Ada Lovelace Day 2010

This post is my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day, which is, as their homepage says,

an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do.

As you may know, Ada Lovelace was, among other things, Byron's daughter; more importantly, she was a mathematician, and worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine, for which she wrote an algorithm which has earned her the label of 'first computer programmer'.

Anyway, the point of my participation in this is that as many of you know I am rather obsessed with the gender imbalance in the sciences and particularly in computer science. I get even more frustrated when I go to talks and forums (fora?) on the topic, and all we seem to get is restating of the problem, followed by wailing and gnashing of teeth, abstract wishes for improvement, and not a shred of a concrete suggestion of how this could occur apart from "we need better childcare!" or "we need to fight stereotypes!".

As it happens, my own small number of years spent fretting over this problem have not brought me any more enlightenment, so it is perhaps hypocritical to complain about others' lack of solutions. And the point of this day, and this blog post, is to celebrate rather than whinge. In that spirit, then, I want to note that I do personally know plenty of successful women in my field who not only do well in their careers, but also manage to have a family, know what's going on in the world, and generally be sociable and interesting and fun human beings. It is a bit unseemly to parade them about like freak-show exhibits, but if that's what we have to do for a bit longer to prove to younger girls that it can be done, then so be it (cf. also my being summoned by my ex-department to go talk to A-level students and encourage the girls in the audience that Computer Science was a good choice - sadly there were no girls there...).

More pertinently, I think the most valuable aspect of having these various generations of women who've either been there, done that, or are currently facing the same problems and dilemmas as ourselves, is, of course, being able to discuss the things that worry us. And so I finally get round to introducing the woman I have chosen to celebrate, FemaleScienceProfessor of the eponymous blog. From her 'About Me' blurb:

I am a full professor in a physical sciences field at a large research university. I am married and have a young child. I have the greatest job in the world, but this will not stop me from noting some of the more puzzling and stressful aspects of my career as a Female Science Professor.

FSP blogs about issues big and small that arise in her daily interactions with academia and scientific research - dealing with applications, writing reference letters, teaching classes, thinking about her daughter's schooling, negotiating grants and journal articles, sitting in meetings...I really value her insights (of course, or I wouldn't be reading her blog), but even more I value the little community that has sprung up around the blog, people who comment more or less regularly and share their own experiences of being researchers, scientists, students, women, postdocs, academics. There are people at all stages of their research career, and their personal lives, from different countries (though it is still a bit US-heavy), different disciplines.

I'm not sure I have ever taken practical advice or followed actual suggestions from anything that appeared on the blog, but I definitely feel a strong sense of community with others there - knowing that there are other people who are dealing with the tension between going where the job is and going where the other half is, with balancing the demands of family life and research, with figuring out how to 'do' grants and covering letters and CVs and conferences and and and...Sometimes to keep going we don't need advice on how to do something, we just need to know that we're not freaks and there are other who have felt or feel the same way - that the problems and challenges don't stem from our incompetence, but are part of the process. Misery loves company and all that.

FSP deserves to be celebrated today for encouraging the women she encounters, both in real life and via the blog, to keep at it and keep fighting bias and prejudice, and for having created such a pleasant community around her blog, giving us a place to keep the conversation going (and it is worth noting that she usually also takes the time to engage with the comments).

I was going to end this post by saying 'Long may it continue!', but actually, that is wrong: may it soon become obsolete, proving that the gender imbalance is no more.

Mind the gap

This blog post stems from a comment I made almost absent-mindedly in a email to Rob recently. I had been listening to a one-off program from BBC radio on the Miners' strike (it's here, though only available for another four days; also related is this good Pulp song), a topic which up to now had been of very little interest to me. Indeed, I wouldn't have known about the program at all if the G2 hadn't given it a glowing review (and it was indeed very good). But, as I said to Rob, I felt compelled to go and find it to learn more about this event, because there is so much I don't know about the recent history of what is now fairly certain to be my adoptive country, and I feel I need to somehow fill all these gaps.

But do I really have to? Is it necessary, upon acquiring a new home country, to get up to speed about all the events of the last 30 years that are impressed on the psyche of those who have been there all along, or is it pretentious (in a look-at-me-how-well-I'm-assimilating way) and futile (since obviously snatches of history here and there are not going to replace having lived through a particular period or event, even with videos and interviews and soundbites and all that)? I'm still trying to figure it out, and maybe writing about it will help me along the way.

To be clear, I am not talking about keeping up-to-date about current events in one's home country (however transient) - that seems to me to be a given, for any number of unsurprising reasons, such as feeling like you're somehow part of the wider community, being able to follow a conversation with your local friends and colleagues, knowing what's going to happen to the places or institutions around you, and maybe understanding your hosts better. It's why I made myself sit through the web-streamed State of the Union the other month, check this guy's blog more or less daily, and sometimes even get round to looking at the CNN homepage.

But what about what went before? On a very basic level, filling the gaps is good because it enables you to get cultural and historical references, in people's conversations, in films and tv shows, in songs. It's not a good enough reason, though. Sometimes I feel like I'm not really allowed to call the UK my home (ignoring for now all the other issues we were talking about a couple of months ago) because I have not lived through the same things that my peers have, big events like the fall of the Tories, the IRA bombs - I know so little about it all. Then again, I don't know that much about my own country, either - obviously there are events you live through and experience, but it's not like I could give anyone a reasoned and detailed account of Mani Pulite or the Red Brigades. Perhaps, if all this socio-historical background is really so important to me, there is an argument to be made in favour of learning more about where I come from before worrying about where I'm going.

Or perhaps I just have a very warped understanding of what makes one feel settled within a community, and a shared past is in fact not a key part of it? After all, one can very happily go about their day-to-day business without needing to know what O-levels are or why one hesitates for a moment when a Jeffrey Archer novel is donated in the Oxfam shop. But shared past, I think, is one of those things that make themselves known only by their absence, not their presence. Ultimately, if you are going to be living in a place for a long time, you want to feel you belong there - not to the point of losing your own identity, just to the point of feeling, understandably, at home and comfortable, without drawing attention to your 'otherness' all the time (just at crucial times, like the World Cup or the Six Nations or when being dragged to Pizza Express :-) ). And, of course, nothing singles you out as 'the other' as quickly as not being able to understand or share in the public reaction to an event (or the memory of one). Like when Gordon Brown had tea with Maggie Thatcher a couple of years ago and most people I know were livid: I could rationally understand their reaction, but I was just missing too much to have the same reaction emotionally.

I guess that, with time, these things smooth over and you end up acquiring enough of a back catalogue, in some way or other, that the issue ceases to be one. And then you can start worrying about losing your homeland identity...