Instant Genius - Why aren't there more women in science?

Episode Date: September 12, 2018

Girls are not picking as many STEM A-levels as boys, while professional female scientists are dropping out of the field. Is it time for change? In this episode we talk to four women currently working in STEM about their experiences, the problems faced by women and girls, and how we can fix the issues. The panel: Dr Suzie Imber - Associate professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester. Last year she won the BBC Two series Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes? Angela Saini - Award-winning science journalist who wrote Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong. Dr Aoife Hunt - Associate director and mathematician at Movement Strategies, which is a company that specialises in crowd flow planning. Dr Jess Wade - Physicist at Imperial College London. This year she won the Daphne Jackson prize from the Institute of Physics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious,

like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease.

It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Find handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. We have loads of research now that shows that if you encourage children in certain areas of play, that helps develop their brains in that direction, their skills in that direction.

So one of the reasons that we have the gender stereotypes we do is because girls are, are given a certain set of toys, boys are given a certain set of toys, and they do actually develop along those lines because of that social input. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast.

I'm Helen Gleney. assistant at BBC Focus magazine. Many teenagers have recently received their A-level results and are now starting a new life at university. Yet just 19% of girls choose two STEM subjects at A-level compared to 33% of boys. Women who do continue on to a science-based career therefore end up in a minority, making up just 23% of people in core STEM occupations. Numbers are slowly rising, which is encouraging. But here at BBC Focus, we wanted to underline.

we wanted to understand more about what's keeping young women from choosing STEM subjects and careers and why women have a tougher time reaching the top and staying there. Here, BBC Focus production editor Alice Lipscomb Southwell talks to science journalist Angela Siney, physicist Jess Wade, planetary scientist Susie Inber and mathematician Eva Hunt about the problems faced by women

and how we can fix these issues. I'm Angela Saney. I'm a science journalist and last year I published a book called Inferior, How Science Got Women Wrong, looking at the mistakes and corrections being made within science when it comes to research on women. My name is Susie Inber. I'm an associate professor of planetary science.

I work at the University of Leicester. I'm Jess Wade and I'm a physicist at Imperial College London in the Department of Physics and Centre for Plastic Electronics. And I'm a big fan of Inferior. I'm I'm EFA Hunt, so I'm an associate director at Movement Strategies, which is a company that specialises in crowd flow planning, so we look at pedestrian and evacuation movements. My background's in mathematics, so I did a PhD in microsimulation of evacuation modelling.

Eva, what inspired you to getting to STEM in the first place and going to maths? I think I was very lucky, so I had a family that was very pro-maths, I would say, and I loved it from an early age. And my path was quite easy and that I always just followed the thing that I loved. So despite getting quite a low mark at A-level maths, which I'm sort of admitting now publicly, because I was a rebellious teenager, I went off and played in a band as opposed to focused on my studies. I knew that I loved it and I pursued it onto degree level, despite advice from teachers saying that I definitely shouldn't do a degree in math. And then I went on to do the degree and then the PhD and I haven't learned.

looked back since. What happened to the band? The band's still going. No. No, the glam rock band has disbanded, unfortunately. I'm getting old now, so it's more blues. So, Jess. I equally grew up amongst scientists,

so my parents are both doctors, although medical doctors, and I think that I was just always really fascinated by understanding the world around me a bit more. I mean, they're really good at the people's side, and the saving life side, and I figured I could be the one that explains why structures were a certain shape or what things were happening in the sky. And I had really, really great teaching at school. I think I had a kind of rebellious phase, too, between GCSE and A-level, but I managed to tame it

before A-levels began. And then I went to art school before doing physics at physics at university, so I did an art foundation. And I think that that kind of kept that whole creative, I have to have something where I can keep creative all the time side alive. And I kind of got into physics and just loved it even more. So I was really lucky because I was really well supported. And I guess that the sad thing I see now is that not every child has that support to get into science, but also has teachers that kind of encourage them to want to take it further, that you're not just doing this to pass an exam or to get a mark on a particular test, that you can study the subject and then use it to contribute to the world. And I think I was lucky to realize that. And I hope that we can all

change so that other people realize that too. Oh yeah, how did I get into science? I wasn't great at science. Actually, I wasn't bad as it, but wasn't grace at it for a long time when I was at school. But again, my parents are fairly scientific and I think that's helpful. I have a twin brother and he is a neutrino physicist. So family dinner conversations are fascinating these days.

