Keeping On Keeping Going

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Athene Donald

Listening to a webinar regarding women in management, I was struck by the panellist who remarked in irritation how her boss had once said ‘you must not have had any problems’ en route to the role she had. She was livid at this remark, and I can understand why. Success does not mean that there were no setbacks along the way. I do wonder whether a (male) boss would say anything similar to a male more junior colleague. To my mind the underlying implication when directed at a woman is that, if they had had any problems, they would likely have been derailed rather than keep going.

Sally Davies, former Chief Medical Officer who recently retired from her role as Master of Trinity College in Cambridge, summarised this well in an interview:

“Well, like most women of my age I’ve had to be better than the men to get the jobs, and then of course there is the inevitable you make and put forward an idea at a meeting and it’s only when a man says it that it’s taken up.”

That doesn’t sound like someone who’s never had any problems. Although she qualifies her remarks with ‘most women of my age’, suggesting the current generation of young women may not face the same issues, I fear I think that is too optimistic. Nothing I’ve heard from ECRs suggests they don’t have similar experiences.

I am reminded of this following an interview[1] I did this week with a journalist from the BBC World Service about why there were, yet again, no women Nobel prize winners in the STEM subjects this year. Where did the problems set in, I was asked. My personal belief is that they occur at every stage of a life essentially from birth. For women moving up the professional ladder, the thought process of any interviewer should be, not an assumption there have never been any problems, more a question about how they found the resilience to keep going in the face of inevitable hiccoughs or worse.

I watch the world of (classical) music as a kind of parallel world to science, with historically similar ways of writing women out of many roles. Marin Alsop, the US conductor, may have been the first woman to be appointed to lead a major American orchestra when she was appointed Musical Director for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, but this led to open hostility from some orchestra members. Instead of giving up this dream job and simply retreating, she worked with the orchestra to overcome their concerns and then went from strength to strength. If you read her Wikipedia page, the number of ‘firsts’ to her credit is extraordinary: she was the first female principal conductor of a British orchestra, the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms….and so on. However, if you watch interviews with her, it is clear how raw that experience at Baltimore was. No setbacks on the way to glory? Rubbish!

Sally Davies and Marin Alsop, in their different ways, did not give up on their path to leadership. Others may. It is too easy to be knocked off course. If you choose not to let ‘them’ win, you have to expend energy that could otherwise be directed at your science instead at manoeuvring, fitting in or finding allies to work with you. This could, of course, happen to men as well as women and to any minority in a situation where they feel excluded, but it does lead to time being eaten up and potentially a sapping of strength which others may not have had to overcome if their path has always been rose-strewn.

Take Nancy Hopkins, for instance. Not a Nobel Prize winner but an eminent life scientist at MIT. If you read Kate Zernike’s 2024 book The Exceptions about women faculty in the sciences there, it becomes clear, not just that she was treated most unreasonably, but that in order to gather evidence about the systemic differences in the way female faculty were treated, a lot of time and thought was required. Going around the labs at night to measure up the space allocated to male and female faculty to gather the evidence that women systematically got a raw deal took imagination as well as time. That she was willing to do this to make her case to MITs senior leadership, made a difference not just within her own faculty but with repercussions far wider when the ensuing report was made public, documenting the way women were systemically disadvantaged.

Hopkins was brave, energetic and yet still managed to outshine most of her male colleagues professionally. But to say she ‘must have had no problems’ would be ridiculous. I’m sure many women have done, in their own ways, what they can to level the playing field for them and those who come thereafter, but it will come as a cost. Does this play into why so few women get Nobel prizes in STEM? Probably not in a direct line, but the woman who is a team player, who fits in with the system so as not to be shafted or takes on the pastoral care and other ‘housekeeping’ that may be tossed in her direction, will be less likely to win this ultimate accolade (which, for all its glory and media attention, seems a very outdated kind of prize).

