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Women in Tech: A Call for Action

Posted on 27 April 2026 by Athene Donald

283 years! That was the figure the DSIT Secretary of State stated would be the length of time it would take, at current rates of progress, for women to make up 50% of the Tech workforce at a reception at Number 10 last week, to celebrate the work of the Women in Tech taskforce. She spoke with great passion about the need to ensure full involvement of women in this sector. As she said, it’s not just the moral case, but the imperative of making sure women’s concerns are addressed, be it in healthcare, femtech or any of the other spheres in which AI and its like are blossoming yet women are not.

Beside her stood Anne-Marie Imafidon, the taskforce’s co-chair, whose work with young girls through Stemettes has been so influential, for both the individual girls and the community. Her work is part of the effort to make sure the pipeline of female talent is healthy, that young girls are not deterred because of societal attitudes (including of their peers) but flourish in those subjects that feed into the tech arena in later years. Children are very susceptible to the views of the adults around them, or that they see on a screen. There is plenty of evidence to this effect, such as the long-running ASPIRES project, led by Louise Archer, one of the task force members. The Institute of Physics has likewise investigated the wider problems for girls in the classroom over many years, and suggested initiatives to reduce the obvious gender biases. Yet, little seems to be changing. I’m not sure where the precise figure of 283 years that Liz Kendall mentioned came from, but a glacial speed of change seems about right.

At the moment, the taskforce is focussing on women already in the workforce, making sure they thrive there and that they move into leadership roles without bias and outdated attitudes thwarting their progression. Work on the talent pipeline will come later this summer.  One hopes that work coming out of the Curriculum and Assessment Review will feed into that, making Computing GCSE, for instance, more appealing. That is one of the subjects set for a major refresh, so there should be lots of scope to make the content both relevant to the world of today (and not the world of ten plus years ago) and not just designed for the type of kid who sees building kit as the be all and end all of computing, or have Steve Jobs or Bill Gates as their heroes. The world of tech has changed and the sorts of people moving into it need to change too. Diversity of thought and approach will only become increasingly important; they are also badly needed, if we are to create AI systems, for instance, which are representative of all of society.

Liz KendallSecretary of State, Liz Kendall, at the reception

But it isn’t just the content of the curriculum that needs a refresh, but also the way the gender stereotypes are handled, both in course materials and in the language (and actions) in the classroom. If teachers, or peers, imply girls don’t belong in the world of tech, in maths, physics of engineering, many girls will take that to heart. To give a couple of recent examples that have come my way, a female primary class teacher who admits she struggles with maths may lead the girls to assume they are likely to struggle too, and the boys to internalise the idea that girls/women are just useless at the subject. Both may carry those ideas forward into later life, neither of which will be healthy views to hold.

And in a different, but parallel example, showing how early on girls internalise messages I could cite a 6 year old family member who wanted to play football. The first club she joined was allegedly mixed, but she was the only girl and consequently miserable. A girls only club was located; a definite improvement until a girl in her class stated baldly that ‘girls don’t play football’, after which she gave up. Replace football with computing or coding and it is all too easy to see why the current pipeline of girls is so poor. Even when surrounded by other girls at the club, a single negative view can be enough to act as a deterrent. One would hope in a classroom that a teacher might quash such statements, but that requires both that a teacher heard the remark and that they felt it was inappropriate. It is that latter requirement that I fear may not always be fulfilled, and why I would like to see more attention paid to the topic of gender stereotyping across every school, as well as in teacher training.

outside no 10 for women in tech reception Outside the famous door of No 10.

In the room at No 10 last week, there was a palpable buzz. Many like-minded women (and almost entirely women, perhaps not surprisingly although that does trouble me a little), all of us committed to the ‘cause’ and active in one way or another. It was a stimulating day – quite apart from the interest that I, for one, felt in stepping through that famous black door – and much food for thought, as well as a metaphorical call for further action from everyone in the room.

Posted in Anne-Marie Imafidon, computing, femtech, Liz Kendall, Women in science | Comments Off on Women in Tech: A Call for Action

In which I come home

Posted on 26 April 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

Jenny at the podium about to give a talk
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been caught in the flurry of the early-spring conference season, crisscrossing continents to take part in that most ritualistic of scientific pastimes: networking, giving talks, sliding through poster sessions, drinking bad coffee from steel containers, frequenting foreign bars, fighting jetlag and never quite getting enough sleep in a series of anonymous hotels. Business travel, something that I used to love, has now become a chore whose ending I anticipate.

Conferences were much more exciting as a young, early-career researcher, when every contact felt like an instant friend and every new city, a gift. Travel memories as a PhD student and postdoc are branded into my mind, sporadic but intense: a smoky basement bar in Kyoto. Eating street food in the sulphur-yellow air of Beijing. The leafy greenness of Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. An ocean-side bar in San Diego, a wine cellar in Berkeley, a snow-heaped square in Boston. A boat on Bingen am Rhein, or on the Seine under a flashy Eiffel Tower. A monastery in Sicily, where the Franciscan friars rode mopeds around the estate and made morning bowls of perfect lattes and decent red wine with dinner, clay tiles flying off the roof and smashing on the courtyard during a windstorm heavy with Saharan dust. A chilly afternoon in Philadelphia with snowflakes spiralling down when, still unbeknownst to me, I carried a child that I lost a few months later. Swimming in the hot air and cool sea with other delegates in Sorrento. Stifling summers in Washington DC, in Columbus, Ohio, drugged crickets whirring in breathless hot nights. A ferry to Bainbridge Island off Seattle; a cliffside venue in Portugal; a winter restaurant with flickering candles in Copenhagen. How privileged my life has been, and how strange to now feel the same privileges to be burdensome.

