{"id":763,"date":"2011-02-23T19:38:41","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T19:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=763"},"modified":"2012-10-13T19:07:45","modified_gmt":"2012-10-13T19:07:45","slug":"remembering-the-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2011\/02\/23\/remembering-the-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week Yasmin Alibahi-Brown wrote a piece<\/a> in the Independent entitled ‘This is still a man’s world’ <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

She said <\/strong><\/p>\n

At every level, still, even in the West, women are invisible, neglected, kept down, slighted, patronised, objectified, denied and demeaned in everyday life\u2026\u2026we women can devalue ourselves and our sisters, often gamely playing along to avoid the dreaded “feminist” tag.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The occasion of her angst? That she had just taken part as panel member in a seminar about broadcast interviews, and during the session not a single woman\u2019s name had been mentioned \u2013 including by her – until a woman from the audience explicitly drew attention to it.\u00a0 In other words she found herself being sexist in the names she was putting forward, despite the plethora of good female role models she could have cited ranging from Martha Kearney<\/a> to Jenni Murray<\/a>.\u00a0 Although the words I quote from her article seem overly dramatic to describe this situation, what she is saying is that somehow it is simply too easy for all of us \u2013 men and women alike – to overlook women. In the world of science, familiar examples would be conference (or seminar) programmes drawn up without a female speaker in the original list. People are now sufficiently conscious of this problem that often a second pass will be explicitly made in order to come up with some women\u2019s names. And the absurd thing is when these names are mentioned the likelihood is that the relevant committee will then say \u2018of course, how could we not have thought of her \u2013 and her, and her?\u2019\u00a0 A recent article<\/a> in Nature highlights a similar problem when it comes to learned societies\u2019 prizes and exhorts<\/p>\n

\u2018Scientific societies must examine practices for selecting awardees.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But somehow, time and time again, this same thing happens. What is it about our psyches that make both sexes fall into this trap of overlooking well-qualified women? The trouble is, when one thinks about it too hard it starts to reek of affirmative action\/positive discrimination, the stuff I wrote about<\/a> a little while ago as being inappropriate and, in the case of jobs. illegal in the UK, although it is not jobs that are being discussed here.\u00a0 Because this is a sensitive issue, it is extremely difficult \u2013 at least for me, the more I think about it \u00a0\u2013 to know where to draw the line about when it is appropriate to \u2018notice\u2019 if the numbers of men and women are anything like equal (or rather, in proportion to the appropriate pool) or not.<\/p>\n

How about this phrasing which offended at least two male heads of department on behalf of their female colleagues when a request was made by HR personnel about nominations for a senior committee and which they were keen to draw to my attention:<\/p>\n

We are expected to have at least one, if not two, women on the sub committee and therefore would you please take this into consideration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, that doesn\u2019t offend me, but clearly the men felt that women should only be being nominated on the strength of their professional abilities, but at the same time of course<\/span> women should be being nominated and it wouldn\u2019t be difficult to come up with names.\u00a0 They seemed to be more sensitive on my gender\u2019s behalf than I felt myself.\u00a0 When an appropriate name was proposed, they got even more annoyed by the wording of the minute which said<\/p>\n

We would also propose to nominate Professor X, in the interests of gender balance\u2026\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that does strike me as a singularly inappropriate way to record the decision, and it was going to be rewritten the last I heard.<\/p>\n

This week I appeared on Radio 4’s Start the Week <\/a>(more on this later) with three other guests all of whom were male: they were respectively a psychologist, a historian and an English scholar, whereas I was the physicist and (obviously) a female at that. Does it matter? Should I think, well at least they had one woman, or why didn\u2019t they have two or \u2013 what I actually did think – which was it really doesn\u2019t matter, it\u2019s simply a fluctuation!\u00a0 Going up an escalator in London en route to the studio I noticed a series of posters explaining that one of the escalators was being renovated, illustrated by series of images of \u2018engineers\u2019 (schematic) doing the sorts of things engineers do (at least when renovating escalators and as imagined by Transport for London): wield pick axes and drills and weld. There were, I would guess, 6 different images repeated up the escalator of which one (but only one) was obviously a woman. My first reaction was that this represented progress. Then I noticed that the woman was the one passively standing around with a clipboard and I wasn\u2019t sure how much progress that really was. One can go round and round this loop of is this right or isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

