Every year International Women’s Day provides a good occasion to reflect on women’s lot, past and present. A moment, perhaps, to consider those spectacularly successful women who have won the Nobel Prize. In the last decade across the three science prizes that amounts to a grand total of five: Ada Yonath (2009 Chemistry Prize), Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider (two of the three who shared the 2009 Physiology or Medicine prize), Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (who won the same prize in 2008), and Linda Buck (2004 Physiology or Medicine prize). Five women out of a total of seventy prizes awarded, or around 7%, a value below even the paltry percentage of women in tenured science faculty (typically 15-35% depending on discipline and country).

These women did not win their prizes because that was what they set out to do; they weren’t driven to succeed by the idea of success. As Carol Greider said:

[W]e don’t do science in order to get awards. I do science because it’s interesting, because I really love finding out new things, so in this sense that changes nothing because what I really love to do is to find. You might think I made it only if the goal was to get a prize, but that was never the goal, the goal was to understand biology.

At the more everyday level of academic science, how should success be measured? As part of its work on gender equality, and to coincide with International Women’s Day, the University of Cambridge is publishing a book entitled The Meaning of Success containing a fascinating series of 26 interviews with women identified as “successful” by their colleagues, plus an accompanying narrative written by Jo Bostock. These women aren’t only scientists, they aren’t only academics, but through them come some loud and clear messages about how they collectively view success, with the issues highlighted not necessarily the obvious ones.



These women weren’t complaining about their lot in life, they weren’t whining, whingeing or moaning, terms of denigration so often thrown at women who speak out. They were celebrating what they loved about their jobs – building teams, seeing their students thrive and progress, working with people who sparked them off intellectually and seizing opportunities to try out new things and make new discoveries. So far so good.

But when we externally judge success, for instance at the promotion or recruitment stage, are these the metrics that are used? The answer too often is no. As scientists, indeed across academia, hard metrics are much more likely to be used: size of grant income; number of invited talks presented at major conferences or of publications in the most highly regarded journals; even number of students who completed their PhDs. These metrics can be “precisely” determined but how precise are they as a measure of accomplishment? The truth is they really aren’t that accurate and need to be used, although they frequently are not, with a great deal of caution. I once heard the phrase ”air-miles should not be used as a proxy for excellence” in the context of a discussion of the relevance of invited talks in this context. Too true. But it is worth digging down into this a little further. The person who accepts every invitation to jet around the world is likely to be the one unencumbered by caring responsibilities. Someone who is encumbered will still receive such invitations, if their research is excellent, yet not accept them. It is of course possible (as Cambridge tries to do) to factor in invitations received rather than only those accepted, but if the parent who has primary responsibility for child-care – who is statistically more likely to be the mother, although with many exceptions – turns down invitations too often, the invitations may in time dry up. So there can be a knock-on price that can hit a woman’s progression, one from which it may be hard to recover, if too crude a metric is constructed around invitations. If we turn to numbers of publications in high-profile journals, that too can be deceptive: personality traits may affect publishing patterns. Increasingly evidence is showing that women are less likely to aim for the highest profile journals, which typically have not only high rejection rates but also often require long periods of revision and discussion with editors. Not everyone wants to go down that route, being satisfied with publishing the work – which may be of an excellent standard and in fact quite good enough for the top journals – in a journal that is less stressful to deal with. But if they follow this strategy for their own personal reasons, does this make them less exceptional in their actual research and so should they be penalised by the system for not daring/caring enough/bothering to aspire to the so-called “glamour“ journals? Currently they certainly are likely to be. The stories revealed in the interviews in The Meaning of Success suggest that women take a very broad view of success, how they achieved it and what it means to them. Take chemistry professor Jane Clarke, who only started research in her 40s after a career as a schoolteacher. She says:

I am one of the world leaders in my field and I’m tremendously proud of that. And I’ve done it in such a way that I can hold my head up and say that I never trampled on anybody. I’ve also done it starting late, in an unusual way, and I think that’s something to be proud of. It shows that there’s more than one way of having a successful scientific career, and you should never be told otherwise.

Or plant scientist and Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, Professor Ottoline Leyser, who says:

I want to break the mould of what you need to be like to be successful. I think success needs to be about collegiality and recognising that the whole should be far more than the sum of the parts. Of course it’s nice if you’re elected to the Royal Society, but it’s a byproduct, not the object of the exercise.

From the University of Cambridge’s perspective this book is meant to start an internal dialogue about how we measure and value success to ensure that we truly do recruit and reward the best wherever that is to be found, not just facilitate the progression of lookalikes to those already in post. We also hope that the sector as a whole will join us in this debate, as we made clear in a letter signed by 50 Cambridge academics and published a couple of weeks ago in Times Higher Education. If we are serious about redressing the imbalance of women at the top of the academic ladder this is a crucial conversation to have. As pro-vice chancellor Professor Jeremy Sanders says in his closing remarks in the book:

We have all had experience of being an outsider, or in a minority, in some part of our lives – and whilst we have different ways of coping with this, my hope is that Cambridge will become increasingly inclusive, so that difference is embraced and celebrated and the effort that is expended on fitting in or conforming can be used to more exciting and productive ends.

Some may question whether it matters that there are fewer men than women at the top of the academic scientific ladder but, regardless of whatever percentage might be regarded as “right” or “natural”, I am firmly of the belief it does matter. Collectively the sector is losing talent the UK cannot afford to lose, often for bad and avoidable reasons rather than the trite “maybe women just don’t want to do science” kind of explanation that some people crudely propose. And if we have a system, as we seem to do, that makes it hard for women to rise to the top I equally fear that we have a system that makes it hard for many men to rise too, a system that promotes people based on criteria that may be too narrow, too simplistic and in some senses too old-fashioned.

Academic science should not expect to thrive if our primary measure of success is “mine’s bigger”.