In The Arena by TechArena - Tackling the Recognition Gap with Jess Wade

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

TechArena host talks to British physicist and inclusion advocate Jess Wade about her research in organic semiconductors and her quest to drive increased recognition for under-represented scientists on Wikipedia.DEIInclusionSTEMTechnologyJessWade

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Jess Wade. Jess, welcome to the program. Why don't you just start by introducing yourself? Sure. I'm Jess. I'm a research fellow at Materials, and I'm particularly interested in new materials that we can use and design for quantum technology. So materials that control the spin of photons and electrons, and then how we can translate that into a device. And I have a side hustle, like everyone does these days, of trying to make science more inclusive and a place that has better representation of people from historically excluded groups.

Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. But before we get there, I want to talk to you about your own research. You're at British Imperial College, and I read your PhD is focused on organic semiconductors. And I was wondering what that was all about. I come from the semiconductor industry. Can you give us a background on that? And where are the applications of the things that you're researching in your lab? Sure. So organic semiconductors are carbon-based semiconductors. So they're kind of combined the electronic properties of inorganics like silicon, but with the processing properties of polymers. So they're just kind of much easier to work with, but also that we can kind of tune their optical and their electronic properties by changing their chemistry. So if I want to have something that absorbs or emits a different color of light, then I can get a very

clever chemist to try and change the kind of molecular structure or throw in a few different elements to make that possible. And I guess the applications of this at the moment in things like displays and solar panels, so the O in OLED display, whether that's your smartphone or your super fancy television, that O stands for organic. And that's because they're these carbon-based semiconductors that display manufacturers are using. Just to have an estimate of how big that industry is, LG make about 20 or 22 million OLED displays every single year. So it's a giant sector. Photovoltaics, similarly, kind of flexible photovoltaics rely on these organic photovoltaic modules. And I guess the kind of twist that I'm bringing to it recently is trying to use molecular chirality to control those quantum properties.

So to control how they absorb or emit spin polarized photons and then how they transport spin polarized electrons and thinking about how we can kind of harness that. extraordinary molecular landscape that you can play with to really tune quite fundamental, you know, quantum properties of materials and then translate that into devices and technologies. What drew you to this field? It's so much fun. I think I obviously had no idea about it when I was at school, although now I do so much work where I go and talk to schools about how awesome science is. So now I know an awful lot of young people do appreciate chirality and how we can use it in electronics. But when I was at school, I didn't really have any idea that kind of careers in research existed. I grew up, my parents are both medical doctors. So obviously, I knew that there was a profession in which you did science and as a result, you made society better.

You know, that's what they do every day. But actually, I became really interested in physics and chemistry when I was at high school. I had really great physics and chemistry teachers. I actually found it very hard choosing between the two to go to university. I also love art. I did art for a little bit before doing physics. And then I found myself in the final year of my physics degree doing a master's research project with a really cool team of people working on kind of new materials for photovoltaics, for solar cells. me to how fun it is to do research you know how great it is to be able to go and collect some powder that some obscure chemist has dreamt up on a computer and then spent a year trying to synthesize and go and get 10 or so milligrams of that and then turn it into a thin film and then study the molecules in that thin film using all of these different characterization techniques and then use that kind of optimized structure to make a device and that whole process and the kind of collaborative teamwork discovery

part I just absolutely loved so there was no intention to do anything I just thought I'll go to university and and I'll see what it's like and then I ended up loving university and also never really wanting to leave something else that happened to me was I discovered a love of teaching. I really love teaching undergrads. And a university gives you the option to do that. So you work with scientists doing this beautiful, wonderful blue skies. Let's work out the fundamental mechanisms of this. And then you have these students who you can kind of blow their mind with what you can

do with nanomaterials nowadays. And yeah, I just love being part of it. It really speaks to how important it is to meet people along the way that open your mind and connect you with things that just take out your passion, right? I completely agree. And the kind of, I guess the critical part in my head of that, of what you just said, is is the people like it was my teachers who I was so excited about when I was doing a PhD and there are times during a PhD it can it can be tricky and it's it's frightening you know getting on stage and giving your first presentation is scary losing your data is frightening it's so annoying when your experiment goes wrong even though you're so sure it was going to work and and there are times of that that are hard, but it's actually the people who you're around who make it kind of

