 Felly, mae'r cyfnod yma o'r 1900 yma. Mae'r cyfnod gyda'r Germany, ddechrau'n gweithio. Mae'r cyfnod gyda'r cockpit a rhaid o'r prys yn bwysig. Mae'n gweithio'n gwawr, dwi'n gweithio'r cyffredinol, oherwydd mae'n gweithio'n gyffredinol. Mae'n gweithio'r cyffredinol yn y ffan ffair a'r newydd yma, a oedd iawn ni'n iawn. Mae'n i'n gweithio'n gweithio. A yna'n i'r llwyaf, oherwydd mae yn Gainbridge. It says, A physicist who never lost her humanity. And in preparing to go to this celebration of her life on Monday, I was reading a bunch about her, and you kind of come to the conclusion that the only reason that she thought slightly differently to everyone else, was because she was always this outsider right? She was always this woman, this Jewish person, this person trying to break through all of the odds to be able to study and do what she loved. And we need those kind of people, we need those kind of voices in science. The other great example who I'm sure you'll have all heard of is Jossin Balbonaiel. But Jocelyn Balbanell went to Cambridge in the 1950s. She came from Northern Ireland. She wasn't as posh as everyone at Cambridge when she got there. She started building the radio astronomy setup that she needed to detect pulsars. So she was out there on her own building this huge piece of equipment, getting these meters and meters, I think even kilometers probably, of data tracking radio waves in the sky. And then saw this very, very repeated, very perfectly timed little glitch in the data that she was collecting. Eventually it turned out that it was these pulsars, these rapidly rotating neutron stars, emitting radio waves from each end. No one believed her, right? She went to everyone and said, this is what I've got. This is the data. There's something very bizarre going on. They thought it was aliens. She phoned every radio astronomy place in the whole country to find out what it could be. Eventually it was proven that she was right, that it was this incredible astrophysical phenomenon. Her supervisors again went on to win the Nobel Prize for it and she didn't. And you just think she thought like that. She thought this isn't the case because she was thinking differently to the people who worked around her. She was willing to kind of break the rules and stand out and say, this isn't right. Anyway, she then won. I'm sure you all followed this story, but I think it's so heartwarming. I'm just going to start with it. She won the breakthrough prize for science last summer, so she won $3 million, I think from Mark Zuckerberg, which slightly takes the kind of, that's great of it. But she won $3 million and she's invested every single dollar into the postgraduate education of scientists from underrepresented minority groups because she recognises that actually people who think slightly differently have to be involved and have to be there for this, which I think is great. And then the side which I guess is also important about having these voices in science is if you think about the impact of the science that we're doing, one really great example is in medicine. So we've really, really not had enough women involved with medical trials for an incredibly long time. Something I learned when I read Angela Sinney's great book Inferior was that it was only 2005 when they insisted that women were involved in medical trials at all. So 2005 they changed the law and had to take a huge number of drugs off the American market. But that's ridiculous. And the other one that I guess we're seeing more and more now is in artificial intelligence and the huge lack of diversity in the people creating the software that is essentially going to decide all of our lives. And that's really, really impacting everybody in this run's life and more broadly than that. And I think what's interesting in this is when I look at the scientists and the technology people who are really trying to counter this and change it, they're always underrepresented minority groups again. So this is a great researcher at MIT Media Lab called Joy, who's done this big study of facial recognition and he found huge, basically racism in the facial recognition software of Microsoft and Google and Facebook. And then Tabitha Goldstab, who's working with the government to try and implement better policy on AI in the UK. But it's always these voices from these underrepresented minority groups just like it was Lisa Meitner and just like it was Justin Balbenel saying, this isn't right, we need to take time and we need to look at this properly. And I think that's really valuable and important. So I think first I'm just going to talk through the school issue because I guess everyone in here might have children or know some children or has been involved with some kind of outreach to schools. And I think for physics it's particularly important. And it's important because we have about 20, 25% of girls in physics A level. I'll talk about A level because it's what I'm familiar with. I know you take higher since Scotland but maybe not everyone here went to Scottish school. But we only have a fifth of A level physics students of women, right? And then when you get to university it's also a fifth. So that's the really, really important number to me for us to try and increase. We can do so much to keep people within the system when they get there but it's really, really important that we get beyond that one fifth. And if you take, if you go on beyond there obviously it decreases slightly and I'm going to talk more about that later. But I think again this is this issue that when you graduate and all the great women physicists on the front row might know this. When you graduate with a degree in physics everyone will want to employ you, right? Everyone wants to employ women physicists. You are kind of, you know, whatever different aspect of the world you want to go into whether it's journalism, politics. I don't even know banking if you really want to give up. All of those things really, really want women physicists. It's really hard to keep you within academia but what we really, really need to work on is this beginning step. Luckily for us the Institute of Physics have done a bunch of research for the past 20 years I'm not going to talk through all of it but really if you want to get involved with this and you want to read more about it I think it's absolutely brilliant what they've done. It started off in kind of the early 2000s going into physics classrooms looking at best practice trying to share that between teachers working really closely with the government so that it's kind of benefiting everyone not just people in the schools that they were working with. Created all of these big kind of, I guess they are guidelines to best practice and reflections on what they've seen in schools. This one is perfect as well, this one in the bottom right which is beautifully pixelated but it's reflections on what