Why Women Are Underrepresented in Science and What Can Be Done

I'm Angela Seanie 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 amber 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 center for plastic electronics and I'm a big fan of F area I'm Eva hunt so I'm an associate director at movement strategies which is a company that specializes in crowd flow planning so we look at pedestrian and evacuation movements and my backgrounds in mathematics so I did a PhD in micro simulation of evacuation modeling efer

what inspired you to get into stem in the first place I'm 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 I was just followed to think the thing I 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 stay focused on my studies I knew that I loved it and I pursued it onto degree level despite advice from teachers say my definition dureena and then I went on to do the degree and then the PhD and I haven't looked back since what happened to the band still

going no the glam rock band has disbanded unfortunately I'm getting old now so it's more and more blues I equally grew up among 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 side and the saving life side and I figured I could be the one that explains why structures were certain shape or what things were happening in the sky and I had really great teaching at school I think I had a kind of rebellious phase 2 between GCSE and a-level but I managed to tame it before a levels begun and then I went to art school before doing physics at University so I did an art foundation and I think that

kind of kept that whole creative I have to have something where I can keep creative all the time sight alive and the 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 it 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 - oh yeah how do I get into science I wasn't

great to science I wasn't bad at it but wasn't great at it for a long time when I was at school but again my parents are fairly scientific anything that's helpful I have a twin brother and he is a neutrino physicist so family dinner conversations fascinating these days and so I think our parents really encouraged 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 we 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 scientist well I'm not really a scientist anymore so 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 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 a 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 that now although I do make all the flat-pack furniture 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 what 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 because what you guys were saying was you didn't necessarily love science that's going to get amazing results in it I'll be reading some research about it does seem that students in school encourage you need to get all A's to get into University and people who may be put off doing those STEM subjects cost can be really hard for me to get an A if I do at maths or physics or something like that yeah I hear that all the time from students saying all physics is really hard or you know thinking that

they will 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 to so the percentage of girls in physics a level is about 20-25 percent and physics undergraduate is about 20 25 percent so you 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 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 that'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 whether what subjects you choose for a level you see the same story in maths so this idea that math is really hard and my favorite Barbie clip in the world is Bobby the button in it 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 a 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 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 he'll 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 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 give him 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 maths teachers that I hear telling their

students well you could go and be a math teacher is an awful lot and so and getting that message across is really important yeah I do think the professions you know the main professions like medicine law the accountancy these kind of standard things that most kids are aware of as careers when they get older and suck in a lot of people and then when if you're outside those categories is 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 they're so marginal that there's no point in you for that because they only need one of those oh you didn't need two of those so I think yeah there isn't much

understanding of the real world unless you have 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 Jesus I think you can see it though so that 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 to a level so if they made physics required for university medicine it would be completely gender balance 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 in chemistry or you did chemistry in 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 yeah follow gene if you did biology physics is out because you needed the other subjects in order to get into medicine it's you didn't need yeah it's it's really rubbish because I think it makes so you kind of get onto

that a level course in chemistry you realize that 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 from genuinely if we had that in 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 it's also evidence that we need to look at a young age not just people who are at ECC or a-level but actually there's evidence that suggests that children at the age of 10 or 12 we've already decided they're not going to be scientists and so reaching out to them when they've done their GCSE XANA

choosing their a-levels is actually too late they've made a decision about themselves I'm not a scientist and I didn't so I think reaching out to a younger age group is really important to try to change things so thinking about that because obviously you're all if you buy the signs 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 oh yeah there's tons so you see the women in science and engineering and 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 I hope there are other you know reasons why you might want to do it and the prizes involved maybe going to an engineering firm and understanding more about what they do or go and spend a night in the museum you know lots of fun things so there are resources out there for families things to do over the summer maybe if they're children aboard you know 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 underrepresented and also why we 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 but those skills that had accumulated just but incurring 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 is 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 and 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 makerspace look for near you and they'll teach you h level that's appropriate for who you are skills to tinker and to play whether it's kind of with Lego or its woodwork or its metal work 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 I don't really know back together again is a nightmare right if you took a part of phone you were never feeling 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 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 von it 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 DTF 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 there 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 and I just keep all the boxes and what you know whatever packaging we have and he makes stuff out he loves it so also we've noticed in stem I said with things like medicine there seems to a neo genetics that seems be quite a good gender balance going on there where is 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 anytime soon as that anything we can do to sort that I mean it's been like it for so long though and don't some facts

oh it's gonna be so like 250 years if it goes on at the current rate before sort of physics is balanced male to female I think it's two hundred and fifty 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 two hundred fifty years for it to be gender balanced that probably take you for longer I think it's academic publishing that lab is that it's extrapolating from the data that we have now things could change very I mean three hundred years ago if you'd said that women would have to vote by the end of this century be the same century be working alongside men doing everything they would never imagine that so society doesn't work we

statistically expressed it I think even in things like medicine and genetics though 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 you know 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 that generally a bit better because of the various stereotyping that we've discussed so far getting young women in I don't think there are only any good at

keeping them do you think that's where the shoes may be related to child care cuz 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 say I want to start a family then you maybe feel your career has to take a backseat at all do you think that could be an issue or yeah I think that's an enormous issue and certainly I structured my career around the expectation that I would be taking on the lines show 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 a lot 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 you know 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 some 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 it's just that they're less likely to do it and I think it'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 the moment when you've been a postdoc for a few you've got your PhD your postdoc for however many years you're a post-op 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 asked you to 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 in the days they work and job sharing it's possible to job share what 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 it's people understanding 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 so much there's this idea in science you have to really put hundred and ten percent in it to get anything but 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 past so anything where you have to look after students or care for students or if a student is crying or in distress they'll 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 grants the