possible to continue. So I think, you know, we underappreciate that because when we think about scientific discovery, we think about, you know, who won Nobel prizes or who's become a fellow of the American Physical Society that year or whatever. We don't think about the actual teams of people that facilitated that discovery. And that was it. You know, it was not just the people who taught me the basics when I was at high school and then inspired me to go and study this at university. It's the people that I'm around every day in the lab and the people that are in the lecture theater when I'm trying to talk about nanomaterials.

That's what keeps me going. So yeah, the people part is huge. You mentioned earlier that you've got a side hustle and that's the reason why I came to get to know you. Tell me a little bit about that and what you've been up to that's drawn so much attention. Sure. Probably everyone here knows certain groups are incredibly underrepresented in science and engineering, and other groups are extraordinarily overrepresented. And I think I hadn't really realized this until I actually got to university. And I kind of looked around in this physics department and realized it was incredibly dominated by men. It was overwhelmingly white. And also for subjects

like physics and actually still computer science and advanced maths, it's so dominated by people from particular socioeconomic groups. You know, there's a privilege, there's a privilege barrier. And whatever your privilege is, gender, ethnicity, educational background, parental occupation, you name it, that privilege impacts your likelihood to study that subject and then succeed in that area. And, you know, I realized when I got there as an undergrad that that wasn't right, that it's not only kind of not fair, but it also means we're not doing the best science we could do. We're not asking the best questions. We're not answering them as quickly. In the case of tech, for everyone who listens to this podcast, we're really not designing the best tech solutions to all of these huge

global challenges. If we're only selecting our big coders or our problem solvers from a handful of the population, we're really, really not pushing the boundaries of what we could do. And we're not designing solutions that really work for everyone. And I realized that as an undergrad. And as I kind of gradually, you know, did my PhD and then was a postdoc, I started thinking more and more about what I could do to try and change that. And, you know, it started off with trying to get as many people as possible excited and enthusiastic about science. I did a lot of work with schools and kind of public engagement. And then after that, I thought, you know, it's fantastic.

But only a certain type of person invites a physicist to give a talk. And only certain types of kids will come into a university on the weekend. So how can we go further? And then I started thinking, you know, this isn't just about the inspiring and exciting part. It's also really about how we give people recognition and we honour people for their contributions to science. There have been phenomenal black engineers and women chemists and Indian nanoscientists, you know, we just don't talk about them enough. And so what I

really wanted to do was to try and take these stories bigger, and to make sure that people were aware of all of these pioneers that have contributed hugely to our understanding of the universe, but just kind of get overlooked in textbooks and presentations and the way that we document science, really. And what better place to do that than Wikipedia? So Wikipedia is, I'm sure everyone knows, but it's this open source kind of collaborative encyclopedia. And it's really, you know, this democratized platform for knowledge sharing, which extraordinarily, in its entire existence, has remained nonpartisan. You know, people trust Wikipedia, irrespective of their political leaning, or where they are in the world, or what it is that they do

for a job. And Wikipedia is kind of critical to all of these different aspects of society, you know, to parents, to teachers, to policymakers, to journalists, to academics, everyone uses it. And yet, it feels like it's got a lot on there. But actually, there are kind of huge gaps on Wikipedia. And there are huge gaps in issues related to science and tech. Firstly, topics on those subjects go out of date almost, almost immediately, because everything's changing so fast. But also, sometimes they're just non-existent because Wikipedia is pretty good at documenting pop culture and not really good at keeping up with scientific advances.