When you are young, everything feels like an adventure, and your fellow travellers, like comrades in arms. When you are older, you retire to the bar with the other aging principal investigators to enjoy academic gossip and a quiet drink before tucking yourself into bed by 10 – but wake to WhatsApp messages on the lab channel, full of videos of your team riding a mechanical bull under disco lights at 1.30 AM in Nashville. And you wonder when that transition happened, and feel a little pang of loss.

But it is the domestic situation that holds my heart in thrall. When I leave my garden, I feel like I’m saying goodbye to a close friend, and when I return home, I mourn having missed the peak of this tulip variety or of that bluebell, and marvel at the three-inch layer of goosegrass that has overwhelmed everything else in my absence. My son, aged 12, going on 40, has somehow grown two inches and become twice as articulate. Time pushes forward, relentless and inevitable, whether I am there to witness the transition or not.

In the abstract, I know that scientific travel is irreplaceable. No hybrid lurking can replace the flesh-and-blood interactions of a few intense days of scientific exchange; no publication can substitute for a senior author up on the podium, publicising its highlights, and no email exchange can supersede the warm, spontaneous dialogue that happens when two or more academics put their heads together and scientific sparks fly. I’ve returned from my travels with a list of new ideas and a half a dozen potential collaborations under discussion, and I look forward to seeing how those pan out.

And yet…as I sit here on my back patio in the fading afternoon light of the weekend, I am weary of my travels and relieved to be home, the quiet center where all of my fervent ideas can rest.

Posted in academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Nostalgia, Research, The ageing process, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which I come home

Persistence, Obstinacy and Red Lines

Posted on 18 April 2026 by Athene Donald

Persistence: such a positive word, nicely aligned with others such as resilience and self-confidence. All positives. But what do you think when you hear the word obstinacy? It conveys an edgy, tiresome quality. Perhaps someone who stops others doing what they want or ignoring what is good for them. Yet, in reality, they are two sides of the same coin.

As my last post indicated, my most recent talk has been on the subject of my ‘leadership journey’. It’s not the first time I’ve talked about how my career panned out, although the audiences vary. I well recall being asked – in Sydney to, somewhat bizarrely, a group of women lawyers – what had got me through the tough times. And, without thinking very hard about my choice of word, I described myself as obstinate. I felt that, at a time when good friends as well as those less supportive, were questioning either (or both) of my choice of research topic and university, it was obstinacy that got me through. I was determined not to let others choose what or where I did my rather unconventional research. (I was researching food physics and the interface with biology at a time when that was regarded as beyond the pale by my more conventional colleagues in Physics, who were inclined to stick with less messy materials that they thought were appropriate for a physicist). I stuck to my guns and am amused to see that these days, for instance, the Institute of Physics has a Food Physics group – so it must be respectable now. I flatter myself by thinking that I was just ahead of the game.

However, to call that persistence feels not quite right, although I clearly was persistent. I think obstinate is the more appropriate word, because I was ignoring all those wise heads around me who could either not see the point of what I was doing (the more hostile ones) or felt that I was hurting myself – and possibly my PhD students – by sticking with something that was causing me grief (my friends who knew I was finding the going tough).

Nevertheless, persistence is a virtue, whether or not you consider obstinacy is. The challenge is knowing when just a little bit more persistence will pay off, and when you should cut your losses if an experiment is not working or you can’t get the accuracy you need or…any of the hundred other things that can go wrong in the lab. There is no simple answer to that.

What about red lines? When should you feel this is a point beyond which you will not go, versus when should you persist (and we needn’t consider Theresa May’s red lines in this context)? You can set red lines in advance: perhaps to say I won’t spend more than six more months doing experiments before I write up my PhD or I won’t spend more than an additional sum of £X on reagents before I give up this approach. But the time I most remember setting red lines in advance was before a meeting with the head of department and a professor who was trying to lay claim to space (essentially both mental and literal) that impacted on what I was doing. I was no junior researcher by this point, but already an FRS, but the other professor was the new ‘kid’ on the block (also an FRS) and people were falling over themselves to accommodate him. I knew this would be a hard battle to win and being obstinate in this situation would not lead to a good outcome. So, I worked out very clearly in advance what I would concede, so that I could hold on to what was most precious to me. I also made sure I took a bottle of water with me so that, when my mouth turned dry as sawdust, as I knew it would, I was prepared.

Those red lines were very useful to me, and probably allowed me to come out of the meeting with the best outcome I could have hoped for under the trying circumstances. It taught me the importance of not going in feet first. This latter is a phrase I have used to describe an earlier style of ‘leadership’ of mine, which I learned to shed: when someone or some system is awry, just going in all guns blazing will likely get you enemies and not the desired change. It pays to think about framing of your arguments, and – as in my example above – what you imagine to be other people’s red lines or viable concessions, as well as your own. Playing the long game of persuasion is generally much more successful than a short, sharp blaze of righteous indignation.