And so I think our parents really encourage both of us to do science and to enjoy science. And again, not being brilliant at it. If you work hard enough, you can get to where you want to go, I think. And so just a lot of hard work later ended up being a planetary scientist. So maybe that's a good story for people, that you don't have to be Einstein when you're 12 to end up being a scientist. Definitely. And Angela? Well, I'm not really a scientist anymore.

I'm on the other side, if you like. But I did study engineering at university. And part of the reason I think I did that was because my dad had been an engineer. and in my culture, so in India, where my family are from where I've lived, engineering is a really kind of prestigious high value thing to do. So I never had this sense that I think a lot of other people in my school had that it was kind of getting greasy and dirty and being a mechanic. For me, it was an exciting route to understanding how things work,

you know, taking things apart and fixing them and building new things. that was what I really loved about reading engineering, was just making things all the time. So I miss that now, although I do make all the flat-pack furniture. I do all the DIY. I don't get as much of it as I used to, but I'm so grateful that I studied it.

And I encourage all girls and boys, whatever they want to go into, to consider it because it's such a great kind of broad, bankable degree. I mean, that's interesting. interesting because what you guys were saying was you didn't necessarily love science and school didn't get amazing results in it. And I've been reading some research about it. And it does seem that students in school are encouraged, you need to get all A's to get into university. And people are maybe put off doing those STEM subjects because it's going to be really hard for me to get an A if I do

like maths or physics or something like that. Yeah, I hear that all the time from students saying, oh, physics is really hard or, you know, thinking that they'll do better, they'll get A's in other subjects and physics would be harder to achieve that. And I think if that's what's putting people, off. I think that's such a shame. They're missing an opportunity there. That's quite a lot of evidence too. So the percentage of girls in physics A level is about 20, 25 percent, and physics undergraduate is about 20, 25 percent. So we don't lose any girls going from A level to undergraduate. So girls really take it as a subject that will get them into university to do physics. They don't take it as a facilitating subject that lets you go

into anything, whether it's kind of engineering maths, physics, biology. Every single person will want you if you have an A level in physics. And I don't think we do. a good enough job at communicating that. So we're not giving people careers advice early on that says this is actually a really useful subject that will let you go and study a whole bunch of other things. We kind of tell them, oh, it's only for geniuses, it's really hard, physicists are so clever.

So that really, really puts them off. And there's something complicated too about the way we give advice about GCSEs. So at GCSE, you have kind of double and triple science. Often that decision, whether you take double or triple, isn't made by the student themselves, it's made by the school. And that can be incredibly gender-biased because it's the decision of the teacher, really. And they often have these historical views of who should and shouldn't do subjects like physics. And then that has a really big influence on what

subjects you choose at A-level. Yeah, I think you see the same story in maths. So this idea that maths is really hard. And my favourite Barbie clip in the world is Barbie, press the button and it goes, Math is hard. Math is two times. Oh, goodness, hell. But we see a similar picture at A level. So there's sort of 40% of A level math students are women. And then you see that carry over to degree level. But the perception that is hard to do well in math is something that's really stubborn. So it's the most important. The most important. It is the most important. Maths was the most popular A level in 2016, for example, of all of the A levels. And if you look at attainment, so for an average A level, you'd expect sort of 26% of people to get A's and A stars. But in maths, it's more like 60. So people do really well at maths, but there's still this sort of stuck view that it's very, very difficult. And that's something that we all need to work together to get over.

And as you say, I think some of the people giving the advice have quite outdated views. about what you can do with these subjects. And because so much of the careers, especially very specialist careers in mathematical sciences, for example, are quite difficult to explain or explain in a very accessible way. And there's so many of them that it gets broadly overlooked. And so the numbers of math teachers that are here telling their students, well, you could go and be a math teacher, is an awful lot.

And so getting that message across is really, really important. I do think the professions, you know, the main professions like medicine, law, accountancy, these kind of standard things that most kids are aware of as careers when they get older suck in a lot of people. And then if you're outside those categories, it can be really difficult to understand what's out there, what kind of careers there are, what kind of jobs there are, or even if you are aware that you think that they're so marginal, that there's no point in you shooting for that because they're,