To be successful as a scientist can take many forms: to bring on the next generation, to contribute a small part to a wider whole, to inspire….it does not mean selfishness and treading on those more junior than you so that the prizes all come to you. Please do not follow the advice in entomologist E.O. Wilson’s quite old book (2013), Letters to a Young Scientist, (he was ‘merely’ a Pulitzer Prize winner, not a Nobel but ambition oozes through his book) to ‘Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade’ to get out of doing the important if boring tasks of administration. His book was all in favour of ambition and simply putting all one’s effort single-mindedly into one’s own research. The world would be a better place overall if the incentives in academia did more to encourage team working, support and a fair sharing of the load of making a department run well, rather than rewarding the selfish.

 

[1] I suspect this interview will only be available in a non-English translation, from what I was told

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Are You Confused?

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Athene Donald

Do you look at your life and wonder what you’re doing? Perhaps you’re too busy ever to step back and consider its balance: balance between work and your outside life, be it domestic or social; and/or balance between what you have to do and what you want to do. It can be scary in the small hours of the morning, when sleep is AWOL, to lie staring at the ceiling asking yourselves those questions. It is often easier just to follow your nose and assume that there is joy enough in your life so that there is no point contemplating disturbing that.

One of the problems about retirement – and personally I’m no fan of the status – is sometimes it is inevitable that you have to look back and wonder about all the twists and turns you consciously or unconsciously made, whether forced upon you or happily chosen. This past week, two occasions have forced such reflection on me. Often I have felt, and continue to feel, that my life does not amount to a coherent whole. So it was reassuring to pause a moment to note that there was a degree of coherence after all, in what I have chosen to do beyond the day job. I have always believed one should seize opportunities (within reason, which is very much weasel wording, as it begs the question of what is reasonable), but that can lead to a degree of randomness.

This week I had the honour of planting the 1000th tree on the Churchill College site. It is now 2 years since I stepped down as Master, but this ceremony was designed to honour my ten-year tenure. Being asked to say a few words I decided to say a little bit about what I have been doing since retirement, not least to stop everyone asking me that same question over lunch. Later in the week I talked at the University’s Technician Conference, which turned out to be a big affair with over 250 participants. My role was to talk about the importance of technical support throughout my career and what – in the spirit of the Technician Commitment – needs to be done to improve technicians’ visibility and career paths.

1000th tree a
Members of the Churchill College community at the planting of the 1000th tree (an oak) on site

Both these talks enabled me to talk about the skills pipeline – not least through my role as Chair of the Science Advisory Council (SAC) for the Department of Education, as well as more local initiatives; the new challenges devolution is likely to make for post-16 education and the changing expectations for post-14 education everywhere and what this may mean for the wider skills landscape. Skills is an easy word to toss around, but when facing up to the growing problem of NEETs (not in employment, education or training), what happens during a child’s early life at home and at school has to be considered in depth, not just what happens at 16 or 18. This is a fast-changing policy space, and one that will, for instance, be likely to impact on the technician pipeline in years to come.

So, let me return to my own retirement and whether one can ever, at any stage, end up with a coherent portfolio beyond the normal demands put upon an academic. As retirement approached, one of the pieces of advice I was given repeatedly, was not to accept the first role I was offered. In practice, I didn’t follow this. I applied for many roles which I didn’t get – rejection does not simply come in the early years of a career – before the Department of Education role turned up, one which I immediately accepted. Looking back, most of the unsuccessful applications would probably have suited me much less well, and could indeed have led to a much more piecemeal combination of roles. Maybe my uncertainty of how some of these roles fitted me individually contributed to my failures. But, I want to stress, failure is not something reserved for the young. It can hit you – and hit you hard – at any stage. It can divert you from where you thought you were going, but nevertheless it will not always be damaging.

The second point to make is, if someone tells you a role takes X amount of time, think hard whether this estimate is realistic. Many years ago, I was told by the outgoing chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee, the time commitment was four meetings a year. Maybe that was all they did, but I found myself spending more like a day a week – and quite often in London rather than remotely – on the role. In part this was because it was a time of significant change in education policy under Michael Gove, and frequent consultations came out requiring a response. Perhaps I should have limited the time I was prepared to give, but then I would have derived much less satisfaction.  That experience told me to treat the advertised SAC chair role as amounting to 4 meetings a year with suspicion. It didn’t worry me, as I was looking for something fulfilling in my retirement, and I have been proved right. The role involves a significant time commitment, with lots of new areas to mug up on (eg getting to grips with SEND and the reforms). Learning new things is, in my mind, always stimulating.

