women in science

feminism, science, trowelblazers

Fieldwork, family, friendship and feeding

Quote | Posted on by toriherridge

I’ve just returned from fieldwork at Ghar Dalam Cave, Malta. This is one of my favourite places, and I’ve been working there and collaborating with my dear friend and colleague John J. Borg for over 10 years now. What made this trip different, however, was that this time I had my four month old baby with me.

So this isn’t a post about fieldwork so much as a post about family and friendship, and how they make doing science as new mum possible. More than possible, in fact. The support I had from my husband, parents and colleagues made doing fieldwork with a baby in tow an absolute joy.

But first, the science:

Ghar Dalam (aka The Cave of Darkness) is — or rather, was — full of fossils of dwarf elephant, dwarf hippo and dwarf deer. Thousands of fossils have been excavated from here over the years, by loads of different people. You can visit the cave today as a tourist (it’s a bargain at €5), and see the fossils in the museum and the excavated trenches in the cave itself.

We are bringing modern methods to bear on the cave sediments and stalagmites, and on the fossils themselves, to find out how, when and why these island dwarfs evolved. On previous trips we collected samples for dating. This trip was all about recording the cave in detail: cleaning and drawing stratigraphical sections, identifying and surveying the historical excavation trenches, and accurately recording key features like sample locations and nearby fossils using a total station.

We had planned to do this last summer, but all the provisions needed to allow me to participate while pregnant (no heavy lifting, no clambering about over and under cave features etc) basically meant I’d be left twiddling my thumbs on the sidelines. So I had the cunning* plan of delaying until I was on maternity leave, using my ‘keeping in touch days’ to take part without violating my leave conditions. That way the project wouldn’t be delayed (especially important for our PhD student Leila D’Souza), I’d be able to hit the ground running when I returned to work (always key for a post-doc), plus we’d get to go during the low season (cheaper! quieter! cooler!).  And in my gung-ho, overconfident pre-baby mind, I thought four months old would be a great time. By then I’d have being a mum down pat, right?

**ROFLMAO**

In reality, by four months I still hadn’t had much luck with expressing breastmilk or with R taking a bottle, and after a rocky start breastfeeding the last thing I wanted to do was spend time training her to not want to nurse! On top of that, R hit the four-month clingy, sleep regression stage just as we were due to head off. My idyllic vision of R spending the day in quality bonding time with her grandparents and her daddy as they had a lovely holiday, while I worked (and pumped), crumbled. I was dreading the trip, and felt like a prize plum for having suggested it in the first place.

But then the planets came into alignment…

 

 

Or rather, all the wonderful people in my life simply kept on being their usual, wonderful selves. It was only me who had imposed the stressful pumping-offsite-child-care plan. Ghar Dalam is an accessible tourist attraction. It’s a matter of minutes to leave the site, and head up the steps through the garden to John’s office. A matter of seconds to reach a bench amongst the fragrant maquise flora. Both places were perfect for feeding, and so R could simply stay nearby and be fed and cuddled whenever she needed it.

My fieldwork day unfolded like this: two good feeds for R before heading to the cave for 09:30**, made totally possible by having my husband and parents around to make me breakfast while I fed her (and abandon the dishes to them!). This gave a good two to three hour window where the grandparents got their morning fix of R, while we cracked on at the cave. My husband brought R to me around lunchtime (give or take), and I sat in the dappled sun feeding her to the sound of bird song while he did a pastizzi run, and the team all stopped for lunch. Then back to the cave for more work, while my husband looked after R for the afternoon. I could hear them cooing to each other, and reading books, as I drew up sections and contemplated contacts. Or silence would fall, and I’d know she was napping in the sling cuddled close to her daddy. It was lovely. We’d finish up for the day around 16:30 in time for R’s next feed, head home to shower and hear about my parent’s afternoon of sight-seeing (they LOVED Malta’s rich history & prehistory), before meeting up with the rest of the team for dinner. R came too, of course!

So while, yes, I got less done than usual as having to break for 40 minutes every 2-3 hours will have it’s impact, and I wasn’t able to work in the evenings as I normally would, the trip was a great success. I used my breastfeeding breaks to do a spot of bonus scicomm on twitter (check out the #IceAgeMalta hashtag), chatting with tourists as they came by and asked about our work, or to email & chat with project members who were back in Britain. Or I simply looked down in awe at my miracle daughter, and let that fierce heart-clenching love wash over me.

