Hope Is A Verb - Jessica Wade- The untold stories of Wikipedia

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Meet Jessica Wade, an experimental physicist in London who has written 1,997 Wikipedia biographies for unrepresented female and minority scientists to encourage more diversity in STEM. In this conversation, Jess chats about what inspired her to use Wikipedia as a platform for change and the power of a single entry to create global ripples. She shares her passion for combining science and engineering with the creative arts and why "celebrating" women is key to a more equitable future. Find out more: Twitter: @jesswade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Wade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red We are proud to have featured Jess as one of our 100 Humankind Heroes and would like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this possible. If you're interested in supporting the work we do at Future Crunch, you can find out more at www.futurecrunch.com This episode of "Hope Is A Verb" was hosted by Angus Hervey, cofounder of Future Crunch and Amy Davoren-Rose, the creative director. The soundtrack for this podcast is "Rain," composed and performed by El Rey Miel from their upcoming album "Sea the Sky." Audio sweetening by Anthony Badolato- Ai3 Audio and Voice. We would like to acknowledge that Hope Is A Verb is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung People. These conversations are inspired by our charity partners and our Humankind Project that celebrates the people who are stitching our world back together. You can contact us directly at [e-mail] Transcripts will be available on our website soon.

Hi, welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast from Future Crunch that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future, and showing us the best of what it is to be human.

Even though you can feel very small in this huge kind of massive global challenge, and gender stereotypes feel like they're really hard to shift, I truly believe we all have a responsibility and an opportunity to be able to do something about it. When you think of all the ways that we commend the world, Wikipedia is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. But for experimental physicist Jessica Wade, the world's largest encyclopedia has become the perfect place to tackle the overwhelming lack of diversity in STEM.

Since 2017, Jess, whose day job involves working in material sciences at Imperial College London, has written and published almost 2,000 Wikipedia biographies of underrepresented pioneers, women, people of colour and members of the LGBTQ plus community who've made extraordinary contributions to science and to humanity and yet don't appear in the history books. Jess believes that greater visibility and diversity in science will lead to more of the innovations that we need to solve the big problems that are facing our planet.

We love this conversation. I think you'll agree that Jess's enthusiasm and sense of wonder is infectious. Hey Jess, welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you here. Hello, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Jess, is there a news story that is giving you hope anywhere in the world right now? I think probably everywhere in the world. It's everyone kind of rising up to shine a light on how dramatically the world is being destroyed by climate change. The kind of collective activism driven by a lot of amazing

young people. I work in a materials department at Imperial College London, which is a big scientific university. And actually, it's incredibly inspiring how many of them want to and do work on projects related to sustainability and kind of transforming processes in big industrial operations to make them more climate friendly. And that call is really coming from young people. I'm inspired by being around them. It's actually one of the best things about working in a university is not just this, we want knowledge hidden in these ivory towers. It's we want

solutions that are going to benefit humanity. Can you tell us about your day job? What is an experimental physicist? What do you actually do? So I work on new materials for electronic devices. We're kind of interested in designing new molecules, actually carbon-based semiconductors that have really interesting optical, electronic and magnetic properties that we can use to make things like more efficient displays or more sophisticated photo detectors or better solar cells. I'm really interested in using the shape of molecules, particularly something called the chirality of a molecule. So that's an object that exists as a non-superimposable mirror image, like your left

and your right hand. And we can actually make left and right-handed molecules and use them to make materials that will emit twisted light or absorb twisted light. And this is really, really useful for next generation technologies. So my kind of day job is studying these molecules, turning them into thin films that could go into devices, trying to optimize the way that they're ordered and arranged to make that device more efficient. So we're really interested to go back to the beginning of your story. Can you tell us a bit about your family and how your early years shaped what you do now and your passion for what you do now? I did kind of grow up curious about the world.