they've done in Scotland. IOP Scotland have been really, really instrumental in pushing these initiatives forward. Unfortunately the data is super, super depressing so if you look at the percentage of girls in physics A level for the past way back to 1985 which is before some of you were born and on the Y axis we have it going from 15 to 45% before you get excited and the red line is maths. Over the past kind of 30 years women have gradually been taking maths more and more sorry I should say this is the percentage of women enrolled in these different subjects at A level. The blue line, the navy blue line is physics and physics has hovered around a quarter, a fifth for the past 30 years without changing much and the pale blue line is AS physics which is the exam you can take at 17 if you don't do the full thing and this is super, super depressing and this should be a shock to all of us given the amount of investment and time that people have spent in all of these things. They also found out two very, very frightening things one of which is this Q1 at the top but 50% of state maintained schools so 50% of free schools send absolutely no girls to study physics A level so half the schools in the country have no girls in their physics A level classroom which should be a national and embarrassment when they released this that IOP went on the news and there was a head of very prestigious all girls independent school and she was saying yeah but girls don't want to do physics they just want to do a softer subject like biology which is just like what are you doing? Anyway the other thing they found so one you're likely to be the only girl in your physics class the other thing that they found is that you're two and a half times more likely to study physics if you go to an all-girls school so they're two really big things that should tell us that education in this country is just unjust and unfair because everyone in this audience knows that physics is so important not just for going to university to do physics but for coming in engineering and for contributing to so many different aspects of our lives. So why does this happen? I think if you engage with all the lovely trolls who like to follow me on Twitter and talk to me about the biological origins of this there's no biology in it there was a really really big study last year of STEM grades in American high school students and in general when you debate with these trolls which you have to do more and more now sometimes they write to me at Imperial they send me actual letters but they talk about this IQ this variation in IQ right in that there's a men have a bigger variance so there's more of them at the top and more of them at the bottom but there's going to be more with a higher IQ which is why there's more men in physics. But this study was really really brilliant and it looked at the grades of children in all different kinds of subjects one and a half million of them so it's pretty good and pretty robust data and they found that while men on the whole boys we can call them because they're at school while boys on the whole did have a bigger variance so they're spread out more in STEM subjects that didn't hold and actually girls consistently outperformed boys in STEM subjects which is exactly what we see here in A levels and GCSEs that if you get the girls to take those subjects they outperform them so we know it's not biology and then you kind of think what is happening in our society to make it this case and has always been this way I read two really great books in the past couple of years about this I don't know if anyone's seen these they're about chemistry education physical chemistry education in girls schools in the early 1900s late 1800s, early 1900s in the UK and this is a really fantastic time because well sad in some ways women couldn't work in universities because of the ridiculous structure of universities so lots of them were teaching within UK schools lots of them were going out you know you had professors basically teaching you on your high school and girls were doing so well in physics and chemistry boys were doing Greek and Latin because that was very important at the time to be doing Greek and Latin so girls were going you know there was one school in Newcastle which is hilariously the school my mum went to and they would get in a horse and cart and travel five miles to be able to go and work in an industrial lab because they had no chemistry lab within their schools and the schools had science magazines and science poems and all they basically I'm trying to say they loved it and then there was a report in 1923 by a lovely great government and the report said basically boys had got jealous they'd seen girls outperforming them and they'd said no longer are we going to do this so they said actually girls can't go to school to learn about physics and chemistry because one of the most important thing they're learning at school is how to become a mother and it went on and you can read it if you look up this how to report online to say that we shouldn't do it because of the amount of hemoglobin in our blood that we're likely to get exhausted and also we're not so physically strong and we may get anemia or spinal curvature and after this they completely changed it so we were doing really really well until kind of 1920-1925 and then after that we went back to doing domestic science again and this stuck for a really really long time and if you think about how we're doing now firstly that percentage of women in physics has barely changed but we have way way more pressures on young people than these kind of ridiculous reports one thing I think really really affects girls particularly is the quality of their teachers and you probably ever in this room is crediting why you got interested in physics and why you got excited by science because your teacher was really really great we have a huge huge shortage in this country of skills specialist science teachers and I think it's only going to get worse after the lovely date in March and I think this is something that the government again have to really really think about and invest in because that's very important for young people maybe also important for boys and girls you could argue and why is it that different if you're a young man in the class and I think the answer to that is if you're a young girl you are exposed to relentless stereotyping from when you're about zero up, right? and if you have all of that stereotyping and then you get to school and your physics teacher is kind of rubbish it's so unlikely you'll choose that subject to study at the end of high school and beyond so you have ridiculous things I'm sure you've all come across these these ridiculous gap ad campaign I don't know if any of you saw it but boys got this t-shirt that said Little Einstein or it said Albert Einstein and spelled Albert Einstein wrong and it