So science has gaps on Wikipedia. But if you dig a little bit deeper, women are incredibly underrepresented in biographies on Wikipedia and anyone actually from a historically excluded group. So women, as time of saying, speaking right now, 2022, November 10th, about 19% of the biographies on English language Wikipedia about women won nine, despite women being, you know, 51% of the global population. And for black women or LGBTQ plus women, the statistics are even worse. So I kind of thought we need to do a better job telling the story of science on platforms that people can access and understand. But also we really need to do a better job of honoring women scientists and engineers and technology leaders. And so for the past four years, I've been writing Wikipedia pages about these legends every

single night. Yeah. And I guess the reason you invited me on is because sometimes newspapers like to say, oh, look at what this little nerd in London is doing. And then everyone in the world wants to talk about Wikipedia. Well, the story really captured my attention because it shows dedication. You've penned, I believe, over 1900 Wikipedia entries, and I don't know where the count is today. But it's impressive to stay with it and to just continue documenting because it's such important work. My question for you is what gave you the impetus to start here? And who was the first biography that you wrote? So the impetus to start was really that I recognized this power of Wikipedia. I recognized its significance in society. And I hate knowing there's something I could do about something and

not doing it. And I have to kind of act and do it. And so when I realized that there was this huge under-representation of people from historically excluded groups, and when I knew there was something that I could do about it, I decided I had to do it. And I like a challenge. So I was like, well, I could just write one a week, but how will I stick to that? Because how will I know what day of the week I wrote it? And what if I'm away? Like, I don't know, I couldn't do that. So I decided I'll just do it every single day. And actually, I find it very comforting and inspiring to kind of get get home after a busy day in the lab or you know some time of teaching

or traveling or whatever and to just kind of have my laptop and just be able to learn about people and I love it and actually the Wikipedia community of editors are amazing in like, you know, you go to bed and in the morning I wake up and someone in California overnight has put on found a photograph that I could use or someone's translated it or Wikipedia pages aren't static. Like what's in a textbook, they's now at Brown called Kim Cobb, who tries to understand the impacts of humans on climate change, and goes out and does all these big ocean missions and collects ice cores and looks at corals and looks at all of the chemistry in those cores and corals and tries to understand what would have happened to the climate if we weren't here and what we're doing. And she also works with government, she informs policy, she's got kids and is this kind of phenomenal world leading scientist, just, you know, incredibly interesting personal story as

well. And that's kind of the beauty of a Wikipedia page that you tell everything about someone. And it's never just the science they do, which is what you find on academic profiles so yeah yeah I started because I saw this inequality and I I'm the kind of person who has to do something about it and then after that I kept going because I realized I could change something now and you've met her is that correct yeah I've met her and and did you meet her before or after you wrote her wikipedia entry no i met her before i met her before and then i decided that i um had to do something when i learned i met her about three months before i wrote her wikipedia page that's fascinating where do all the ideas of who you write about come from because i'm assuming you haven't met all of these thousands of people

the answer i can't say anymore is twitter because we can't go on Twitter anymore. But I go through university websites. I go through who's become a fellow of a particular society. I go through who's been awarded a big shiny prize. You know, I just go through all of these places and kind of have, you know, archived content, journals, conferences. Sometimes I see them on conferences. Sometimes I see them on television. Sometimes I hear them on radio. So I just have all these kind of constant sources

of information, I guess, like everyone does nowadays. And then I think I'm going to kind of forage through that. And I have a bookmarks tab in my browser. And it's not very scientific. It's just who I was most inspired about when I sat down at my laptop when I started writing them I thought I'll just you know I can write about physics and chemistry relatively easily I'll um I'll go to just the physics and the chemistry first and I'll start stay UK based because that's achievable but then you realize very quickly that I was kind of over selecting white physicists because that's who's represented in UK academia. So I went to America, where you've got, you've had amazing affirmative action programs for quite a long time. And a lot

of world leading scientists in America are African American. And so you know, I started to branch out, but but I've really loved the journey. That's fantastic. Do you want to share with the audience a couple stories about folks that you've come along the way where their stories just blew your mind that nobody had shown a light on their research before? Yeah, I guess the kind of most sensational one for me, and just because of the way that she's been honored and recognized since, is a woman called Gladys West. She's a mathematician who was born in 1930.