My parents are both medical doctors. My mum is a psychiatrist and my dad is a neurologist. I went through school kind of interested in science and arts, just really interested in school. I liked being at school a lot. I had amazing teachers in in physics and chemistry particularly and but I always I I loved art and I went to art school for a little while before I ended up studying physics and so I think that you know I was always

fascinated by science but always knew that I had to do something. I had to have that kind of training in something quite purely creative as well, because that was really important for making discoveries in the way I wanted to make them or joining things up in the way I wanted to join things up. And you said that growing up, you didn't have any idea that jobs like the one you do now existed. Can you tell us what you meant by that? You know, when I was at school, my parents were doctors, other people's parents had whatever jobs other people's parents did. But I didn't know any actual scientists working within a university and having this chance to do things that, you know, may have, and now I'm in an engineering department, it definitely does have, but it does have a societal focus and this

industry relevance. We want to make things better. We want to make solutions that will help people across the whole of the world. And we want our science to enable that. But you could be in university doing that. You're not doing it to make a profit. You're doing it for that joy of discovery. And yeah, I had no idea that that could be a job or that your job could be fun. I love it. I do it on the weekend. I'll do it all night long. I don't think everyone in life gets that. And I feel very lucky to have discovered that. Jess, there is such a joy in listening to someone talk about their job in the way that you do. When did you realize that being a woman in science meant that you were in the minority? Probably when I started studying physics at university.

So I went to an all-girls school, actually. It's quite interesting when you look at the demographics of who does study physics at A-level at high school. It's the majority of women who study physics go to an all-girls school. So there's this over-representation of people who are in an environment of all women who choose to study physics in the first place. And so when I look at the big leading physicists in the UK, the big leading women physicists, professors, industry leaders, lots of them went to these all-girls schools. So you get this kind of strange shift, which is truly not representative of most of the population most people don't get that opportunity and I got to the physics department at Imperial which is 80% men majority white like overwhelmingly non-diverse and and it really strikes you you know and and I know as well as

you know and hopefully your listeners know um that there's nothing biological that causes this under-representation or under-representation of women or people from other historically marginalized groups it is just the stereotype that tells certain groups of people that you're not as good or as welcome in these subjects and you you see it strikingly on day one of a physics department. And I suppose it took me a few years to kind of get the confidence to say, I want to be the person who changes this. And so you started giving talks in schools, but what sparked the Wikipedia project? I started probably like most, a lot of scientists. And you go out, you give a talk in high school,

it feels great. You feel great. You love what you do. When you talk to kids about what you do, they're just like, whoa, and they're like, that's fantastic. But actually, how many opinions you actually change long term is really hard to gauge or to try and quantify. You know, you can have that, speak to two classes, 50 kids, maybe one person will change their mind and choose to study something like physics or chemistry or go to university to do physics or chemistry. You're mainly preaching to the converted. And then I started thinking a lot about how science and scientists are portrayed. You know, the big roadblock, I think, for young people choosing to study subjects like physics is physics has not a great image.

If you imagine physicists, you imagine this kind of isolated genius with a really messy desk and a blackboard and probably fuzzy white hair making discoveries on their own. When actually it is super international, absolutely giant teams of people who work together. And so I was really interested in that shift between what we think physics is and actually what these types of subjects are in reality. About the same time, I learned about, well, obviously I knew what Wikipedia was, but I learned about just how impactful and important Wikipedia was on pretty much every aspect of society. You know, if you want a platform for communicating knowledge and information with everyone from, you know, school kids to teachers to parents to policymakers to journalists, Wikipedia is that platform. It's really remarkable how many different aspects of society trust it

and how non-partisan it is. You know, whether you're left how many different aspects of society trust it and how non-partisan it is. You know, whether you're left of center, right of center, wherever you are, people use Wikipedia. And so I was kind of, you know, interested in that way science is portrayed and scientists are portrayed, interested in using a platform that everyone was going to and accessing their information on, and then aghast to learn just how underrepresented women were on that. When I started editing Wikipedia at the beginning of 2018, 17% of biographies on English language Wikipedia were of women. And that's kind of, I don't know, that's mad.