was the little scholar for the boys and the girls got this social butterfly or LEGO so LEGO realised that they weren't selling a huge amount in Europe so conducted all of these interviews and focus groups with parents and said what would make you buy our stuff and what they came out with was this range for boys which you may have even bought called LEGO City which looks great and they have all these great cars and tractors and all of this and then girls got LEGO Friends which you can probably even see in the picture the characters are one and a half times size the normal character of LEGO so you can't take them and put them back in a normal world they have to stay in this ridiculous pink world where they get like bakeries and cameras and it's just so depressing and this is our answer to all of this, right? and we still keep buying all of this rubbish anyway, so what do we do about it? we know we've got this huge stereotyping we know we have this huge shortage of skills specialist science teachers and the kind of global consensus on the answer is we'll make some disgusting naff pink videos I think everyone laughing in this room has seen this everyone who hasn't seen it, it's 100% your homework it was made by the European Commission in 2012 and it's like Hollyoaks they're all dancing around in very small amounts of clothing with lipstick, writing equations on windows and this was it, this was going to save us and completely transform the way that girls think about science and I think it's great because we can all laugh about it now but actually people still invest massively in these kind of three minute video campaigns thinking this will change young people's perception of a subject and I think it's just very naive and very arrogant of us as a scientific community to think that would influence the choice that a 15, 16 year old makes, anyway the other thing that we do and another thing I have great debates about on Twitter is this sending in of high achieving role models for one hour in lunchtime you've probably all done this I know I've done it a lot during my scientific career but a school emails you and says will you come and give a talk at lunchtime we really need a physicist to come in and you go in and it feels great because it's so fun to go and talk about what you do but actually the long lasting impact on that whole classroom of young people might not be as consequential as you think we invest a huge amount of time as scientists I think in all of these evidence free approaches to engaging the public in outreach and none of them have had quite the impact that we wanted them to and we need to start actually evaluating and collecting that kind of data to see what changes it there's also this big prevalence of girls only science classes and competitions this was by IBM they made, IBM made a great competition called hack a hairdryer and that got so criticised that they had to take it down before they even launched it and then this is another one that people don't really like hearing about but we've got very, very angry at all of this stereotyping so we've said stereotyping is bad we don't want to do it anymore but then we have this huge number of books now that are stereotyping again so every time I talk to parents or talk in front of kind of grown ups about this they say oh go and buy this book Rebel Girls and I just think the parents who buy that are buying that for their daughter there's no way they'd buy that book Rebel Girls and give it to their boys and they're the people who really, really should be getting it and I think the sad thing is to try and avoid all of this pink over butterfly whatever stereotyping we've gone back into stereotyping again and this is something that drives me mad anyway so the Institute of Physics have done this big improving gender balance report and this is the important one to look at they've taken it in a scientific way which should appeal to everyone so they had three strands they worked with a bunch of different schools and in each different school implemented one of these strands one was just working with the girls on their confidence and resilience and there they really found as you can expect that whilst that might be a really brilliant thing to do you have to work much, much earlier than kind of GCSE A-level age you have to go in kind of basically in primary schools have any impact on what a young girl thinks of herself as she becomes a teenager so yeah need to start younger they also work just with physics classrooms and this is interesting because this is basically what we always do as scientists right we engage with the science teachers or the science department or the science classroom and there they got them to collect data and they got them to think about the way that they taught and to try and integrate careers into what they were teaching I think it's very hard for young people to understand how a subject might contribute to their broader life because of the way they're taught it at school anyway that was nice and that kind of had an impact but by far the biggest impact was working with the whole school and this is very obvious when you think about it right you can't get more girls to study physics if you don't put more boys in drama and the arts because it's a whole school approach that you really really need and actually if you think about it when you're at school I took art for A-level and when I would speak to my art teacher about studying physics they're kind of like why would you want to do that and that really really impacts the way that you feel about that subject and you know if I wasn't so resolute and determined to do it anyway I may have swayed just because of that so working with the whole school they really got the whole school to reflect on what they were doing they gave students a voice so they really worked on this kind of student empowerment thing and also gave an overview of the options that people were taking but if you want to read more about it I really advise you to go and look at this they've just, I mean it's been so successful that they've just launched this gender action campaign which is kind of like a school's equality kite mark so it's very similar to Athena Swan if you're familiar with that but it's kind of a gender balance award for schools who are engaging with this whole school equality stuff and the things they did were really exciting and again I don't want to talk about it too much but one thing they did which was brilliant was running these ambassador workshops so they trained 15 and 16 year old girls to be ambassadors to primary school so you get them in you train them how to go out and talk confidently about physics and then they go and talk about the physics to younger people and it kind of has the benefit of not only making those girls more confident and feel like they own a subject and they can go and do it but making the primary