Recent discussions with friends about Margaret Thatcher, and her training as a chemist led to me wondering whether it is rarer for a Head of State to be a woman or to be someone trained in some aspect of science, engineering, or technology (SET).

 A quick review of the qualifications of recent female Heads of State, suggest that being a woman and having a SET qualification is very rare. My list of 20 below shows only one woman with a clear STEM qualification: Angela Merkel- she is another Chemist, and one: Gro Harlem Brundtland who has a medical degree.

1.  Angela Merkel – German Chancellor- (German Doctorate in Quantum Chemistry)
2. Aung San Suu Kyi, -Opposition leader Burma-  ( India, degree in politics, UK degree in philosophy politics, and economics, UK degree in Burmese literature)
3. Benazir Bhutto – PM Pakistan- ( US degrees in comparative government and law, UK degree in philosophy politics, and economics)
4. Corazon Aquino – Pres Phillipines- (US degree  Maths/ French- joint degree)
5. Dame Eugenia Charles – PM Dominica- (Canada and UMK degrees in law)
6. Golda Meir -PM Israel-  (US teacher qualification)
7. Gro Harlem Brundtland, – PM Norway- ( Norway Degree medical doctor, US degree public health)
8. Helen Clark – PM New Zealand- ( NZ degrees in politics)
9. Hillary Rodham Clinton -not quite US president- ( US degrees in political science and law)
10. Indira Ghandi – PM India- ( studied in UK for degree in history, politics and economics- never graduated)
11. Isabel Perón -Pres. Argentina- ( no higher ed)
12. Julia Gillard -PM Australia- ( Australia, law degree )
13. Mary Robinson -PM Ireland- ( Ireland, and US  Degrees in law)
14. Sheikh Hasina Wajed -PM Bangaldesh- ( BA Univ Bangladesh)
15. Sirimavo Bandaranaike – PM Sri Lanka- worlds first female PM-  ( no higher education),
16. Tansu Çiller -PM Turkey -( US degrees in economics)
17. Tarja Kaarina Halonen – PM Finland- ( Finland degrees in law)
18. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, – PM Latvia- ( Canadian degrees in psychology)
19. Vigdís Finnbogadóttír – PM Iceland- ( French degrees in French literature , Danish degree history of theatre)
20. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro – PM Nicaragua- ( No higher ed)

Margaret Thatcher - Chemist

I first came across Thatcher as a young student teacher in the early 1970s. She was Secretary of State for Education and I was part of a group of young teachers invited to the Houses of Parliament to ‘discuss’ issues with her. I think I went because I liked the idea of seeing the inside of a committee room in the House. I knew little about her, but was y wary of Conservative education policy. All I remember of her at the event was wondering why this was a billed as a discussion. We asked questions she didn’t answer them, but spoke about things she had clearly planned to speak about before we arrived. That just shows how innocent I was of professional politicians. I remember her voice as horribly grating: this was before she was ‘de-elocuted’, to undo the years of elocution lessons.

But despite this only and unpleasant experience of her, I supported her in the 1979 election. As a radical feminist I believed that having a political party in power led by a woman would be revolutionary enough to counterbalance the impact of the party having policies I did not agree with. My Lefty friends were horrified.  But there was no way that the Labour party would have had a woman leader at that date, and it is important not to forget just how sexist traditional left wing political practice was. Very soon Thatcher made it clear that she was actively against feminism, and her actions suggest that she was not that keen on gender equality.  I also learned a lesson that changed my feminism – that getting women into places of power does not necessarily change gender subordination or inequality. There are still many feminists who seem to believe that change will be brought about by equalising the numbers of women at the top of politics and the professions. It is a naïve position that doesn’t recognise that the complex interactions of gender/race/class/caste ….  structure social position and power.  Sometimes gender becomes the less important aspect of what detemines opportunity, and worse sometimes it blinds everyone to bigger issues of inequity and  injustice which are hidden by its shining light.  A recent IPPR report  notes:

‘The narrow focus on women at the top and on work as purely emancipatory ignores the polarisation of women’s experiences of work and glosses over the fact that men also occupy different positions of power and class. Furthermore, the suggestion of linear progress for women risks reaffirming the current economic and political model, at a time when deep rethinking is required. The narrative of progress resonates with some families, but life has not gotten better for all women. Some compared their life to their grandmother’s, and felt it was worse.’