They only need one of those. They only need two of those. So I think, yeah, there isn't much understanding of the real world unless you've got experience of it to begin with. So, for example, my dad was an engineer. So I knew what engineering was about. How many kids actually get that? And I knew what medicine was about,

and that's why I didn't choose to study it. I think you can see it, though, so the idea that the, like, established professions is definitely what parents know about. Most parents, especially want their daughters to become doctors or teachers. And as a result, subjects like chemistry, which is required for university medicine,

is completely gender balanced at A level. So if they made physics required for university medicine, it would be completely gender balanced at A level overnight. And there's actually evidence that if you've got a physics A level, you make a better first and second year junior doctor. So I think we should do that, but that's really hard to change. It would open up possibilities for people, though, wouldn't it? Because at my school, at least,

I don't know if it's still the same now, but you either did biology and chemistry or you did chemistry and physics or maths and physics. And it was either or that's why I was the only girl in my classes, because all the girls were doing biology. And if you did biology, physics was out because you needed the other subjects in order to get into medicine. And you didn't need it. Yeah, it's really rubbish.

Because I think it makes, so you kind of get onto that A-level course in chemistry, and you realise actually chemistry is really awesome. So I might want to do this at university instead of doing medicine. So chemistry at university, undergraduate level, is actually pretty gender balance. So genuinely, if we had that in physics, physics is super useful for kind of medical imaging and all data processes within hospitals. And yet you completely don't appreciate that when you're at school. So yeah. I think there's also evidence that we need to look at a younger age, not just people who are at GCC or A level, but actually there's evidence that

suggests that children at the age of 10 or 12 have already decided they're not going to be scientists. And so reaching out to them when they've done their GCS and they're choosing their A levels is actually too late. They've made a decision about themselves. I'm not a scientist. And so I think reaching out to a younger age group is really important to try to change things. So thinking about that, because all of you, by the science, but have really supportive parents, what can parents be doing to sort of encourage their boys or girls to look at those STEM careers and to encourage them that, you know, you don't just have to go and be a teacher or you could pick these subjects? Is there something that can be done in the home or how soon can they start introducing those ideas to children? Oh yeah,

There's tons. So the women in science and engineering, there's a summer of engineering going on at the moment. And they set a challenge every week for people to do with all age groups, families to do with their children essentially. Like a little engineering challenge you can do at home. And there's prizes if you do well. But, you know, if you haven't built a rocket that goes into space, it's okay. There are other, you know, reasons why you might want to do it. The prizes involve maybe going to an engineering firm and understanding more about what they do or going to spend a night in a museum, you know, lots of fun things. So there are resources out there for families, things to do over the summer, maybe if their children are bored.

Yeah, I think making things, building things, doing experiments at home, these are easy things that can be done. And they really are the linchpin of not just generating an interest in a young child in that subject, but also helping them at the point at which I go to university fit into that subject. So I think fitting in is a big part of why women are underwerect. represented and also why we'd lose women. When I was in engineering school, when I arrived, a lot of the, and I was the only girl in my class, a lot of the other guys had built stuff over the summer.

You know, they'd been making things. And I didn't even know that was possible or where to begin. I'd only done, you know, tiny little things at home. One of them had built a car. I just thought, how? But those skills that he had accumulated just by tinkering at home were invaluable. they helped him fit into that department, you know, understand how to solder, how to weld, how to use all the equipment that was there.

And I don't think you can start early enough with that and with things like coding. You know, it's useful to understand the logic of how to code. It's so simple. You know, a five-year-old can do it. So there's no reason why that kind of thing can't be done at home. I think that's also programming you can do completely at home, right? There's a big hour of code online where you can do challenges all the time. but there are so many teaching resources on the BBC website in elsewhere.

So you can do all of that for free. And the kind of maker movement is really well established now across the UK. This idea that you can rock up to a kind of maker space, look for one near you, and they'll teach you at an age level that's appropriate for who you are, skills to tinker and to play, whether it's kind of with Lego or it's woodwork or it's metalwork. There's a phenomenal amount of things that I don't think we had access to as young people. because when you talk to a kind of older generation of established engineers,

all of them say they got into it because they used to take apart a washing machine or take apart like radios. And now if you took apart anything, the idea of putting it all back together again is a nightmare, right? If you took apart a phone, you would never fit into each of them back together. I'm not even sure there's a lot of phones now that you could even take a file. And I think that we've kind of lost that, but it's sneaking back in. It feels a bit too like the price point is still a bit. bit high, which is why the programming and coding is nice, because that's still free.

Making is still something that seems you either have to pay a huge subscription or something like that. But there are clever ways of working with your library more. Now they've got kind of micro bits and things like that inside so you can loan these making equipment. But I definitely think this is happening. There's an amazing robotics competition for schools called Vex, and they build these little robots and they fight each other. It's very like kind of early robot wars. and you have to program them so that they can autonomously fight each other. And there's a school in Northwest London, Henrietta Barnett, and they are so sensational at this competition.