amounts of grant money they get in because those things also 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 going all through the school life because we said that people think they need to get high grades to get it go and do as a levels in physics and maths and there may be later in their career 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 think that's something that made women do more than men I don't know if it's a confidence thing giving 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've 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 maths or going to engineering Mohsen 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 think well then I have to be brilliant in order to be able to do that because things are gonna 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 your

average let's say you're below average academically what you do you're going to do go down the path of least resistance right you're not going to deliberately do the thing unless you're so passionate about it there doesn't matter which women do but you know you have to 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 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 I was the

minority absolutely and I think that's not just 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 this the same grade you could both have an A or B at the end of your GCSEs and be looking at a levels and the girls more likely to think that's not good enough for that step and the confidence in your abilities is a big predictor on of whether or not people will go on and do that but 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 are a woman trying to get a job it's not good enough or historically wouldn't have been good enough to just be the same as the man applying for the job because a man applying for the job would be more likely to get it anyway you had to be better and that 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 it so you do have to be better we're told that you have to be better we know and it's not the girls fault for being under confident it's the industry's

fault for not giving them the jobs at equal rates two 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 Fitz is if I asked a group of six-year-olds to draw me a scientist they're gonna draw me Albert Einstein and that's lovely he's an amazing scientist so he was an amazing scientist don't get me wrong that's great but I would rather they drew themselves or their mom 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 you and then they can see themselves as doing that job because until they can see themselves they're often they're enthusiastic about the subject and I saw what you're gonna 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 of that's not for me that I can't do 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 were just like us so there's no there's no reason that you shouldn't do that something really nice that the Institute of Physics it again was getting kind of 1415 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 Oh am I really good enough eh so it's kind of interesting with 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 like empowered on your own confidence you're like whoa I am a physicist and they get to find out about physics which they're never really found out about before and you can leave the kind of associate professors of space science in their labs doing their space line so it's a really great way of letting it happen so that the kind of role models and the chief inspires who are 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 it's such an inspired sharing off the load of doing that's a great idea I love that and it's so simple it doesn't cost anything exactly Sophie if I Sue's you did the have you got what it takes to be an astronaut's the BBC programme which you want yeah have you had good reactions from girls since you've done that if they be myself I didn't realize I could do it and yeah lots actually so as soon as the show was aired of course lots of feedback in the show was made in a very positive way and so I think they showed us 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 it'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 often there's 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 I just joined Twitter and I was doing it so tweeted like I wouldn t more public engagement and you know thousands of people replied said how come to our school come to us and so I've been doing that now for the last eight months and yeah so I don't just go

to girl schools I talk to anyone I want everyone to be a physicist um but so I gave a talk yesterday morning and a space call 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 but I ended up being a physicist and 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 my autograph books but obviously now they just want a selfie right now you know it's a combination of the two and I've never understood why you want my name on a piece of paper with a pen and a piece of paper but otherwise yeah lots of us I'm getting good at selfie now lots and lots of selfies yeah and with you Jess's 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 spoken you should all read it but 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 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 just isn't paid 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 on to 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 Asian use it in schools it's actually a phenomenal good 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 percent of editors or women you're not really sure because you don't

have to disclose that information you're 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 color and lgbtq+ 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 or such 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 or some 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 there are always these kind of slightly unconventional stories I find myself if I have someone who's like a historical scientist and I managed to find like a tiny bit of information of their school I'm like jumping up and down in my room

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 sense of beginning of this year but increasingly getting other people involved with it too and 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 sources 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 or 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 that 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 Marie Curie by the end of that they 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 certainly not to the extent of having a Wikipedia page so it's been a great way to make me realize how many just how many people there are in this science that we don't recognize but also to get other people to realize 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 there'll be stories in the news recently about a lot of women in stem who have some last experiences whether that's well they're at university or when they starting 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 and sexual harassment and bullying are in industries where men are at the top in the film industry in academia in subject like physics and engineering where men are largely in positions of power and then you have science universities and

I'm not super cleared 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 and 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 whose social media who mate work really long hours when they're working with these professors who've been allowed to get away with a certain amount of bad behavior for a 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's coming to kind of a head 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 you know women see very 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 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 it's always going to be a problem so social media prime example ten years ago what I did have Twitter I didn't have to it 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 as is another debate but I think it's recognized as being serious like really interesting though I was just gonna 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 they'll 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 a Hollywood casting room in that sense you know

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 a it's an environment ripe for abuse really yeah and you're in that's a kind of what I was gonna 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 effects their 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 a 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 now I 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 gonna make an award scheme where grant money will depend on your ability to get one of these awards and you'll get fronts over a goal depending on your commitment to improving the scientific community forever and working there for undergraduates for postgraduates for professors for everyone and then they started to take action into change and this kind of set

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's a story last week about UCL a few weeks ago about other ones and I just think like it's 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 and you kind of got your blinkers down you've heard this reputation of a university that's a really historical one and you think I'll just apply that because you know this universities are only 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 quicker I think yeah I absolutely agree with Jess and like her I recommend the work of Emma Chapman in this is an incredible she's put together all the statistics around there 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 you know thousands of

students and post graduates 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 lgbtq+ 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 Sciences 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 field for everyone but that's the point isn't it these things don't change overnight and you know bringing in a policy now is really helpful but we have to recognize that it takes years of work to change this kind of thing it doesn't just change in a heartbeat