So yes, we now all think that leading a country is an appropriate job for a woman, but the daughter of a young single parent today probably has less opportunity to reach such a position than her post-war baby boomer grandmother. Are both these trends attributable to the Thatcher revolution?

It is also fascinating that some of the earliest representational objects found were small figures of pregnant women.  The exhibition speculates whether these objects were made by women as talismans for a good outcome in childbirth.  Many were pierced and showed signs of being worn, and many seem to have been deliberately broken.  These ‘Venus’ figures kept being produced in more ever more simplified versions for 30,000 + years alongside carvings of the animals that these early humans hunted for food and clothing.

Ivor Bison 20,000 years old. From www.britishmuseum.org

It would be nice to think that they were creative representations by both women and men in a community of the value they placed on motherhood. But perhaps these Venus figures could simply be representations of ‘commodified’ creatures that human communities needed to exploit/exchange for survival [sadly this pessimistic possibility comes from my early reading of Engels on the origins of the family].

We can’t ever know which of these explanations comes close to the reality. But we can wonder about the life of the woman – who looks so much like us- portrayed in the 26,000 year old little head below.

Woman's head in ivory. 26,000 year old. From www.britishmuseum.org

 Last Wednesday I felt uncomfortably like a man among men. We were a room full of women –all able to be there because of the work done by other women who we pay minimal wages to clean our houses, look after our children, make our clothes and the prepared meals and cappuccinos we pick up on the way to catch our trains. They work across the world on our behalf in shoe factories in China, and by our elbow offering us another salmon canapé. And some of them are men.

Caulflower seller Brixton Market 1930s. Copyright Margaret Monck, Museum of London

On which day do we celebrate their work? Are we embarrassed to celebrate the common work that women everywhere do? Keeping the spotlight constantly on the women who get Nobel prizes and become ‘Captains of Industry’ blinds us to the poorly paid women working in that parallel shadow land  that provides us with those things that make us comfortable. Next year I hope I get invited to a celebration of the value of ordinary women

Be-Ro Recipe book 19th Edition 1956

 I was stuck by how expensive a dozen eggs were in 1956, and wondered how this compared to 2013 prices. An online historic price converter gives two conversions for 5 shillings and six pence. Using the retail price index it is equivalent to £5.35 (2010 prices). But a better measure of relative cost is to use average earnings as the indicator because this suggests the proportion of an average income (present day) that the original price (1957 prices) equates to. Using 2010 average earnings a dozen eggs gives an equivalent cost of £13.50.

What value would we place on an egg if we paid £1.10 for it, rather than present supermarket prices which range from 12p (‘Value’ range) to 35p (free range organic)? This brought home to me, very pragmatically, what we all know- that food is probably too cheap, and that is why too many of us are too fat.

Once we had lunch-breaks

In the last century – when I began my working life-  lunch-times belonged to the workers.  We could use this time to eat, drink, lie on the grass and chat, go shopping, keep fit or play sport, attend  clubs and events – some of us even spent lunch-time with our children at the workplace nursey.  But these days it feels as if lunch-time if belongs to our employer.  It is now expected of us that we have ‘working lunches’, we attend ‘brown bag’ seminars where we bring our own sandwiches while we listen to work based speakers, we are ‘invited’ to lunch-time meetings . 

Recently I have challenged two colleagues who have organised different work-based meetings during the  lunch period – they did it deliberately, they argued, because there was no other time in the day when people were free attend the meeting; if they organised it at any other time few people would come. This suggests three things:

1. We have work overload.

2. Staff are hugely committed to doing a good job to the point of agreeing to be exploited.

3. It is expected that all the time from when we arrive at our place of employment until the time we leave should be spent in productive activity determined by our employer through the way our managers organise our time.