It's an all-girls state school. But they've got maybe seven teams who went to the kind of huge international finals in America this year. They work on their robots for maybe 12 hours a day. Half of them take DT for A-level. That's like unheard of in schools in the UK. It also affects your brain development. So we have loads of research now that shows that if you encourage children in certain areas of play that helps develop their brains in that direction,

their skills in that direction. So one of the reasons that we have the gender stereotypes we do is because girls are given a certain set of toys, boys are given a certain set of toys. And they do actually develop along those lines because of that social input. So if, you know, even junk modelling, that doesn't cost anything. Just keep all the, that's what I do with my son at home. I just keep all the boxes and, you know, whatever packaging we have.

He makes stuff out. He loves it. So also we've noticed in STEM, like, with things like medicine, there seems to end, you know, genetics, there seems to be quite a good gender balance going on there. Whereas maybe maths and engineering and space as well, it seems a bit sort of separated. There's still sort of the women and men aren't equal numbers. So do you think we'll be able to sort that out any time? As soon as that anything we can do to sort that, I mean, it's been like it for so long now. And there's some facts that it's going to be, like, 250 years if it goes on at the current rate before sort of physics is bad.

balanced male to female. I think it's 250 years for physics papers to be balanced. So for the number of citations for men and women to be equal on papers, it's not 250 years for it to be gender balanced. That probably take even longer. I think it's academic publishing that that's... But that's extrapolating from the data that we have now. Things could change very... I mean, 300 years ago, if you'd said that women would have the vote by the end of this century, be the same century, be working alongside men doing everything. Going to university. You would never imagine that. So society doesn't work quite the way we statistically expect it to.

I think even in things like medicine and genetics, though, that that's true early on in your career. There aren't many women professors in medicine. You don't have as many senior consultants in hospitals. It doesn't. It's the same issues, the kind of structural ones that affect women in those kind of biology and subjects, which are quite gender balanced earlier on. And they're the kind of big structural changes we need to make. within the scientific community to keep women there.

So whilst I think they're generally a bit better because of the various stereotyping that we've discussed so far at getting young women in, I don't think they're any good at keeping them. Do you think that's with issues maybe related to childcare? Because I know that a lot of women, they still feel they've got to do the lion's share of maybe the housework and the childcare,

and maybe once you get to that age, if you're in your 30s and you think I want to start a family, then you maybe feel your career has to take a back seat at all? Do you think that could be an issue? Yeah, I think that's an enormous issue. And certainly I structured my career around the expectation that I would be taking on the lion's share of the childcare when I had my son, which is exactly what happened. And I've turned down opportunities, really good opportunities because of the childcare situation. And it's not just child – I mean, affordable childcare is important.

But we kind of relegate, you know, home – whatever you want to call it. Everything outside work, we relegate it. because we think it doesn't matter. It also matters. There are lots of very accomplished professional women who give up work or who go part-time or who take smaller jobs, not just because of childcare,

but because they want their children to have a parent at home. They want to be part of their children's lives and they want their child to have someone. And if men aren't taking on that role, then somebody has to do it, right? And generally, even though we have paternity leave now, men aren't taking on that role. And very often it's because they don't want their careers to take a hit.

So it's the same fear that we have is just that they're less likely to do it. And I think there's also a time issue here in the sense that when you're in your 30s, in a scientific career, that's a really big moment. So that's a moment when you've been a postdoc for a few, you've got your PhD, you're a postdoc for however many years you're a postdoc for, you're applying for fellowships and then you're going for that permanent job. That's a really critical moment. And so possibly if you then go part-time, it's perceived negatively when you're going

for that really big step, which I think is really important. I think attitudes are changing, actually, and I think we need to improve things like flexible working. We need to allow people to be more flexible in the hours they work and the days they work and job sharing. It's possible to job share. Well, I'm not so special that I can't share my job as someone else, you know. Other people can do what I do.

But it's people understanding that that's the case, and there are ways to make that happen and facilitate that. And that you're just as enthusiastic about science if you do that kind of thing, that if you have something else that you do on the side, it's not because you don't love your job. much. There's this idea in science. You have to really put 110% in it to get anything back. I think that there are also kind of roles that women take on in universities and maybe in hospitals, if it's medicine, that aren't necessarily the ones that get you promoted to a senior level.

