PassW0rd – 8th March 2017

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm. Hello, I’m Jane Wyatt and this is Password Woman. If only we had a password that would unlock all the best high-paid, rewarding and fun jobs in technology, there would be no need for a show like this on Resonance FM marking International Women’s Day and female achievements in technology. All the other 364 days in the year would also be great for girls and women in tech, but they’re not. As of 2015, the annual UK shortfall of the right engineering skills is 54,000. 5,000 people. Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 female graduates in science, technology, engineering, and maths, the STEM subjects, were unemployed or economically inactive according to statistics from the Women’s Engineering Society. No one knows why. There are some theories: the leaky pipeline, the imposter phenomenon, the queen bee syndrome. More on those later. At the University of Dundee in Scotland, they’ve got the world’s only exhibition that displays the female inventors, technologists, and scientists down the ages. You probably haven’t heard of most of them. I know I hadn’t. Dundee’s Professor Inka Natke tells me about her own groundbreaking career.

Speaker B: Oh, there’s so much we know now, and there’s still so much we don’t know. So the idea that we can with blue sky science, which is harder and harder to do, but we can still find out things that we never know where it’s going to make a difference. So I just started working with engineers, that’s something I never thought I would do, that has to do with early detection of cancer using modalities we hadn’t considered before, and it’s come out of a conversation I had and out of something we had done. And it’s sort of the unpredictability of where something might be useful and where it will lead that I find really exciting. Kind of not knowing how important what we’re discovering might be. I think my ability to succeed was greatly enhanced by the mentors I had, by good role models, by women who modeled how you go through life and don’t worry about the potential disadvantages or being treated differently, and that started very early in my life. With my mother and my grandmother and my adopted mothers, of which I had several along the way, and that’s not because I’m adopted, but because I adopted them as potential additional mothers. My PhD advisor was a woman, and I remember once asking her if she ever felt disadvantaged, and she said no, it had never occurred to her, and only very late in life did she realize that there were a few situations when probably she should have worried about that, and I think that attitude was really helpful to me. I think the best is just not to think about it, but when things do happen that you, that in my case might, I would have construed as being, or putting me at a disadvantage, challenging them in a constructive way, best with humor, that has always helped, and sort of saying, actually, you know, then that happens, or this way that that is not— that’s negative for me, can we not do it that way? That’s very difficult the first time one does it, but I think in the end you practice that. And so is that an advantage by being able to do that? Is that— I don’t know if that’s a female thing, I don’t think so, but I’ve had to do that, and I think that now comes me in good stead because I’ve practiced that kind of thing.

Speaker A: And new technology itself means that we don’t all have to travel to Scotland to get a full picture of everything women have done down the centuries. In science and technology. Wikipedia is getting a makeover from volunteer editors who check, create, and upload stories of female-led research teams. And they can work anywhere in the world once they’ve learned the Wikipedia rules. Dr. Sarah Cook is the University of Dundee’s new media art historian.

Speaker C: Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor. There’s lots of tutorials and lessons online on how to edit Wikipedia and The edit-a-thons are just a way of gathering people together socially in a group to learn to edit together. And Scotland has been one of the forefronts of this and have devoted a number of edit-a-thons to redressing the history of women in science and women in art and very many other disciplines. And just by improving the coverage of information about these artists is just one way of changing the discourse around it. So we’ve done this a bit with, as I say, women’s contribution to science as well as women’s contribution to art. And so the Women in Science Festival that happens here has a program where we have just tried to educate a little bit more the history of some of these women that we’ve highlighted in our display. And so you’ve reminded me that I’ll go back and I’ll check the Wikipedia entries for all these women as well and make sure that anything we’ve uncovered is represented there too. It’s been tough in some ways finding the records for some of the women, which have to do with the way record keeping has been at the university, and of course women changing their names when they get married and sometimes giving up their careers, or sometimes remaining the unspoken, unnamed assistant alongside their male colleagues. I think there were a few cases of, in the field of chemistry in particular, where a female chemist married another chemist and he might have continued his work and she may have continued as an assistant but might not be named on the published paper. So we’ve been trying to sort that out and so we’ve been trying to find out a little bit more about Nellie Walker who studied here in Dundee in 1908 and we think she was the first woman to graduate in chemistry. But then she did move to England and became Mrs. Wishart and the trail runs a little cold at that point. So I’d love to know what she got up to after that.

