physics A-level, you make a
better first- and second-year
junior doctor.
Suzie I think there’s also
evidence that we need to look
at a younger age. Reaching
out to them when they’ve
done their GCSEs and chosen
their A-levels, it’s actually too
late. They’ve made a decision
about themselves: “I’m not a
sc ientist.”
What can parents be doing to
encourage their boys or girls to look
at STEM careers? How soon can
they start introducing those ideas
to their children?
Angela 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 generating an
interest in a young child in
that subject. And with things
like coding: it’s useful to
understand the logic of how
to code. It’s so simple. A
five-year-old can do it.
There’s no reason why that
kind of thing can’t be done at
home.
Jess Programming you can do
at home. There’s 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.
Angela We have loads of
research now that show that if
you encourage children in
certain areas of play, that
helps to develop their brains
and skills in that direction.
One of the reasons that we
have the gender stereotypes
we do is because girls are
given a certain set of toys,
boys are given a certain set of
toys, and they do actually
develop along those
[gendered] lines because of
that social input.With subjects like medicine, there
seems to be a good gender balance,
whereas in engineering, physics and
space, women and men aren’t equal
in numbers. Some figures suggest
it’s going to be 250 years before
physics is balanced male to female.
Jess I think it’s 250 years for
physics papers to be
balanced, so for the number
of citations for men and
women to be equal on paper.
It’s not 250 years for it to begender-balanced. That will
probably take even longer.
Angela But that’s extrapolating
from the data that we have
now. Things could change. I
mean, 300 years ago, if you’d
said women would have the
vote by the end of this century,
and in the same century be
working alongside men doing
everything they do, you would
never imagine that. Society
doesn’t work the way we
statistically expect it to.
Jess 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’s
the same issues, the structural
ones. And they’re the kind of
big, structural changes we
need to make within the
scientific community to keep
women there.Could these issues be related to
childcare?
Angela Yes, I think that’s an
enormous issue. And I
certainly structured my
career around the expectation
that I would be taking thelion’s share of the childcare
when I had my son, which is
exactly what happened. I’ve
turned down good
opportunities because of the
childcare situation. And it’s
not just childcare; we relegate
everything outside work
because we think it doesn’t
matter. It does matter. There
are lots of accomplished
professional women who give
up work or who go part-time
because they want their
children to have a parent at
home. They want to be part
of their children’s lives, and
they want their child to have
someone. Generally, even
though we have paternity
leave now, men aren’t taking
on that role. And 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.
Suzie I think there’s also a
time issue here in the sense
that when you’re in your 30s,
that’s a big moment in your
scientific career. You have
your PhD, you’ve been a
post-doc for a few
years, you’re applyingANGELA SAINI
@AngelaDSaini
AWARD-WINNING.SCIENCE JOURNALIST.
WHO WROTE.INFERIOR: HOW.
SCIENCE GOT.WOMEN WRONG.Angela’s book Inferior uses hard
facts, research and evidence to
dispel myths about gender that are
perpetuated to this day.