And growing out from that role I have become involved in other education- and skills-related activities. Of my ongoing activities, there is nothing that I can think of that couldn’t be badged under over that overarching umbrella. Yet I cannot claim that I achieved that by a ruthless focus on it, so much as the roles that I have sought and then been offered have all come together under that heading. Giving this past week’s talks highlighting these activities was therefore reassuring to me about coherence.

However…if you feel you’ve ended up with a random collection of tasks on top of your day job (or in retirement) I would reiterate the key point I made in my TEDx talk some years ago. It was not for nothing it was entitled ‘nothing is wasted’. You try something new. You may or may not enjoy it, but if not you will know (as I did about such talks) you never want to do such a thing again. Or you may learn something that comes in useful many years later. That was what I felt about the role chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee, because knowing something about school education was certainly a help when I became Master of a Cambridge college although, rather obviously, that was neither the motivation nor even in my mind, when I accepted the chair role. And so it goes. In retirement, as in the rest of a career, it is perfectly possible to look back – be it in the small hours of the night or any other time – and think, yes, there is some coherence there after all.

 

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Condescension

Posted on September 13, 2026 by Athene Donald

Janet Taylor’s (1804-1870) was not a name I was familiar with until rather recently. She was quite the pioneer, however, despite the hurdles she had to face as a woman committed to delivering improvements in navigation for British sailors. A biography of her life, Mistress of Science: the story of the remarkable Janet Taylor, pioneer of sea navigation  enlightened me. She set about improving the lot of the British sailor, by setting up a ‘Nautical Academy’ which offered training in those subjects a mariner would need. This included “a complete course on Navigation, including Trigonometry, and its application to Navigation”, but also how to use the instruments and tables that mariners of the time needed to understand. Furthermore, she published a number of books to provide more accuracy in these tables that were used across shipping to establish a ship’s position.

The first book she published about this, Luni-Solar and Horary Tables, was designed to permit an accurate calculation of longitude using the so-called lunar method, but with the improvement of allowing for the earth’s spheroidal shape, which she was one of the first to highlight (as opposed to a simple sphere). The book was given an anonymous review in the Nautical Magazine, which highlights the way people approached her work. To put it mildly, it was not favourable, referring to the book as ‘useless’ and of ‘disproportionate accuracy’. But, her gender had undoubtedly played a part in the reviewer’s mind, as he (it must have been a he!), commented:

The work before us being the production of one of the fair sex, and, we believe, a first effort, disposed us to treat it, as in gallantry we were bound to do, with every indulgence….

This condescending statement, as well as all the other criticisms in the review, did not go down well with Taylor, who wrote a lengthy rebuttal which in turn provoked a further rebuttal of the rebuttal….Over a difficult career of many years, her persistence paid off and she gained increasing stature within the field, and her Academy proved successful despite the odds. (It was not for nothing it was originally labelled with her husband’s name, to try to overcome suspicion of work led by one of the ‘fair sex’, although George Taylor was more the logistics lead rather than the brains of the operation.) That sort of condescension towards the ‘fair sex’ still can be found today in most walks of life. I was reminded of it by a reference I saw to Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, and the original 2012 essay which provoked the book’s title, in which she recounts how a man tried to tell her all about Eadweard Muybridge, having read a review of a book about him. On and on this man went, despite interjections that Solnit was indeed the author. That story, and others like it, in time provoked the new word ‘mansplaining’, but there are of course many ways in which condescension plays out.