I had, quite simply, a wonderful time. And I think everyone else did too. And we got all of our work done, thanks to the efforts of our superb team.

Here’s why it worked out so well: privilege. I am privileged to have supportive colleagues who are also friends, who were totally behind the plan to bring the family along and who never once made me feel they begrudged R’s presence (or the time I gave her). I am privileged to have a partner who was willing (and able, thanks to generous annual leave) to take time off work to take on the bulk of the daytime childcare. I am privileged to be wealthy enough (and have parents who are wealthy enough) to cover the flights and accommodation costs of my family fieldwork entourage.

With the right support, anything is possible... Feeding R in the cave, while giving instructions!

With the right support, anything is possible… Feeding R in the cave, while giving instructions!

The lesson here is that with a bit of child-care support in place, and flexible attitudes, anything really is possible. If we freed up funds for this, it wouldn’t just be for the privileged few.

In the meantime, thank you to my fieldwork family: Adrian Glover, Julie & Ray Herridge, Adrian Lister, Leila D’Souza, Chris Standish, Neil Adams, Maggie Johansen, and Suzie Pilaar Birch.

 

*not so very cunning. If I’d waited til my 6 months paid leave was up, I’d’ve got paid for my KIT days!

**another thing that helped make this trip a success is that the working day was constrained by the cave’s opening hours — unusually civilised!

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I was inspired to write this post after reading Bethan Davie’s blogpost on fieldwork while pregnant. You should check that out too, and share your own experiences on the comment threads there and here!

Educating 21st Century Women Conference

Posted on by toriherridge

10th September 2014: Four hundred 15 year old girls, arranged around fourty-odd tables, in the lecture hall at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. And a Tardis. This was the Educating 21st Century Women conference, and I was attending as a panel speaker.

 

 

The conference was organised by Mulberry School, a truly wonderful non-selective, all-girls state school in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s most deprived boroughs. The diversity of uniforms in the room, however, was testament to the fact that girls from all over southeast England were in attendance. The atmosphere was electric, but focussed. That morning they’d heard from Mamma Mia and The Iron Lady director Phyllida Lloyd and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, amongst others, about gender issues in the Arts and Broadcasting. My panel, on STEM careers, was up next. So, no pressure…

Alongside me on the panel were Lady Geek’s Belinda Parmar, Teach First’s Ndidi Okezie and Pathologist Professor Paola Domizio. Kirsten Bodely from STEMNET chaired.

Questions from the floor focussed on our career paths – how we came to do what we do, the challenges faced along the way, and what advice we’d give to girls today. Apart from the horrified gasp from the room when I told the story of me dropping arts in favour of science subjects at A Level because the course-work got in the way of my teenage social life (I’m not proud and think this May have been a big mistake), I hope my advice was sound. This is what I tried to get across:

  • be honest with yourself about what you want out of life — don’t waste your time chasing other people’s dreams for you, however well intentioned they may be.
  • don’t allow other people’s ideas of ‘success’ to define you (see above).
  • if you don’t know what you want to do, then focus your efforts on what you are good at and what you enjoy. Work at them. That ought to bring you to a place where you have a good chance of being happy.
  • Be proud of who you are, and where you came from. Don’t apologise for your origins. But equally don’t be shackled by them.
  • It’s never too late. You can change direction in your life at any point. It might be a bit harder, but it can be done.
  • Don’t let fear of failure hold you back. One of the biggest advantage privilege & wealth gives is the freedom (and confidence) to take risks and make mistakes. But even without these, it’s not the end of the world if you mess up or make the wrong choice (see also previous point).

I also talked about the power of mentors and networks, and how TrowelBlazers has emphasised the importance of these for me. This led me to give one rather more specific piece of advice: don’t be afraid to contact people in high places for help and advice. As a school student it would never have crossed my mind that you could contact (read ‘bother’ in my mind) academics and the like for work experience. I didn’t know anyone who worked at a university, and no one in my family had even been to university. It was an intimidating world. Now I am inundated with requests for work experience, but always from public- or private school students. Never state school. I want state school kids to feel as confident about their rights to such advice and experience as fee-paying ones.