Speaker A: So many female scientists and technologists have been lost like this along the way. But now crowdsourcing family history and editathons can start to give them recognition. Dundee University tries to practice what it preaches and has 43 female professors. This is partly thanks to a government initiative to address the gender gap in women’s pay and promotion prospects.?

Speaker B: So I can speak to that. We have analyzed our gender gap and it is not bad. It does exist. I’m also chair of the Athena Swan self-assessment team in our school and I work with all the other Athena Swan self-assessment teams. So I’ve actually looked at all this data and I have to say that Athena Swan has made a huge difference and I think falls on very fertile grounds in Dundee because of its history. And because of the city and its history and the role women have played in Dundee over the last centuries in the society here because of the way industry worked. So I think there is certainly the awareness has been raised tremendously by that, and because we have a fertile ground for that, that’s been very helpful. What it is, is a charter that was started over 10 years ago, and what it aims to do is it has principles that are effectively about promoting and retaining women. It originally was in STEM careers, so science, technology, engineering, and medicine. It has now been rolled out to all academic careers because it was noticed that there is this what we call the leaky pipeline where we have about equal numbers at student level, and as we go up the ladder, the number of women proportionally drops. So what Athena Swan, the charter is, is you sign up to this charter, which means. And what that means is you have to look at your data about how many women, men do you have in all the different staff categories over the years. How is that changing? What are you doing to try and achieve more parity? And so, the institution has to sign up to this idea. It has to apply for its charter status and then individual units can sign up for it. So, that means it has to be supported from the top. And it’s about transparency in data and of course that appeals to scientists, because we have data and that speaks really loudly, and interrogating that data. Why is it? Where do these changes happen? What do we do that maybe is disadvantageous?

Speaker D: Or what is—

Speaker B: what do we do well? And so collecting that data is an enormous task, and that’s something we do very well now, and so we can learn from that. That’s what Athena Swan is about.

Speaker A: Even so, the Women’s Engineering Society reports that the proportion of female physicists of women engineers in the UK has stayed static since 2012 at around 9%. Compare that with Bulgaria. 30% of their physicists are women. And trends in employment could make it worse, not better. New technology with an artificial intelligence is putting real women’s jobs at risk. For example, the medical secretaries and receptionists who used to advise doctors about individual patients’ needs. Dragon’s Nuance software has created a virtual assistant called Florence. Welcome, Dr. Dreyer. Your next appointment is Susan Carter. She is 34 years old and is complaining about frequent painful urination, urinary tract infection site not specified. Patient has no known allergies. Here are her latest lab results. Create new report. 34-year-old African American female with a history of hypertension now complains of frequent painful urination with some blood in the urine and a low-grade fever, period. Next section. Obtain urinalysis, urine culture, and start patient on levofloxacin, period. Sign report. Here is your order. Is this correct?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Thank you. The order has been sent to the pharmacy. But let’s not forget that the first medical Florence, Florence Nightingale, was a real woman who really transformed British healthcare, army practices, and government statistics in the 1890s. Here’s a recording of her voice played on a wax cylinder.

Speaker E: As Florence Nightingale’s health tends to dive further, 1890 comes.

Speaker A: My dear old comrades of solid lava and green lead, thank you all. Florence Nightingale was known as the lady with the lamp, the face of compassion in the squalid field hospitals of the Crimean War. But her real history is that of a politician, statistician, and scientist who created the profession of nursing. Today’s nurses are being replaced in some hospitals and old folks’ homes by care bots, machines that are deliberately engineered to make us think they really care. And the humanoid touch goes even further with the new generation of sex robots, 90% of which are built to look like women. Dr. Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University in Leicester believes this touchy-feely relationship with robots is unethical and wrong. That’s why she’s supporting the Cyborg Manifesto.