Effectively this means we no longer have the right to a ‘proper’ lunch-break - so a right to time when workers take a ‘break’ from work is not guaranteed each day. People are simply working all day – going from one meeting to the next and eating during those meetings that happen between noon and 2.00 pm.  This is certainly a less visible way for the employer to extend  working hours

From the employers’ point of view it seems that keeping people ‘at it’ all day gets more done than letting them have a break. This is what  a piece of research by Charlotte Fritz argues. It might be true, but it seems to me that Charlotte misses the point, she presumes that lunch-breaks and coffee breaks exist for the interests of the employer: to  make the workers more productive. If they don’t fulfill that function they should be abolished. She recommends instead that workers spend the time writing out to do lists, or seeking feedback on their work. Oh Dear I think I see lunchtime appraisals and self-criticism sessions just cresting the horizon.

On the other hand I think that  lunch-breaks exist (or at least they should do) for the benefit of the worker taking them. There are many ways in which employers can squeeze more productivity out of their workers- certainly if they have no long-term responsibility for their workers’ wellbeing and they can simply replace workers when they are no longer maximally productive, abolishing breaks is one one of them. But we workers have other responsibilities to ourselves and our communities: and that means that we need to take back ownership of that short lunch period – reclaim that break from work during an 8 hour working shift, and do with it whatever pleases us.

I already know that a number of collections of papers about organisations and initiatives that promoted women’s education and employment in science and technology has been lost/mislaid as they were moved from one organisation to another, that had neither the skills to look after an archive nor the funding to be anything other than a temporary resting place.  The creation of the London Women’s Library in its home in the renovated East End wash houses in 2002, was a hopeful sign that, not only the precious collection of items from the First Wave feminist suffrage movement would be properly cared for and exhibited, but that it could be a home for the archives of Second Wave feminism too.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the opening of its last exhibition: Treasures of the Women’s Library.  This exhibition started life as a celebration of 10 years of the Women’s Library, it opens as the last exhibition that the Library will have since it will move from its purpose-built [ although it is   a renovated wash-house so I am not sure that this adjective is quite accurate] home to a new location in the library of the London School of Economics.  It is a wonderful exhibition of books, pamphlets papers, photos, flags, badges, posters and flyers, products of the commercial publishing industry side by side with the roughly printed posters of action groups and campaigns ,and the hand embroidered banners.   One of the most orginal aspects of the exhibition was the little side room dedicated to Greenham Common. The evening that I attended one of the women who donated many of the items in this room was there talking about them, and the impact on her life of that action. It was the kind of experience of critical consciousness that led her to further action and to becoming in her 50s an undergraduate student. Education and social and political activism at times go hand in hand. I am not sure if Britain in 2012 is one of those times.

The Library’s collection and some of its staff will move to the LSE, and open there next year. The LSE library has a huge collection of political and social reform movements, such as the Fabian Society and CND, so this looks like a safe home for a collection on UK feminist and suffrage activity.  I hope it can support the collection as ‘living’ and growing. The present exhibition would be much diminished if it had not included its Greenham room.

Malala Yousafzai

It is too easy to slip into the frame of mind that thinks the battle for educational access and equality of treatment for girls and women is won when in many countries women are more the 50% undergraduates.  They are 65% of students in Iranian universities, but this did not stop the Iranian Science and Education Ministry this August from banning women from studying a variety of disciplines, in particular those where it is considered inappropriate for women to be employed: mining agriculture and engineering being the most obvious, but business studies and hotel management being some of the others.  How much has been won if one gender is banned from access to a whole raft of education and the jobs it leads to.

 Worse has come more recently when on Tuesday Malala Yousafzai a fourteen year old school girl in Pakistan was shot because of her public campaigning for girls’ education – for herself and girls like herself.  In large areas of the world women’s education is such a threat to male dominated cultures that girls and their teachers are shot for going to school

 We should  be wary of thinking that these kinds of actions happen only in unstable religious fundamentalist states, and  remember the Montreal Massacre of 1989, when a male student at the École Polytechnique in Montreal deliberately targeted and killed 14 women, twelve of whom were engineering students, as well as injuring ten other women and four men. That is not so long ago or so far away

 It is hard to be positive with events like these in your head but Plan International has just sent me an email reminding me that tomorrow is  The First Ever International Day of the Girl- with a major focus on girls education. Online campaigns are not enough by themselves but they remind us that the world is a very hard and unjust place for many girls and women, and access to safe education is the first step towards gender justice and autonomy for most women everywhere.

