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HOW TO GET MORE WOMEN IN SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
Geraldine Rogers: They’ve got to put a bit more emphasis on science and technology education. I’m sure it’s second to none in universities, but it’s not good enough in primary school and secondary school as far as I can see. The first thing they’ve got to do is make sure the educational opportunity is there. Then I guess you need to look at why it is perhaps women don’t seem to want to stay in science and technology jobs.
Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I’m Cobi Smith. That was Geraldine Rogers from Cambridge Enterprise, introducing this episode, in which we look at ways to get more women pursuing successful careers in science, engineering and technology.
Annabel Sedgwick: If you want to increase the amount of women in science I would put the money, invest the money into decent science teaching in schools. When I was at school I wasn’t really pushed into doing science and I should have been, and I did a little bit but not as much as I should have done, and that sets you up for the rest of your life, you know, you’re canceling so many fascinating options if you don’t do science at school, but you’re not actually canceling out, for example, languages, you can learn a language at any time in life, it’s not a very difficult thing to get on a course and do, or go to a country and absorb. Whereas you know, to start learning science when you’re not in a peer group and that kind of thing later in life, I think it is a bit more of a challenge. So I would put the money in at a school level, definitely.
Cobi Smith: That was Annabel Sedgwick, who runs a science communications agency, talking about the importance of science in school.
Kate Jackson: I think it’s an image issue, I think it’s an image problem with sciences and engineering and technology, that it’s a male thing, and I think it’s the lack of job opportunities. If the practical applications and seeing the opportunities, and you can actually say, well, this is why, you know, one of my favourite things I did in biology was, when we were doing A levels, my teachers opted for us to study applied genetics, and most people studied classification, and I went off to uni knowing about stem cell research and gene therapy, and that was fantastic, we loved that, we all found that really fascinating, and I think, because it was so new and it’s all still being developed, and yeah, that was really, really interesting. I think round Cambridge, you know, there is that sort of buzz about science and technologies, around, you know, Norfolk and Suffolk there isn’t the industry there that gives people that buzz, and the great thing that’s happening in Lowestoft now is because we’re getting these renewable energy developments and things there is a new buzz about the town, ever since the big wind turbine, Gulliver, there’s a real buzz about the place, and hopefully if they can get women involved in that as well that would be really good.
Cobi Smith: And there was entrepreneurial zoologist Kate Jackson, suggesting that science in schools could be made more interesting by focusing on real-world applications. She also touched on the image problem associated with these careers for women – and this starts a lot younger than high school, as innovative engineer Anne Miller explains.
Anne Miller: Many women, they don’t even enter the race to get an opportunity, I mean it’s not that they applied for a job and were turned down because they’re a woman, because I think at junior levels they actually, if anything, you know a young woman has an advantage. It’s that from the age of 13 or even earlier, a woman who wants to do engineering is teased, she’s made to feel that she’s a tomboy, she’s discouraged – as I say I had to move schools in order to do the entrance exam for Cambridge, because I knew that that was the only way I’d get to Cambridge, if I did that entrance exam. So there’s so many hurdles, it does start really young. Because, you know, by the time a child is, sort of, 13 and it’s the first moment they ever come across the concept that a woman can be anything other than a stereotypical profession, you’ve got a real struggle on your hands. It may well be that in the sort of children’s programs, you know to have some of the characters of things that were archetypically thought of as male as being, you know, the woman that comes along, will actually make children just not notice that this feels weird. One thing that does annoy me actually is that the toy companies have a very rigid policy that toys have to fit in categories, and there’s boys toys and there’s girl’s toys. Once I was involved in taking along a toy invention to one of the major toy companies and I was really, genuinely shocked to find that we had to categorise this thing as either a boy’s toy or a girl’s toy, and so therefore it had to be either pink or blue. And I thought this is really shocking, because actually this is something that isn’t, you know, gender specific, it could be great fun for both.
Cobi Smith: Manufacturing consultant Suzy Lynch agrees stereotypes are a problem.
Suzy Lynch: I got back to the school where I was at secondary school and I go back and talk to them about engineering and that makes it real, and people can see you and perhaps you dispel some of the big, brusque, engineering type images that people have, and you can talk to people about real issues and real work that you’re doing, and try and inspire them and interest them. So I think there are a lot of girls at school who just never even think of it as an option. And I think the media can do a lot to help that as well. All the engineers that we see on television are car mechanics. You know, we see Kevin on Coronation Street is a car mechanic and he’s seen as an engineer. But where else do we have guys working as engineers? We don’t. And it would be nice to see some strong engineering role models, both male and female, within the media and you know within the television, and ways that just make it more accessible for people at school.
Beatrice Leigh: You need to put the right women I guess on the television. It’s quite remarkable following, I don’t know if you watch these forensic science programs right, everybody wants to do forensic science, it’s just stunning. So if you pitch it right – and probably everyone wants to do law as well – if you pitch it right, with the right role model, on the television, sad isn’t it, you will get more people thinking about this kind of a career. I think it has to be more of the sort of role models, make senior women more obvious, make them appear to be nice people so they’re not these big ogres.