So she's, you know, over 90 now. And she was born in Virginia, attended a historically black college and university. And you know, anyone listening who isn't appreciative of HBCUs, they really train some of the best scientists and engineers and mathematicians in the world and continue to do so at rates that far exceed other universities. But anyway, Gladys West was a mathematician. She ended up teaching maths in a high school and then she worked for the US government and she worked actually on the mathematics that underpin GPS technologies. So kind of satellite navigation, Google Maps, whatever you use to navigate around to your city and your car on your bus. Thank Gladys West for that. And I wrote her Wikipedia page just after the movie Hidden Figures had come out.

And so I was, you know, buzzed about discovering this incredible mathematician and kind of calculator. And then she because that's what they called them, a calculator. She wasn't a physical, she was she was a human. But anyway, all of these documents about her were kind of had these redacted sections because she'd worked for the government. So I really thought this is a hidden figure. And this was kind of February 2018. And then by May, the BBC had put put Gladys West in their list of the top 100 women in the world. So kind of at the age of 89, there were 1000s of page views every hour on her Wikipedia page. And then the US Air Force inducted her to their Hall of Fame, which is so cool, right? 89 year old Gladys going to get that I should call her Dr. West, she then got a PhD by distance learning. And so everything was happening, you know, the page was still alive. Gladys was still doing incredible things.

And then just in November 2020, The Guardian, a big national newspaper in the UK, wrote a whole profile of Gladys West, you know, as the hidden figure who helped to invent GPS. And then last summer, the Royal Academy of Engineering, which is like your National Academy of Engineering, like huge prestigious engineering society, awarded Gladys West the Prince Philip Medal and Prize. And this had never gone to a woman before in the entire history of the award. And the first person to win it is Dr. Gladys West from Virginia. And I don't know, like things like that, like, you know, Gladys West is an extraordinary woman

and her story is extraordinary and she's huge in her community and in her church. And I think it's powerful. But, you know, taking that story and getting it seen by so many eyeballs is kind of critical. And so that's by far my favorite story of the power of Wikipedia and the power of this storytelling. But, you know, incredible pioneers. I've just been teaching this year, this term, a nanomaterials course for third year undergraduates. And as you can probably imagine, I try and fill it with as many extraordinary researchers from historically excluded groups as possible. And it turns out there's a lot who do awesome nanomaterials research. And a really

incredible person is an Indian American inventor called Sumita Mitra. And Sumita Mitra was the pioneer who bought nanotechnology to 3M. She was working at 3M, she was working on dental fillers, and she thought nanoparticles in a polymer matrix could make really effective dental fillers. And, you know, it was the first time that dentistry had used Nano. It was the first time 3M had used Nano in any project or any kind of product they were creating. And now they're used in billions of dental procedures around the world. And, you know, her name's everywhere in inventor worlds,

but it wasn't on Wikipedia. And now she's also in my lecture course. Oh, very nice. So, yeah, just these phenomenal, phenomenal kind of pioneers and leaders. And yeah, it's just, it's amazing to tell their stories. I think it's so powerful because you, you know, as you're telling me this, those stories about those two amazing women, and actually all three of the amazing women that you shared, you can picture a girl sitting in a classroom being inspired because somebody that they relate to has delivered something that amazing.

And you open up STEM with stories of people, just as you talked about your own career trajectory, right? I think that's it. I think it's seeing, you know, not just another Western white guy's name, but seeing something a little bit different and seeing, hey, people who look like you or went to your high school. You know, in my head, I love it. Very few people sit down on Wikipedia

and type in someone's name and then read up everything about them. You know, the beauty of Wikipedia is that you start on one page and then you just can't stop clicking through all of the links. And then there's some like game on Wikipedia that no matter where you start

and if you just keep clicking, you'll end up at philosophy. But anyway, I love that along that process, there's a high school student who's sitting there looking at alumni of the high school on Wikipedia or maybe people who from their town or maybe they're

looking at their favorite kind of spectroscopy, if they're like a super nerd, and then they realize that actually, that the person who pioneered that or came up with that is just like them. And that's the part, you know, it's that kind of subtle, not, not kind of screaming at them, hey, there are women scientists, which I think happens a lot. But it's kind of subtly bringing in those stories and saying they're just like you and and the only difference between you and them is that right now you don't feel as as confident as you should do but you 100 should feel that confident because look what you can go and do with it so kind of you know all of these educational studies say the thing that's really holding young people back from choosing subjects like physics and computing