Speaker F: I think primarily what humans will do when they’re interacting with tools is make use of them. So you don’t exploit tools, you don’t exploit robots, you can’t harm them. None of that is going on. But that’s when the confusion starts creeping in. But the confusion only starts creeping in because In the lived world of human relationships, we treat some human beings like tools, like inanimate objects, like instruments. Particularly in the sex trade, which I think is a very explicit way in which human beings are treated like instruments. Also within slavery and some working practices around the world where people have no right at all over their own kind of destiny. So, it’s because that exists that we then start developing this confusion around the relationship we have with machines. So, in the research that I do and the kind of position that I take, I say use instruments, use robots as instruments, but don’t use people as instruments. People are not things to be used as instruments. And if you get that right, then actually the effect of that would be that the kinds of ways we think about we can have relationships with inanimate tools would also be more in line. It would actually transform. If we took away the word robot and we used the word property instead, right? And we took away the word cyborg and we used the word property. I think what is really going on are different people advocating for property relations. So, different kind of arguments today expressed through the cyborg as one example that, if you like, venerate property. Property relations is a dominant way in which we understand the world because it’s great for people who have power and resources if they can convince the rest of us, the rest of humanity, that we’re also property, that our bodies can be property, that we can remove parts of our body. Because when you have this pesky thing called human rights, you know, getting in the way, there are kind of limits to how you can keep extending the market, particularly into a human body, for example. But if you can refine and reframe that narrative as some kind of evolutionary, progressive, idealistic development, then every— all of a sudden people think that they get on board with it and they think that what they’re doing is they’re not actually turning their body into property, but they’re actually, you know, being individuals, that, you know, they’re expressing their individuality. We’re not property. I believe in a radical distinction between persons and things. And I think we need that distinction because the confusion comes from slavery, as it happens. So slavery was a way of presenting people as property so that they could be exploited. So I think it’s important when we think about the cultures that we live in that we don’t repeat the mistakes We don’t keep endorsing the idea that people are property. Because the impact of that is really going to be on ordinary people. It’s not going to be on the power structures or the status quo. The status quo is always finding a new way to assert its ideology in the world. And it just so happens that robots and digital culture is, and the cyborg manifesto is the way in which it’s doing it today.

Speaker A: Even in everyday life, technology takes on traditional gender stereotypes. Why is the voice of my sat-nav a woman? Why don’t we have Steve and Alfred on our mobile devices instead of those flirty girls Alexa and Siri? Alexa, can you tell Hive to put the temperature to 20 degrees? Sure, your heating is now set to 20 degrees. Alexa, What’s the weather like outside?

Speaker B: Currently in Lavenham, it’s 7 degrees with mostly cloudy skies.

Speaker A: You can expect more of the same today with a high of 8 degrees and a low of 3 degrees. Alexa, play some Kinks. Playing songs by the Kinks from Spotify. Alexa, tell me the truth.

Speaker B: You can’t handle the truth.

Speaker A: Alexa, turn it off.

Speaker B: Good night.

Speaker A: Good night. Sleep tight. You’re listening to Password Woman on Resonance FM, and after this you can hear DJ Ritu with World in London. In the tech industries, women may be the exception rather than the rule, but there are some real high flyers. Helen Baker, for example. She’s a lesbian mum and LGBT campaigner and the head of quality assurance at Sage. What’s more, her boss is also a woman.

