 any more of her time away from her. It's wonderful to have you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to tell you about these workshops we've been doing in Trieste for a while now. So the story of how it started goes back a while, I think. So in 1985, I entered Harvard University as a PhD student in the physics department. And this is how my class was. We were a class of 30, and we were two women. And the other woman was very shy, and she already had a boyfriend at Harvard, and she wouldn't really talk to me. And the men had their own little cliques, and they would do homework together, et cetera. And I felt very isolated. And the next, so that's me. I looked rather different in those years. And the next year, two women joined out of, well, there were three women, actually. And again, it was a class of 30, and there were three. So we felt very isolated, very much in the minority. But we did start to stick together as women and support each other. And we decided to formalize it and form a group called Women in Mathematical and Physical Sciences that had the rather unfortunate acronym of WIMPs. At that time, we thought it was funny. Now I think maybe it was not that funny. And then we finished our PhDs, and we went our separate ways. And Liz Simmons, who is here, stayed on in the US. She went on to have a very successful career. She was at Boston. She had an offer from Princeton. She went to Boston University. She went to Michigan. She went to UCSD. She went up and up and up in her career. She became a professor. She became a dean. She's now executive vice chancellor in UCSD. I went back to India. And I slowly rose up. I became a professor. I became chair of the department. I became a dean. And we would meet every few years at the international conferences of women in physics. And so for example, we met here in Seoul in South Korea. That's me there. That's Liz. And in Stellenbosch in South Africa in 2011. And that's me. And that's Liz. And we would compare notes. And what did we find? We found that we were not happy. It was very, very tough being a woman in physics. We found that our colleagues were not very supportive. It was a very hostile environment. And what was even more disturbing to us is that when we talked about our cohort of female physics graduate students who were with us when we were at Harvard, people were having an awful time. People were having nervous breakdowns. People were dropping out of physics. People were leaving their departments because they found the atmosphere too hostile. And we had been students at Harvard. And you would think we were the ones who should have been the most likely to succeed. So we felt some things really very wrong in the system. And we would talk in 2008. And then you talk three years later. And things were not changing. So we found this really disturbing. And I can tell you exactly when my aha moment came for these conferences. It was in South Africa. There was a session. And after this, in the question and answer session, a woman participant from Kenya stood up. And she said that she became pregnant and she was entitled to maternity leave. And when she applied for maternity leave, the department responded by firing her, by dismissing her from her job. And she said, I was thinking of leaving my job forever, of leaving physics forever. But I came to this conference. And now I think maybe I should stay on. And a woman stood up in the audience and said, sister, do not leave. Fight. We will support you. And other women in the audience stood up and said, yes, sister, we are with you. And for me, I found this a very beautiful moment. I thought, if women support each other, we can really achieve something. And then I thought, I want to do something about this. What can I do? And somehow, in the next half hour, I got the idea for this workshop. I said, I want to do workshops for women in physics where they can support each other. And I had been coming to ICTP as a physicist. I'd been an associate here, et cetera. And I thought, maybe I can do it at ICTP. And so this is, see, I can see people laughing. Because this is very much the experience I had as a woman in physics, which is, I found the men hung out together a lot. And I was always excluded. Now, this isn't just a question of socializing. Because when they go out drinking together, they form collaborations. They tell each other how to apply for jobs. They tell each other how to write grant proposals, how to respond to referee reports, things like that. And I was just left out of all this. And my experience was, they never asked me. And just one time, I asked them, they were all going out drinking, my colleagues in my department. And I said, can I come to? And they said, no. And I was so shocked. I said, what do you mean no? How can you say no? And they looked at each other a little uncomfortably. And then one of them said, a decent woman wouldn't come along where we're going. And I said, where are you going? And things have changed over the years. And now sometimes they do ask me along. But I really felt that we need to form some kind of network for women to replace this kind of network. And also, very often, women have family responsibilities. And they just don't have the time to go hang out with men after work. They have to rush back to their families. So this was one thing. And so the idea behind these workshops is, first of