I am reminded of this, not just because of the ‘leadership journey’ talk, but because of ongoing situations I’m involved with beyond academia, where it is clear to me how much taking your time to bring people around is more likely to be fruitful than just getting cross with any protagonist. I may not rigidly be setting red lines, but I am definitely consciously thinking where I am not prepared to go/lose ground/ or give up on. This looks much more like persistence than obstinacy to me, and I hope to the protagonists with whom I am engaging. Mentally I know the difference, and it probably behoves others to do so too.

Posted in leadership, persuasion, Science Culture | Comments Off on Persistence, Obstinacy and Red Lines

Fish Worship – Is It Wrong?

Posted on 14 April 2026 by Henry Gee

‘Why don’t you go into Angel Aquatics and get some more angel fish?’ said Mrs Gee, thinking that our very large (136-litre) tank was down to just two fish – one Plecostoma, and one large angel fish, so was looking rather bare. I needed no encouragement and soon found myself in the Fish Room but there were rather few angel fish, all rather small. Perhaps small enough to be snaffled by the Plecostoma, which goes round the tank like a Roomba, snarling up anything small enough to fit into its mouth. But then I saw this:

IMG_0835

This. Recently.

This is a Senegal bichir (Polypterus senegalus), a freshwater fish from western and central Africa, and I fell in love. Why? Because, as a palaeontologist (recovering), I appreciate extant signs of a lost world. The bichir is a member of an ancient lineage (it includes sturgeons and paddlefish) that extends right back to the Palaeozoic Era. Like all fish once did, it has functional lungs (in most fish this has since evolved into a swim bladder) and the pectoral fins are like stumpy little legs. Bichirs can even survive and move around quite well out of water. Mrs Gee, on being told this, wondered if Steve (it is called Steve) might make a break for freedom and will be seen scuttling down the garden path to the pond.

Here is Steve from the front, showing a rather smiley face like an axolotl (we used to keep axolotls a long time ago, they are now exolotls), and the resemblance is not a coincidence. All fish once had faces like this, before the highly evolved jaw mechanisms found in more recent fish — the teleosts, a group that evolved much later and which mow includes virtually all fish you can name, from swordfish to seahorses, from trout to turbot). Tetrapods – a group of fish that came ashore, have faces rather like this, though this does not reflect close relationship, more that tetrapods have retained the ancestral fishy face that most extant fish have now lost.

IMG_0845

Steve. Front view.

Despite its seemingly happy demeanour, a bichir is a fierce predator and would soon denude a tank of all other fish unless I gave it, as protection money, a fresh (defrosted) mussel each day. At the same time I bought three golden cichlid-like fish as its backing group. They all came from the same community tank as Steve, so I hope it’s learned more peaceable ways than its fellows in the wilds.

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Taking the Chair (for the first time)

Posted on 12 April 2026 by Athene Donald

Sometimes things bring you up short in ways you weren’t expecting, and that happened this past week as I was trying to prepare for a talk. I’ve been asked to discuss my ‘leadership journey’ with a group of mid-career academics who may be facing up to the challenges of moving beyond research to, for instance, chairing committees for the first time. Now, over the years I’ve written a lot on this blog about the ups and downs of committee work and the characters one encounters.  You might have thought I’d find it easy to do such a talk. Instead, I found myself reacting badly to the whole concept initially: I’ve never been a leader was my initial thought, stoked by the fact I failed both to become a head of department or a PVC, for all I tried. (What went wrong on both occasions is perhaps a story for another day.)  But, not only was I Master of Churchill College for ten years – undoubtedly a leadership role – but I have chaired more committees over the years than I could possibly count. My first reaction was simply imposter syndrome getting loose again. For younger readers (probably just about everyone, given I’ve been retired for some time) suffice it to say imposter syndrome – at least in my case – doesn’t go away, one just gets better at managing it.

As I say I’ve written a lot about chairing committees but over the years I’ve also learned that every committee is different and one has to flex tactics to suit. When asked, by the facilitator for the upcoming talk, what my style was I can come up with some overarching themes regardless of the nature of the group, but beyond a handful of phrases one has to adapt one’s style according to what the nature of the desired outcomes is (sometimes much clearer than other times as for instance when a ranked list of grant applications is required) and whether the committee is made up of well-known colleagues or a bunch of strangers meeting for the first time. The dynamics will vary, particularly if everyone knows everyone else and has strong views about their colleagues. More on that below.

The first, and I think most important word I used to describe my style of chairing in this preliminary chat with the facilitator was ‘inclusive’. This is a word currently much bandied about; some years ago, I would have used a less definitive statement, such as ‘make sure everyone’s voice is heard’, caveated with ‘and don’t let anyone dominate’. The latter is easier said than done. Some people like to take over any discussion, regardless of their depth of knowledge or what anyone else might want to say. Practicing phrases for how to shut such people up without being downright rude can be helpful. Things like ‘that’s very interesting, now can we hear from other people round the table’ tending to the more blunt ‘I think we’ve heard your thoughts, but not everyone agrees’ if needed. At meetings where hands are raised (electronically or otherwise) it is possible simply to ignore the dominant voice for as long as possible. Sadly, on hybrid calls I have had people say ‘since I’m online I’m just going to jump in here…’ which is a tough one to control. Hybrid meetings are, in my view, the hardest to keep in good order.

