Research Comms Podcast: Suw Charman-Anderson, founder of Ada Lovelace Day
“I think we really need to get away from this gender wars nonsense. This is not a war, this is about collaboration. It’s about helping each other build a better life, for all of us.” Suw Charman-Anderson, founder of Ada Lovelace Day, on improving diversity in STEM and the wider community.
In this episode of the Research Comms podcast, Suw Charman-Anderson tells the story of how Ada Lovelace Day started over ten years ago and how it has evolved over time. She also discusses how the COVID19 pandemic is prompting the event to return its online roots this year, and how we can all be part of the struggle to increase diversity in STEM.
The below interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of space. To hear everything that Raven had to say in the interview please check out the podcast!
Most people listening will already know about Ada Lovelace Day but for those who aren’t yet that familiar with it, can you explain what it’s all about?
Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). We interpret that pretty broadly, so I'm very open to people celebrating it in whatever way they want to, and celebrating however they want.
All sorts of stuff happens on the day. Every year we usually run an event in London, at the Institution for Engineering Technology, where they have a beautiful venue down by the River Thames.
We normally go down there and run something like a STEM cabaret. We get women to talk about their work, or their research, for ten minutes each. We have an absolutely amazing compere, Helen Arney. She's a comedian and songstress and she's fabulous.
We try and make it a really entertaining evening. So you're coming out and you're having fun and maybe you’re learning a little bit about what women in STEM are doing.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
And it’s become a bit of a global phenomenon, hasn’t it?
Yes! Around the world, people do all sorts of things. Lots of people put on their own events, we normally get between 170 and 200 events a year. Last year, there was one organiser who put on nearly sixty events around Mexico City! There was even one in Antarctica one year, which was very impressive.
This year is a weird year. We’re obviously moving everything online. But what's important for me is not just making the best of a bad situation but asking, ‘What can we do online that we can't do offline?’ It’s about trying to make Ada Lovelace Day 2020 a little bit special.
In some ways we're going back to our roots this year. It started in 2009 as a day of blogging about women in technology, and people immediately interpreted that in very broad ways.
People were writing about Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie, as well as women in tech. So it was very obvious that there was a demand for this to be a STEM thing, not just a tech thing. So we thought we’d go with the flow, and the emphasis over the years has evolved.
How did the idea come about in the first place?
The whole idea behind it was around my frustration with tech conferences, and spending a lot of time going to tech conferences that had very few, or sometimes no women speakers. You’d see the lineup and you're just thinking ‘Oh come on, where are the women? I know there are women with this expertise, they should be up there on that stage.’ Organisers would always have excuses like ‘Oh, we asked all the women and they all said no’, or sometimes, ‘we couldn’t find them.’
So the idea was that if we all wrote about the women in tech that we admire, then organisers wouldn't have an excuse. They would have this resource and be able to look through it and find amazing female speakers.
So we did our first event in 2010, and around 2012 you started to see people putting on their own Ada Lovelace event, and over the years the number of events has just grown and grown. For a lot of people it's become part of their calendar.
It's really changed a lot over the years. I think the emphasis that we had at the beginning has fallen away. But this year, in a way, is a little bit nostalgic. We can't meet in person, so we're back to blogging, Twitter, Facebooking, Instagramming, podcasting and all the rest of it.
What’s your advice for people with kids, or who interact with children in other ways as parents, educators, uncles, aunts etc. to help them fight the stereotypes that feed into prejudices around gender?
It's a big challenge. Ultimately, as a parent, or an educator, you're only one voice, amongst society’s millions of voices that exert a huge amount of influence over how children think and perceive the world. The most important thing is to provide gentle encouragement and support and model good behaviour; to give your daughter the tools to question what she's been told from elsewhere.
I once did a talk at a school, and it involved a little bit about how marketers segment their audiences to sell more stuff. The smaller the segment, the more they can sell.
I used photographs of things that were gendered that shouldn't be. There was all sorts there, like gendered pens and balloons. It wasn't just the books, bed sheets, wallpaper, bedside lamps and the posters - it's everything.
There was a group of girls sat at the back, and I made this point about how they’re being manipulated for the market’s gain. If you have a younger brother, and your parents buy you a load of gendered stuff, then your younger brother can't use that stuff, and the parents will need to buy another set for a boy.
The girls sat there, and I could just see the rage starting to grow behind their eyes. You can see them looking at each other going, ‘wait, hang on a minute, this is a disgrace!’
So show them that they're being manipulated and why, and suddenly they start to become a lot more aware of what's going on and the choices they're making.
One of the things the COVID pandemic has done is to highlight existing inequalities in society and we’re seeing reports now that women in STEM have been disproportionately affected by lockdown. That’s pretty telling isn’t it?
It is and you see this in all the numbers now. Fewer papers are being submitted by women. I’m not sure how much of that is because men have gained time because they're at home, they're not commuting anymore, it's easier for them to block out distractions, and so they're just producing more papers. I suspect there's a bit of that, but there's also the fact that there has been a negative impact on women.