Not giving women their proper titles is one version that turns up all over the place. I wrote about one particular interaction of mine with the local media where this played out some years ago. One of the funnier versions I encountered was back in the days when I used Twitter. Sir Joe Bloggs (I forget what his name actually was) had just been appointed to do a review of something gender-related (and equally, I forget what that was after this distance in time), and I put out a tweet saying what a good thing that Joe Bloggs was going to do this review. To which, some jerk responded saying ‘Sir Joe Bloggs to you’, or something to that effect. Foolishly, I responded stating as a Dame I thought I could drop his title, to which the reply was ‘No’. Why not? Does this jerk not understand the relative standings of Dame and Knight? Clearly not. And, as a passing moan, I will mention those tedious pull-down lists on online forms that list different forms of title, may often have ‘Professor Sir’ as a choice, but much less often ‘Professor Dame’…Oh well, I’m not particularly keen on the slightly absurd title of Dame, but – in the current much-used phrase in a different context – parity of esteem suggests you should either have neither choice or both.

Condescension features in so many stories of women’s lives, and science is no exception. It may be more than 50 years ago since Jim Watson wrote disparagingly about ‘Rosy’ Franklin in The Triple Helix, but comments about women’s dress, as well as their scientific abilities, still are frequent. The presumption that if a man and a woman turn up to a meeting, the male is the senior player is another common variant of this. To give another recent example I heard about, in my own university, it concerned a gifted early career researcher, someone working in a hot topic and much in demand by both the media and Government. Yet when she was looking for a college affiliation within the Cambridge system, one college offered her a teaching fellowship, with its requisite substantial time commitment to teaching, at the expense of her research. In response to her pushback, that that was not what she was looking for, she was told that as a woman they had assumed that would be sufficient. Needless to say, she went elsewhere. The College in question will have been the loser (and, suffice it to say, it is one of the colleges well known for its backward attitudes towards women).

Of course, it’s a case of ‘not all men’. Nevertheless, the reality is that many of the men who do this are probably blithely unaware that they are so blinkered and biased. I will end with one more anecdote of my own. Some years ago, I attended a dinner for the Honorary Graduands of a particular university. There were a number of us and, carelessly I’d say, the Vice Chancellor presiding did not do any formal introductions. Two men, who undoubtedly would have regarded themselves as of the ‘Great and Good’ of London (not scientists) clearly decided I was some obscure hanger-on, presumably another honorary graduand’s partner or guest, and talked across me. Indeed, they chose to talk about genetics about which it was clear they knew little. But would they let me get a word in edgeways to correct them? Of course not. Unlike Solnit, I haven’t written a book on the subject that was being described to me, but nevertheless it was painful to listen to them getting facts wrong while ignoring my attempts to intervene. It was only a single dinner, and I was never going (I hope) to see these clowns again, but it was certainly tedious. And, I would say, representative of too many men’s attitudes to too many women. Condescension did not go out with the end of the Victorian era after Janet Taylor died, nor mid-last-century after Rosalind Franklin died. It is, sadly, going strong.

 

 

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Alexander Borodin and the Education of Women

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Athene Donald

For those of a certain age who remember Chris Tarrant’s Who wants to be a millionaire?’, there was a moment when the contestant had reached the million dollar question which was: What was the composer Borodin’s profession? To me, that was easy. He was a chemist in St Petersburg. Being a composer was very much a part-time occupation, although he wrote some wonderful pieces, ranging from the thumping beat of the Polovstian dances to more reflective music, such as representing a camel train In the Steppes of Central Asia. He met his pianist wife Ekaterina during his studies in Heidelberg, when she was there recovering from tuberculosis. She alerted him to the problematic situation of women’s education in Russia and in due course he followed this up: certain that women would make excellent doctors, Borodin became one of the founders of the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg. To this day, women make up an unusually high proportion of the doctors in Russia.

So, what was the situation for women in mid-late nineteenth century Russia? In the 1860’s there was a spirit of radicalism in the air. Tsar Alexander II enacted the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto, proclaiming the emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of domestic serfs. This encouraged the Russian intelligentsia to think the time was ripe for more progress, including for women’s education.  Turgenev referred to these people as nihilists. They believed strongly in the natural sciences as relevant to progress and the power of education including for women. Science to these people was a way of improving wider society, pushing back the barriers of religion and superstition.

