uk resource centre for women in science, engineering and technology

Great to read your story Anne. What tips could you give to women who would like to get a position on a Research Council? I assume it's very competitive. Do you have to be at Professorial level before it's worth applying?

I've found it very rewarding being involved with Research Councils at all levels. I have served on grant committees etc and I think that this was very valuable for background experience. It's worth looking to see what comittees etc. reflect your own interests and experience and make a start there. I spoke to people I knew on different committees to get an idea of their background and an appreciation of the work of the committee. This then helped when applying for a position. Most academics on Council are at prrofessorial level but business and other respresentatives are not. There's no rule for this however.

Anne, yes, its a good picture of a life in science which seems to shows how science can be talked about in a way that non scientists can "see" and begin to understand. I want to ask 2 different questions - hope that is ok!
1) what lessons for the women who need to be bold can you give them from the men who are bold but nevertheless get 'knocked back' sometimes, but presumably bounce back.

2) is it possible to get gender equality and SET issues talked about and addressed across government at a higher level, wherever science is being discussed and decisions made - this is a point about mainstreaming you will see!

Marion, I'm not sure how you get women to be bolder in their aspirations but one thing that I'm sure would help is to take advantage of mentoring from senior colleagues. It helps to hear that people you regard as successfull have often been "knocked back" at different times in their careers but that usually learned something from the experience. Regarding your comment on gender equality issues being discussed at high level across government, you're right, it is important. It is happening but we need to keep our foot on the pedal to make sure that we continue to look for imaginative ways to take advantage of all the SET talent out there and that people are not disadvantaged due to gender issues.

We at the UKRC find that mentoring provides invaluable support for women in all sorts of areas, but building confidence is one of the most commonly reported benefits. Anyone who is interested in mentoring should see the UKRC's mentoring pages. Follow the link at the top left of this page. If you would like to join a mentoring programme and can't or prefer not to access one through your employer, university or professional body you could try MentorSET. You can find links to it through our pages.

You have done lots of different things during your career - what have been the biggest challenges and what have you learnt most from?

Allison, that's a really hard question! I think the biggest challenge was building my research career, especially right at the beginning when I had little experience of grant writing, teaching and giving seminars. For a while it seemed like an uphill struggle and it was hard to judge how well I was doing. I was very relieved to get my first promotion to senior lecturer (although it seemed like a long time in coming!) as I felt that was an independant review of my performance. It might sound odd but I think I've learned the most from working with difficult people and always finding something positive to take away from it.

Dear Professor Anne Glover,

I am working on a large programme involving the environment and saving energy and decreasing emissions into the atmosphere. My company is called Young SET Ambassadors Ltd and I am based at the University of Edinburgh. I do not mind if the people I provide employment for are women or men as long as they have the qualifications and skills to do the job. I am able to provide training. I also do not mind if they are mums and have been out the system for a long time as this would be a very good way to reintroduce them into the science, engineering and technology sectors once again. Anyone interested is welcome to get in touch.

It's good to hear such a positive stance on UK science and were very pleased with the positive light in which the Research Councils have refelcted.

Many thanks for your thoughs Anne!

Benjamin D. Aubrey
Research Councils UK Strategy Unit

Aileen, I agree that you should always engage the best qualified person for the job. I think that sometimes, especially if people have had a career break, it can be very daunting to re-enter the workplace . Even although potential employers have no reluctance to employ them, they may feel inhibited about applying. This is a really good example of why we need positive role models and strong encouragement from employers for potential staff who have been out of the workplace for sometime.

Ben, it's really good to see so many good women (and men) working with the Research Councils. The Research Council I work with most (NERC) encourages Council members to engage with the UKRC mentoring scheme for women (mentioned by Rachel above) and we have had mentees come along to Council meetings so that they can experience what a Council meeting is like and speak to Council members. As you know, all Councils actively encourage women to apply for positions on committees and on Council. The problem we face is that there are are either not enough suitably qualified women to appoint or that they do not apply.

I would like to ask how you took your first step to becoming involved in science decision making. The UK Resource Centre is working to promote public appointments to women, but we find that many women are not even aware of how to take that first step. The process of applying can also seem very strange and long winded and we are working with the Commissioner for Public Appointments (OCPA) to try and inform those who may be interested. We have a written a Good Practice Guide in Making an Application which can be downloaded form the UKRC website and we promote vacancies on the website.

Pat, the first non-university thing I did was sit on the Society for General Microbiology (SGM) Council (www.sgm.ac.uk) I was a member of SGM and saw the vacancy advertised in their quarterly magazine. I knew someone who was already on Council and I asked them about it to find out it it was the sort of thing I would want to do and to make sure I could make a reasonable contribution.