But to be inclusive, it is important not just to shut the vociferous people up, but to make sure the quieter voices are heard. In Churchill, the governance arrangements at the time (since modified) meant that both students and staff were equal Trustees on the College Council. Both groups were often, I suspect, daunted by the louder voices and I tried to make sure I always brought them into the debate, particularly on matters specifically relevant to them. In general, turning formally to them meant they were happy to express their views but might have been reluctant to jump in without that invitation.

A College Council is an example of a meeting where many of the individuals know each other and may have done so for twenty or more years. That can bring its own challenges as old rivalries or tensions get played out for the nth time. As an example of how not to handle this situation, I am reminded of a search committee I sat on (not as chair) in my department many years ago. One of the other members was someone who I had a fractious relationship with, and I went into the meeting apprehensive about this. When push came to shove the two of us, in discussing one particular candidate, ended up in the unhelpful situation of claiming that ‘yes he would’ versus ‘oh no he wouldn’t’ about someone well known to both of us. As the external on the committee said to me afterwards, that was not a very constructive discussion but was definitely fuelled by past antagonism and present anxiety (at least on my part).

All that is about inclusivity, which I believe has to sit at the heart of good committee work. There are lots of other tactics I use to make sure that people remain engaged: a bit of light humour, coffee breaks in long meetings and keeping to time, for instance. I can remember one committee – again not one I was chairing, but one where the chair seemed to have no regard for time – which turned into farce as one after another of the members left for other meetings as the meeting dragged on about an hour past its scheduled end point. It is a trick to manage to keep to the allotted time without making anyone feel a decision was rushed or that they didn’t get a chance to speak. For sure, no one objects to a meeting finishing a few minutes early, but everyone can get peeved with an overrunning meeting. Once more, an example of how not to do this comes to mind, again not when I was chairing. The chair of this committee allowed the group to go round and round in circles about a particular candidate until the then Vice Chancellor stepped in and essentially said ‘enough’ and broke the loop. The chair should have done that at least half an hour earlier.

As will be apparent, I have learned a lot from watching other chairs make what, to my eyes at least, are a mess of things. That is certainly a key piece of advice I will be passing on to the mid-career academics later this week. Know what works and what does not from watching others succeed or fail. Chairing is a skill that improves with practice (and confidence). I copy below a list I made in a previous post on this subject that includes what I think are some crucial essentials (to be read in conjunction with how to be a better committee member):

  • Do your homework, read the paperwork and think about where the sticking points are likely to arise;
  •  If necessary and appropriate (and it often may not be) talk to people in advance if you know that they hold strong but opposing views;
  • Know who everyone is and what their backgrounds are; remember names;
  •  Concentrate so that you know when to wind up a particular discussion point;
  • Take the time necessary to reach a consensus, or at least let those whose views are being over-ridden feel that they have been heard;
  • Try to ensure anyone who wants to speak gets their chance – in particular do not let a couple of vociferous and possibly arrogant people dominate. It is the chair’s job to see this does not happen and that the timid get their moment;
  • Do not let tempers flare and use humour if you can to keep the meeting light (self-deprecating humour is fine and is often described as typically British);
  • Use breaks as time-outs if necessary, but also to allow legs to stretch, comfort to be restored and caffeine and sugar levels to be banked up as desired.

Finally, it is probably good to be aware of what not to do. I had fun many years ago describing all those chairs you do not want to be or meet. Sadly, I have met all of them, but I sincerely hope I cannot be pigeonholed into any of the categories myself.

Posted in careers, committees, inclusive, mid-career, Science Culture, time-keeping | Comments Off on Taking the Chair (for the first time)

In which sadness serves a purpose

Posted on 5 April 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

It’s one of those weekend afternoons when the garden is almost too beautiful. Too much. I sit here under a blanket on a deck chair in the blustery wind, trying to write, but all the songbirds have forgotten I’m here and they’re putting on a show. Robins, tits, dunnocks, wrens, starlings seethe around the feeders, splash in the fountains. In the terraces beyond, the sun is too bright to make out more than a rainbow blur of blooming.

Everything feels touched by sadness: cherry blossoms ripped prematurely off their branches and falling like rose confetti. A once-perfect orange tulip, sagging and dishevelled. Ovoid pink magnolia petals scattered across the newly sown vegetable beds. Even the fresh green tree leaves, soft as a baby’s skin, seem coded with their inevitable senescence, already foreshadowing the tired and dusty look they’ll adopt in high summer.

Of course the sadness is not an intrinsic part of these things I see. The sadness is firmly in me today, and has been these past few weeks, a filter through which all else is processed.

I am not talking about depression: to my knowledge, I have never suffered from that particular malady. My occasional low moods are not crippling, and I can bear them with little effort. Like many other people, I suppose, sadness is something that just happens from time to time. There is usually not a cause I can pinpoint. Probably it is physiological: insufficient sleep, or the aftermath of a solid stretch of excessive stress, or the consequences of sometimes being too busy to eat properly. Or there is a triggering event that on the face of it seems trivial, except perhaps it synergises with a memory of another time when something more serious was afoot, and my brain cannot tease them apart, decanting the past into the present. Sometimes I wake from tragic dreams, but while the feeling lingers, the story behind it slips away just out of reach.