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we’re fantastic to have Jacqueline de Rojas at our helm now. Sage UK, and Jacqueline is bringing a new vibe to the UK part of the business. And it’s great to see now that more women are coming through into engineering roles within the technology teams. We’re also doing a lot more out in the community. Sage has a Sage Foundation, which is to get out into the community to evangelize about technology and technology roles. And we’re working with lots of local schools to help, you know, influence and describe the types of skills that, you know, as a child you might not think are applicable to technology but really are. Certainly in the future, you know, roles such as, you know, or disciplines such as psychology or sociology are very much going to come into the world of technology as we go into artificial intelligence. So, you know, we really need to get out there and, you know, probably myth-bust, if you like, some of the roles that people have as a preconception for what a technology company needs. There are so many different roles within a technology company, you know, developers and test engineers are only the tip of the iceberg really. You have project managers, business analysts, product owners, people, and all of that is about relationship building and building teams and being able to analyse data and alongside coding or, you know, some of the more technical roles. You know, it takes lots of different skills to really build and deliver fantastic software and services for businesses in the future. So all of those skills are extremely relevant, and I do think we’ll see an increase of a real variety of skills coming into the industry as, you know, our technology actually becomes invisible to people. That’s where we’re trying to get to. I mean, it’s already starting with having phones on watches, and cameras on watches, and wearables, and so on. But that’s going to increase, and so lots of disciplines will come into play as we get to grips with that. We’re doing quite a lot of work at the moment with bots. So you may be familiar with Siri on your iPhone, for example. That’s certainly an area of technology that we’re now exploring, relating that back into our business software, bringing artificial intelligence into our business software so that, you know, it becomes a seamless just, you know, part of the day. Certainly for, you know, new startups across the UK, it’s really important that they can focus on the building of their business rather than all of the kind of mundane administration behind it, and our software is there to really support them in that. So those are the sorts of technologies we’re starting to invest in.

Speaker A: Starting in schools with positive messages for girls about maths and science seems like a good idea. Jana Eggers at NURA in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been researching the problem of math anxiety suffered by many girls and women, including me.

Speaker G: I can tell you some of the things that my research on math anxiety covered, the differences between women and men, because women have more math anxiety than men. Some of it stems from very early days in that a lot of elementary school teachers are women. They don’t like math themselves, and they’ll say, “Oh kids, I’m sorry, it’s time for math.” And that’s not to blame teachers. They were raised in the same way, right? So it’s just perpetuating. The girls identify more with the teachers than the boys do, so it has a bigger impact on them. It’s something that they feel feel like they’re not supposed to like. There’s also lots of different ways that people learn, and this has been shown time and time again that we can actually get girls more excited about math and sciences by doing different activities. Girls like to work in teams more than boys, and so building a team and working together to get something done and showing them. So I think And some of it starts very, very early. I do think there’s a lot— I feel very lucky that I decided to go to the research science path first rather than a business path because I do find that research scientists are not— there’s not as much of a problem of sexism in research science. I don’t think they really care. I was also lucky that I was at Los Alamos, and so pretty much anyone who got there you had respect. So I think that eased me into it and I got more used to working with men. It is surprising sometimes how much sexism there still is in technology. I can’t tell you so much if it doesn’t exist in other places or we have it more. I think we have more men, so there’s bound to be more just because of the numbers. I mean, I won an award and I was at the lunch after winning an award and I had The guy behind me literally looked at me with a straight face and said, “Well, we all know you won it because you look good.” And I’m like, “Wow, really? It can’t be because I actually have a brain like yours? It has to be because I look good?” I mean, give me a break. I just looked at him, I didn’t even respond because I’m sitting here thinking, “He really meant that?” Like, who even thinks that’s appropriate to say?

Speaker A: Huh, perhaps that’s some kind of male attempt at a joke. Or maybe he was trying to provoke a new case of imposter phenomenon. Dr. Terry Simpkin at Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford believes there’s an epidemic of this particular form of self-doubt amongst women in technology.

Speaker H: They feel like at any moment someone’s going to tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, we’ve given the job to the wrong person,’ or, ‘We should never have given you this project, it was meant to actually go to somebody else,’ or that they just feel as if they should be better because they feel less able to actually live up to expectations. At the end of the day, it’s really about an inability to internalise one’s own achievements and successes. It’s all attributed to other things such as luck or knowing the right people or having the right people around them. It is, it is is, as I said, largely something that people know that is perhaps untrue, but they’re unable to actually fight these feelings of not being good enough.

Speaker A: But surely you’re just as likely to be put down by another woman as a male colleague in this highly competitive, highly paid industry?