and advanced math isn't a lack of ability. You know, if you look at ethnicity or gender, it's never ability and it's rarely, rarely interest. You know, usually everyone's as interested as each other, but it's just that confidence it's that confidence to choose that subject and to make that jump and to go and do things that you think might be tricky um and and what we really need to do as a society is to make every young person feel as confident as every other young person and give everyone that opportunity to discover a world in kind of technology or physics that is extraordinary. And there is one where everyone feels welcome and included. And yeah, I love the idea that

somewhere, somehow a Wikipedia page could contribute to that. Jess, you've obviously put a lot of thought and the passion of inclusion has imbued everything that you do. You know, it's very obvious as you tell your story that that's the case. When you think about the challenge, you know, it's an epic challenge and you've made an incredible contribution. But have you thought about what we do to imbue that passion in others so that we aren't talking about inclusion in 50 years and 100 years. undergrad, you think, well, I see this inequality, but what can I do about it? Or if you're a parent, you see, you know, the ridiculous gender stereotypes in society. Or if you're a high school teacher, you see the differences in outcomes that your students get, depending on the support and the preparation that they had before the class. And that's so different,

depending on the socioeconomic background or the values of the parents like you know we see these inequalities and it's so easy so easily to quickly overwhelmed by them and as a result of that kind of freeze and not act but I think equivalent to daily acts of kindness or whatever we can all do something small every day that just makes the world a little bit better and that might be that you sit down and write a wikipedia page it might be that you put someone forward for a prize it might be that when your daughter is going into high school or going into school that day you you give them a really good show and tell thing that's this incredible woman engineer that

no one else in the class has heard about or it could be coming up with new displays for your walls in your classroom that kind of say, you know, hey, by the way, actually, the Middle East was doing geometry and algebra way before the white Western world, we just didn't tell that story, you know, it could be it's just subtle ways and little things that individuals can do. So that would be my biggest kind of message that sometimes these challenges feel so, so huge that we won't take them on alone. But I think every single small act you do changes someone's life or opportunity. And you really shouldn't discount that. And we can't see that. And the other thing I would say, and which is probably harder to articulate, but often when you're talking about equity,

and when we talk about inclusion, it can feel quite combative. You know, I think it can often feel like, oh, these awful men and these awful white men and look at what the awful and as a result of that, it can create a kind of friction, right? It can be like, well, I can't do anything about that. And that whole group hate me. So there's nothing I can do. When really, I think that fixing these issues is going to take the effort of everyone in society. You know, people with the most power will have the most power to affect change. And so we really can't keep making any issue of equity, one where certain groups are kind of pitted off against each other we have to make it one where we're all collaboratively working on on a kind of goal and then science and tech and whatever it is that we're creating will be much much better places for it and we'll make discoveries faster and we'll make different discoveries and we'll create tech and medicines and things that truly work for everyone in in society and you

know we have a responsibility to do that because everyone in america everyone in the uk is is contributing to our ability to do science you know taxpayer funding is is how we do these experiments or whatever but actually we really need we need that commitment from everyone at every level because at the moment we're trying to get people or, you know, ineffective communications is making people at odds with one another. And I think it's a collaborative effort. So, yeah, that's a very long winded way of saying it's going to be small acts. And no matter how disempowered you feel, you have some power to do something for someone else. And the other part of it is we have to do this together. It can never be an us them scenario, because if it keeps being us them,

we'll just keep being this polarized and we won't get anywhere. I think that's great. Well, thank you so much for being on the program today. You're very inspirational to me. Thank you for having me. I think that I'll just leave you with this. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and talk to you about what you've been doing or maybe join the cause? Yeah, I mean, for now, until the whole actual website crunches, I'm on Twitter at Jess Wade. I've also joined Mastodon in the trend of everyone moving to a different platform. I'm now also on Mastodon. So you can find me on Twitter at Jess Wade. If you find me there,

or you can drop me an email at my Imperial email address. And yeah, I'm happy to help you fight this fight. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Jess. It was a real pleasure. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyrighted by the Tech Arena.