It's not just women scientists or women engineers. It's just the biographies, you know, the people that Wikipedia deems notable and important, women were less than 20% of that. And so I was just like, I've got to do something about this. I can't, I'm not the kind of person who can just sit around and be angry. I have to act. So I was like, well, I'll start writing biographies. And then I was like, well, actually to do this properly, I have to do it every day. So then I started writing biographies every day. And then I got a little bit carried away and haven't stopped. Who was your first entry?

It was actually a fascinating woman called Kim Cobb, who is a professor of climate science. She goes out on kind of big ocean missions and collects ice cores and corals and looks at how the chemistry has changed over big length timescales and uses that to understand how humans have impacted the climate. And but she's also a huge advocate for working for scientists working better, better with policymakers. I think that's something that you miss when you, you know, don't fully understand what science or careers in science are, is that you're not only on your own in a lab, but you also work to influence policy. You work closely with governments. And Professor Kim Cobb is a fantastic example of that. I saw her give a talk.

And as you do when you see impressive people on television or hear them on radio or see them give presentations, you go onto your phone, you get out your little search engine and you look that person up. And just the very date of having a Wikipedia page means that that Wikipedia page comes up to the top of any search you do. And it gives them that kind of credibility. So I looked up Kim Cobb. She didn't have a Wikipedia page. I just learned about how Wikipedia was failing women. And I thought, I can write this. And now she has one. Now she has one that's probably in a bunch of languages and is updated

and maintained by hundreds of people all over the world. And I just think that's an amazing thing to be able to do. So you started writing these Wikipedia entries on underrepresented women scientists and engineers from around the world. You write one, then you write another one. When did it sort of turn from this flash in the pan idea into something you thought, okay, I actually have to keep on going at this, considering, by the way, that you've got a pretty demanding day job? I decided over the end of year, Christmas, seasonal holidays, end of 2017, beginning of 2018, I was going to do this every day and no one really spoke about it for about half a year I was writing these Wikipedia pages I was

sending them to like my parents like look at this cool woman um or my dad was texting me you know being like oh look I found this woman neurologist you should write her Wikipedia page and then someone from the Guardian um the newspaper, came in to write an article about it. And I thought, oh, no, I'll never read it. It will just be in the education section. I don't need to worry. I didn't think I even told my family that someone was coming in to write it. I think because it was like a good news story on the internet, and usually the internet's, you know, not got very good stories. Everyone went a bit wild for it. So it was like a week in 2018

when everyone in the world wanted to talk to me about Wikipedia. And then, you know, things like that keep you going because it is this extraordinarily cost-effective way of doing science communication. You know, it's free to edit. It's free to read, obviously. I can teach people how to edit.

You can translate pages into different languages. A lot of big scientific societies got quite excited because not only is it a way to better improve the representation of or the knowledge and understanding about women scientists, but also about whole scientific fields. You know, if you want to really explain chirality on a medium that people use in a format that people understand, Wikipedia is the best place to do that. It's so exciting. I think it's probably the same as you when you're researching people to come on the show or anyone in the audience. If you're preparing for some big meeting and you get that chance to sit down and do the homework and the like research part and you learn and you put together a story and and that's so inspiring and every night I get to learn about a new part

of science or a new you know a new technique or a new kind of weird state in America or like you know all these weird things that you learn about so so I feel like it keeps me going and actually um I love seeing things change over time. So I love seeing the numbers of women change or when these people start to get recognition beyond their kind of academic circle for the very thing of having a Wikipedia page, you know, you put the knowledge on there. And because the information is there and accessible, people start getting invitations to speak or they get nominated for awards. That kind of propels me to keep going. I think this is what we fell in love about your project, Jess, is that you're tackling a problem, not by amplifying it, but by celebrating these

incredible scientists who happen to be female or people of colour. Why do you think this idea of celebrating is so important when it comes to change? If you cast your mind back to when you were young, or if I think about at high school, what changed my mind? I don't think I'd have ever gone into a subject or thought about studying a subject if someone went in and said, by the way, no women do this. There's like, you know, there's 9% of women in engineering. It wouldn't have made me think, oh yeah, you know, sign me up. But I think if I heard like an inspirational story of someone who was doing something really fantastic, then that would have changed my mind.