school feel like they're getting a bit of science and they can have a scientist come in and talk it's really great and so so easy and it means that all our wonderful young physicists on the front road don't have to go out and do those things in schools the other thing that they did was really engage young people in these discussions about stereotyping and bias and that had a huge impact on the way that these young people thought about themselves and boys and girls because I think when you engage young men in these conversations they realise how unfair it is for their sisters, for their friends and anyway, these two kinds of things are incredible and this last, this worked so the schools that they worked with in 2014 had 15 girls in their A-level classrooms but in 2016 tripled and this was just in one school but it happened in all of the different schools that they worked with so obviously a big investment for schools to make this kind of commitment but I think, I mean it shows it happens so I want to just end this tiny little bit on schools to think about what you guys can do going forward and one is that I think we need to have more long term sustained interactions with schools you know, if you're going out and working if you want to do all of this outreach that's great but make sure you go to the same school for a petered amount of time or get them to come into the university because that will actually reinforce to them that you're the kind of person who cares scientist cares, physics is great I'm going to do that kind of thing not just the one of activity think about the words you use in the stories you tell I didn't talk about that but that seems very obvious to try and encourage and engage teachers and parents ultimately these are the people who are around these young people all of the time you know, teachers are there every single week every single lesson the words parents say has a huge impact so if you can involve them discuss bias and stereotypes and then give practical advice so now talking more about diversity at university and I didn't want this to get depressing I was putting this together and thinking this is very there are so many big issues here and I'm going to try and talk practically about people who've worked to try and challenge and solve some of them so there are a bunch of things that make academic science particularly difficult for people from underrepresented minority backgrounds or groups and I wanted to think about them one is this uncertain career path that you may have heard about or may think about if you're an early career scientist or a researcher the other is sexual harassment well the other has nine things on this list one is sexual harassment and bullying that you've probably read about in newspapers if people haven't come forward to talk to you about it one is this crippling imposter syndrome that we all feel all the time whether you're an underrepresented or overrepresented minority I think in an academic discipline where everyone's very brilliant it's easy to feel like you don't belong or shouldn't be there but every successful woman physicist you talk to says they've experienced this in some way Jocelyn Balbanell is very perfect on the topic if you google it the other is universities thinking properly about parental leave and caring responsibilities and I think that these conversations are starting to be starting to happen much more openly people are saying this is really really important and actually academia now seems to be ahead of industry in the kind of provisions that they're offering one is mental health the others are things like unconscious and very very conscious bias and then this lack of recognition which is when I'm going to get to talk about the Wikipedia stuff and also what are people doing about it you know you hear or you may read about these things they seem to be in the Guardian every single week one of these different aspects of academia that makes it rubbish for all of us but I think that the good thing is and the really exciting thing for people at the beginning of their career is people are aware of these issues and people are talking about them more now than they ever have done before and so many people are trying to strategically change it so actually it benefits us all in the long term and there are so many different awards within universities so you've probably come across something like Athena's one if you haven't you can look it up and look up their principles if you have issue with it or the amount of administrative work it takes they're doing a kind of consultation at the moment to see what they can do better and how they can change but I think it's easy for us to criticise the seenest one but it only came in because of great scientists like Jocelyn Balbenel saying actually universities at the moment are just paying lic service to diversity they all put on these little events they all have these kind of token posters on the wall of people from diverse backgrounds but no one's actually going to do anything unless we link it to money and we link it to prestige and as soon as they did that when they made it an award scheme people started to take it much much more seriously and actually in health sciences so the welcome have completely linked it to funding so you can't apply for funding from the welcome trust unless you have a silver Athena's one which is quite a big thing to say then in physics again because it's particularly rubbish we have this you know award as well so the Institute of Physics have another award scheme to recognise equality and diversity the race equality charter is a new one that universities are going for so everyone will be trying to get a bronze and then there's stone wards recognise LGBT equality so there are lots of different initiatives in universities and they have been phenomenally successful when you look at other countries around the world everyone's starting to copy us now so Canada have just started Australia have just started and America have just started and all of these have taken the kind of gender balance aspects of Athena's one but integrated the other parts about race equality and LGBT equality which is quite progressive and different to the way we think about Athena's one but I think this is just testament to while we may criticise it quite quickly it's actually really really important so I forgot to put the graphic here but one part of navigating an uncertain career is thinking about sustained support and funding and something that the Royal Society of Chemistry have done and I've put it in the links and the references at the back so I'll send it to you but they're starting a consultation on how to better support people returning from maternity leave about to go on maternity leave and trying to really think about this ridiculous idea we still have an academic science that you should move about every three years you know