Watch this video for something uplifting:  Because I am a girl

The conference and Fashion week told the same story: gender divisions and extreme masculinity and femininity are happy and well in both the ‘real world’ as well as that produced by digital culture.

Lisa Nakamura from the University of Michigan made a keynote presentation that used evidence from online games sites to argue that digital culture was one of the main environments where young men learned to perform a particular kind of extreme misogynistic masculinity. She introduced us to the concept of ‘trash talk’ in online gaming. Lisa described how trash talk was the significant discourse in online gaming and the insults and taunts were directed at anyone who did not fit a white male stereotype of a games player. The insults were highly sexist, and, she argued, learned by boys as an appropriate form of masculine behaviour. Learning to do it well gave a player ‘rhetorical capital’. Women and others who join the games culture find it very hard to challenge the use of trash talk – even though they are the focus of insults,  because – they are told-  this is the indigenous culture of whatever game is being played and they have to learn to operate in this culture if they want to join the game.

Users deny that it is a discourse with meaning, they say it is simply procedural, and so deny that they are behaving in a racist or sexist manner.  This trash talk is not restricted to online gaming but permeates the whole web. For example while images of breast feeding mothers are censored by Face Book , the same site refuses to remove rape ‘jokes’  

Lisa recommended a blog posting by John Scalzi:  ‘Straight White Male the Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is’   as a way of explaining structural gender discrimination in the ‘real world’ through the analogy with online gaming structures. It’s a very nice piece and I recommend it. It also reminds me that the flow of influence between the ‘real world’  and the ‘virtual world’ goes both ways.

In the real world we re-create hyper-femininity and wear those impossible shoes that we once only saw on Second Life avatars.

Open access journals that currently have no financial support at all, struggle to produce quality issues and rely on the efforts of academics doing every job from copy editing to publicity. The two open access journals I work on have been innovatory and are respected in their different fields but both struggle against a tide which pressures authors to submit to ‘high impact’ journals and where academic time for non-REF and non teaching activity to give to producing this kind of journal is ever more tightly squeezed.

Both the open access journals have debated the ‘author pays’ model and are reluctant to adopt it, or attempt to adopt it. Few of the authors in either journal are writing up funded research projects and many have no easy access to institutional funds to pay for publication. The Finch Report has little to say to non-commercial open access journals. It offers no new business model that will solve our funding problem and instead appears to erect a new barrier to publishing by requiring authors to pay.

The Finch report suggests that UK university departments should fund their staff to publish, but this discriminates against papers coming from the global south in particular where funds are even more difficult to access. The impact on those of us who publish in the field of gender (or other critical interdisciplinary areas) is likely to be negative. Many of us would find it hard to get access to departmental funds to pay to have our papers published. If there are scarce resources in an institution our experience tells us that the challenging interdisciplinary fields do not usually get first call on those funds. They go first to traditional high status areas.

There are also the authors outside institutions. I was interested in a recent email by Jorgen Burchardt to science mailing list in which he says: ‘I have recently made a study of Danish academic journals that shows that 30 % of the authors are unemployed, retired, students or are working for not-research companies/institutions.’  That certainly resonates with what I see submitted to the journals I work with.

The Finch Report also suggests that for some years there will need to be ‘hybrid’ journals with some papers open access because authors have  paid and other papers only accessible for a fee, because authors have not. Some commercial journals already offer this option to their authors when papers are accepted. When we discussed this in the commercial journal I work on we were reluctant to operate what at first sight appears to be an unequal two tier system of papers.

The list of negative impacts in the areas in which I am involved with academic publishing seems so clear I have been trying hard to come up with some possible positive impacts.  Unfortunately I could come up with only two highly speculative scenarios that might benefit the non-commercial open access journals:

-  As more journals adopt the ‘gold’ author pays model, it may be that more authors who cannot access funds to pay for publication will choose to publish with non-commercial open access journals and counteract the ‘pull’ of commercial journals.

 -  If universities advise their staff to publish only in open access or hybrid models then non-commercial open access journals could become a preferred publication outlet for UK authors.

Unfortunately I cannot  come up with even one positive speculative scenario for the commercial journal I work on – yet I hope.