And that if, you know, if that person happens to look like me or have been to a school like mine or have come, you know, had a similar story, and that might have really inspired and motivated me. So I do think there's something around the fact that we really do need to do this because we have to have that positive, exciting message to kind of capture a new generation of researchers and I truly believe subjects like physics and engineering and material science particularly are absolutely critical if we want to solve any of the challenges that this world faces you know we can't keep shouting about climate change or doing any of these things if we're not simultaneously training a new generation of physicists and engineers to be able to come up with ways to tackle these problems. So I think that's one of the reasons. The other one is that I truly think

these people deserve recognition. You know, it's obviously Wikipedia is one aspect of that, one very small aspect. But there are so many incredible women, incredible people of color, incredible LGBTQ plus researchers who aren't getting the awards or the kudos or the invitations to speak. And the scientific community owes it to them. We owe it to them to celebrate them now, but also to document the contributions that they've made so that in the future, they're the ones in history books. We can't just rely on institutions to do that.

It's not happening quick enough. We have to, as on institutions to do that. It's not happening quick enough. We have to, as individuals, take that on. And kind of coming back to what you said before, we have to just stop amplifying these problems. We have to actually act upon them. The way you speak about it, you can really understand why you keep on doing it. It's almost like you stumbled by accident into this incredible idea, but it's almost like the idea is bigger than yourself. Yeah. And that's super exciting about it too. You know, it's obviously not just me. There are projects all around the world to try and document the stories and the contributions

of women. There's a great initiative on Wikipedia called Wiki Women in Red, which is a project that goes through Wikipedia, making all the red links blue and red links. If you're a Wikipedia user, you'll know if you if you click between pages the links between those pages are blue so if i went on someone's wikipedia page and it said the university they went to that would be a blue link and i could click it and go to the wikipedia page about that university and but for women more often than not the pages don't exist so that's a red link there's a big initiative to try and turn those red links into blue ones. And that's collective action from people all over the world.

So it's the other thing that kind of motivates you is to know that you're not alone in all of this, that there are so many other people who are part of this mission and this journey too. But we all do need to kind of keep stepping up because we can't rely on other people to change it. It's really on us. Do you know how many bios you've actually written yourself personally so far? And can you tell us

one or two of your favorite biographies of all of them? So I can tell you exactly how much I've written because I've just Googled it thanks to the internet. But I've written 1,977, which is which is pretty great I when I when I started editing it was on 17 percent of the millions of biographies on English language Wikipedia about women I think now we've just surpassed 19 percent and that's not because people haven't been doing their work on creating women's biographies it's because actually also people keep creating men's at the same time but um I I think it's never just writing the Wikipedia pages. It's actually that society has to recognize these women's contributions more

because Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopedia. So there are quote unquote notability criteria for defining whether someone's notable enough. And women disproportionately don't fulfill those notability criteria because we don't honor women enough. We don't write about them enough. We don't give them awards. They don't get big research grants. They're not promoted to high senior positions. There's two parts of it, right? There's the being on Wikipedia, which is great, but there's also having to shift how society celebrates women's contributions to the world. And so I feel like we're doing the Wikipedia stuff, but we've also started that conversation about honoring women more. So even though 17 to 19% probably sounds quite small to your listeners, I feel quite like that's

obviously in the right direction. And by far the most remarkable story ever that I've written about on Wikipedia is this phenomenal woman called Gladys West. She's a mathematician. She was born in 1930s in Virginia. She went to a historically black college and university and she studied maths, ended up working for high school, then worked for the US government and did the calculations that enabled GPS, so kind of satellite navigation, Google Maps, Apple Maps, however you get around in your car. That's thanks to this phenomenal African-American mathematician who actually calculated how far from perfectly spherical planet Earth was. So she did maths to say, you know, the world's not a perfect sphere and this is how non-perfect it is so that we can put our satellites around it properly and be able