all, a space for women to share their experiences. Because when women have uncomfortable experiences, very often they're just told, or you're just overreacting. You're just imagining it. So you need somewhere where people can tell them, no, it's OK. I have the same experience. Then acquire these soft skills to rise in your career, which, you know, mentors give men and often women lack those mentors, and then form a community that can support one another. The organizers is, this is Liz Simmons. That's me. This is Erica, whom you just heard from. Nicholas Baldwin from ETH has been an organizer in the last couple of years. She won the L'Oreal Prize a couple of years ago. And as part of the L'Oreal Prize, she was given 20,000 euros to support programs for women in science. And she used that to support this workshop. And this is Marie Chantal from Rwanda. Last year, she became the first woman from Rwanda to get a PhD in physics. And she helped us organize one of the workshops. So we needed support from men to conduct these workshops. So this is Sandro Scandalo from ICTP. And he was last year, or earlier this year, L'Oreal, gave him a title of Male Champion for Women in Science. And so he's a good friend. And he's the first person I went to with this idea because at the time, now it's a well-established program. But when we first came up with the idea, it was something very different for ICTP to do because at that time they'd only had workshops that focused on scientific topics. They'd never had something like this. So there was a certain amount of resistance from some people in the community. So we had to do some selling and convince people that this is also part of ICTP's mission and mandate. So Erio Tosati was the chair of the committee that reviewed our application. And we had some exchanges of email. And Fernando Quevedo was the director at that time. And he was also very supportive. And Sandro did a lot of the convincing also on my behalf. So we've now had four such workshops at ICTP. And one last year at the new ICTP in Kigali in Rwanda. And there's a plan that that will also become a regular event. We've had participants, I think, from about 70 or 80 countries. This is the one that happened last week where we had participants from about, I think, over 40 countries. This is the participants from the one two years ago. And we try to focus on women early in their career. So we usually have young faculty members and postdocs as the main participants, but we also have a distribution. We were a bit surprised, even myself, as a woman scientist in a developing country, I was surprised by what some of the participants told us. For example, one woman participant told me, this is the first conference of any kind that I've attended because this is the first conference my husband allowed me to attend. And he allowed me to attend this one because I told him only women would be there. If a man is there, if men are there, he won't allow me to go. So there's a whole range of experience. There's a whole range of situations. Women operate within constraints. We operate within, which even I was unaware of. And so there's a real need for workshops of this kind. It never occurred to me that a woman would not be allowed to attend a conference if men are present. And we used to joke that little did our husband know that this was a far more subversive activity than any physics conference that she could have gone to. It was very important for our conference, for our workshops to involve social scientists because I realized that as physicists, we did not know how to get people necessarily to work together, to bond together. And these are two women who really helped me. One is Anuradha Srinivasan, who was an expert in cross-cultural learning. And Maitri Gopal Krishnan is a trained counselor and psychologist with expertise in drama therapy. And they were the ones who, for example, told us about World Café format discussions which were also held here yesterday. And we've had drama workshops, I'll say more about those in a minute. We also decided that it is important to involve men because we do not want people to view men as the enemy. It is important for women to realize that there are men who support them, who support their cause. But I like this picture because it shows one man surrounded by a sea of women which is so much the reverse of what you usually see in a physics conference. This is Sekar Chivukula, who has been a regular speaker at our conferences. This is him in Rwanda conducting a CV writing workshop. Atish Dabolkar, who is the new director of ICTP, has been regularly participating in our panel discussions. He's been a supporter. We have talks by women who we think are inspiring role models. So for example, Jocelyn Bell Bernal was a speaker at the workshop one year. For those of you who don't know her, she is the discoverer of pulsars when she was a graduate student and her male advisor refused to believe her results and mocked her. And of course, when the Nobel Prize was given out, he got the Nobel Prize and she didn't. So that year, people called it the No Bell Prize because she's Jocelyn Bell. And she told us that after having made this discovery, she had a really hard time even getting a postdoc because her advisor told people that she just isn't a very good physicist. But she went on, of course, now to be acknowledged. And last year, she won the