By the end of lunch, I had plenty of requests 🙂

But by far the most inspirational part of the day for me came after our panel, when the poet Hollie McNish read her ‘three most hated poems’. Hated by people like the English Defence League, that is. Her feminist take on being asked by a TV director to pose naked for a short film on her poetry had the room on their feet and cheering, as did her funny, polemical tirade against her parent’s next-door neighbours’ anti-immigrant opinions.  By the end the whole room was ready to take to the barricades and bring on a multicultural feminist revolution!

To get some idea of just how brilliant Hollie is, watch this video of her performing ‘Mathematics’:

 

 

And the Tardis? Well that was there because the conference saw the reincarnation of Dr Who as a woman, as designed by the girls themselves. If only it becomes TV reality one day…

Shiny new website for TrowelBlazers — trowelblazers.com!

Posted on by toriherridge

Check out the new and, if I do say so myself, absolutely gorgeous internet home of TrowelBlazers: trowelblazers.com

Thanks to Neil Monteiro, who did the web-design. My absolute favourite thing so far is how the circles in the homepage banner change with every page refresh. Most addictive…

*clicks refresh repeatedly*

[if you’re trying to click on — or refresh — the circles here, I’m afraid the picture up top is just a screen grab — you’ll have to go to trowelblazers.com instead!]

Cosmic Genome LIVE at the Conway Hall

Posted on by toriherridge

Last night Brenna Hassett and I represented TrowelBlazers at the Cosmic Genome LIVE event to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the London Skeptics in the Pub group. It was a lot of fun to talk Six Degrees of Dorothy Garrod, Dorothea Bate, Hitler-defying Halet Çambel et al. alongside Robin Ince, Helen Arney, Adam Rutherford and Steve Jones amongst others.

Wikipedia gets the TrowelBlazers treatment at the NHM

Posted on by toriherridge

The 19th October 2013 was a perfect confluence of international celebrations as far as TrowelBlazers were concerned: International Day of Archaeology, the final day of Earth Science Week, and the end of a week events surrounding Ada Lovelace Day.

Our contribution to mark all three of these things was to organise a Wikipedia editathon with the dual aims of improving wikipedia content about women in the geosciences and archaeology, and to increase the number of women editing wikipedia pages.

Trowelblazers-wiki-edit-event-1

Display of fossils and archival material relating to NHM-linked pioneering women scientists. Those covered included: Mary Anning (1799-1847), Dorothea Bate (1878-1951), Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968), Barbara Yelverton Marchioness of Hastings (1810-1858), Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (1822-1907), Helen Muir Wood (1831-1924), Elizabeth Gray (1831-1924), Mary Home Smith (1784-1866) and (Lucy) Evelyn Cheesman (1881-1969).

With the help of the Natural History Museum’s wikimedian-in-residence John Cummings, I pulled together a whole day of activities that were open to anyone who was interested. Wikipedia training and time for editing, of course, but also a chance to meet historian Pamela Jane Smith (Dorothy Garrod expert) and writer Karolyn Shindler (Dorothea Bate’s biographer). On top of this Hellen Pethers, from the NHM library, and NHM curators Pip Brewer, Sandra Chapman and Zoe Hughes helped me put together a display of archival material and fossils collected by NHM-linked pioneer women scientists. This material is kept behind the scenes, so it was a rare and special opportunity not normally available to the general public.

Places were limited (and it was completely sold out!), but we also live-tweeted it from both @trowelblazers and @thewomensroomuk so that people could join in online. Team TrowelBlazers Suzie Pilaar Birch even joined in from a sister-wikithon in the USA:

 

For more details read fellow Team TrowelBlazers member Brenna Hassett write-up for the British Geological Society, and Hellen Pethers blogpost on the NHM library blog.

And the #TBwiki hashtag on twitter is well worth checking out for pictures and links from the day.

TrowelBlazers join forces with the Credible Superstar Role Model project

Posted on by toriherridge

[this post first appeared on the Science Grrl blog]


“If you love [BLANK], then you’d love my job”

If someone asked you to fill in the blank in this question, what would you say? What one word or phrase could possibly capture the essence of a career in science and – simultaneously – capture the imagination of a nine year old child?

It’s the kind of question that makes my mind empty immediately. But Fiona Gill, a chemical palaeontologist from the University of Leeds, paused only momentarily before answering. Firmly, clearly, and with her face breaking into a huge grin she said,

“If you love POO, then you’ll love my job”

Thirty seconds later, we were all doubled over with laughter. The giant concrete Iguanadon behind us looked rather unimpressed, but then he’s looked that way -come rain or shine – for nearly 160 years.