to navigate. She did that at a time when society, particularly America, was really not as welcoming as it should have been to African Americans. And, you know, she was often the only black person in the team she was in and certainly the only black woman. And I wrote her Wikipedia page in February 2018. And by May that year, the BBC had put her in their top 100 women in the world. She's on the BBC homepage. I can see the numbers on Wikipedia of the page views. And it's kind of like popping off, right, like thousands of page views an hour.

And then she started getting profiled in all of these places. She was inducted to the US Air Force Hall of Fame. She was 89 when this happened. She finished her doctorate. She did a PhD by distance learning, which just shows you like, you know, people are just remarkable. And then she was awarded the Prince Philip Medellin Prize from the Royal Academy of Engineering, which had never been to a woman before in history. And the first woman was a 90-year-old mathematician. She has always been remarkable, but her story was never on a platform where people could read it. And all you do as a Wikipedia editor is put that story on that platform and then suddenly the world has access to it and that is just remarkable so so yeah I love that so much oh such a good story what is amazing Jess is that

not only have you done this incredible project and the work that you do as a day job you've also written a beautiful children's book called Nano, the Spectacular Science of the Very, Very Small. And you've run nano workshops for children. Can you tell us how working with the very, very small can expand your view of the world? When I started doing all this Wikipedia stuff, a bunch of publishers wrote to me. They were like, will you write a book about women scientists? And it's very flattering when people ask you to do things like that. But actually, I think there are loads of books about women scientists. And the problem isn't that there aren't books. The problem is that the only people who read them are people who really care about women scientists. I realized in those conversations that

although there were lots of children's books about dinosaurs and the body and outer space, there weren't really any books about chemistry or material science or actually how materials are so critical to our interaction with the world. world. I think materials are kind of crucial for not only how we interact with the world now, but also if we want to achieve any of our kind of climate ambitions. And I loved the idea that we could try and convey that to children. Nano is this particularly fascinating world, because it's really thinking that we can start with these kind of fundamental building blocks with atoms and molecules, and start to build them into kind of complex structures that will give us the functionality we want to do these new and extraordinary things. But kind of hard to get your head around. It took a while for me to learn how you could write that in an engaging way for five or six year olds. And so we had this kind of back

and forth. And what came out was this really beautiful story of kind of the scientific method you know how we do science how we understand and manipulate atoms and molecules and how we use that to create really extraordinary materials and wonderful devices and technologies and and actually I worked with this illustrator a really beautiful fantastical and whimsical woman called Melissa Castrillon. And this was her first nonfiction book. And obviously it was the first kind of children's book I'd written. So we both went on this journey together. And that kind of inspired much of the workshops that we've done since, because we both care so much about not only science, but also

getting young people to be excited about the arts. So we've done lots of workshops around nano, where I talk about materials and we get young people to come up with ways that we could create, you know, this new wonder material to save planet earth. It's opened a whole new world for me. And hopefully it's been useful for teachers as well. You know, something wonderful that happens when you write a children's book is you don't only write it for the child who's reading it, but their teachers and their parents and they talk about it with their families. So you have much bigger conversations

than just that individual personal one that happens when you're on your own in your bedroom. And I love that. So if there was one thing you could change about the way that science is taught and spoken about

in our educational institutions, what would that one thing be? That's such a good question. I actually think we do a pretty good job in universities. So I think, you know, at Imperial where I work, we only have science. We have science, we have medicine, we have engineering. I think we do a fantastic job there of showing how interdisciplinary it is and how connected it all is and how global focused it is. But I don't think we convey that enough in schools. I always think it whenever I get invited to go to a high school and you go back in and nothing's

changed from 15, 20 years ago when we were there. Like, you know, the staff room's still the same. They still have like maths on a Monday and then physics on a Thursday afternoon. Like that seems so ridiculous to me that these subjects are so joined up and so important to one another. And yet school really segregates them and says, you have to be a scientist or you're an artist. You can never be both. The two shall never meet.

