Naturally speaking. The project that I'm working on is led by Professor Jane Reed and we are also collaborating with Francis from C8 and Jane Reed have been following them for the last two decades and now we have enough data all over the coast. They go to the P2H2, there's the bullets of black and the new bird, so there's different colonies along the coast that they have been monitoring. So they spend the day of breeding season on the Isle of May and then during winter they reach a new area.
Some of them do that, but some of them don't. And that's a thing that makes them particularly interesting because we have a partial emigatory system which means that some of them remain in the Isle of May during the winter. But some others they migrate. So that way we can evaluate the differences in the life history traits as a survival or breeding success that they have.
So your study is a modelling study to assess the fitness costs of migrating or not migrating? Yes, so that's one of the parts of the project and that's mostly the work that Paul Laker has been dealing and he has been estimated what the survival differences and the breeding success differences are between migrants and residents. And the part that I'm working on is kind of building in all of those parameters that he has estimated into a theoretical model and this theoretical model is not as scary as it might sound. What this model allows us to do is to evaluate the effect of partial migration at the metabolism level and to see when individuals and populations might be able to persist.
So we assume that migration is going to have a cost and when they migrate that might have an effect in the population and with no anything about that. So what we aim to do is to see if everybody is migrating, what is the cost of that and when the population will be able to persist and it looks like migration needs to be for it to allow populations to persist. If there were lots of individuals dying during that migration then the populations and the metabolism would not be able to persist. And what are the application of these theoretical models?
This is particularly relevant when you look at the management of migratory populations. So usually we think that migratory populations probably the monarch butterflies are the most emblematic example or the articulant that they go all the way to and tarry come back. But most of the species they are migratory to some extent and in the face of climate change if we have populations or species that they segregate in time and space meaning for instance you have a population and all the females go to one winter inside and all the males go to another winter inside. If the environmental conditions are different in those two sides during the winter and one is particularly crossed by those environmental conditions then when they come back breeding it might have different effects.
So if the one that has been crossed is the female side of the population or the male side of the population. So if the females have been experiencing a lot of mortality then when they come back there's a lot of males but very few females. However if it is the other way around you will have lots of females and very few males but the consequences of each one of those are completely different. And do you find a difference between migrating shags and non migrating shags in mortality if there are bad weather events for example or with change?
Yes we do and that's very striking because sags are long leaf species and they are most affected by survival and what we found is that during normal conditions both migrants and residents they do more or less than they do more or less than they do more. If migrants and residents they do more or less than the same but when their conditions are bad like a couple of years ago that you had the bees from the east survival is 20% lower for residents than for migrants and we believe it's because they don't have shelter against our environmental conditions. We don't know exactly which is the phenomenon we in or the conditions that are exactly causing those mortality events but we know that when there's extreme conditions like a huge storm or several days of extreme conditions then these wrecks happen that is that we find lots of carcasses of sags along the coast. It seems that the residents are coping worse with those kinds of events.
I've been to myself on the Isle of May, you're in winter and sometimes the weather is quite terrible. And the Isle of May is like a window of land towards the North Sea. So when there is a big storm, you can actually see that the part of the island gets a lot of wave action, a lot of wind. And I remember quite vividly that there were shugs that usually they fly just on top of the water.
They could fly much, much higher to avoid the waves and the wind. And I guess that these are the costs and of course the crazy survival of these shugs. I mean, there's different things that might affect the survival. One is that when the weather is bad, they might not be able to get a dry again.
And the flood capacity is reduced, therefore, foraging is harder. But we don't have direct evidences for this. It's just what we think is happening. When we see the final effect, not mechanism.
And because you are not busy enough with your research, you also dedicate the part of your free time to science, communication and outreach on it, right? You have just run a workshop here at the Institute on Women and Men in STEM Research, which got actually after men's attendance. So thank you for that. Can you tell us more about the background to your motivation for running these kind of workshops?