So there's an awful kind of lot of evidence that academic housekeeping roles always disproportionately go to women. And anything kind of pastoral, so anything where you have to look after students or care for students, or if a student is crying or in distress, they'll say, send it to the woman academic. And that's not something that will get you promoted. That's not something that you'd ever mention when you're trying to apply for a fellowship. And so I think we need to start really recognizing the contributions

that everyone makes to science more broadly than just a number of citations and kind of grant the amount of grant money they get in because those things also are very, very biased against women. But even just things like on interview panels, we have to have one woman on every interview panel. Well, there are only three of us. So at that point, I could do an interview panel every day, basically.

And so, you know, in that sense, it's not deliberate. It's not designed to disadvantage the three women that there are, but it does mean that we get the lion's share of this particular load. Do you think women tend to suffer more of a lack of confidence or put too much pressure on themselves, so they might not take those A levels in the first place. I think, I'm not going to get an A, so I'm not going to do it, and then be in their professional career, they don't push themselves hard enough,

or they just won't, you know, or they're trying to juggle so much at home and in their careers. Do you think that's something that made women do more than men? I don't know if it's a confidence thing. I'll give you an example. When I was at school, so in my chemistry class, there was, I think, eight of us. And I was the only woman in the class. I got the highest grades in that class.

And there were a lot of boys in that class well below average. They at no point thought, I'm not good enough to do chemistry and maths or going to engineering. Most of them went into engineering. That never bothered them, that their achievement, you know, their academic levels were below standard. it really bothered the girls. And I think part of the reason is not because girls feel they need to be perfect,

although maybe there's an element of that. I think it's because when you know you're going into an industry where you're already going to face challenges because you're in a minority, where, you know, every stereotype threat message tells you that things will be really hard for you, you think, well, then I have to be brilliant in order to be able to do that because things are going to be hard enough for me anyway. The boys don't think that because it's easy for them. You know, they don't face those stereotype problems.

They don't face the discrimination or the barriers or the sexism that the women do. And the girls know that. So strategically, if you're a woman in this situation, you're average or let's say you're below average academically, what do you do? You're going to go down the path of least resistance, right? You're not going to deliberately do the thing, unless you're so passionate about it that it doesn't matter, which women do do, but you know, you have to really, really want to do it in order to face all that off.

And you feel you need to be perfect in order to be able to do it. I felt I needed to be better than everybody else to do engineering, a degree which is so easy to get into in this country. You know, there are many universities in this country where you can get in with passes to do engineering because it's someone to subscribe. You don't need to be brilliant to do it, but I felt that you did because of,

was the minority. Absolutely. And I think that's not just in that, in that jump to university, but at school age, certainly in maths, girls underestimate themselves. So like for likeability, girls and boys will rate themselves at different levels from about the age of 10. And it goes down from there. So you have this situation where you could have the same grade. You could both have an A or a B at the end of your GCSEs and be looking at A levels. and the girls more likely to think that that's not good enough for that step. And the confidence in your ability is a big predictor of whether or not people will go on and do that. But to some extent, I think, we underestimate the extent of discrimination within the industries themselves.

Engineering has been a very sexist industry for a long time, manufacturing in particular. And actually, if you were a woman trying to get a job, it's not good enough. Or historically, it wouldn't have been good enough to just be the same. as the man applying for the job, because the man applying for the job would be more likely to get it anyway. You had to be better. And I think there's still an element of that. I still meet women who tell me that, you know, they, against all advice, went and got their physics degree or got their engineering degree. And when they applied for jobs, even though they did just as well as everyone else, the boys got more callbacks. So you do have to be better.

We're told that you have to be better. We know that. And it's not. It's not a good. You have to be better. We know that. not the girl's fault for being underconfident. It's the industry's fault for not giving them the jobs at equal rates to men. Talking about perceptions, it's also one of those things where students historically have looked at physicists and seen kind of late, middle-aged, white men. And that's the perception of what a physicist is. If I ask a group of six-year-olds to draw me a scientist, they're going to draw me at Albert Einstein. And that's lovely. He's an amazing scientist, or he was an amazing scientist. Don't get me wrong, that's great. But I would rather they drew themselves or their mum or, you know, someone who looks like them as a scientist.

And so actually I think all of us have a role in that as well, which I'm sure we all do in going to talk to young people about science and being someone that looks a bit like them that they can relate to and then they can see themselves as doing that job. Because until they can see themselves there, often they're enthusiastic about the subject, and I say, oh, are you going to study physics? You sound like you really like it. And they say, oh, no, I can't. Well, you said you liked it.