There is also, of course, the ticking clock. Aging increasingly makes me feel existential. My son and I were once part of the same body, glowing and heavy with possibility, but now, his rushes towards independence and a seemingly infinite future, while mine slips away from me, becoming something foreign and strange as my own future telescopes ever more tightly closed.

Sadness can be many things. But today, I’m thinking about sadness as fuel.

In my life, I’ve been privileged to have experienced several protracted periods of sadness that catalysed a major espisode of artistic creativity and productivity. These were not merely casual “suffering to sing the blues” moments, but months of blistering fire.

The most prominent of these was when I was made redundant from the biotech company in the Netherlands. After an entire lifetime of working insanely hard to pursue my dream of being a scientist, I was suddenly wholly unoccupied, home alone and on the dole. In short, I went from sixty to zero so fast that you could almost hear the cartoon screeching, see the black marks stretching out on the road behind.

After such a shock to the system, not being sad would have been inappropriate. For a few weeks, I did hardly anything, retreating into myself and trying to work out how I could regroup and carry forward with my life. But then something strange happened, strange and wonderful. I’d been writing before that time, but suddenly, writing was all that I could do. I wrote the moment I woke up, I wrote all day, I even woke in the middle of the night to scribble notes in a pad beside my bed.

The rare few times I was coaxed away to do something social, a situation where I couldn’t turn to my laptop or where it would be rude to daydream about plots, I deeply resented the intrusion. The only exceptions were activities that fed the creative fire: novels, poetry and art that resonated rather than distracted. I remember almost having a religious experience at a pre-Raphaelite exhibition in Groningen called “Fatale Vrouwen”, and being so devastated by the ending of His Dark Materials that I couldn’t function for a few days. For my own solitary writing breaks, I’d pace a habitual quadrant near my flat in De Pijp: north along the River Amstel, across the Nieuwe Amstelbrug, south on the other bank and then across the Berlagebrug home. Walking past the houseboats on the Weesperzijde, with their tidy flower gardens, entire scenes of dialogue would channel through me like my own conscious brain was surplus to requirements. The characters didn’t just have a life of their own: I was sharing my body and brain with them – all at once.

I felt like a comet hurling through empty space, a heart of stone with a long tail of burning plasma. The words were in the tail, searing themselves onto the pages. I finished the first draft of my second novel in only a few weeks. It is probably the favourite of the three I published, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is steeped in poetry – and sadness.

Sitting in the garden now, this period feels like a lifetime ago – verleden tijd, as the Dutch would say. I was young then, and my future was still nearly as infinite as my son’s. I’ve not had a true comet moment since. I find myself wondering whether I ought to ceremoniously abolish this sadness, try to make a fresh start, shed some burdensome stages in the pursuit of a more stable orbit. (As I write, NASA’s Artemis II mission is just about to swing round to the far side of the moon, so perhaps space metaphors are on my mind.)

But then I consider that my emotional load, my existential night terrors, are also part of a full life. Would it truly be better to try to paper over those honest cracks? I doubt it. Instead, I should channel my old periodic friend, sadness, into the creative life of the mind: my writing, my art, my music, my scientific theories and future experimental plans. Even if I don’t catch fire this time, a seam of sadness may at least make things more interesting.

In the meantime, I sit in this garden and I watch these birds, and the confetti rains down on me.

.

Posted in art, Nostalgia, staring into the abyss, The ageing process, Writing | Comments Off on In which sadness serves a purpose

Equity for Women Around the World

Posted on 30 March 2026 by Athene Donald

It is always good to be stretched beyond one’s own comfort zone, even if by definition it is an uncomfortable thing to do. Recently, I found myself stepping up to the podium to talk following four successive philosophers, whose take on the policy questions under discussion, was inevitably going to be very distinct in language and form from my own approach. The occasion was the Royal Society’s Discussion meeting on Science as a Global Public Good. The philosophers approached the problem from a variety of different viewpoints – what is a ‘public good’ and how does it differ from the commons, legally what is enshrined in different UN charters and so on.

What about the importance of science diplomacy? This was discussed in the talk immediately before mine by Angela Liberatore, a colleague I’d known back in the days I served on the ERC Scientific Council, although she has since moved on from heading up their research team. We need every kind of diplomacy we can get in this uncertain world. There may be scope for links with the USA, as detailed in this recent piece by Hollie Chandler from the Russell Group, but many scientists of my acquaintance will not attempt to enter the USA for conferences right now. Who knows what might be lurking on their phone that officials take exception to? That will not be helping diplomacy. Nevertheless, I recall many years ago how the Royal Society was supporting links with North Korea in the area (if I remember rightly) of volcanology, at a time when there were essentially no other links between the UK and that country.

My own talk was, perhaps predictably, much more rooted in numbers and facts than legal niceties, looking at the subject of women entering the scientific pipeline. There are some striking numbers out there. According to UNICEF data, globally119 million girls are out of school (34 million of primary school age, 28 million of lower-secondary school age and 58 million of upper-secondary school age). Those are striking numbers, and nothing that is happening in the world right now makes me confident that the numbers are likely to be improving. But, around the world, we need all the talent we can get to move the agenda forward, not just in terms of obvious innovation opportunities, but in terms of maternal and neonatal health, nutrition and vaccination choices. These are all issues that women are the prime movers in and denying them an education means they are less well positioned to make decisions around them, or appropriate innovations.