There are lots of ways opportunities arise - sometimes vacancies are suggested to you personally and my feeling is that this is particularly good for getting women to apply for public (and other) appointments as they respond very well to this approach. Men on the other hand tend not to need the personal encouragement to apply, they just go ahead if they are interested. Both approaches are good but women might find it helpful to realise that the reason that some of their male colleagues have been successful in public appointments is that they just went ahead and applied, they weren't especially invited. A Good Practice Guide to Making an Application is great for both female and male applicants and I really like the Public Appoitments section on the UKRC website.

When I was at a very early stage in my career I wondered how a male colleague of mine was invited to talk at meetings and I wasn't - I assumed it was because his research must have been much better thought of than mine. One day I asked him about it and he told me the reason was he usually wrote to conference session organisers, told them about his work and why it was important and suggested they invite him. Many of them did. I learned a lot from that - the main thing was - don't wait to be asked!

This is such a useful blog, many thanks for setting it up, and the issues Anne raises are exactly the kind of issues that younger academics or scientists find are holding them back. Another one I found is that the fear of not being good enough at a job or being criticised for failing coudl prevent me from taking something on. It is therefore so important to have a supportive environment to work in.

(By the way a note to the blog moderator - I wanted to subscribe to the RSS feed via google reader or other way but it does not work for me...)

Hi Liora, thank you for your kind comments. The RSS feed is a new feature for us. Thanks for telling us about the glitch - we will look into it. (RSS feeds are a good way for people to be notified when there are new items on a blog they find interesting.)

Liora, when considering new opportunities I found it helpful to ask myself the question "what's the worst that can happen?" Surprisingly, it's never that bad. It struck me that a much worse thing was living with a regret that I didn't try something rather than expose myself to potential rejection or criticism.

The role of scientific advice to the Government, society and to the public is really important I think. As head of the Natural Environment Research Council, NERC, I am involved, like Anne is, with advising as widely as possible on the scientific evidence relevant to the critical environmental issues of today - climate change, loss of biodiversity, scarcity of natural resources etc. Being able to talk about the scientific evidence in an independent way without crossing over to advocating particular policies or actions seems important to me. Many climate change sceptics, for example, seem clearly to be motivated by advocating particular policies (in their case not to have limits on carbon dioxide emissions, for example) and they try to point to the uncertainty in the science to suggest our knowledge is poor or even flawed. Iain Stewart - a geologist from University of Plymouth and a proud Scot too! - did a great job on the BBC2 TV programme last week on the "Climate Wars" in showing how each of the main arguments the sceptics use to deny the human role in changing climate can be refuted using the scientific evidence.

Alan, as scientists, evidence is central to everything we do and it is a real challenge for us when faced with situations where evidence is disregarded or manipulated. It would be great to have more accessible science on TV both for enjoyment and to provide high quality information to non-scientists to allow them to contribute to the wide variety of debates on science issues. It would be great if more scientists took the plunge, as Iain Stewart has done, into mainstream science communication.

Anne, I know you are are great advocate of science engagement and would like to see science embraced more readily as part of popular culture, so you must have been excited by the publicity surrounding the switching on of the Cern accelerator
(albeit some of the science reported was not too accurate). How can we do more to make the wider, non scientific community understand and value the breadth of influence of science and technology which I believe is ultimately the way to get more young people involved?

Anne, as recently retired Head of Communications for NERC, I'd like to say what a pleasure it was to work with you as a female scientist who was always willing to speak in debates, to the press and to front-up events aimed at non-scientific audiences. The confidence issue in communication is important - it was usually easier to find male scientists, but there are lots more of them at senior levels anyway thanks to the gender imbalance. I do hope that all scientists are aware that there is a lot of support for science communication (eg training, coaching, technical issues) to be had from their organisation. Being well-trained is a huge boost to confidence.

Picking up on Fiona Logue's point, I agree that the publicity around the CERN event was amazing. All communications people long to create a media feeding frenzy in this positive way. It is however a fact that the step-wise progression of science rarely lend itself to such public engagement. In the absence of frequent big bangs, how do we get science into the news and registering with public interest? I am an advocate of lots of local engagement in local communities until science becomes much more part of culture. In the last few years, policy support has been for large scale activities attempting to target wide swathes of the public. I do hope that the new centres of excellence in public engagement, recently established, will achieve much more at local levels throughout the UK.