Anne Miller: I got very used to, as a young woman, you know, I’d be a party, and people would say ‘what do you do?’ and I got to know that if I said I’m an engineer they would think ‘oh my god’ and they’d go and look for somebody interesting to talk to. So what I learnt to say was I’m a professional inventor, and they’d go ‘ooh that’s really interesting”.
Cobi Smith: That was Beatrice Leigh, CEO of a biotechnology company, followed by Anne Miller, on how the stereotype of her role doesn’t reflect reality.
Agnes Aubert: We all have preconceived ideas about what a woman MP is like, what a scientist is like, anyone really we sort of look at a job and have ideas. We might not have the right ideas, so having a range of women to look up to, and to think, to have an idea of what they do and how they have done it, is inspiring for us. I mean, I like the idea of looking up and trying to find role models out there. And traditionally a lot of the role models have been male so it’s nice to encourage female role models. But I think it’s also, the position of a woman in society has changed, and it changing, but we still are, need to be aware of the fact that a lot of women have a lot less resources than men have, so I think initiatives that make it more affordable for women to get training and to get all the resources and help they need, I think that’s useful.
Cobi Smith: That was Agnes Aubert, who runs an IT training company, on the importance of promoting role models to fight stereotypes. Here’s Sally Rose, business development manager of a biotechnology company.
Sally Rose: I’m actually in favour of positive discrimination, which is maybe not a good thing to air, but I think you do need positive discrimination in all cases, whether it’s colour, creed, race, whatever, you need a certain amount of positive discrimination to make change happen, otherwise, you know, you wouldn’t see anything like as many women in science even as you have today. I think it’s good that there’s now a lot more women MPs, and these things are beginning to be reflected in all walks of life, and certainly if you look at the lower levels in science, in chemistry now as well there’s a lot of women and they will get through to the top, there are some very good ones in senior management positions in some of the big pharma now. And it’s just meeting them and seeing them give talks at these scientific meetings is very important. The role model thing is just so important. But it’s getting there. It just takes a long time to change everybody’s preconceived ideas.
Anne Miller: My policy really was that we’d be looking to recruit somebody, and I’d get a whole heap of CV’s and if there were any women CV’s there, even if they looked halfway promising I would interview them. So in a sense I was doing a little bit of positive discrimination there because if that had been a male name I thought probably not, you know. So I would always give them the chance of an interview. But then maybe, there was one or two where I was quite tempted and we finally decided no, but one of the problems is that it’s not a very big pool. There just aren’t very many out there. It may be that the ones that there were, were all being far too successful to apply for the salary that we were offering, of course, but the other thing was also that I was absolutely determined that I wasn’t going to appoint a woman just because she was a woman even if she was incompetent, because the last thing I wanted was people saying ‘oh you know she only got the job because she was a woman’, I didn’t want to have somebody who was going to reinforce the stereotype that women weren’t up to the job. So they didn’t get an easy ride when they got an interview, but they did, I admit, tend to get an interview more easily than the young men. When you look at how positive discrimination has transformed things in the US, you know it has actually been very important in meaning that people’s ethnicity is less of a, you know, discrimination factor, giving people the opportunity to just become normal. So I think probably, as I see it, it’s, well, I feel quite comfortable with the way I did it, of in a sense giving positive discrimination in terms of giving people a hearing, because a) even to have got that far they’ve probably had to fight harder than a man – not necessarily but probably, and recruitment is often about balance of probabilities, and secondly because of this thing that, you know, there is a bit of a tendency for women to understate their achievements whereas men may be overconfident. So if you put that weighting factor in that then means that if you’ve got two equal CV’s I might well choose to interview the one from the woman, which in a sense is a bit of positive discrimination. That said, equally if somebody had done something really interesting on their CV, like they’d gone off and built wind turbines in Nepal or, you know, they played the tuba exceptionally well, or you know something else like that that makes them stand out from the pack, I think ‘ooh, you know, here’s someone who’s going to be interesting and would be the sort of person who would be a pleasure to have around.
Cobi Smith: Anne Miller again there, on the pros and cons of positive discrimination.
Fiona Marston: I sit on some BBSRC panels and I see some statistics and the way I understand it is that at an undergraduate level you’ve got more women than men in science, certainly in biology and the life sciences and chemistry, then when you get to postgrad level you’ve got more or less even numbers, and it’s somewhere between then and where I am that it goes completely skewed. But you know, is it positive discrimination? I don’t know if I agree with that. Perhaps it is a culture, perhaps it is women like me who’ve got to encourage other women to go for it. I mean I just feel, possibly personally I don’t do enough to encourage women in science. And even with the women who are CEO’s I’d actually like us to talk to each other more about our own experiences. Because it is, it’s very, very lonely in this position. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean it’s very good to share experiences and learn from other people’s experiences. But you know I would say to any woman scientist it’s amazing what you can achieve if you put your mind to it. And even if people tell you that you’re not capable of doing it, but you believe you are and you want to do it, if you’ve got that desire then I would just say go for it.
Cobi Smith: And there was Fiona Marston, CEO of a biotechnology company. We’re going to look at women in management in our next episode. This has been the SETwomen podcast, funded by the East of England Development Agency and YTKO. I’m Cobi Smith, thanks for listening.