The week before this conference I had been at another two-day event at the Royal Society, this one the culmination of the organisation’s year of celebration around the election of the first female fellows, with the theme of focussing on where we are now and where we need to go around Women In STEM. On the Royal Society’s website you can find new analysis of HESA data from JISC; a new film about Hertha Ayrton’s life and contributions (the first woman nominated for Fellowship, but rejected on the grounds she was a married woman and, under the laws of the time, was therefore a ‘non-person’); and a map on which anyone can enter information about a female scientist from the past at their location. On the site there is also a brief blogpost from me about women at the Royal Society.

During the conference there were strong views expressed about the status of women in AI and the dangers of their absence as AI is developed, algorithmic bias being the most obvious and visible one. Chair of the session Wendy Hall was particularly strong on this point, and outspoken in an interview with Rachel Sylvester published ahead of the conference. There she spells out her worries with regard to Silicon Valley:

“It’s all tech bros. It’s very aggressive. Silicon Valley is very difficult for women to work in, but we need women there”.

Currently, in England, the percentages of girls taking Computing at GCSE or A Level are dismally low, so little is likely to change without a radical rethink in our education system. It is to be hoped that the revised curriculum in the subject provoked by the recent Curriculum and Assessment Review will improve the situation, but only if the school environment itself doesn’t put girls off. I am a strong believer in the importance of teachers not inadvertently reinforcing gendered stereotypes, and the whole school environment ensuring the school’s culture does not deter girls from typical ‘male’ subjects. This is a topic close to the heart of the DSIT secretary of State who has convened a Women in Tech Taskforce. They have a consultation currently open – so now is a good moment to submit your views on how the situation at all levels can be improved.

There were many fascinating sessions at the Royal Society Conference, highlighting where things have improved and where, inevitably, work needs to be done. At a societal level I feel it is hugely important we don’t simply look at the fact that, on average, girls are outperforming boys at school and therefore not look at the detail of what that means. If white working-class boys are struggling in school, that is clearly a massive target for improvement and the situation for them needs to be remedied. But if girls are passing their exams and then walking away from many of the subjects that would, not only satisfy them as individuals, but allow them to progress to some of the higher paying jobs – due to the messaging they receive from the world around them – we have a different sort of equity problem.  With so much attention paid to metrics of school performance, this problem is too easily overlooked. As Michele Dougherty said at this Women in STEM conference:

“‘we will know we have got equity when I no longer get asked if things were difficult for me.”

(Of course right now things are difficult for her, as Chair of STFC, but that’s a different problem.)

These past weeks of intense meetings have been simultaneously rewarding and exhausting. Sadly, the two meetings merely confirm that in this country and around the world, equity is still a long way off, in STEM and, still, at much more basic levels of education.

Posted in education, Equality, UNICEF, Wendy Hall, Women in science, Women in tech | Comments Off on Equity for Women Around the World

In which we tell a story: on metaphors in science and life

Posted on 29 March 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

There is such a stark divide between those who understand scientific complexity and those who urgently need or want to. The onus falls on the former to translate their messages in a comprehensible way. Perhaps it’s a radical claim, but even though communication is a two-way dialogue, I believe that the blame for anything lost in translation lies squarely and one hundred per cent with the communicator. There is, in short, no excuse.

As my teaching winds down for the academic year, I’ve just given my last undergraduate science writing workshop – a sort of gun-for-hire side hustle that, via word-of-mouth, has gradually spread across multiple modules offered by the Faculty. These interactive sessions are not so much about technical science writing, although I do cover those aspects, but rather the strategy needed to engage readers of any level of understanding.

While I cover a lot of the basics, such as the importance of clarity, balance, brevity and understanding the needs of the audience to whom you are pitching, I think my most important lessons lie in two areas: strong story-telling, and creative techniques for achieving that in the most engaging way.

My own personal way of understanding the world involves a lot of imagery. I am forever making little sketches in my notebook, when I plan experiments or try to understand a particularly complicated paper. There is nothing that brings me more joy than a clean whiteboard, multiple colours of pen and a conducive group of colleagues happy to brainstorm. The paper just accepted for formal publication from one of my postdocs started out life as an ink drawing on a cocktail napkin in a restaurant. Pictures and mind maps allow me to boil down complexities into visual constructs, herding the elusively abstract into something tangible and, therefore, knowable. Just as you cannot teach something you don’t know inside-out, you do not truly understand a concept if you cannot draw it.*

(*Exceptions may apply to disciplines such as cosmology or quantum physics! Fortunately, most biology is reassuringly tangible.)

How, then, do we draw pictures with the written word? The MVP on the bench is clearly the metaphor. In my workshops, I show them examples from the popular press – for example, pieces by Tom Whipple of the Times (a master craftsman), or from the Guardian science desk – where metaphors are such common workhorses that they appear in every single piece. I invite my students to magic up metaphors for biological phenomena. Some are easy: the infiltration of immune cells during an inflammatory response, for example, being readily likened to the fire service being called in to quench a blaze. Others are hopelessly abstract and require more thought.