The Government was aware that, to the radical element, science was equated with progress, but they also knew they had to expand science education since there was a great need for technical experts. Recognizing this, they sent many men abroad to study science in German and Swiss universities, including the chemists Dmitri Mendeleev and Vladimir Markovnikov – and Borodin.

Meanwhile back in St Petersburg in the early 1860s, women were allowed into lectures as ‘unofficial auditors’, welcomed by the professors and tolerated by officialdom. The St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy began to admit women to their courses, unofficially, although they could not obtain degrees. Two key figures were Nadezhda Suslova and Maria Obrucheva (Sechnova upon marriage), who were both closely linked to radical groups. They served to attract other women over the next couple of years, believing the future was opening up for all of them. It was hoped that the ongoing revision of University statutes would formally admit women to all universities in Russia, with the same rights as men. However, the Tsarist Government quashed this plan and by 1864 all universities had clamped down on women’s attendance once more.

As a consequence of this, the most determined women who had sufficient financial resources, left Russia to study abroad, mostly to Zurich, but also Heidelberg and Leipzig, where foreigners could be admitted to the University without formal qualifications  (the attestat obtained in the gymnasia). Suslova obtained a medical degree from Zurich in 1867, the first Russian woman to do so and was subsequently allowed to practice in Russia. Many women followed her in obtaining medical qualifications, and by the 1880s Russia had more licensed women physicians than anywhere else in Europe. Another notable first was Sofya Kovalevskya, who studied in Heidelberg and Berlin and, in 1874, was the first nineteenth century woman anywhere to obtain a mathematics doctorate, in this case from Gottingen.

However, the number of women studying in Zurich did not please the authorities back home, and a proclamation was made stating that any women who remained there after New Year 1874 would be barred from ever being hired by the Government, or studying in the future in any Russian institute of higher education or taking qualifying exams there. Some returned home, but others stuck it out and gained degrees and good careers, despite continuing to be harassed.

But the Government could not ignore the pressure to permit women to study medicine, and by 1872 a course in obstetrics for women was initiated in St Petersburg, leading to a qualification as a ‘learned midwife’, and this was where Borodin came in. He was active in the administrative activities of the Medico-Surgical Academy and, together with a number of colleagues, he helped found this first medical course for women. This quickly became a course of higher medical education for women, with Borodin devoting considerable time to both the administration of the school and to teaching.

However, after the then Tsar was killed in a bombing, he was succeeded by the highly reactionary Alexander III.  Under Alexander III the Medico-Surgical Academy was renamed the Military Medical Academy and placed under the control of the Ministry of War. This ministry refused to allow the use of the military hospital as an academic base for the women’s medical courses. For the next three years, 1882-1885, Borodin and others were able to restructure the course under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, but thereafter it too  was closed by the authorities, greatly affecting Borodin who was said to have burst into tears.

When finally courses for women were reopened, they were mainly steered towards courses in languages or art. The Government clearly felt the association between the natural sciences and medicine and progressive thought was too dangerous to be permitted. Thereafter there was a long period before the situation improved. The short couple of decades when there was a brief flowering of higher education for women in the sciences coincided with a rich period of science for men in Russia too. Borodin was not one of those leaders of science himself, but he was a keen supporter of the women, and for this he was much appreciated. When he died in 1887 his women students had a silver plate inscribed on his burial casket with the words: “To the Founder, Protector and Defender of the School of Medicine for Women.”

Source Material for this post mainly came from:
Ann Hibner Koblitz, Science, Women and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Generation of the 1860s in History of Women in the Sciences, ed Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, University of Chicago Press 1999

And Medicine, molecules and music: Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) – surgeon, scientist, composer, educator, women’s rights advocate, Broadway award winner, Brooklyn Transplant blog by Stephen Keller, September 26 2014

 

 

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Mentors in Passing

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Athene Donald

Recently I was approached by a young woman after a talk, requesting we met so I could give her some advice. In fact, I suspect she didn’t actually want advice, so much as reassurance that what she had in mind to do was sensible and likely to achieve her aims. Mentoring comes in many forms, from long term over years – during which the relationship may change to be much more that of equals, each finding the other a helpful, objective voice – to a single meeting at a critical juncture. There is also the not unrelated but distinct persona of sponsor that may be valuable at different stages, someone who puts you forward for a prize or a promotion, often without even telling you they’ve done so.