Anne, this is a very good and interesting blog. Thank you
To come back to Fiona's point. I think that besides having a 5 minute sport slot on (for example) BBC radio Scotland every hour or so, the BBC should consider also having a dedicated 5 minute science-slot, presented by a knowledgeable scientist. Such a person would be able to ask the 'right sort of questions' that are not necessarily always sensation-driven. By doing something like this the general public will get their 'daily portions of science' during the news programs every hour. Just like the sports!

To pick up the points made by Sheila and Pieter - the UK Resource Centre is actively building a pool of women scientists, engineers and technologists who are interested in interacting with the media, the public and other audiences. If women are interested in joining this 'talent pool' of communicators they should register on our GetSET database http://www.getsetwomen.org We are looking for women from a range of career levels, backgrounds, sectors and disciplines and will offer free media training for those who would be interesting in speaking to journalists. We also refer women for speaking and role model opportunities. Please sign up and/or promote GetSET in your organisation. We need to ensure that both women and men are involved in debating and commenting on issues in science, technology engineering and maths, and we need more female role models to inspire the next generation of girls into STEM careers.

I got into science through the medical route. I direct clinical genetics labs and patients services for half the week, and lead research into genetic conditions the rest of the time. I love mixing my roles to brings insights from clinic to lab and back again. I also do my best to raise a 4 year old!

When I was 10 teacher said I could not build a windmill from junk with the boys, but had to learn to knit so that I could clothe my children. I have learned that you can buy boottees in catalogues, and that as Shrek says, "the biggest barrier to you being able to do something is yourself". But cultural barriers remain, and its great to see women like Anne showing us what is possible.

Dear Anne,
Thank you for starting up this blog; it is really great and encouraging to see a woman in the top science position. Being a woman and a mother myself, it is a very hard job of balancing work and family life and sometimes it is so easy to miss out on so many things/opportunities; I think that you are right about different attitudes that men and women have, starting with that we always feel "lucky" we achieved something and "it must have been luck" that brought us where we are, while men never consider themselves "lucky" but deserving. I think we have to start changing our attitude just by admitting that perhaps we were the "best" candidate and things should start rolling from there. In addition, I also decided to volunteer for a lot of committees even though sometimes it means an awful lot of work and time commitment (sometimes having to organise a babysitter in order to do "work" things); good to see that it may be worth the investment! I hope this science blog continues...

Some great ideas here on science engagement. It would be a start if scientists (at all stages in their careers and with a passion for communication) were routinely embedded in newsrooms and established relationships with our newspaper journalists to provide the media with interesting and accurate science input to news stories. I think the intiative has to come from us. Our employers often have Press and Comms offices that can help with this and there is a Science Media Centre, see http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/pages/ which promotes science news stories. As Sheila mentions, there is a lot of support to get us started. There are science centres around the UK who are always looking for enthusiastic communicators and I would recommend the Cafe Scientifique network (see http://www.cafescientifique.org/) with cafes from Aberdeen to St Ives, to get started in informal sceince engagement. There's an awful lot of us (scientists!), we could make quite a splash if we weren't so quiet!

Zosia/Mirela, I think you are`pretty impressive role models yourselves! I've always found it quite a spur to achievement if I was told I couldn't do something.

I have found mentoring from strong role models (female and male) invaluable in helping to build my confidence to identify and take on new challenges. A wise woman once told me not to worry about being able to do a role if I was successful in winning it, something I have carried with me in moving from lab-based research into other areas of the system. I shall certainly look into the mentoring opportunities mentioned above.
Anyone interested in opportunities to work with the Research Councils should keep an eye out for new opportunities. As someone who has desparately searched for experts for peer review, I would encourage anyone to have a go if they are asked to help. You can always ask for help or clarification if you are unsure of what is required.
I think it would be great to get more science in the media, but also into other areas where it can have an impact. The Research Councils are doing lots to help researchers meet and work with users of science (public, private and third sector e.g. charities, NGOs, voluntary organisations etc). Links can usually be found under "knowledge transfer" or "knowledge exchange". I have recently been involved in trying to get more of NERC's science into policy, working with people in government who are very keen for help in building the evidence base for their policies. NERC and ESRC have specific schemes that provide funding for researchers to spend some time working with policymakers, rather like Anne's suggestion for embedding scientists in newsrooms http://www.nerc.ac.uk/using/publicsector/placements.asp http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/opportunities/current_funding_opportunities/placement_fellows_scheme.aspx