breakthrough prize of $3 million. So she was a very inspiring speaker. We've had Setsuko Tajima from Japan, whom some people in the room know. She got married after doing her masters. And then just one day a week for years, she would go into the lab and do experiments just for the pleasure of it. And after six years, the person whose lab she was working in said, you know, you have enough now to do a PhD. So if you want, you can write up a PhD. And then she went on to, she now has, I think, 300 publications and she's a professor at the University of Osaka. This is Sarsina Haile, who is originally from Ethiopia and went on to become a professor at Caltech and is now at Northwestern. When she came, she also went to the high school in Trieste and gave an outreach talk. So we've had women like this whom we can look up to. These are some other women who we had really inspiring stories from. This is Rabia Saeed from Nigeria. She got married straight out of high school. She had six children out of whom one was born with a clubfoot, one was born with sickle cell anemia. She went on to do a bachelor's, a master's and a PhD and she's now a lecturer at the university. And I thought she said something very interesting to us. She said, my philosophy in life is you should be like a snail. And I thought, what does that mean, you know, like a snail? And she said, move ahead slowly, slowly, slowly so that no one even notices that you're moving ahead. And when there's danger, you retreat into your shell and when the danger has passed, move ahead again slowly, slowly. And this is so different from what I was used to. You know, you think, oh, you must fight, you know, you must race ahead. But for some women, that's what works, you know. This is Ivana Vobornik. She works here at the Synchrotron in Trieste. And when she was a student, she was in Sarajevo in the US, the war. And she really wanted to do physics. And in order to, there were no facilities in Sarajevo. So she escaped out of the war zone by crawling through a tunnel and then walking many kilometers. And then finally escaped to Switzerland where she was able to do a PhD. I know these sound like stories out of readers' digest or something, but they're very inspiring stories. This is Shazreen Mohamed from Zimbabwe, whom again, people in the room may know. She said when she was young, her father would take her out into the bush and she decided she wanted to be an astronaut. Now many people decide they want to be astronauts, but what is different about Shazreen is she really went after it. She made a list of countries which have space programs and she applied to only them to study for her undergraduate. She got into Harvard. And then she joined Rotsey, which is, you know, a program supported by the US military because she thought that would help her become an astronaut. She learned to speak fluent Russian because she thought that would help her become, go on to the space station. So she really went about it very systematically, but then 9-11 happened and so all non-US citizens were removed from the program. And then she decided her real love was astrophysics. So she went on to get a PhD in astrophysics as a Rhodes scholar from Oxford. And then she decided she really wanted to go back to Africa, so she now works in South Africa. She was supposed to be here last week and this week, unfortunately, because of some visa-related issues, she couldn't be here. So these are just fantastic women we've heard from. We have World Cafe format discussions. I won't say much about them because we've had them here also. We have workshops on how to write scientific papers. The idea here is really on how to raise the notch of your writing one step up. We have it, we do a lot of interactive exercises. So for example, here are four pictures. You can do the exercise later if you want. And it's not at all obvious how to arrange them to tell a story. Like there are lots of different ways and lots of different stories. And the same way we talk about science, you may have a bunch of results and how do you tell a story with your results. So we discuss issues like that. CVs, a lot of time women from developing countries do not have an idea how to make a professional-looking CV. They put things like, here's someone on their hobbies. They've said, I'm interested to search through the internet. And that looks really bad on a CV, you know? So we do a workshop where women bring their CVs and then they're given guidelines and then they work in groups on how to improve their CVs. And by the end of the week, everybody has a nice professional-looking CV. We have workshops on how to make slides that look PowerPoint slides. So with examples, again, what looks nice, what doesn't look nice, what fonts to use, what colors to use, workshops on giving presentations, how to stand, how to speak. And then, you know, examples of people who are good speakers like Feynman here. And then at the end of the workshop, every participant gives a one-minute talk about her's work. So this is just some people, some of the women last week who gave talks. So we had 51-minute scientific talks. There were excellent talks. And I also like these pictures because I think people really took the advice about body language to heart and you can see everybody is standing confidently making, using their arms, really making a point. Then negotiation is something important