these postdoc positions are only three years long you may have to go to Edinburgh and then to London then to America and then to I don't know the Czech Republic and that's based on a very old fashioned idea of science that we don't have this big international connectivity that we do now you know you could Skype someone in Brazil for a meeting at 2pm today and that would be much much easier than it would have been 20 years ago so something that the learned societies are trying to do is trying to have that conversation with people very high up about that progression of people throughout their academic career the thing I think is really important for us as young scientists is obviously building a network so like your network here that will be phenomenally important for all of you going forward but also bigger international networks and learned society involvement you know this network 500 women scientists is great I don't know if any of you have heard of it it was started by a bunch of women in America and they got together one night and thought we're going to make a network of we'll get to 500 let's just call it 500 women scientists and we're going to put all of them on the internet on a map so that journalists and people in the media can come to us for expert opinion and have a woman rather than Brian Cox giving the opinion on general physics and in about two weeks there are 21,000 people signed up from all over the world from all different kinds of backgrounds and it's been absolutely incredible they've started a fellowship for indigenous scientists to be able to go on and pursue their academic careers then there's Pride in STEM which is a UK charity if you don't know about it you should get involved with it they're really really great and very very active in different physics departments the women's engineering society the association for black black and minority ethnic engineers that's very very important have that network of people around you and then beyond that try and find an academic mentor this has been discussed so much in the press recently in scientific press but particularly about supporting postdoctoral researchers and undergraduates and postgraduate researchers women are much much more likely to stay in women and all underrepresented minorities stay in academia if they have someone vouching and championing and supporting them and giving them very honest and great advice and I think this should be a lesson to us all we should have all academic departments appointing a mentor from really really early on and hopefully those conversations will start to be had the other one of the others is thinking about sexual harassment I don't know if any of you have come across Emma Chapman she's an astrophysicist at Imperial and she's really great she's been a Royal Astronomical Society Fellow she's now Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Fellow she works on the early stars in the universe she's got three daughters and is writing a book like how but anyway she's been very angered by the lack of provision in the UK to support students who are affected by staff student sexual harassment and launched all of these freedom of information requests and has since set up with a bunch of social scientists a group called the 1752 group and if you haven't found out about them or don't know what they are on their website it's called 1752 because they applied for money to run their first conference and only got £1,752 so they called it that but anyway they've done the first two biggest studies across the whole of the UK about the prevalence of sexual harassment in UK academia and they found that there's very very little policy to protect students from experiencing this very little to try and get out people who are accused or culprits of this and they've really really worked with universities and with learning societies like the Institute of Physics to try and make science a better community and this is one of those big things that you think why does this still go on and if we got rid of this diversity would just happen right if we got rid of this sexual harassment and bullying you wouldn't need someone on stage talking to you about diversity because it would just be natural and that's something that I think is really important they've had a huge amount of press coverage so again if you want to look it up and look at the evidence from their reports you can and she's also been given a massive amount of money from somewhere in America to run a big conference in June in Wisconsin I think looking at it you know the National Academy of Sciences in America has also been very progressive and active in this so yeah I have a feeling that with Emma on it she'll campaign and challenge and really end this or at least start these conversations within higher education establishments academic bullying is something that I don't really want to dwell on but it's something that is starting to be taken very very seriously we have training at Imperial now so that if you see anyone be victim of bullying you know where to go and how to report it again the welcome have been very very progressive here I don't know if you saw this story but someone who'd been very very big very broadly accused of academic bullying has lost a massive massive research grant because of it so people are saying now we're not going to put up with this anymore and I think I mean I guess I think that's very important so now speaking more about bias and what people are doing to end that I put a bunch of things in here that you can't read so I can really pretend they say whatever I want them to say but nature have done these big big studies about bias in peer review bias in the allocation of funding and bias in the way that people cite other people when you're writing a publication they found massive massive bias in the allocation of funding towards women and minority scientists that bias basically decreased when you reminded them to focus on the science and not that person's CV or their resume the Iris Research Council as a result of this just took off all of the applicants' names and their kind of past employment history and when they did that the number of grants that they allocated to women went from 35% in 2013 to 57% in 2017 so people are really working on this and thinking about it now which is great for all of us and I'm sorry to everyone else who didn't get this when they were at the beginning of their career but I think amplifying and echoing these messages you know how ridiculous is that it doesn't feel unconscious to me it feels very very conscious the other one is this huge bias in peer review and if you want to read more about it read and look it up from what nature have done they looked at the allocation of who they were asking to do their peer reviewing and found a big bias against women and non-Westerners again they also found men were more likely to cite men