Speaker H: Mm, that’s a really interesting question. I think it was Madeleine Albright who said there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. And there’s some research going on actually at the moment that is actually looking at women’s behaviour towards other women. Popularly that’s known as the Queen Bee Syndrome, although researchers who are looking at this tend not to use that moniker. Yes, there is evidence to suggest that where perhaps women have reached certain roles, most often when they’ve reached perhaps levels of management or leadership, that they may well fend off other women using the resources that they’ve used in order to get to those particular roles. I don’t think it’s as widespread as we might think, and in fact all of the women that I’ve spoken to and in the workshops that I’ve been running are exceptionally supportive of each other, and when they actually get to leadership managerial or people management positions are actually more than willing to actually provide assistance and encouragement to other women. So I think this idea that women automatically put other women down because of scarce resources or wanting to secure their own positions, I think it’s not as predominant as perhaps the media might make out.

Speaker A: Let’s look at the evidence. 100,000 female STEM graduates unemployed or economically inactive. Women can do maths. They can be engineers. They can even be astronauts. Did you know that Lego has brought out a range of dollies modelled on the actual women who were behind NASA’s space programme? If toy manufacturers can build role models, why can’t the tech industry itself? It’s a question of attitude. Some of our politicians seem to believe that we’ve all had enough of experts and evidence and that they should rule instead by ideology. By putting evidence first, Tracey Brown and the Sense About Science campaign managed to create a whole new libel law in England and Wales that now offers protection through a robust public interest defence. This means that whistleblowers and those who denounce bogus research and bad science can speak out without fear of being ruined by punitive damages in court. And Tracey Brown is still campaigning.

Speaker E: I’ve been accused of being disruptive and persistent by government officials and by companies and by a swimming pool attendant. I’m okay with that. It is my job as director of Sense About Science to seek out and consider the evidence on which factual statements and decisions are based, whether they’re by companies or governments or by media or by celebrities. Unsurprisingly, and much to the embarrassment of my children, I tend to do the same thing in other parts of my life as well. So when our local swimming pool insisted that I pay to stay and watch one of our children have a one-to-one lesson with a qualified instructor,, I couldn’t resist asking for evidence for their claim that this was in the interest of child protection. When Luton Airport forced me to pay £2 for one of their see-through plastic bags to put my toiletries through the scanner instead of using one of my own, I couldn’t resist asking for evidence as to how this contributed to national security. Such questioning of authority isn’t always welcome. But it’s not a character trait. I’m not a pedantic person. I’m actually quite shy about making a fuss. I found, rather, that asking for evidence is a way of changing things that are wrong. I’ve discovered that it can have a transformative effect. Now, in some ways it’s strange that we don’t all question rules and policies more. We’re all supposedly much less deferential than our grandparents’ generation. Where my granddad said, “You know best, doc,” we all say, “Let’s Google it.” We are discerning consumers. We’re informed patients. We’re skeptical voters. We’re savvy information gatherers with a world of search engines at our fingertips. We’re ever seeking that second opinion. And yet, yet we seem to have a problem with challenging authority in what has been called an age of complexity. Where it’s difficult for us to perceive and easily understand the risks around us and the options as to what we might do about them. Where despite the fact that we have access to information orders of magnitude greater than previous generations. We rely even more on experts and authorities to tell us about the risks we face and what we might do about them. Will multi-million pound flood barriers actually prevent future flooding? Is the library really so dangerous that a 7-year-old should not be allowed to return a book alone?

Speaker A: We worry that we haven’t perceived the fullness of the risk, so we don’t question. Everyone can use evidence to challenge fake news and bust myths. We could all log on to a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, and the European Parliament has opened a public consultation on its plans to build in ethics to robots and AIs, so we can have a say there too. Password Woman is a Future Intelligence production made by producer Blue Buffery Reporter Melissa Wills and me, Jane Wyatt. You can find out more about technology in society at the Future Intelligence website, where you can download our podcasts and sign up for our London conference on artificial intelligence. And we’ll be back with another Password on Wednesday the 12th of April on Resonance FM. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.