because a lot of studies have shown that women are not very comfortable asking for things. For example, in the US, where you have to negotiate your salary, women typically have much lower salaries than men do. Or women have bigger teaching loads. Women have less lab space. Women have lower grant amounts. And so we have exercises on how to ask for things. You practice asking for things. You pair up with people. And you just get comfortable with feeling that I deserve this and this is how I'm going to ask for it. Without antagonizing anyone, but at the same time being forceful. So we have workshops on negotiation. The drama workshop, I think, is perhaps the most interesting workshop that we do. And many of our participants have said this is the one that has had the greatest impact on them. We talk about situations that in our careers and lives that make us unhappy or bring stress. It might be conflict at the workplace. It might be the conflicting demands of the family and the career. And we act out little skits about them and we discuss maybe how we can change our behavior or change our responses to the situations. And it's a very emotional and intense bonding experience for all our participants. Most people say this is the one that stayed with them the most and made the biggest change to their thinking. We talk about how to gain funding, how to write grant applications. This year for the first time we talked about how to make use of social media to raise your profile because that is something that is increasingly important. The talk was given by Sandra Scandalo and this is a screenshot of his Facebook post where he talked about this workshop, this week's workshop. And we had a poster session where people can talk about their work. In the poster session, one of the participants from Brazil, a young undergraduate, she showed us a video she had made about women in science. It's a very interesting immersive video that is at 360 degrees. You can see it in YouTube, but on a mobile phone, then to get the 360 degree effect, you have to turn the mobile phone around. But otherwise, there's a very cheap VR box you can buy for about five to eight euros and then you put your mobile phone in it and then you get the full effect. And it's a fantastic video. I really recommend that you watch it. We've had panel discussions on things like how to balance a career and family, how to pick a research topic, because this is very important, especially often women from developing countries don't know, maybe they don't pick the best possible research topic so their research doesn't get the high profile it requires. So we do an exercise on that. We did it in this room. Everyone's given these big posted sheets and they write a question to which they really want to know the answer and you put it up on these windows and nobody's allowed to talk and you move around the room and questions that you think belong together, you put those sheets together and this way you nucleate groups of people who are interested in similar questions and then they go and have lunch together. So you form collaborations in this way and indeed our participants here's two women last week discussing Dirac semi-metals because in this way they found that they had a shared interest in this question. I'll just end by saying what do women take away from the workshop? We asked them. They all feel that we have a lot in common regardless of our culture, our background, our religion, we are very similar. One thing many women said is that the workshop gave them increased confidence in themselves as people, in themselves as physicists. And this is what I base my title on. A very, a thing we heard again and again as people said, now I know I'm not alone. Many women who've done our workshops have gone back to their countries and done similar workshops. For example, Umi Dao is here, did a workshop in Uzbekistan, Anu did a workshop in India. I'll just take a minute. I'll just finish in two minutes. What impact do the workshops have? This is what a participant from Peru said to us. She said, I've never seen so many women physicists. I met a physicist who got a PhD at age 40 another who escaped a country through a tunnel. One woman had raised six children. Another changed her topic completely to continue. Another built a very successful Korean industry. Their stories proved that I didn't have an excuse to not try. They had strong personalities and I decided I wanted to be like that. Before, I was not so sure if I wanted to apply to a PhD program, but the workshop helped me to see this is what I want, that it is possible because I love physics, I love what I'm studying. And here is a story about two women. This is Zipora from Kenya and Arthi from India. They met at our first workshop. Arthi had ideas for research, but nobody to execute these ideas. And Zipora had a fellowship to do her PhD, but she didn't have an idea on what to work on. So they met at our workshop and then this was sort of a perfect match. And they decided to work together. So Zipora went back and forth between India and Kenya and they worked together. They published four papers together. And Arthi is effectively supervised Zipora's PhD work. So this was perfect. And I will end with this slide, which somebody, one of the participants said, she said, sometimes I think that I'm alone, but this workshop is a good antidote to that feeling. Thank you.