So it's like the worst of both worlds. Men are able to be more productive while women are being less productive, which creates a much broader gap.
Women just don't have the time and the capacity to devote to finishing up their papers and getting them submitted. It's the same with grant applications. Men are producing more grant applications than women at the moment, and noticeably so.
I think it’s a big question, not just in academia but across industry, because women are struggling with childcare. Even when they have a partner who's willing to take on the child care, that doesn't always happen because of the issue around whose job is more important.
Men, because they tend to already be in more senior roles are tending to say that their job is more important. We're forcing this Hobson's choice on people. It's an awful thing to have to say to your spouse. ‘Look darling, we’re going to have to make some difficult choices here’, and women are often the ones who lose out even in the most equal of marriages.
What do you see as being the impact of all this in the future?
I think the challenge is how do we take this into account going forwards? How are we going to look at CVs five years down the road and understand that COVID caused career setbacks for a huge number of women? How do we work that into the recruiting process so that women aren't penalised forever?
The big risk that I see is that this is not just a temporary setback. If COVID went away tomorrow, by some miracle, women would still be behind where they should be by now.
Lockdown happened in mid-March, and you're already seeing damage to women's careers in a matter of just a few months. So what are we going to do to repair that damage going forward? Otherwise, we're stirring up a lot of trouble. We already have trouble around having a very small pool of women ready for leadership positions, and a lot of that is because women don't get the opportunities to develop those skills.
This goes back to mentoring. This is why the Finding Ada Network focuses not just on women as mentees, but women as mentors also, because if you want to be a leader, become a mentor. That's where you can start to learn the leadership skills that you're not getting from your work.
You’re not getting those stretch opportunities to develop those skills because those tend to go to men. And that comes back to women not having as much time during that period of their life when they're working mothers.
The more you pick at it, the more you realise that COVID has got really, really long tentacles, and I'm not hearing anyone talking about it. We really need to because this is a serious, serious problem, and we are going to end up going backwards very rapidly if we don't start thinking about how we ameliorate this problem.
So this is the kind of thing that you’ll be looking to address at the Finding Ada conference later this year?
It is, yes. We need to start having this conversation right now and to ask what this all means, and what we can do about it.
We already have push back from men around single gender opportunities. I hear complaints about there being a women’s network and not a men’s network. People say that the women’s network should be open to everybody. But they’re fundamentally missing the point of what we're trying to achieve here.
We're trying to even things up for women because they have been consistently discriminated against since birth. The whole point of having programs for women isn’t to give them an advantage, it's to give them the same level of opportunity that men are getting simply by breathing.
I know there's a lot of men that disagree with that but we are talking generally here. This does not mean every man has an easy life. We all have difficult lives, the question is, is there unfair discrimination? And the evidence is yes, yes there is.
So we need to work to make up for that.
Have you seen much change since you started Ada Lovelace Day, over ten years ago?
Totally. Let’s take panel discussions as an example. More and more, we’re seeing men refusing to attend unless there is more diversity on the panel. I know a lot of men who have a policy of saying, ‘if there's not a woman on the panel, I will not speak. I want you to give my place to a woman.’
That's brilliant. We need more men to do that, and we need men to hold organisers to account. If you've been invited on a ‘manel’ [all male panel] but you've turned it down and asked them to find a woman, did they? And if they didn't, give them hell. Because there needs to be consequences for this stuff.
Also, I think over the last couple of years we've seen the pace of acceptance that there is a problem speed up. I think it's important to understand the dynamics of social change. Social change doesn't happen in a linear fashion. What you tend to see is that things trudge along for a long time, there doesn't seem to be any change, and we're just grinding away at the problem, wondering when it's all going to get solved. Then suddenly enough people are on board with whatever the issue is that there's huge change rapidly.
So I think we see very slow progress, and then suddenly there'll be a tipping point and bingo, everything will be different.
What can men be doing to help?
It's so important for men to get involved because they still control the levers of power. As a woman it's frustrating to admit that. Women should be in charge of their own destiny but men still hold many reins of power.
I hear more and more from men who say that things have to change and, interestingly, a lot of men with daughters, and that's fabulous. Men, go have daughters and get on board, because your daughters will thank you for the work that you do now!
But it’s very important that men work to support women who are already active in this area. I see far too many big businesses wanting to own the change. In actual fact, what we need is for men to get behind the women who are already doing the work and Ada Lovelace Day is just one of thousands of groups working on this project.
We need men to say to us, ‘What do you need?’ And in quite a lot of cases the answer is money, and your voice. Especially money now, because it’s so hard to get sponsorship right now.
It may at times be challenging to fight that fight, but ultimately equality is genuinely a rising tide that floats all boats. This is not women saying, ‘Give us more stuff’. As we work together, we improve life for everyone. This is so important, and I think we really need to get away from this gender wars nonsense. This is not a war, this is about collaboration. This is about cooperation. This is about helping each other build a better life, for all of us.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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