anything and that even the venerable BBC programme Woman\u2019s Hour <\/i>should be banned because there isn\u2019t a Man\u2019s Hour <\/i>on Radio 4. This\u00a0viewpoint has it that all such actions are inherently sexist.<\/p>\n
I understand this position although I\u00a0personally don\u2019t subscribe to it. It seems to me that so often lists of the top 100 people in business, technology or whatever basically mean men and that equally good women often get overlooked by the list-makers. Just as I see prizes for women as having their place in our world as a way of reminding people that we can be hugely successful and should rightfully be celebrated, so I see lists of the top women in one field or another simply as a way of flagging up the many contributions made by this slightly-greater-than-50 per cent of the population.<\/p>\n
Recently this argument has been revived in the wake of the BBC\u2019s 100 Women<\/a> project, which culminated in a day of discussions in October around the current status and role of\u00a0women. I, however, had a different beef with those preparing the list of \u201cfemale trail-blazers\u201d. Along with a number of others, spearheaded by my colleague Val Gibson<\/a>, professor in high energy physics at the Univer\u00adsity of Cambridge, I was a signatory to a letter about the project to The Times<\/i><\/a>. Our complaint was that there wasn\u2019t a single practising scien\u00adtist on the list. The BBC tried to claim (responding not only privately to us but also publishing its own rebuttal<\/a> in The Times<\/i>) that the list did feature \u201ceminent contributors from scientific and technological fields such as Claire Bertschinger, director of tropical nurs\u00ading studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Russian-Finnish-Indian engineer Irina Chakraborty and the technology entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox\u201d.<\/p>\n Without wanting to denigrate these people, who no doubt do wonderful work, the reality is that none of them is a practising scientist. The worry is that the BBC does not recognise what this means and anyhow confuses science and technology. One can even question whether a mere three representatives (even if\u00a0they were representative) is an appropriate balance in a list of 100. This question is part of a cultural bias that remains endemic. The 100 women selected are skewed towards activists and journalists. Those who created the list no doubt chose the people with whom they feel most comfortable or with whom they network regularly.<\/p>\n The same problem was identified by science writer Martin Robbins in a recent Guardian <\/i>article<\/a> about the BBC\u2019s Question Time<\/i>. As he pointed out, the programme has featured regu\u00adlar appearances by other non-political profes\u00adsions, but with barely a scientist in sight; for instance, the proportion of comedians to scientists is 14:1\u00a0over the period he considered. Likewise, The\u00a0Independent on Sunday<\/i>\u2019s most recent Pink List<\/a> of influential lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people contains many journalists and writers, but only one scientist. Somehow scientists simply don\u2019t feature on the radar of the people who dream up these lists and so consequently vanish from the public\u2019s daily diet of reading.<\/p>\n This is a problem on many fronts. In the case of the 100 Women list, I felt it was disap\u00adpointing if those chosen, however splendid, were taken as representative of suitable careers for girls. It seems an uphill struggle to remind people \u2013 teachers, parents and journalists \u2013 that science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects are entirely suitable for schoolgirls to consider, leading to a wide range of interesting career options. But the other examples given above demonstrate that over\u00adlooking scientists is not about gender: this is an issue about the mainstream media more generally taking the easy way out and always choosing to focus on areas with which their own journalists appear to be familiar.<\/p>\n This, I fear, is a direct result of our education system and cultural values. Chancellor George Osborne and Vince Cable, the business secretary, know that science and technology are key to the UK\u2019s economic recovery and future growth. They frequently make comments to this effect, as in the discus\u00adsion of the \u201ceight great technologies\u201d they like to highlight<\/a>. However, I do wonder, when discussing the need for research on energy, whether Osborne could distinguish a watt from a volt, or whether he appreciates (in the field of regenerative medicine, another of the \u201cGreat eight\u201d) the distinction between pluri\u00adpotent and multipotent stem cells; perhaps a\u00a0good Etonian Classics education helps him with that particular distinction. The Royal Society, among many other organisations, has previously stated<\/a> that it feels our education system narrows student choices too much. We are at the mercy of too many people making too many easy choices that effectively write science out of many people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n Note added 1700 on November 7th.<\/strong> This piece first appeared<\/a> in the THE on November 7th 2013 under the title ‘Evidence of Absence<\/em>‘ but the title was subsequently changed. Consequently, to be consistent, I have changed the title of this post also to the revised version\u00a0Why are scientists off the radar?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are those who believe that one should never have \u201cwomen-only\u201d lists of anything and that even the venerable BBC programme Woman\u2019s Hour should be banned because there isn\u2019t a Man\u2019s Hour on Radio 4. This\u00a0viewpoint has it that all … Continue reading