And so it's an idea that it's not for me that I can't do it. It sounds great, but I can't do it. And so I think it's for all of us to stand there and say, but actually we have and you're just like us. So there's no reason that you shouldn't do that. Something really nice at the Institute of Physics did again was getting kind of 14, 15-year-olds. So just deciding GCSE age to go into primary schools to be those kind of ambassadors for their subject. Because when you're studying these things, you're like, oh, am I really good enough? So it's kind of interesting.

Well, the solar system, this is so great. But then if you go and tell kids about it, you're the boss, right? You know way more than them. So you get really empowered on your own confidence. You're like, whoa, I am a physicist. And they get to find out about physics, which they never have really found out about before. And you can leave the kind of associate professors of space science

in their labs doing their space science. So it was a really great way of letting it happen so that the kind of role models and the chief inspirers were really close to them age-wise, but also did inspired both sides. It got those young people to stay on and keep physics for A-level. It's such an inspired sharing of the load of doing that. That's a great idea.

Yeah. I love that. And it's so simple. It doesn't cost anything. Exactly. So if you found Susie, you did the... Have you got what it takes to be an astronaut, the BBC programme, which you won. Yeah.

Have you had good reactions from girls? Since you've done that, as they've been married, oh, I didn't realise I could do it, and now I can. Yeah, lots, actually. So as soon as the show was aired, of course, lots of feedback, and the show was made in a very positive way. And so I think the show does on our best possible light, to be honest, which is,

great. And so it was meant to be inspirational and aspirational for young people, basically. That was the goal. And I think they really achieved that goal. So there's a lot of enthusiasm at the end of the show. And then I decided that I wanted to launch a massive public engagement program, kind of went a bit off, off on 90 degrees to my job and decided this is actually really important. And now I have a platform from which to speak. And so I started, I just tweeted out, because I just joined Twitter, I didn't know what I was doing, just tweeted out, like, I want to do more public engagement. And, you know, thousands of people reply and said, oh, come to us. school, come to a...

And so I've been doing that now for the last eight months. And, yeah, so I don't just go to girls schools. I talk to anyone. I want everyone to be a physicist. But so I gave a talk yesterday morning at a space school we have at the University of Leicester. And there was a queue of girls at the end. I don't know where the boys went, but there was a queue of girls at the end, you know, chatting about what they wanted to do and kind of how I'm...

how my career had led into being a physicist and what challenges I had overcome and how I'd done it. So, yeah, there's always a really sort of... I have a kind of strange story about how I ended up being a physicist. people kind of relate to it and think, oh, that's interesting. Maybe that could be me. So, yeah, people have been really positive about it, I think. I like the idea that when I was younger would have been coming up to you with, like,

autograph books, but obviously now they just want a selfie, right? You know, it's a combination of the two. And I've never understood why you want my name on a piece of paper. Oh, gosh, she used to go around collecting everyone's autograph. They do. They still go around with a pen and a piece of paper, but otherwise, yeah, lots and lots. I'm getting good at a selfie now, lots and lots of selfies. Yeah.

And with you, Jess, as well, you've recently been in the news because you decided you were going to start doing a lot of Wikipedia pages and writing them up for female scientists. So what inspired you to do that in the first place? Probably Angela's book. Inferio is a really great book and you should all read it. Throughout all of the book, you find out about all of these scientists who've been very determined to show that men and women are different from kind of Darwin onwards. And then you meet also all these kind of incredible characters who are standing up for women's rights

and women's own intellect and saying, hey, you know, this isn't right. we don't have access to all these things. You can't judge us on an equal footing. And I don't want to ruin it. So I really genuinely do believe everyone in the world should read it. Jess isn't paid. I'll make it my mission to make your read it. But Wikipedia is this phenomenal educational platform, right?

It's the fifth most access website in the world that's used by pretty much everyone, whether you're booking people to come onto a radio show or whether you're looking for a new kind of telescope that you might want to build. Every single person reads through that site. And whilst people are critical about the level of referencing and there are kind of rumors that teachers say you shouldn't use it in schools. It's actually a phenomenally good source at putting together different points of view. And the citations are really strict.