and more likely to cite themselves than they were to cite other women which is yeah, thanks everyone but they've been really proactive and said they're going to change it so the American Geophysical Union were the first who put a small statement on their website when you're submitting a paper to say we take diversity is very important to us so please consider women or people of colour or whatever scientists when you're applying for this paper to think about people who could be your reviewers and it wasn't anything massive right they weren't saying we won't submit or accept your paper if you don't put a woman's name down but after just putting in that tiny statement they had a huge increase in the diversity or improvement in the diversity of the pool of people they were asking to do their reviewing nature have also said they're going to look really strategically at engaging early career researchers in peer review because we're a much more diverse pool of candidates anyway and we have the time and the kind of energy and enthusiasm to do peer review something they did say in that if you're interested in getting involved with that whole process is to make sure your academic website is very up to date so when someone goes to Google you if they land on your web page at the University of Edinburgh you have a list there of all the different techniques that you're a specialist in and all of those kind of things and then they're much, much more likely to ask you and IOP publishing have been really progressive in this as well the next one is trying to think to people again just like with young people talking about your language so speaking to the postdoc development centre at Imperial the other day about applying for fellowships and they said the really big thing to do is make sure when you go and ask for a reference letter that you get to see it because the language they use people use, scientists use about women in reference letters is so, so gender biased it has a really big impact on their likelihood to be accepted onto a fellowship which is kind of depressing having to write to someone being like, please don't use any of these words but this was a tweet that I read last year I'll let you read it it's very important, right? that's ridiculous anyway, the University of Arizona have a really, really great guide to how to avoid all of this gender bias and reference writing but I think, I mean I guess we just need to keep saying it so that people are very aware of these kind of things but the more when I was speaking to this lady from the postdoc development centre she said she has to have conversations with really serious, senior, not serious they are serious as well senior women academics when they go into a big meeting not to just pour everyone tea because that's the kind of default thing that they do and you don't want them to be doing that because they're this expert strong world leader whatever words you should be using the other one, big challenge I think we have is this very conscious bias so I don't know if you saw this ridiculous story of this guy from Sun saying that we as women shouldn't be able to do physics and the only reason that we were able to do it was because we were women not because we were talented or able but after kind of hearing that you think that's really, really awful but then the academic community worldwide I think this is a brilliant time to be in science because they all came forward it was something like six and a half thousand high energy particle physicists from all around the world who wrote this very, very good letter all linked with loads of different evidence and support to kind of champion them and campaign and this had a really big impact you know they did a big investigation at CERN they've done a big investigation at the university that he works in and people having very, very honest in open conversations and I do not think that this would have happened five or ten years ago you know this is quick and this is because people act and people want change now more than ever before mental health is obviously a really, really big challenge for researchers particularly from under and presented minority backgrounds because you can feel very isolated in the groups that you work with again nature had this really great series and I hope that some of you have read them or if you want to after this some of them are very, very powerful and moving but from people at every different stage of that academic career talking about challenges that had presented to them throughout their studies that challenged their mental health and obviously you read about this again a lot in the news as well about this provision for mental health support at universities I think again the government has a big role here in better linking the NHS and university mental health support but really being honest and open and coming forward and talking about these things and this is the first step and actually you have a great person here at Edinburgh called Sarah Shinton I don't know if any of you have ever come across she is a psychologist I want to say she put together for the Institute of Physics a resilience toolkit for physicists you can download this for free on their website it's like a little e-book and it just talks through all of the different challenges that you may face throughout your academic and undergraduate career and goes through each one and how other people have tried to solve them anyway it's a great thing that you can do without someone standing on a stage in front of you having to tell you to go and do it or to think about your mental health you can do this in private and it's wonderful so that's great and all these different people are trying to work on different aspects of diversity and that's very exciting but actually it's also like there was this study in the summer last year that looked at how far with current diversity initiatives that I've spoken about how long we've got to go until the gender gap closes in sciences so people are investing millions you've got Athena Swan we've got the race equality charter you name it we have it but how long in physics will it take before the gender gap in academic publications closes and this guy called Luke Holman did it basically found it's 258 years and that's a very long time and I think we all really need to get our skates on and to try and campaign to make this happen a lot quicker one big part of that is this lack of recognition and that's something that I've been doing particularly with this Wikipedia stuff mainly because when you Google something like physicist you get this really great wall of old men they look quite similar as well and that's really made me think about the way that we as scientists see science but also the way that the young people and the general public see science and I think we have the power to change it as everyone who follows me on Twitter