women in STEM

Making science the hero

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Celebrating International Women and Girls in Science

Tina Eyre, Curator of the Collecting Covid Project at the History of Science Museum, shares contributions from women and girls to the Covid-19 pandemic response

Every year on 11 February we celebrate International Women and Girls in Science Day.

The United Nations (UN) launched it in 2015 because — despite progress — women and girls are significantly underrepresented in science.

The UN sees full participation in science as an important step towards complete gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. 

Meeting successful women in science

I’m proud to be the Curator on a project which every day reveals that empowerment in action.

I started work as Curator of the Collecting Covid Project in November 2021.

Since then, I’ve met many strong successful women with ambitions in the field of science.

They include internationally recognised names like Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert — and young girls sending thank you letters to the vaccine team. 

One of a huge number of thank you letters and cards received by the Jenner Institute from members of the public, congratulating them on the Oxford Astrazeneca SARS-CoV-1 Vaccine
One of a huge number of thank-you letters and cards received by the Jenner Institute from members of the public, congratulating them on the Oxford AstraZeneca SARS-CoV-1 Vaccine

What is Collecting Covid?

Collecting Covid is a joint project between the History of Science Museum and the Bodleian Libraries to capture Oxford University’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both institutions also have long-standing collections featuring notable women scientists, including Dorothy Hodgkin and Louise Johnson.  

Professor Sarah Gilbert & the Covid-19 vaccine team

Professor Sarah Gilbert recently donated the first part of her archives to the project.

Made a Dame for services to medicine and public health, Sarah is the leader of the Oxford ChadOx1 Covid-19 vaccine team at the Jenner Institute.

Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert has kindly donated the first part of her archive to the project. The files are currently being processed by Project Archivist, Michaela Garland, at the Bodleian Library
Project Archivist Michaela Garland is working on Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert’s archive at the Bodleian Library

Professor Gilbert has said:

[I’m] passionate about inspiring the next generation of girls into STEM careers and hope that children who see my Barbie will realise how vital careers in science are to help the world around us.

Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert

She’s received many honours. Maybe the most unusual was from toy company Mattel, who produced a Barbie doll in her likeness.

Making science the hero

This is all brilliant coverage. It has inspired many girls from around the world to write to Sarah and thank her.

'Thank you' poster sent to the Jenner Institute for their work on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine
‘Thank you’ poster sent to the Jenner Institute for their work on the Oxford-AstraZeneca SARS-CoV-1 Vaccine

But some might ask whether it gets the right message across to girls from and from all backgrounds across the globe.

By making a hero of a single, brilliant (white) scientist, don’t we make the career seem elitist? Is science out of reach for the average girl?

Professor Gilbert herself has always acknowledged and thanked her team.

She sees the science — and not herself — as the role model.

We did not have time to think about how dangerous this virus was, we just did our job.

I could see how hard and devotedly our scientists worked, doing day and night shifts.

The atmosphere was nice and friendly.

I think, we all were getting closer, like one big family.

Mariya Mykhaylyk, Lab Assistant at the Jenner Institute

So this singling out of the team’s leader is a media invention.

A ‘hero genius’ makes for a good story: a long hard slog by a team of hardworking scientists doesn’t.

Shouldn’t we instead celebrate the role of the whole vaccine team with its many women? Wouldn’t that better showcase the range of opportunities and variety of people involved?  

Knitting the stories together

At the Collecting Covid Project, we see a surprisingly wide range of pandemic-related work.

So far, we’ve tracked down equipment, stories, beer bottles — even virus-themed knitting!

And that means celebrating the very many staff involved at all levels.

Here’s just one example from Marion Watson, Head of Operations at CCVTM where the clinical aspects of the Covid-19 vaccine trials took place.

This knitted scientist and virus particles were made by Marion Watson, Head of Operations at CCVTM, where the clinical parts of the COVID-19 vaccine trial work took place.
This knitted scientist and virus particles were made by Marion Watson, Head of Operations at CCVTM, where the clinical parts of the Covid-19 vaccine trial work took place

Marion told us:

I did my degree and PhD at Imperial College London when there were only 8% women there (1976-1982).

Sometimes the men treated us as a commodity rather than peers.

The UK is so much better than it was (but still not equitable), let alone the wider world.

Marion Watson, Head of Operations at CCVTM

More on Collecting Covid

Keep an eye out for more news as the Collecting Covid project develops.

These are the first contributions from strong, ambitious, capable women.

I’m confident they won’t be the last.

Tina Eyre is Curator of the Collecting Covid Project at the History of Science Museum.

More to explore

More blogs about Women and Science

‘Women and Science’ Series – How Einstein’s theory of gravity is helping me see the world

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Dr Hayley Macpherson in Sesto, 2018

I never wanted to travel much for work. Now I’m sitting in a trendy café in Stockholm writing about how I got here. The idea of travelling all the time turned me away from a potential career as a pilot because I didn’t like the idea of living out of a suitcase. Eventually I landed in an undergraduate science degree, saw the list of elective units and thought “huh, Astronomy. That sounds cool.” Fast forward 8 years and I now fill out forms with my occupation as “Astrophysicist”. Something I didn’t know was that travel is a big part of the job.

I basically make fake Universes. I study how the largest clusters of galaxies formed over the entire history of the Universe using a supercomputer (which is literally just a really big, powerful version of what you’re using to read this right now). But really, I just write computer code and do a lot of maths. That doesn’t sound as cool, though. 