At what point do things really matter? Because it is only at that point that it is worth drawing attention to any inequities that may be occurring \u2013 if they\u2019re slight, then let it be, if they\u2019re slights then make a fuss.\u00a0 When women\u2019s names are being unreasonably overlooked \u2013 in panel discussions, for plenary lectures or for committee membership \u2013 then we should press hard. We should also try to work out, for each and every one of us, why it is that women\u2019s names don\u2019t necessarily come to the fore despite there being \u2013 as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown berated herself \u2013 obvious and respected names that should trip off the tongue.\u00a0 But we should not go for equal numbers simply for the sake of it or constantly beat ourselves up about it.
\n <\/strong><\/p>\n

A media aside:<\/strong> I previously wrote about<\/a> my media training\u00a0 in advance of appearing on the Today programme when the Royal Society released its report \u2018Preparing for the transfer from school and college science and mathematics education to UK STEM higher education\u2019<\/a><\/a> last week. I duly got my three minutes on air and felt deeply appreciative that I had been so well prepared by the exhaustive\/exhausting training I had been given. I came away from the interview with Sarah Montague<\/a> feeling it hadn\u2019t been anything like as challenging as the mock interviews I had been put through by the Royal Society, which was very reassuring.\u00a0 I had practiced for the trick and trip-you-up questions, which didn\u2019t come, and I had the necessary key facts pretty much at my fingertips and managed to fit at least most them into the allotted time.\u00a0 My interview with Radio Scotland was rather longer (the Royal Society was applauding the Scottish system of Highers, as it keeps almost twice as many 16-19 year olds doing science as in England and Wales), but felt equally comfortable. Maybe it helped that I had no time for nerves due to the fact that the \u2018remote\u2019 \u2013 and consequently unmanned – studio booked for this latter interview was all but double booked so I hadn\u2019t even had time to sit down before I was live on air \u2013 and immediately after that I was whisked straight up to the Today studio so still no time for nerves to overwhelm me.<\/p>\n

However, one is never prepared for everything, and the Royal Society training was absolutely no help for appearing on Start the Week<\/a> less than a week later and completely out of the blue. They had picked up I was giving a talk on \u2018Alzheimer\u2019s disease and yoghurt: a physicist\u2019s exploration of proteins\u2019<\/a> at the IOP at the end of March, and the title had tickled their fancy. The format of the programme is a structured conversation between four random individuals, and each is supposed to mug up something about the others. Consequently I was given two enormous tomes, one on poets of the Civil War (Reprobates <\/a>by John Stubbs) and one on the 3000 year history of Jerusalem<\/a> (by Simon Sebag Montefiore) to be read over a single weekend. This meant I really couldn\u2019t do my homework properly; there simply wasn\u2019t time to read both books, although we were helpfully told which chapters to read to get the gist of them (for the third guest, Simon Wessely<\/a>, we merely<\/span> had half a dozen pages of notes). All I could do was plan a few plausible questions I was comfortable asking when, in all truth, I felt so far out of my comfort zone as well as under-prepared in a way I never would have allowed myself for an exam. Andrew Marr<\/a> <\/a> as host, an impressive and experienced presenter, volunteered he found the programme far more challenging than his Sunday TV show when all he had to do was \u2018poke politicians\u2019. Start the Week, for him, was hard work.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I should say too much about my fellow guests, but suffice it to say at least two of the others clearly shared my view of being outside their comfort zone (one actually complained about \u2018how much more\u2019 radio experience I had than him, as if it wasn\u2019t fair), and the third guest spent most of the time fidgeting with what looked like a stress ball but I think was probably the foam top of a disintegrated microphone he had somehow acquired.\u00a0 I am sure (perhaps I mean I hope) listeners will have thought we were all relaxed and totally confident about what we were doing \u2013 but they would have been wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week Yasmin Alibahi-Brown wrote a piece in the Independent entitled ‘This is still a man’s world’ She said At every level, still, even in the West, women are invisible, neglected, kept down, slighted, patronised, objectified, denied and demeaned in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,4,27],"tags":[933,230,107,229],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communicating-science","category-equality","category-women-in-science","tag-committee-membership","tag-gender-equality","tag-media-training","tag-start-the-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}