Speaker A
[Music] Thank you, Jess. So, I'm really excited, audience, because I've never met Jess before. I know about her, I've read about her, she's amazing. So, I feel like I'm getting to know her along with you, so this is gonna be great.
Dr Jessica Wade advocates for diversity in science, highlighting biases in Wikipedia and academia, and the need for systemic change.
Key Takeaways
- Diversity in science is hindered by stereotypes, biases, and systemic barriers.
- Wikipedia and academic institutions reflect gender and racial biases that need addressing.
- Current diversity initiatives often lack impact without structural changes and leadership commitment.
- Investing in skilled teachers and young people's confidence is crucial to retaining diverse talent.
- Individuals can contribute by challenging stereotypes and promoting underrepresented voices.
Summary
- Dr Jessica Wade works on flexible electronics at Imperial College London.
- She is a strong advocate for diversity in science, especially through editing Wikipedia.
- She highlights the underrepresentation of women and minorities in science and Wikipedia biographies.
- Wade discusses the impact of stereotypes and biases on young girls choosing science subjects.
- She shares stories of inspirational women scientists and her efforts to create Wikipedia pages for them.
- She critiques current diversity efforts as insufficient and calls for investment in teachers and confidence-building.
- Wade emphasizes the need for senior leadership to enforce zero tolerance on harassment and bias in academia.
- She encourages individuals to challenge stereotypes and tell diverse stories daily.
- The video includes examples of overlooked scientists and the importance of accurate representation.
- Wade calls for systemic, scientific approaches to solving diversity issues in STEM fields.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Jessica Wade's scientific work
- 01:08Advocacy through Wikipedia and addressing bias
- 01:56Impact of stereotypes and historical bias against women
- 02:50Highlighting inspirational women scientists on Wikipedia
- 04:15Examples of influential women and their stories
- 05:59Challenges in current diversity efforts
- 06:51Barriers in academia and need for leadership action
- 08:33Individual roles in challenging stereotypes and promoting diversity
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
So, first of all, just tell us what you do in one line.
Speaker A
Okay, so I work in the Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College London, and I use carbon-based materials to make flexible electronic devices, so things like
Speaker A
light-emitting diodes for mobile phone displays and also sensors, so something that everyone in this audience would happen—everyone has a mobile phone and thinking, yeah.
Speaker A
So, yes. Now, as I said, I know you for not your work, brilliant though that is. I know you as a kind of one-woman powerhouse for advocacy, particularly through your work with Wikipedia.
Speaker A
So, how did you come to do it and why?
Speaker A
And so, I reckon everyone in this room knows that science, particularly physics, isn't very diverse, and we don't have enough young women or senior women in it. I've tried throughout my whole PhD to fix that.
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So, I went to a bunch of schools, did loads of talks, but it's really hard to solve that. And the big challenge is that young girls, particularly, face a huge amount of stereotyping and bias that stops them from choosing subjects like physics in the first place.
Speaker A
Last year, I read Angelou's Inferior, and that really changed my life because it gave me all the evidence, the kind of stories about how bad the science was behind all these stereotypes, how women have been biased against for the whole of history, and how
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actually the majority of history has been written by men, about men, for other men.
Speaker A
And did that apply to Wikipedia as well?
Speaker A
Well, of course, that applies to Wikipedia as well, but actually it taught me something. It taught me
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that there have been all these women who have been standing up and shouting and fighting back. You know, when women couldn't vote, we couldn't graduate from university, we couldn't own property. So, women writing to Charles Darwin saying, you know, it's not okay to call us
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intellectually inferior. We can't do any of these things. And we can do that now, and Wikipedia is phenomenal. It's such a powerful platform. It's used for education, it's used to find journalists for articles, but unfortunately, just like the majority of
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history or physics departments, it's also really biased in favor of men. And the majority of content on Wikipedia is written by white men in America, and the biographies that they write are mainly about men. So, only 17% of the
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biographies on English-speaking Wikipedia are about women, and that really annoys me because I want young people to go on this website and read about all the phenomenal women scientists that I know, and the people of color and LGBTQ, huge, large scientists. So,
Speaker A
tell me about the best Wikipedia page, your favorite, the one that you've created.