Fiona – who analyses fossil poo to work out what extinct animals were eating – was one of eight palaeontologiststs that TrowelBlazers had brought to Crystal Palace’s Dinosaur Island on the 12th September 2013 to be interviewed by Catherine Bennett, the palaeo-popstar creation of performance artist and comedian Bryony Kimmings. All of the questions in the interviews came from 9 year-olds. Our answers would be filmed and shown in schools up and down the UK. This was our contribution to the Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model Project.

“When you were 9 years old, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

I wanted to write stories; Xiaoya Ma wanted to be a dancer or an actress; Lucy McCobb wanted to be a vet. Anjali Goswami wanted to work with tigers (and she actually did for a while!). Only one of us, Susie Maidment, wanted to be a palaeontologist, and that was because someone – her Granddad – had told her that she could be, that this was possible.

The Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model Project is about opening up possibilities like this for children everywhere. It is a direct challenge to the sexualisation and commodification of childhood for profit. Its aim? To fight back against a world where little girls – and little boys – are sold a sorry story of female achievement. A world where success means fame and fame, for women, more often than not means sexual objectification. A world where Disney princesses grow up into pop sex sirens.

Susie Maidment being filmed saying that dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken or duck. And that the pterosaurs behind her aren’t dinosaurs. Photo credit: Victoria Herridge.

Bryony asked her 9-year old niece Taylor to help her invent an alternative, and Taylor’s brief was pretty awesome: a tuna-pasta eating, bike-riding popstar with very curly hair, whose songs – about changing the world, rather than love and lust – sounded like a cross between the Gorillaz and the B-52s.

Oh, and Taylor had another requirement – this popstar worked in a museum with dinosaurs.

Catherine Bennett, popstar palaeontologist, was born.

“What would you say if someone told you girls can’t do your job?”

Sometimes showing is better than telling. No, scratch that. Showing beats telling hands-down, all the time. Bryony Kimmings wanted children to understand that people like Catherine Bennett really do exist, and that working in a museum with dinosaurs was something that they really could grow up to do whether they were a boy or a girl, and regardless of their background.

Lucy McCobb shows off her golden trilobite! Photo credit: Victoria Herridge

This is an issue close to our heart at TrowelBlazers, and so we brought together a crack-team of palaeontologists who were also great communicators, to be filmed with Catherine Bennett and show the joy and fun and diversity a career in science can bring. Because the simple answer to anyone who says a girl can’t do this job is, “You. Are. Wrong. And we have the evidence to prove it.”

Like TrowelBlazers, Catherine Bennett was born of a desire to reset imaginations. It’s about challenging the mainstream narratives of women’s lives that innevitably shape our own aspirations, and the aspirations and expectations of our children. Projects like the Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, or TrowelBlazers, or ScienceGrrl won’t change the world all on their own, but no single project has to; everyone has their part to play.

“Just talk. Just be yourselves”

Towards the end of the day of filming on Dinosaur Island, Rebecca-the-director asked all of us to gather together and just talk to each other about our work, and our lives, so that she could film us behaving naturally.

Cue awkward silence.

Xioya Ma and Anjali Goswami, plus three dinosaurs. Only two of which are scientifically accurate. Photo Credit: Victoria Herridge.

Then, quite suddenly, the camera was forgotten. At the foot of a concrete iguanadon, as school-kids watched from across the lake, eight scientists laughed and shouted and debated, and the conversation flew from 1m-tall dwarf elephants to 2m-long giant millipedes, de-extinction to dinosaurs.

And looking around the group of women and men assembled, who had come from across the UK to do this simply because they cared about the next generation of palaeontologists, I felt quite extraordinarily hopeful. Gender stats in science are bad; those for ethnic diversity and socio-economic background are far worse. And yet there is such a will to change things – we just need to harness it.

Catherine Bennett (@RealCB)’s  music videos are here (they’re catchy!)

Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model (Winner, Fringe First Award 2013) will be on at the Soho Theatre 8th-26th October. Book tickets here.

With huge thanks to Bryony, film team Rebecca Brand and Daniella Cesarei, thePalaeontological Association, and Stephen Tickner from Bromley Council for making all this possible.