I encourage my students to avoid metaphors that are so overused that they have come clichés. Prime example? The powerhouse of the cell. (Pity the poor mitochondrion, eternally type-cast and never given a fresh take!) Or those cursed building blocks of life. I present lists of metaphorical scientific terms that are so ancient and established as proper scientific nomenclature that we have forgotten that they were ever metaphors in the first place: transcription; translation; proof-reading; editing. Funny, isn’t it, and pleasingly circular, that so many of our scientific terms are derived from writing itself?

Metaphors are so useful that I put them to work to help understand my everyday life and the interactions I have with people, institutions and the demons of self-doubt that crawl out of my brain at 3 AM. My journal is full of them: tiny narrative universes of possibility. I cannot imagine my world without them.

So this is why I want my students to understand the power of metaphors, and to deploy them liberally whenever they are struggling to get across their own scientific stories. The battle for truth may be lost, but in some ways, we have no choice but to keep fighting.

Posted in academia, Research, Scientific papers, students, Teaching, Writing | Comments Off on In which we tell a story: on metaphors in science and life

In which we build the perfect scientist

Posted on 22 March 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

The work universe bubble at home

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But I’ve been wondering recently what it takes to raise an independent scientist. Specifically, I’m thinking of the ‘valley of death’ between a postdoc and a well-functioning group leader with a team.

A former senior colleague once likened the transition from the former to the latter as “escape velocity”: the difference between milling around on the launchpad with too much fuel (ambition/ideas) and not enough hardware (the rocket ship and crew that will actual propel you into a stable orbit). It’s a brilliant metaphor, which he presented to me after the disappointing news that my major fellowship interview had not been successful.

At that moment, more than a decade ago now, I was despondent, on temporary contracts and about to enter into a massive teaching commitment to earn my keep at the university – a teaching commitment that I still bear. Although it was a long time ago, I still recall the mix of emotions: relieved that at least I could carry on taking home an academic salary and trying to grow my lab, but wondering how on earth I would manage to succeed with such little protected research time – research time I had to actively buy out from my multiple grants, all stitched together to create a day or two a week.

Fast forward to now, and the good news is that everything turned out for me. Against the odds, I managed to craft enough competitive grant funding to secure my salary and to hire a sizeable team long-term. I’ve maintained a group of between 5-7 people ever since, alongside my own salary buyout, through a combination of very hard work and not a little luck. Collaborations turned out to be key: when I stopped acting like a lone wolf and started seeking our like-minded individuals, more opportunities opened up. Today, I operate within a small but close-knit group of collaborators who share my values, interests and (unexpectedly importantly) sense of humour and fun*, and who also embody a Venn diagram of complementary and unique skill sets.

(*One of my colleagues, who I consider especially wise, once told me that they had long ago resolved never to work with people who did not bring them joy or could not share a laugh. I promptly adopted this as my new mantra and have never looked back. Life is, frankly, too short to work with assholes. These I have shed with the utmost relish.)

I am now privileged to act as a mentor to more junior scientists who are where I was a decade or so ago. They, too, often feel despondent and pessimistic about their chances. Sometimes, like I did, they think about bailing out of the profession altogether.

I, personally, have done the experiment. It’s rather inferior to a randomised control trial, as there is no “control me” who took alternative paths. Instead the study design is what is known as a longitudinal “crossover”: I have been a scientist, and left research for publishing, and returned. It is not perfect, but I know that when I clipped my wings and tried to bow out of science, I had a more stable life, but I was ultimately unhappy. And I quite soon realised that I had made a grave mistake. Returning to research made my life more difficult in some ways, but also, overwhelmingly, more fulfilling and happy.

Revisiting the original question, what does it takes to raise an independent scientist? I think the most important thing has less to do with intellect and resilience, and more to do with home environment. Succeeding at academia is very difficult if you do not have a supportive home life and good work-life balance. I have been blessed with a family who understands my need to travel and to work hard. Although I sometimes feel guilty when I have to fly away, work late or spend time on my computer on the weekends, this guilt is entirely self-inflicted: nobody ever makes me feel that I am not doing enough, and we have wonderful experiences working around my constraints. I even have time to pursue my hobbies, albeit on a rather restricted schedule: making music, learning languages, writing, sketching, ham radio, gardening. As a result, my home life is grounded and fulfilling, yet I still manage to get everything done.

But it’s not just about a permissive and supportive home life. None of this would be possible without the lab team behind me. The more senior members look after the more junior members, and all of them keep the lab running effortlessly without me needing to intervene, or sometimes even to think about it. The older members hand over to the newer ones to ensure continuity. For this, I am eternally grateful: a village, indeed.

There is, of course, a gap between the “team of one” and the fully functional team that even the most supportive family or home life cannot bridge. For this, only the luck of a few successful grants can really fill that gap, rewarding you with the team who will shoulder the quotidian load and free yourself for more advanced tasks like publishing papers and dreaming up more grants.

Escape velocity.

And the secret formula? Engaging with collaborators and submitting as many grants as humanly possible – meaning that for a time (months? years?) your own work-life balance will invariably suffer.

