 So first of all, thanks, Julia, for joining us to talk about successful women on International Women's Day. I know that you've been very successful at the UK data service. So to start with, I wonder if you could tell us about how you've been at the service and also all about your job? Sure. And I started in October 2019. And so that puts me at not quite a year and a half with the service. And what I do here is I lead the computational social science training team, which is a mix of some research, but mostly sort of ad hoc webinars and workshop presentation on topics of computational and empirical social science. Essentially, we're trying to get people trained in social science to put down their clipboards for a moment and think beyond traditional social science methods into things like maybe web scraping and machine learning or sort of combining the surveys that they're used to using with things like real time wearable data collection and things like that. Just sort of somewhat bonkers things, maybe fill in some of the gaps that are not necessarily very attainable with traditional methods, but that are more attainable now with high powered computing and sort of fully interconnected world of digital nonsense. Is this how new is this kind of approach to using data this way? Is it quite a kind of a new and up and coming way of doing things? It's definitely up and coming, but I wouldn't say it's entirely new. I'd say it's been a bit slow to get off the ground, but it's now gathering speed. And I think that's because it's quite diverse. There's a lot of different ways that people can use computational methods or sort of empirical data collection in social science. And there hasn't been anyone yet who's put it all together as a new category. And so that's that's a development that's helping it gain speed. And is the idea to bring different kind of data sets together so you can buy and look at them across the board so you can have the most impact on changing policy or people's lives? It's certainly one way is that if you gather multiple different kinds of data, you get new perspectives on established problems. But there's also just new problems that we have never been able to address before that we can only address if we have, you know, maybe computers to deal with millions of comments on a, you know, newspaper article or something like that. That wouldn't have been possible before we had sort of computational assistance, you know, and then different kinds of methods and approaches allow you to either address old questions in new ways or with maybe new support, new insights or entirely new questions and some combination of the two. So sometimes in addressing an old question, we discover a new question or a new avenue or maybe a new perspective. Well, that works out as very interesting. And as we said before, you've been very successful in your career so far. But have there been times along the way when you've had to face challenges because you're a woman and it's so how did you overcome them? That's a little bit tricky. I think all of the challenges that I faced are kind of the slippery cultural challenges that are hard to document and hard to discuss. So things like discussing over lunch, maybe with colleagues one day, someone had talked about quotas, gender quotas for new hiring projects. And he commented that he couldn't understand how women who got hired wouldn't second guess their ability to do the job on the basis they would think. Well, I was only hired because of this quota. And I said, but if there's no quotas, how does a man who gets the job not think, have I only got this job because I'm a man? And he'd never even considered it. It just never crossed his mind. And it's just that kind of little cultural issue that people. It was nice that we could have that discussion and feel free to talk about potentially tricky things. But it shows that in a lot of cultures, people have never really critically applied some of the experiences that women talk about. Do you think there still is a kind of unconscious bias? Or in that example, there probably was unconscious bias. And is that have things moved on since that point? I guess so I think certainly some some offices and it's it's down to good leadership that individual offices can encourage people to reflect, to be curious about the lived experiences of others and to look into actually, is anyone feeling marginalised here? How can I address that? And others are really focused on, you know, productivity and achieving goals and doing things. And therefore they they don't. Some leaders don't make an effort to ensure that people reflect on potential challenges in the workplace. And I want to come across that comment there, which is out of blue because I know that International Women's Day is all about choose to challenge. So do you think it's important and those situations to choose to challenge and not just accept it? Yeah, it's difficult. And you have to really pick your battles. In that case, I did feel that I could challenge him and I could say, well, you know, don't men feel the same kind of self like imposter syndrome kind of self doubt, but not everyone would feel comfortable challenging people and certainly you might feel comfortable challenging your close friends, but maybe not your boss or you know, there's all kinds of times that are appropriate for a challenge and times that are not. And I think it's important for people like me that are perhaps a bit loud and shouty to challenge more often because the people who are a bit quiet