You have to be incredibly careful when you're creating these pages. But on English-speaking Wikipedia, which is obviously the one with the most number of pages, only 17% of the biographies are about women. So it's incredibly biased by the people who create the content. About 8 to 16% of editors are women. You're not really sure because you don't have to disclose. that information in your editing profile. So basically, men are editing Wikipedia

and men are writing content that they're interested in or familiar with. Women are underrepresented in science and engineering anyway, and so are people of colour and LGBT-Q plus scientists. So we have to work to make sure that this platform that is being used so often amongst educators and researchers and so many people is as unbiased as possible. I want that to be a neutral platform. I want people to be able to go on there and learn about the research

that we all do just as much as they can learn about Albert Einstein's research. And I think, obviously, that's going to take a lot more than just me editing it. But I kind of decided at the beginning of this year that if I met awesome women or came across them on the internet or awesome people of color, I would start to make their Wikipedia pages. And it's a really fun journey because you kind of sit down at night and you've got this name. You've maybe come across them on Twitter or someone sent you an email being like, oh, this is my mom. She's a great doctor. And then you start to look them up and learn about them and their story.

And they're so inspiring, right? They're always these kind of slightly unconventional stories. I find myself if I have someone who's like a historical scientist and I manage to find like a tiny bit of information of their school, I'm like jumping up and down in my room. Like, I've found it, I've found it. And it's such a great thing to do to make me want to stay in science to be one of these people who's kind of important enough to make a discovery

to do something great for science, but also have this very interesting life where you've put it together. And so I've been doing this kind of since the beginning of this year, but increasingly getting other people involved with it too. editing Wikipedia is really fun and it's really easy and it's free. It's another kind of free tool that we can use and it's really empowering for young people to use so they can learn how to edit Wikipedia. They learn how to do citations properly. They learn what an impartial source is. They learn an awful lot of skills that are applicable to lots of their studies later on in school.

But then they also create something which is on a website which is the fifth most access website in the world. So they put together this biography of someone like Susie and suddenly they've learned everything about them, they're inspired by them, and they've made something that you can track the number of views on, and their teachers can look at, and their parents can look at. And I found that it's really good with young girls, because they come in, you ask them to draw a scientist, it's a man with stupid hair, you ask them to name a woman in science, it's Marri-Guri. By the end of that, they've found out so many things, and they've also realized how probably these women have been treated throughout their career and not recognized so far, and certainly

not to the extent of having a Wikipedia page. So it's been a great way to make me realize how many, many people there are in this science that we don't recognise, but also to get other people to realise that too. And the great thing too is even if we write a page in English, there's all the other language Wikipedia pages and scientists from all over the world now are like, oh, let me translate it into Greek, let me

translate it into like Russian and there's so much enthusiasm to make this website a better place. There's no limit on the number of biographies we can have, so we should make it as representative as possible. Also, there's stories in the news recently about a lot of women in STEM who are being, have some nasty experiences,

whether that's while they're at university or when they start doing a PhD, where maybe they're supervisors or lecturers, they're getting sexual harassment or something from them. Do you think this is particularly a problem in STEM? I think it probably is historically a bigger problem in subjects where men have dominated senior positions, right? So all of these stories that are coming out in sexual harassment and bullying are in industries where men are at the top in the film. industry in academia in subjects like physics and engineering where men are largely in positions of power. And then you have science universities. And I'm not super clued up on this. My friend Emma Chapman runs something called the 1752 group. So if you're more interested, you should look that up.

But you have laws and rules in universities that are incredibly dated that are hundreds of years old. The things protecting students aren't necessarily imagined recently. They're not written to protect the people of today who use social media who make work really, really long hours when they're working with these professors who've been allowed to get away with a certain amount of bad behaviour for a very, very long time. And there aren't things in universities that are set up a bit more like I imagine industry is, but there's nothing transparent about reporting the way that someone behaves. There's nothing very clear that will happen to that person if you tell them off. And I think that that's coming to kind of ahead now, especially in subjects like

astrophysics. Lots of these stories have come out in astrophysics. And that's because women are starting to get to about 30%. And this is the kind of nominal percentage where things start to change. There's kind of a cultural shift and women start speaking up. There's been some really high profile, astrophysics, sexual harassment cases.

And the question is, why now? You know, why is this suddenly the high tide mark? And part of it is Me Too and Hollywood and women feel braver to speak out. But like you say, it's also because they have each other and they didn't always have each other. But I think historically that has been the case. But to be fair, I think we're working really hard at the university on exactly this.

And the fact that society changes so rapidly and we have to keep changing the rules and changing the game to keep up is always going to be a problem. So social media, prime example. Ten years ago, I didn't have Twitter. I didn't have Twitter until last summer. But, you know, I'm behind the times. But it wasn't a problem. And now it is a problem and we have to deal with it. And there is some latency in dealing with it.