Speaker A
No, gosh, it's so hard. I know we were talking about this backstage, and I have like 60, 60 ideas in my head right now. We just fall down. So, okay, I'm gonna
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do it. So, I think that my favorite one, first speaking at TED London and speaking particularly about women, is Roma Girl. So, she's a structural engineer. She grew up in India, in New York, in London. She studied physics first and
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then went on to do structural engineering, also at Imperial College London, and then became a structural engineer for the top of the Shard. So, she came in when the Shard was struggling to be built and completely changed the way
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that they did it, and, you know, revolutionized the engineering, but also did that phenomenal construction on the top and has been a huge advocate and supporter for young women in engineering, has written a book on engineering. She's a great role model in
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so many ways, and actually hearing her story and hearing about her was just so exciting. I wanted to check more about her on Wikipedia, but she didn't have a Wikipedia page, so it's incredible.
Speaker A
Yeah, well, actually, it happens more often than you'd think. I saw Susan Goldberg, who's the first woman to edit National Geographic since it started in 1888, and I saw her talking once, and she was so great. She was so powerful. You know, she
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came into National Geographic in 2016. She pushed for this edition on gender that they published in January last year that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she's done so many phenomenal things for that magazine, really giving the kind of content creation to the
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readers, changing completely the way they tell stories. And she was so inspirational, and she's had such a great legacy in journalism, and actually seeing her speak and wanting to find out more about her, there was nowhere that had
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that full collection, and hers was a really fun page to make as well. So, sorry, I said tell you about one already.
Speaker A
That's okay. We could talk forever, but one of the things that you know you're most
Speaker A
associated with is diversity. So, you make these efforts. What is wrong, do you think, with the current diversity efforts? Because loads of places plow money into them, you know, you go anywhere, there's diversity all over the place, but
Speaker A
are we making progress in the right way?
Speaker A
I think there are two kind of big challenges. One is obviously getting enough girls and diverse audiences to study sciences like physics in the first place, and the other one is keeping them
Speaker A
in academia. So, for the young people's education, I think we have a real challenge in this country. So, we don't have enough skilled specialist teachers teaching subjects like physics, computer science, math. It's really hard to get a young person to choose a subject for
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something like an A-level, which is very, very important, if they've been stereotyped out of that subject for their entire life. And then you get there and you say, oh, by the way, your teacher doesn't even have an A-level in physics.
Speaker A
Please come and study it. It's a really hard thing to convince someone to do that. So, we have that one massive challenge, and I think that the majority of diversity efforts are all very well intentioned, but there are
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kind of a big executive board who think, let's just put a hundred thousand pounds into a series of videos that would change the world, or let's get someone to come in and do a talk in lunchtime because that will inspire
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everyone, and that doesn't work, right? We've seen it doesn't work. We tried that for decades, and nothing's changed with the numbers. We've never actually sat down and tried, so firstly invest in our teachers, but also invest in young
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people's confidence. And I think that's what the massive challenges for people within academia and at universities. There are so many biases and barriers against women. You know, there's sexual harassment, there's bullying, there's huge bias in peer review and the allocation
Speaker A
of grants. They're still absolutely abysmal shared parental leave. And the reason that it frustrates me so much is that if we wanted to solve this kind of scientifically, like we should as a bunch of scientists, we'd speak to people with
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money in positions of power. Diversity won't change within science departments if you've just got the underrepresented minority groups speaking about how rubbish it is to be an underrepresented minority group. We need those senior people to say, I'm
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going to invest in this. We're gonna completely have a zero-tolerance policy on bullying. We're gonna kick out all these people who've been accused of sexual harassment, because unless you do that, you won't change anything.
Speaker A
But now what you're saying is that we need to start—wait, wait, before that, and maybe target parents, teachers. I mean, if you're—I mean, there are maybe teachers in the audience, parents in the audience, I'm not quite sure, but you know, what can we all as individuals do?
Speaker A
Well, I think change—they all have—we all have the decision as individuals about what stories we tell, right? We have the chance every single day to challenge stereotypes, to tell people who are underrepresented, who are being silenced,
Speaker A
that they're brilliant, to really amplify.