probably knows and for my great jumper in 2017 I was asked by Physics World to review this book inferior by Angela Saini and she's incredible in her own right so she's an engineer, grew up in India moved to the UK to study engineering at Oxford and then did this MIT Night Media Fellowship and is now a science journalist and she was asked by The Guardian to write an article about the menopause and then realised how little science had been done on the menopause because it's an issue that affects women so men researchers who are the majority don't research it and so she started putting together this book which is really looking at how science has failed women throughout all of history so all of these dodgy scientific studies that are set up to show that men and women are different that we have different brains that we have different hobbies all of these are based on very very ropey evidence very very hard to reproduce the scientists who've been involved have largely left the field and you have a bunch of people shouting very loudly without much to kind of sustain what they're trying to say but the impact of these things like men and women have different brains has been absolutely massive on people's perceptions of what we can and can't do anyway this book gave me so much evidence and also so much confidence and I just loved it it was such a kind of powerful empowering message because also in the book you meet all of these women who are just standing up and saying this isn't right so it's called inferior because Charles Darwin wrote about women's intellectual inferiority in kind of the 1800s and at the time he was writing it women couldn't go to university they couldn't own property they couldn't vote and people were writing to him women, a great woman called Caroline Kennard and saying this isn't right like this isn't fair you can't judge us compared to you know what you're experiencing because we actually can't do anything and to think she could do that then I think we can all do that now so I've taken this book all around the world I gave it, it used to have a different cover Millennial pink was the name of that colour by the way if you're thinking why did she make it a pink book but anyway so I took it everywhere I gave it to every single impressive scientist that I met and loads and loads of different students who came in to do work experience Imperial and beyond just because yeah I thought it was great and then I met this great Wikipedia called Alice White Dr Alice White she's a Wikipedia in residence at the Welcome Collection and her job is to get the archived content from the Welcome onto Wikipedia because they've kind of noticed that a bunch more people go on Wikipedia than go on the Welcome website and if you want to really really increase the interactions of people with your science you put it on Wikipedia my friend who is a computational biologist who did her PhD at Oxford uploaded a few figures from her thesis onto Wiki Commons which is the image version of Wikipedia she didn't think about it for years and years and she now works in Sweden and then she got an email from someone making a textbook in California who'd used all her images and just paid her royalties for this textbook because it'd been so successful so if you want to get the message out about what you're doing if you have a thesis with a bunch of figures that no one's looked at for 30 years if you have a great lab with equipment that you want to demonstrate and showcase to the world you put it on Wikipedia and people will look at it unfortunately though Wikipedia is super biased so yeah it's brilliant yes it's the fifth most accessed website in the world yes there are 30 million whatever times views a day but if you look at the biographies only 17.5% on English speaking Wikipedia about women so more often than not you're coming crossing man particularly if you're looking for scientists or engineers and that's because for a very very long time the people who've edited Wikipedia have been men mainly men in America actually so that the lack of content about the developing world is massive as well and this is frustrating because you think about not only how much it's used in kind of you know every day we just Google things and it comes up on Wikipedia and my whole family of medical doctors they use it the entire time for diagnoses and then they're pretty good okay don't worry and then use massively in education and all of that and it's super super biased so since the beginning of this 2018 I've been making a different Wikipedia page every single day and yeah these people are absolutely incredible sometimes all women mainly people of colour women LGBT scientists whatever and just increasing the representation of these scientists have been absolutely massive and also watching their kind of career journey even during this small time one of my favourite examples is this great African American mathematician called Gladys West and I learnt about her exactly one year ago and in February 2018 when I was watching a video from CNN for Black History Month and she was born in the 1930s and at the time last year was still during her PhD because she realised later in life she wanted a PhD and she worked for the government and got really involved with satellite tracking and developing early GPS didn't really know how much impact she was having at the time because so much of it was kind of controlled the information she could get and actually when I made the Wikipedia article you could only get all of these documents and they were all redacted it felt very exciting to do anyway, since then she's been nominated twice for that BBC 100 Women so every time she gets put in this category the page views go from like 300 a day to 2,500 a day and you can track that which is great and then also she's been inducted into the US Air Force Hall of Fame and you saw this is such a great picture of her so it's amazing to see that on that one small time scale or just phenomenal people that I've come across one is Roma Aguoral I don't know if you've ever met her or come across her she's a structural engineer who works in London she studied physics but then went on to do a Masters in structural engineering and was the engineer responsible for the shard and has done a huge amount of kind of public engagement around the shard has written a whole book about structures has gone on to write a children's book about it and she's so brilliant and just very exciting one to make one to show you because also I do make men's pages that get evocatio me is Chris Jackson who's an earth scientist at Imperial and he's amazing you know if you read about the lack of women in academia the lack of people of colour in academia is really really incredibly depressing and should be a huge embarrassment for the UK he's probably one of few black professors I would say he's the only black professor in the whole of Imperial