Of course there is. But I think universities are taking it seriously. And I think they're really trying to do something about it. And I think things are improving. So I don't want to make it sound really negative because I think a lot of work is going into this. And whether or not we've reached a level that's acceptable is another debate. But I think it's recognised as being serious. It's quite interesting though.

No, you go fast. Well, I was just going to say, I think one of the reasons that I think it's worse in STEM, and particularly in lab research, is because this is a small closed atmosphere, an environment where sometimes there will just be a few people. You may be alone with your supervisor quite often. and there's nothing you can do about it. You know, this person will be older. You'll generally be very junior.

And your entire career can depend on them. It's no different from Hollywood casting room in that sense. You're a very young person, completely dependent on this older person for your career. You're with them alone a lot of the time. I mean, it's an environment ripe for abuse, really. Yeah, and that's kind of what I was going to say, but your whole career is based on that power,

your whole transition through university will be on that relationship with that academic. And I think that the thing we don't necessarily notice in these environments is how much that affects the kind of broader scientific community around you. I mean, I've heard stories about people who've been maybe dating professors and stuff like that. And then the people around that, the other people in that research group who might not be as interesting to that professor are completely ignored scientifically. And that's really dangerous because they're the people who won't get the support from laws that are introduced to universities or anything like that.

So I do think we actually have to start changing kind of, it has to be a big shift. It can't just be, it can't be lagging. There are so many great people in science right now that I really don't ever want to leave because they experience this. But I think there have to be money. There has to be something, some incentive that they'll have to do.

You know, this Athena Swan Award that universities in the UK compete for, it's kind of a gender equality kite mark. So it was introduced because whilst there was an awful lot of talk about women in science initiatives, No one was really putting any money into it. Everyone was like, oh, yeah, we've got these women professors. We've renamed this lab. That's really great.

But no one was really trying that hard. And a bunch of very senior female academics got together and said, we're going to make an award scheme where grant money will depend on your ability to get one of these awards. And you'll get bronze, silver, gold, depending on your commitment to improving the scientific community for everyone working there, for undergraduates, for postgraduates, for professors, for everyone. And then they started to take action and to change. and this kind of sexual harassment and bullying, all of that infrastructure needs to be very clearly included on those guidelines.

So you cannot get a bronze silver or gold award if you have any cases of this. I mean, the sheer numbers of the reports of these things in UK universities is absolutely terrifying. There was a story last week about UCL, a few weeks ago about other ones. And I just think it's too big now for us to just say, we'll just wait around for it to kind of change quicker. We have to say something really quickly about how it's going to impact the university's reputation. Because I don't think necessarily you read that as an undergraduate.

I don't think, I think you're kind of, not even as an undergraduate, when you're a school student, you've kind of got your blinkers down. You've heard this reputation of university that's a really historical one and you think I'll just apply there because, you know, this university is really famous for X. You don't see that kind of information, but that's exactly what we need to change. We need people to start acting on it much, much quicker, I think. Yeah, I absolutely agree with Jess. And like her, I recommend the work of Emma Chapman in this. It's an incredible. She's put together all the statistics around this. She's helping women kind of address this issue because she's gone through it herself.

And it's incredibly important. They did a survey within the NUS, the National Union of students, of thousands of students and postgraduates across universities, and just the kind of proliferation of it. And it's much more likely if you're an underrepresented group, whether you're a woman or a person of color or an LGBT plus scientist, all of these kind of add up this intersectionality. makes you much more vulnerable to these positions of power.

And that's where I think, you know, we go on and on about science is lacking of women, but it's because they're leaving, whether it's a huge sexual harassment case and it's something really big that's happened, or it's just these constant knocks to you because of your gender. There was a big National Academy of Sciences report recently, too, that came out of America. And they both just show you how much catching up we have to do to really make this a level playing feel for everyone. But that's the point, isn't it, these things don't change overnight

and bringing in a policy now is really helpful. But we have to recognise that it takes years of work to change this kind of thing. It doesn't just change in a heartbeat. It's all of our jobs to work on changing things, I think. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In the October issue of BBC Focus, which is on sale on the 19th of September, you can read the interview with Angela, Jess, Susie and Ifa. We also take a look at the science that could help us leave Earth for good,

investigate male suicides and find out the benefits of your Friday night curry. And of course, there's much, much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com will look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery. shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes so you can

feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.

Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.