{"id":8571,"date":"2015-12-02T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/?p=8571"},"modified":"2015-12-04T17:18:20","modified_gmt":"2015-12-04T17:18:20","slug":"taking-control-of-your-career-as-a-female-physicist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/2015\/12\/02\/taking-control-of-your-career-as-a-female-physicist\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking control of your career as a female physicist"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Institute of Physics recently held an event on \u2018Taking control of your career as a female physicist\u2019. Naturejobs<\/em> sent Jack Leeming to find out more.<\/h2>\n

Late, I sneak into the back of a room on the 4th<\/sup> floor of a conference centre in central London, where 70 young female physicists are listening to Professor Dame Athene Donald<\/a> speak. I try not\"129692-compressor<\/a> to break their concentration as I find a chair. Professor Donald is relaxed and passionate, and manages to condense her advice \u2013 put into context through deeply personal, humorous anecdotes \u2013 into ten simple points to live by. Donald has had a hugely successful career (though, she admits, she is still embarrassed when people say it), making her way through the physics of metals and polymers, then the physics of food, then colloids, then starch, then proteins and
\ncellular biophysics, and finally ending up in her current area of the physics of biological and soft systems. She\u2019s now the Master of Churchill College at Cambridge. It\u2019s a quite the CV, and made all the more impressive by her achievements outside the world of academia.<\/p>\n

Donald casually weaves her personal life into her career as she speaks. She has to leave early \u2013 her husband has been to the hospital recently for a bad leg, and still needs looking after. Her daughter did a placement when she was 17 and learnt a lot about office politics; apparently it was useful. Her message is one of pro-activity, self-confidence and overcoming failure. She\u2019s been the gender equality champion for Cambridge University, has written for The Guardian, The Observer and The Conversation, and her blog<\/a> \u00ad\u2013 started in 2010 \u2013 has become enormously popular online. Somebody asks her what\u2019s next. She says retirement. I don\u2019t think anyone quite believes her.<\/p>\n

Her advice \u2013 seize any opportunity you have; don\u2019t assume you\u2019re bad because something is hard; decide for yourself what advice to take \u2013 is good and solid for all scientists and perhaps everyone looking to move forward in their career, but the personal stories accompanying it, about adversity, getting \u2018cross\u2019 and taking action, is what the room enjoys most. It sets the stage for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n

I sit in on the morning session, listening to Dr Jenny Wooldridge<\/a> and Dr Valarie Berryman-Bousquet speak about their careers. They\u2019re both experienced industrial scientists, and are candid with their advice. Wooldridge went down the traditional academic path, but decided against a postdoc. She looked for a job in research but had to take her time, working as a business analyst for a year before joining the National Physical Laboratory. It\u2019s taken six years there to get her salary back up to where it was, but she doesn\u2019t regret her time in research.<\/p>\n

Dr Berryman-Bousquet is the research manager of one of the four SHARP research and development labs. Her job, she explains, is to bring her research to life in the form of actual products that somebody could pick up and use. It\u2019s the perfect fit for her \u2013 since she visited CERN after her BSc, she was enthralled by physics, but wasn\u2019t interested in research for research\u2019s sake. She wanted to see her work move on into something, and then do the same herself. And since she joined SHARP in 2000, that\u2019s more-or-less been her job description.<\/p>\n

After lunch (networking\u2019s important, all of the speakers remind us), we pack into a conference room for the third time to hear from Professor Donald\u2019s college at Cambridge\u2019s physics department, Professor Valarie Gibson<\/a>. Gibson is the head of high-energy physics in Cambridge, but perhaps her most memorable achievement is at the Large Hadron Collider, where she leads the LHCb (the \u2018b\u2019 stands for \u2018beauty\u2019, after the eponymous quark) experiments, searching for clues on the relationship between matter and antimatter. After talking through her career history, Gibson shows us her proudest achievement \u2013 a photograph of her two daughters. She goes on to talk about her challenges as a woman in physics. Things have improved: when she started 10% of people in the field were women, now there are 20%. There\u2019s still room for improvement. Maternity leave was a big struggle for her; she was the first lecturer at Cambridge to take it \u2013 they were more or less making it up as they went along. When she came back she had to immediately jump into a lecture course. It was too much too fast \u2013 she had to leave again.<\/p>\n

Professor Gibson answers questions and makes way to the back of the room, leaving the stage free for Dr Emma Chapman<\/a>, a postdoc in astrophysics at Imperial College London. She speaks through her experiences as a physics undergraduate, and then committing to her postdoc and her children at the same time. She leaves her research in the lab at 5pm, and says it works well for her. She gets angry when she sees the gender imbalance data on physicists in academia. She shows us data from 2011<\/a> to illustrate but when we speak after her talk she mentions a report in her field from this year<\/a>. The numbers don\u2019t look good. Women are less keen, and less confident, looking for a career in academia then men from the beginning of their degrees. They\u2019re right to be less keen \u2013 the numbers show career progression for women is much worse than it is for men in astrophysics.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, we attendees all spend some time chatting with each other (networking again) over drinks. We speak about women in physics and I\u2019m politely asked what I\u2019m doing here. Someone asks what it\u2019s like being the only man in a room at a scientific conference. I admit it\u2019s fairly intimidating. \u201cThat\u2019s what it feels like\u201d, I\u2019m told. And now I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0  … Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90925,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,302,195,196,287,197],"tags":[12,426239,28,68,426237,255,153,165,60,256,213,304],"class_list":["post-8571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia-2","category-diversity-2","category-faculty-2","category-industry-2","category-physics-2","category-postdoc-2","tag-academia","tag-cern","tag-industry","tag-institute-of-physics","tag-iop","tag-jobs","tag-mobility","tag-networking","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-women","tag-women-in-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90925"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}