The thing is, most people use the wrong theory of gravity to do this. Well, it’s not “wrong”, it just might not be the best one to use. Most people use Newton’s original apple-on-the-head theory of gravity, which says that objects with mass are drawn together by some invisible force. This was the first real explanation for why we don’t all fly off into space. Then Einstein came along and thought: “Actually, it’s because space is curved in such a way that makes things move towards each other”. Objects like the Sun are essentially sitting on top of a kind of fabric and bending it, making smaller objects move on curved paths around them. So, our idea of a “straight” line isn’t always “straight” anymore. You can visualise this by taking a trampoline and sitting in the middle of it. When you bend the trampoline, an apple that was sitting nearby on the trampoline will start to move towards you. This is why we don’t float off into space, because the Earth bends space just like the trampoline (and we’re the apple). Say your friend rolled an apple across the trampoline instead. Its path would curve as it moved past you. This is why we orbit the Sun.

Turns out we can use Einstein’s theory to describe the motion of everything from apples to galaxies. Newton’s theory works pretty well for apples, but it starts to break down as we try to describe bigger things. I’m trying to figure out when we need to use Einstein’s theory instead, and whether this makes any difference to how our Universe looks. 

Dr Macpherson travelling in Amsterdam.

I never thought I would be where I am today. Not Stockholm, but in my career. I love my job. Especially the work trips. I’ve seen some amazing places and always learnt something or met someone new along the way. I guess the reason I didn’t want to be a pilot was… I didn’t want to be a pilot.

I remember clearly the day of my last maths exam in high school, being so excited that I would “never have to do maths again”. Well, a message to my past self: Sorry… but not really. I guess when you find something you really love doing, you can sit back, relax, and watch a movie rather than having the lives of hundreds in your hands. 

Dr Hayley Macpherson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in the evolution of the entire Universe over all of time, but specifically which theory of gravity best describes this process. She studies this using numerical simulations on huge supercomputers, but also gets to travel a lot, too.

‘Women and Science’ Series – Clever? Not really.

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Dr Katy Clough is a postdoctoral researcher in gravitational physics with a focus on dark matter environments around black holes. She was previously an accountant and before that an undergraduate Engineer.

Dr Katy Clough

I’m a researcher in the astrophysics department at the University of Oxford, who works on numerical simulations of gravity. This involves studying black holes and the Big Bang using supercomputers, which all sounds very impressive. The usual response I get when I tell people that I am an astrophysicist is “you must be clever”. It’s a difficult statement to respond to because, whilst I certainly like to think I’m not stupid, behind it is whole host of misconceptions about what scientists are like, for which the standard response of “well, not really”, is inadequate.

We tend to tell ourselves stories about how an elite few follow the right paths, and are somehow predestined to discover important things in scientific fields. And often we judge ourselves against these imaginary people, and find ourselves lacking the necessary “special” qualities to be truly great scientists. Did Einstein fail at maths at school, or was that part of his rebellious genius? This question should be irrelevant to you – there is no such thing as the right path to science, and you can and should create your own story.

So below I have listed the three things that I would say, were it socially acceptable to respond to casual chit chat with a small lecture (note to self – it isn’t).

  • I do not know the names of the constellations, except Orion (and everyone knows that)

The presentation of science in many popular programs is as a series of facts about the universe which one learns – the names of the planets, the distance to the nearest star, the masses of particles. But this is not what science is – fortunately, because then it would be very tedious! Science consists in understanding the connections between different phenomena, the processes by which things occur and the use of mathematical models to predict what should be observed. The reward for the effort you put in to understanding this is a deeper insight into the Universe. Did you know that the Earth is not flat? Hopefully yes – most of us feel a bit sorry for those who think it is. But did you know that space-time is not flat? Just like saying the Earth is not flat, this statement is more than a simple fact – it changes the way you understand our place in the cosmos. You are missing out if you don’t explore it.

  • I rarely understand difficult concepts immediately, and I use a calculator to add big numbers

I constantly tell my students that learning is not a linear process – sometimes you may struggle, and sometimes you have to practice many problems without fully understanding what you are doing before suddenly the fog clears and you see how everything fits together. Good scientists need to be willing to immerse themselves in a question without being sure that they can find an answer, to make mistakes, and to ask others with more expertise to help them. So yes, I struggle with new ideas, but this is just a sign that they are challenging and thus interesting. I also don’t have savant-like abilities in mental arithmetic, but that is not a barrier to me participating in science, given that calculators are now widely available.

  • I did not always know that I was destined to be scientist, nor was I plucked from obscurity by someone who recognised my potential.

If you do not see people like you winning the Nobel Prize, for example, because you are female, working class, or from an ethnic minority, it is unlikely that you will have thought of yourself as a future Einstein. I chose A-levels in maths and physics because I knew it would minimise the amount of time I spent doing homework, not because it would lead me to a scientific career (although happily, it did). Since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, I spent many years of my life waiting for a tap on the shoulder from someone who would say “Katy, we have noticed how talented you are, and we need you to do X”, X being something interesting, exciting and important. This did not happen, and I have to confess that initially it was a pretty big disappointment – am I not good enough? But I have since realised that I am good enough, and I can work in a field which is interesting, exciting and important – I just had to choose it for myself.