This is a great initiative Anne and that you're making/taking time to respond is yet further evidence of your personal commitment to communicating science. Of the many great points raised above, I'm picking up on the need to have more scientists in the news media - an area where the UK as a whole has long lagged behind much of the rest of the world and which is overdue for adjustment. As someone who has spent most of her working life in science public/media relations, I think there are three linked issues. The first is the reality that, on the whole, science doesn't sell advertising space, so there is little perceived benefit to employing scientists as specialist journalists. Second is the misconception that scientists can only write or speak in 'science', so can't be understood by non-scientists, hence editors' reluctance to employ them. Finally, the perceptions of the relative values to society of journalists and scientists. We all know about the surveys which show that 'the public' value and trust scientists more than they do journalists. So it's understandable that parents and teachers push their scientifically-inclined youngsters towards careers in science rather than journalism and this in spite of the fact that neither career is inherently secure or high-value in cash terms. So few young scientists seek journalism posts. I'm not sure what the answers are, but action is needed on several fronts. Grounding careers advice in the reality of today's real people/role models would be one thing; raising the profile of resources like UKRC4setwomen and other similar, without wanting to imply we need a male-free ghetto; persuading the media owners/editors that the success of the likes of the Discovery channel never mind the likes of CSI and its ilk, proves that there's a public appetite for quality science news that they should be trying to satisfy. The 'weather', the 'travel news', the 'god spot'........ they've all become almost subliminal timechecks, but everyone notices when they change. The hourly 'science spot' has potential to become another, especially if it was delivered by a woman! 'Science Snaps' broadcast I think on Aberdeen's local independent radio station during NSEW a couple of years ago were a good start and there are the 'Naked Scientists' in Cambridge. Finally, it would be wrong of me not to mention the BA Media Fellowships http://www.the-ba.net/the-ba/ScienceinSociety/_Schemes_and_awards/MediaFellowships/index.htm which offer limited possibilities for scientists to spend short periods working in media organisations and also learning about how the media 'tick'. But on the whole, they're only available in London-based media, adding a challenging hurdle to participation for those beyond easy commuting distance. Maybe some high-level pressure could be put on editors/media bosses beyond the M25 circle?

Caroline/Fiona, you have given people a lot to think about. A common theme is communication. It's not easy to switch between science communication for the specialist to science communication for a general audience. It's a skill worth perfecting though. Put simply, science not communicated is science not done. There is some good science media out there - I particluarly enjoy the BBC Radio 4 programme, Material World, introduced by Quentin Cooper (16.30-17.00 h on Thursdays which isn't much use if you're working, but it's available as a Podcast or on Listen Again on the BBC website). It's science, its eminently accessible and it's fun.
I was at a reception last night hosted by Scottish Government in Edinburgh Castle to recognise the achievement of some of the best early career scientists in Scotland. It was great to hear about the range of research being pursued from the development of UV lasers to cancer biology. On the way home from the event a very welcome thought struck me - when I looked at the assembled crowd , it was clear that there were many more women than men. It's not often that that happens! I hope that they all continue to excell and become our next generation of science leaders. They will certainly be an inspiration.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to two weeks of fascinating and useful comments. Our system here is to invite different members of our GetSET database to write one entry about their experience in SET. This is then our lead entry for two weeks. Its a chance to highlight, one at a time, the huge range of roles and issues in this area, and we welcome the comments and conversations that develop.

So we are now moving on to our next blogger - Rachel, an architecture student. We hope you will find this of interest too. Many, many thanks to Anne for being so generous of her time, and her insights gained from a remarkable career.

Well done with this Anne. I'm working hard as the University of Aberdeen's new Public Engagement with Science coordinator to ensure more researchers, staff and students get the help and support they need to engage their work with the public. There will be challenges as I'm sure you know, but much greater rewards! Cafe Scientifique Aberdeen coming soon to Waterstones Union St. And Cafe Med, bringing clinicians, researchers and the public together, also to follow... best. wishes Ken Skeldon.

Thanks Ken. There is more information about Ken's work here:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~wox004/release.php?id=1513

Hi Ken - really looking forward to the Cafe Scientifique in Aberdeen. I hope more of these get going around the UK. They are a great way to interact with the public in very relaxed circumstances (the public don't always feel very comfortable in Universities).

Hi Anne,

I am a mature PhD student with a physics background doing cross disciplinary research molecular mechanisms in living cells - using Raman spectroscopy - a very exciting field. I am in Edinburgh and have been looking for a local mentor for some times. I was wondering if you have any advise, and if you would be interested in mentoring mature women, or if you know of women scientists based in Scotland or Ireland who would be interested in mentoring mature women.

Thank you

Ruby

Hi Anne,

I should have included my contact details - rraheemosa@yahoo.com

Thanks

Ruby