Whether it is ultimately worth it depends on the outcome, and the temperament of the individual in the midst of their own particular career experiment. For me, it was: for others, it may not.

Sometimes you just have to do the experiment.

Posted in academia, careers, Domestic bliss, Nostalgia, Research, staring into the abyss, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which we build the perfect scientist

Unintended Consequences

Posted on 15 March 2026 by Athene Donald

We appear to be living in a world currently beset by unintended consequences, or at least a world in which the main proponent does not seem to have thought about the consequences the rest of us now have to live through. In lesser matters, though, unintended consequences may also be rife, including in the pursuit of science and the role of leadership.

I am prompted to write this in part from a musical direction. I recently heard a piece of music I last encountered as a teenager, singing in a choir organised outside of school but run by the school’s music teacher. We were known, back then, as the Carissimi singers and this was a piece written by this very Giacomo Carissimi (ca 1604-74), Jeptha. It tells the biblical tale of a successful, if unwise, leader who, having won some battle, vows to sacrifice the first person he encounters on returning home. Sadly, for him and indeed her, this turns out to be his daughter. Radio 3 played the plangent tones of the final chorus as he laments his loss. Vows like that are dangerous things, but his unintended consequence only wiped out one person, unlike some current actions.

So, let’s scale down again. In our every day lives we may all perform actions that don’t turn out as we intended but are unlikely to lead to actual human sacrifice. Having spent the start of last week at the Royal Society’s conference on Women and the Future of Science (part of their celebrations of 80 years since the first female fellows were elected; I wrote a framing document for it), there was more cause to think about consequences, unintended or otherwise. In several of the sessions there was discussion about leadership, both how one acted as a leader, but also actions that had made a difference to each speaker during their career path. Empathy, support and above all kindness got a lot of air-time; one might wonder if panels of men would have mentioned the same topics, even if they equally identified with them.

It reminded me of one time when I thought I was being kind to a struggling PhD student, only to find that the consequence of that was not all that helpful.I had a student (male) who was writing up their thesis. As was usual in my conversations with students at this stage, I  would set him targets about what I wanted to see from him each week. To start with, every week he turned up empty-handed with plausible explanations why. I wanted to encourage him not deflate or bully him, so I accepted these excuses. Then he asked for longer between meetings, so he had time to complete things. Again, I went along with this. After about 3 months it became clear that this was not the right strategy. Once I pushed him harder, he admitted that he had completely failed to write anything and was in a complete tizz. Once he’d opened up to me, we agreed he should just come each week and talk about how he was, or wasn’t, getting on. That turned him around and in due course he completed the thesis and got his PhD. But I realised that being ‘kind’ had been anything but, as it just left him able to stay in denial about his own progress and leave me in the dark. A lesson learned. But every student is different and needs a ‘personalised’ strategy to get them through what can be a really challenging period.

As a supervisor, a teacher or any kind of mentor means that one’s words can have an effect that may or may not be intended. Again, this past week, we heard of women saying how being told they ‘couldn’t’ do something, or – probably even worse, they weren’t ‘up to’ doing something – pushed some people to stamp their feet and determine to show their interlocutor they were wrong. As a clear example of this, take Rita Colwell (the first woman to lead NSF in the States). In her book, A Lab of One’s Own in response to being told by a professor at Purdue that ‘we don’t waste fellowships on women’, she says:

‘My first reaction is dismay – quickly followed by anger at the injustice of this policy and at his off-handedness in telling me about it…..He seems to think I have no future. Well, I tell myself, I will damn well prove you wrong.’

And she did. That was 1956, but today as then, many people – regardless of gender – may have their hopes apparently dashed by some ‘off-hand’ remark, only for that to spur them on to achieve whatever it is they are apparently being denied. Unintended consequences, but in that framing a positive outcome, sadly not so often true.

As a leader and a mentor one can immediately see that brushing someone off carelessly and without thought, as that professor brushed Colwell off, is not a kind or caring thing to do. The trouble is, there will be people who may be aiming at something beyond their reach and it is necessary to let them down gently. That can also be kind, but it can appear to be quite brutal to the recipient. In reality, and as the panel at last week’s discussion made clear, for those (all women as it happens) who had succeeded, a helping hand, a frank piece of advice, sponsorship and just ‘being there’ as a support were the things that stuck in their mind and coloured their own leadership styles as they rose in seniority.

Business gurus tend to talk about ‘being authentic’ as the right way to lead. But if you are a testy, over-bearing soul being authentic may be very destructive for those around you. The mantra, I believe, means don’t be afraid to show your own weaknesses – perhaps you’re tired having spent the weekend visiting your elderly parents 200 miles away, or are struggling with PTSD or whatever upset is occupying your mind – but too many people may want to deny they have any weaknesses at all. In which case being authentic may lead to yet more unintended consequences, as an exhortation to a team to strive harder may come across as bullying and lead to resignations. I prefer the encouraging words that Ijeoma Uchegbu, spoke last week, having experienced this herself when junior, that it is ‘always important to show empathy and kindness.’  We should all remember these words. Who knows who we will inspire or encourage to progress and who will thereby go on to make the most of their potential.

Posted in empathy, Ijeoma Uchegbu, Rita Colwell, Science Culture | Comments Off on Unintended Consequences