and he is in the earth science department and works on volcanoes and he did this great BBC programme called Expedition Volcano I don't know if any of you watched that but if you didn't another piece of homework it was sensational and just to show you the impact of representation not only on Wikipedia so this show Expedition Volcano was looking at the impacts of volcanoes worldwide how they impacted the communities who lived around them and they screened it in America so it was on a channel called PBS in America and I hope you can read this or you can go and read his Twitter page afterwards but it's basically from a high school teacher I think a geography teacher in America if I read this all the little hairs on my arms stand on end so I really like it so this classroom watched this documentary and he says I don't really know if they know much more about volcanoes but it's made a huge impact on then seeing people who look like them in other countries and having scientific experts who aren't all white I guess you just learn about how small changes whether it's Wikipedia or the media or television or radio actually have a really really big impact on the communities who watch them or listen to them and I've been nominating and I hope you will get involved with this too but nominating a bunch of different people for prizes so the more that you read about these phenomenal people and learn about their lives you can nominate them so easily for a prize because you've written a great Wikipedia page about them and actually when you look through all of these prize lists they are so gender biased you know lots of the ones I love the Institute of Physics so much but lots of their awards have never ever been run by a woman and that's ridiculous but part of that is that people aren't nominating them so people aren't taking the time to sit down there and write a nomination so I encourage you all to do that and in terms of growing a network and those kind of opportunities all this Wikipedia stuff has been absolutely phenomenal I went to New York last year to see my friend in a play and I was only there for two days and we did a Wiki editor phone when I was there they were simultaneously doing editing sessions in South America translating all our pages into Spanish and Portuguese and you just see the impact of this is absolutely massive for the editor thumbs we did for Ada Lovelace Day so in October we only had 72 people register on this dashboard to look at it and they created 69 pages, edited a few more but the page views we got three and a half million nearly page views just for that small week of editing so really really huge impact in a small amount of time and this story this idea of covering Wikipedia I just thought it was me sitting alone after dinner doing some editing making Wikipedia slightly less sexist but then suddenly everyone in the entire world wanted to talk about it including China and South Korea and the Daily Mail and so it's been this wild journey of speaking to people about how we can actually try and challenge all these bios and stereotypes and try and think about how we can do it firstly for free you know, none of this cost the millions of pounds of those ridiculous videos but also ways to actually champion these scientific communities who for a very long time haven't been spoken about and then I used all of that great energy to start a crowdfunding campaign to get a copy of this book into every single state school in the country and we did that in 12 days wow and we're doing similar campaigns in America and Canada America just being New York when I say America, America is a massive place but unfortunately the Americans are not very generous we're really struggling there to raise enough money so if you know anyone please help me and they all got into schools so just in January all of these books went into schools across the whole country which is very exciting and I think the next big one the next big discussion to have although my mums made me promise not to give them out and to buy them so often is Angela's next book is looking at race and science so superior I think it comes out in May they're having it if any of you are in London and come down on May the 30th these great people who are minorities in STEM it's a collective of people from different backgrounds in science and they have a podcast and they're doing a great kind of open evening with Angela talking about it so yeah I want to end on a positive note so I think it's a very brilliant time to be a young woman in the world you have the most diverse ever number of candidates selected to Congress you have I mean every single thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez writes I just think I love you but all of these people are so encouraging and empowering and I think they should be an inspiration to all of us we have the first woman doctor in the past couple of years we have Donna Strickland and Frances Arnold winning the Nobel Prize and again I think that Jocelyn Balbenel's story is just so brilliant and also someone called Paul Coxson who some of you may follow on Twitter pointed out that this year for the first time women are presidents of all of these different learned societies actually to give credit to my father he told me about the Association of British Neurologists so that's very exciting too so I think we can do it and the most important thing is to find allies and people who support you to build these networks that you already have done to speak up but also ask for help if you need it for anything whether it's an experiment that goes wrong or help with submitting a paper everyone's been there and felt awkward before mentor and be mentored if you don't get given a mentor go out and ask for a mentor my friend just got given this big prestigious EPSRC fellowship and in it it says you will get an academic mentor no one set that up no one from the EPSRC made it happen no one from Imperial made it happen she had to go out and push to get a mentor and I think we all should just do that when I do all this Wikipedia stuff I come across these amazing women scientists all of them have just been very like from the beginning I'm going to have this mentor I'm going to have that mentor this person's going to look after my academic career they're going to do that and I think we need to get better at doing that nominate people for prizes speak honestly call people out if they're horrible sexists at sun and also don't expect the people who are in the underrepresented minorities to do all the work and I think this really happens to women and people of colour that you feel you're responsible for changing the world and actually you need people in power they're usually old white men you need them to get involved and to help too so thank you very much for having me these are all some incredible books that I think you should all go and read but yeah thank you