Speaker A
much to the frustration of my mother who kept seeing all these inferior coffees that I was ordering and actually I gave it to a bunch of young people too so I often have interns and work experience students in the lab at Imperial and and
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I got all of them reading it and they were so inspired and motivated by it you know it's not just enough to tell a girl but you know oh just please be a bit more confident you've actually got to
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give her the tools to realize that none of the feelings that she's feeling is because of her so we set up a crowdfunding campaign I set it up in in the summer this year and it was to achieve what it was to try and get a
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copy of inferior into every single girl state school in the country because I thought I'm not that popular there are only 200 girls state schools let's do it it took one night to do that so in after that I was like okay I've got a few more
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friends than I think so so we pushed it and and actually we've got enough money within 12 days to get it into every single secondary state school in the whole of the UK and Ireland it's gone international so yeah actually the publishers are so
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phenomenal so 4th estate have come on board and really supported us and they're making a special edition for schools and now people in New Zealand have started Canada and we've started a crowdfunding in New York as well and you
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said about Spain and France well all of them are getting on board especially with the Wikipedia editing too so it's been absolutely kind of a phenomenal journey of people getting excited absolutely and you have become a real figurehead for this the energy and
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advocacy have you had moments of self-doubt push back because I know that you were contacted once by a male PhD student that said hey you're kind of biasing Wikipedia yeah am I getting all these women in it was it was quite funny
Speaker A
so so it was kind of in the early summer and someone wrote to me and said I was doing it firstly for self publicity and secondly I was damaging the Wikipedia community so at the time I've been making Wikipedia pages for half a year
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and just kind of tweeting one Wikipedia page today thinking like oh this is a nice thing to do and no one had really been paying attention and then someone told me I was doing it for self-publicity and then suddenly I got
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all this phenomenal amount of publicity she was like for such to be them but after after that I think I realized that actually you know if I'm angering those kind of people then I'm probably doing the right thing and of course there are
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going to be people who don't think that all of these sensational women and people of color should be on Wikipedia but actually they totally should be and the response from people who supports it has been so encouraging and so much more
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positive I really don't care what they have to say and you talked about changing the world changing the world changing the world one Wikipedia page at a time I think so we talked about women but also sexuality color you know
Speaker A
ethnicity just how about that I mean are there efforts being made there - sure there are huge efforts I think probably all of the kind of diversity stuff if we particularly focus on science started with women because the data is so much
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easier to collect you know you may declare that kind of thing on a form when you submit it it's much easier to pull that information if I speak from a like a PDF perspective first you can find out what gender a biography is
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about just by looking at the pronouns usually and whilst that might not be entirely reliable people do do that when you start to go to ethnicity or sexuality it's much harder to collect that data and actually the numbers are
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so small at the moment that you really risk calling people out like any really risk exposing who they are so one of the non science Wikipedia pages that I made recently was the first black woman professor of history in the UK she only
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became a professor in October 2018 and if you wanted to collapse that kind of data you'd very quickly identify who that was so so I think that you have to start from a set where you're not going to
Speaker A
discriminate and I want quickly to ask you for who you think are the three scientists maybe that we don't know about that we should know about I like how you say quickly really I'm the clock so many phenomenal ones once I think
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everyone should know about there's an incredible engineer called Ozaki who grew up in Nigeria and then she came to study engineering at Loughborough did a PhD she won the institution of Engineering and Technology young women engineer for year and she just spends
Speaker A
all of her time outside of her day job of engineering inspiring other people to become an engineer another phenomenal scientist a bio Mystikal Roisin owens who has worked in kind of industry and also academia and she uses the materials that i work on to
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make implants for your brain that can detect and treat epilepsy in one go she is so phenomenally inspiration on supportive and the last one okay one of my favorite Wikipedia pages I ever made was GLaDOS West who's an
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african-american mathematician who was born in the 1930s and she was amazingly exciting to research because she worked on the early programming for GPS but for the government so at the time she didn't she didn't continue in a kick for a
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career in academia she's still working on her PhD now which is incredible that she was also chosen as one of the BBC 100 women so making a Wikipedia page has an impact it's brilliant and you will have much more impact in the years to
Speaker A
come thank you [Applause] you
Topics:Jessica Wadediversity in sciencewomen in STEMWikipedia advocacygender biasscience educationSTEM diversityacademic biasstructural barriersinclusion