And I think that's crazy. It's just not how science works. It's not how the world works. We have to have people who are trained to think creatively with these interdisciplinary skills that are often going to have to be technical. You know, we shouldn't all be frightened of maths. We should embrace maths and use that for what we need it to do. We shouldn't all be terrified of taking exams. We should know the kinds of capabilities we have available to us. You know, we have the internet, we have chat GPT,

use that to do the problem that you're trying to do in a more efficient way. You know, get clever about how you ask a question so that you can do something with this huge repository and access to information you have that no one's ever done before. So I think we need schools and high schools to become more interdisciplinary, to join up subjects more, to harness technology for good, not be terrified of it and not talk about how students are going to use it to cheat in exams. Because if you can use that to cheat in exams, then we're setting really terrible exams. But what I think needs to be done to make that happen is I truly think that the world does nowhere near enough to celebrate and recognize how important teachers are. In the UK, we have such a shortage of skills specialist teachers in maths and physics.

We do not have anywhere near as many physics teachers as we need or anywhere near as many maths teachers. So most kids are getting introduced to these subjects that I think are absolutely critical for the future of the society by someone who's not an expert in them. And I think that's, you know, a terrible thing. So I think we have to start recognizing teachers, honoring teachers. They should be, you know, the pop stars and the rock stars. They should be invited to speak at world conferences and given prestigious honors, and they should be paid better. to speak at world conferences and given prestigious honors and they should be paid better and because because i think to shift people's mindsets about science it's all going to start in classrooms and it's going to be those teachers who do it people who are listening to this they

want to get involved they want to support where can they go what can they do um well i think they can make changes locally right they can just start at your dinner table in your classroom with your workmates and your colleagues speaking more and amplifying more the contributions of women to the world. You know, speaking about incredible women from history or contemporary women today who are doing awesome things and just recognizing that, making that part of a normal conversation that we do that more often. Obviously, I'd be super happy if people got involved with editing Wikipedia. Probably everyone listening can think about an incredible woman in their life who's done something amazing for planet Earth or for society. And if you search for them, more often than not, sitting down, writing a prize nomination, writing a prize citation, nominating someone to speak at a conference or become a fellow of a society.

You know, I think we can all make changes kind of in our private lives, changes on the internet, but also much bigger changes. Even though you can feel very small in this huge kind of massive global challenge and gender stereotypes feel like they're really hard to shift i truly believe we all have a responsibility and an opportunity to be able to do something about it there's not kind of one website which i can direct you to that will solve all global problems but i do think everyone has that opportunity to make the change at the position they're at. You can make a huge impact. So Jess, we have a question that we finish all our conversations with. And it's, what does the word hope mean to you?

Hope to me means change. You know, I can get up out of bed and know that the world is going to be a better place at the end of the day than when I started, because I'm going to do that tiny thing to make the world you know some somewhat better for someone for some individual for something and I think we all have that capacity to to do something to make that happen this project is about the people who are stitching together a better future. And that means one that by definition is fairer and more equitable. This conversation with Jess is a great reminder that although this work can be frustrating and at times heartbreaking, it's also a celebration of the very best of us. If you want to learn more about Jess and how you can get involved in

diversifying Wikipedia, check out our show notes for more details. We are proud to have featured Jess as one of our 100 amazing heroes in our Humankind project, which you can find on our website. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making these projects possible. If you'd like to find out more about supporting us by becoming a paid subscriber, check out futurecrunch.com. We would like to acknowledge that this podcast is recorded in Australia

on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support Hope as a Verb, please subscribe and leave a review. And if you want to reach out directly, send us an email at hope at futurecrunch.com.au. Thanks for listening. Thank you.