and retiring won't challenge. And I don't know. So far, challenging has not come to any harm for me that I know of. So it's good as well to demonstrate that sometimes challenging at least sometimes doesn't doesn't have any negative consequences and potentially has positives. So is it important that younger women coming into male dominated environments or in any of our really do feel confident that they can speak their mind? Is anything you'd say to younger people to encourage them to find a way of establishing equality in their workplace? That's quite difficult. In an ideal world, I think, yes, everyone should feel confident to speak their mind. But that's the kind of thing that you get through experience. And so far, a lot of people are still experiencing situations where speaking their mind has negative outcomes for them. So I think rather than encouraging women to gain confidence and speak their mind, I think it would be helpful to enforce policies where everyone is allowed to speak their mind. You know, I think I think there has to be a bit of a cultural change that involves both bottom up and top down kind of demonstration of change. So is it this sort of work to be done on that kind of approach and cultural change in organisations? In societies as a whole, yes, I think. I've had the good good luck to work in a few different spaces where there was much less problems than I could see other people having. For example, where I did my PhD was at a university that I think was some departments were 90 percent male and 10 percent female. And one of my friends who worked in that department, she really struggled with people being dismissive of her and critical of things that she did in ways that they weren't critical of male colleagues. And she didn't feel like she had a lot of support in that context, whereas I was in a department that was about 60, 40, still favouring men. It was an engineering university. And but I felt like I could say what I wanted to say. And I felt like there weren't negative consequences for having a differing opinion. So it fits and starts. Some areas are moving faster than others. Actually, you won't have all the answer, but do you have any ideas on how they could how things can change? What policies could be put in place? What makes this more we call it? I think as a data scientist, I'd like to see some more data, some more research, empirical research specifically, and possibly computational research done on the effectiveness of different interventions, because I think a lot of people are keen to point out the issues and they're keen to write up reports about where things are now and they're less keen to go out on a limb and try new things, even though it's only by trying new things and seeing what happens that we can really learn effectively what works and what doesn't. But there's a there's a real unwillingness to try things that might go wrong and might have negative consequences, rightly so. No one wants negative consequences, but you have to you learn by failing rather than achieving perfection the first time. That's really interesting. So anyway, we this sort of all works. We don't on looking at the data or what what works, what doesn't work and then come up with new conclusions. Yeah, well, I think quite rightly people are unhappy to think that they're being made into a human experiment. Nobody wants to be the guinea pigs in a big social experiment. But if we never do any experiments, then we don't really gain good data of a variety of potential interventions in different cases. So, you know, I don't know. I don't have a good solution on how to convince people to be OK with being experimented on, but it must be done. That's just very difficult because, like you say, if you speak up and you're with you alone, aren't you? And I mean, the emphasis should be on the institution to still that safety. Yeah, but exactly how to instill that safety is not clear. And so, yeah, we've got to just try a few things and see how people feel. And, you know, it's it's difficult and it's uncomfortable, certainly for institutions to admit that they haven't been doing the best that they could have been and that things that they had made perhaps dismissed as possibilities are, in fact, quite effective solutions. But, yeah, try and see, throw it at the wall, see if it sticks. Yeah, so it's good that we're aware of these things and we're thinking about it and it's been improvements. But just how this conversation makes you realise that there's no definite, there's no definite solution out there yet, even though we all talk about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's there's we definitely don't know how to fix these problems. And that's not surprising because they're complex problems full of, you know, years of cultural evolution and people who are at best erratic and sometimes downright, you're like, on an un unintelligible, you know, we don't know what people are saying, even much less why they do the things they do. And it can be quite difficult to try and imagine how solutions will go. You know, every economic interventions, for example, often have unintended consequences and we have to expect that some of that will happen with gender policy change, things like that as well. But yeah, if you never do anything, you'll never get any consequences. We'd like to thank Julia today for her time in talking about her experiences as a woman in the world of data, especially for International Women's Day. And we'll be back again soon with some more podcasts from experts.