I have been fortunate in having some great mentors in my life, some of whom I’ve written about on these pages, even if sadly at a point when they have just died (Ed Kramer and Sam Edwards in particular), but other people in the field have supported me at different times in ways for which I’m permanently grateful. But here I want to celebrate someone whose name I don’t know, perhaps never did, and whom I only met once, but who shared wise words with me at a critical point in my career.

I met this woman by chance, when travelling from Ithaca (where I was a postdoc at Cornell University) to New York City to visit my husband, who was living in Manhattan at the time, working at the Rockefeller Institute. It’s about a 5-hour journey by Greyhound bus, and we were sitting next to each other. For whatever reason we started talking, although I’m not a great one for engaging in conversation with strangers, particularly if you are trapped next to each for several hours. It turned out she was an academic from nearby Ithaca College, not, I think, a scientist, but established in her career unlike me.

The critical juncture I was facing at this particular point was that I was about to apply for a faculty position in my department (Materials Science and Engineering) at Cornell. Nothing unusual there for a postdoc to try to secure a permanent, or at least tenure-track, position. However, by this point I was in my third year as a postdoc in the department, and my first two had been an unmitigated disaster. I had not enjoyed the project, not put any substantial effort into it, my experiments had not gone well and the relationship with my then supervisor had remained civil but was hardly cordial. An unsurprising response, given how unsuccessful I had been. At that point, at the end of two years of dreary unenthusiastic toil, no one would have thought for a second a tenure-track position might be on the horizon.

But…things had changed for me essentially instantaneously when I switched from grain boundaries in metallic bicrystals (the topic of my first postdoc) to working with Ed Kramer on the failure of polymers. Suddenly, I came alive. Whether this was for the stereotypical reason that as a woman I couldn’t think in three dimensions in the way studying the join between two misoriented crystals required, but  for whatever reason amorphous polymers engaged me in a way my previous project never had. Perhaps it was simply that I was fed up with being fed up and threw myself into the new project with renewed enthusiasm. Certainly  Ed was a very different kind of person from my first supervisor (Steve Sass), with whom it was apparent there was some kind of rivalry within the department, both being much of an age and seniority.

Be that as it may, for whatever reason, my first year working on polymers was a total transformation so that, by the start of my second year, I had become a plausible candidate for a faculty position. But, my problem was, how did I make a case I was a good choice when the whole department (I assumed, though possibly inaccurately) would know of my utter failure during those first two years, even if I was now transformed into an industrious and successful postdoc with Ed?

What this amazingly kind woman did for me on the bus, was to reassure me that if she were on an appointments committee, she would not simply rule me out for my two wasted years. That I had to own my failure and explain why things were different now. Over the course of those five hours trapped next to each other, she must have explored a lot of options with me, as well as discussed wider academic life. Her advice: that I should write a clear statement stating my position and owning the mistakes of the first two years at Cornell. She provided me with a framework to make my previous failure seem more explicable to the faculty, however ‘unfortunate’, and to make a case for why I was worth taking a punt on now. The details of that advice are long since lost to me, but I got off that bus feeling far more excited and positive than I had got on it. I turned up in New York feeling confident that I could write a covering letter which dealt with my lost two years in some plausible way.

This all happened nearly half a century ago (!), but the kindness and wisdom of this woman remains with me as someone who, in passing, made a big difference to me. I know that when thinking about mentoring, it is the long-term relationship that people tend to think about. But I am also aware that single conversations can be amazingly effective at some crucial moment. Individuals have told me how, some conversation with me made in passing, made such a (positive) difference to them, and it is always heartening to know that, even if I barely recall the interaction.  One doesn’t always know that someone is going to take a casual comment to heart, and it is also quite possible they may have some much more unfortunate and unintended consequence which one probably never hears about. Words matter, however carelessly they may be tossed out. Being kind to people when they’re feeling vulnerable is always important.

 

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