Top photo: Palaeontologists assemble on Dinosaur Island. Left to right: Susannah Maidment (Imperial College London), with Amber; Fiona Gill (U. Leeds); Liam Herringshaw (U. Durham); Anjali Goswami (UCL); Lucy McCobb (National Museum of Wales); David Legg (Oxford University); Xiaoya Ma (Natural History Museum, London); Victoria Herridge (TrowelBlazers) and Catherine Bennett. Photo credit: Daniella Cesarei

TrowelBlazers is Launched!

Posted on by toriherridge

It’s easy to imagine the academic world at the turn of the 20th Century, right? A world closed to all but the most privileged of men – whiskered gentlemen in stiff suits, pipe smoke and port, explorers with a whiff of pith helmet about them.

Imagine, then, arriving on the island of Crete in 1904 to find not one bold, brave young woman researcher digging up the past – but four: Harriet Boyd, Blanche Wheeler, Edith Hall and Dorothea Bate.

Or the Arabian Desert in 1900, where that striking figure riding towards you, headscarf billowing, at the head of a caravan of camels is not Lawrence of Arabia – he was barely out of short trousers then – but Gertrude Bell.

Try archaeology* in the interwar years, then. In our popular imaginations this is proper Indiana Jones territory. But in 1929, on the far eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, Dorothy Garrod was leading an excavation team of five women. Over the next five years, in caves dotting the steep-sided cliffs of Mount Carmel, Garrod’s team would uncover remarkable remains of Neandertals and some of earliest evidence for modern humans outside of Africa.

There were many, many women archaeologists, palaeontologist and geologists in the 19th and early 20th Century who were well known and respected – then – for their work and achievements. Now, however, they have been forgotten. This isn’t totally surprising – after all, how many men from those fields are household names? But it’s more than just forgetting a name or six; we’ve failed to retain the idea that women like these formed a significant – if under-represented and often resented – part of the cultural and academic landscape. We’ve allowed them to slip from our popular consciousness.

It’s a cautionary tale.

Fast forward to today. Women are a significant, but under-represented, part of the cultural and academic landscape (sound familiar?). Like our predecessors, we face institutionalized prejudice and inequality, even if our individual work is respected. In fifty or a hundred years time, will our existence and contributions have made as small a dent on people’s imaginations as the women of yesteryear?

Not if we can help it! On Friday we launched the TrowelBlazers tumblr blog** to carve out more space on the Internet for the story of women’s contributions, past and present, to the fields of archaeology, palaeontology and geology (authors note: we aren’t above a spot of land grabbing, and given field-boundaries are a tad blurry and multi-disciplinary study common, we will also be featuring women geographers, explorers and anthropologists).

By scouring the Internet and beyond for images and videos, and posting them alongside short, readable snippets of information, we want to reset people’s imaginations. As the blog grows, we hope that the volume of entries – as much as the individual stories – will be its own powerful testament to just how significant these women were, and continue to be.

Because it isn’t just the derring-do of pioneer-era women we are interested in, we want to celebrate the full diversity of trowel-blazing women working today, from all backgrounds and from all parts of the world. On top of this, we want to highlight the networks of women that have worked together over the years – something often lost in heroic tales of success against the odds, where women are inevitably framed by a world of men.

It’s quite an agenda we’ve set ourselves, and we need help building up this picture. We aren’t historians of science – we are learning too – and we know that we haven’t even scraped the surface of the awesomeness of these trowel-wielding women (even if we are quite proud of our spreadsheet with nearly one hundred women on it already). Anyone can submit a post to our blog, or join in the conversation on Twitter and Facebook. Together, we can showcase the aggregate contribution of these trowel blazers.

One exception to the rule can be dismissed, many exceptions cannot. In essence, that is the spirit of TrowelBlazers, served up with a dash of ancient wonder, a sprinkling of adventure and – of course – buckets of mud and sweat.

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TrowelBlazers is run by Victoria Herridge (@ToriHerridge), Suzanne Pilaar Birch (@suzie_birch), Rebecca Wragg Sykes (@LeMoustier) and Brenna Hassett (@brennawalks). They all also tweet at @trowelblazers.

* Yes, archaeology is a science (some bits more than others), but we are interested in women beyond the realms of science as well.

** in May 2014 we moved to our new internet home, trowelblazers.com