My motivation for running women and men in STEM workshop, it has been increasing lately. I have always been very sensitive to the topic, but a couple of years ago, I became a member of Humberbong. Humberbong is an international project that was born in Australia and was developed by a researcher and by a businesswoman. And what they were aiming to is to empower women in science and give visibility to women in science, provide us with the tools to achieve leadership positions within academia.
This program, what we want is that during the year, we get training on project management, looking for funding, strategy, how to communicate our resilience, how to make ourselves and the women around us more visible. There's 80 women each year from across the globe that work together through this year of learning. And then at the end of that year, we go on an expedition to Antarctica. During this process and after that, I have been developing some skills and also after seeing what women have been experiencing in science, because sometimes we don't talk about it, but there's a lot of things going on in the lion that I'll never...
For example? There's so much in visualization within academia and how women feel that feel and are actually being not listened, for instance, in meetings. All the sexual harassment that they're in academia and is not spoken of, maybe now with the Me Too Movement has some of it has arrived a little bit. And this project has given me the visibility and the chance to speak up and to bring these issues to the table and help maybe institutions to discuss what the issues are within these institutions.
It's very rewarding to see some of the things that arise after those workshops. You think that your career changes somehow after this experience with the home world bound? Well, home and home has given me lots of opportunities. I mean, the visibility that I have at the moment has nothing to do with the visibility that I had before.
And I have been always been very active in organizing events and doing science communication. So I already had a good network of people that knew who I was and the websites that I was doing. But after a home or home, my visibility increased exponentially. Is that because you made it increased exponentially or because of the workshops you're doing or your behavior changed or why didn't your own visibility increased because of the workshops?
I think it's a mix of everything. So after we went to Antarctica, I think that the Antarctica part was key for making my visibility high because I got lots of attention from the press in Spain. We were five people, five women scientists that created a theme to work together and find rice together to achieve the goal that we had to fundraise to get into the program. In the last year and a half, maybe we have around 200 interviews from the media in Spain.
Some of them were from the National media, but mostly the focus of the attention that we were in Spain. But we were everywhere. We got so much attention that everybody knew what we were doing. It was wonderful.
It's incredible. So you were mentioning that maybe in Spain and sometimes the situation of women, in Korea, is not well recognized because it's a military in country without a fancy country. And so do you think that this is going to change the mind or the general thinking in Spain about the women and making them more visible? I think that in the last two years we have made lots of improvement regarding making women work and figures visible to the general public daily life.
And especially for instance now, the eighth of March, there's a women's strike. And lastly, I had a huge support. And I think that this year is going to be even bigger. So I think that things are changing.
I'm not sure they're changing fast enough. So what were the most interesting aspects of your home-woodbound experience in terms of learning about gender inequality and other people's stories, the people that were also on the home-woodbound trip? The most interesting part about being on the program and learning about other women's experience, I guess was the kind of imagined feeling that happened after everybody said there's been that we were not alone, that there were more people out there, that they were feeling somehow the same kind of things, experiencing the same kind of things across the globe. It was not some places were better than others, but the pattern was consistent across nationalities.
And to see that there were people that were developing a momentum for action, and that that was actually happening. What are the highlights where they're from the home-woodbound trip? Tell us about this boat trip a bit more. It's Antarctica.
That's been amazing. It was actually amazing. I think that from the whole program, not just from the Antarctic day, because the Antarctic day was like the cherry on the cake, but we had been working for a whole year before. I think that from that year, when I most appreciate this kind of pushing myself forward and seeing what I was capable of in terms of making myself vulnerable and visible, because at the same time that you are becoming more visible to people, you become more vulnerable and more successful to attacks and rejection.
We had to fundraise quite a lot of money to get into the program and go in and ask, get in and ask, get in all those, no, no. We're not in the estate. No, no, no. It was like it made us kind of toughen up and realise that we were able to do much more than I thought that I was capable of, and that feeling was super rewarding.
Also, being able to know this amazing moment, we were on the boat. I mean, I was having dinner with people that had won a Nobel Prize. At the beginning it was kind of like, oh my God. They intimidated me.
They intimidated me. It was like, what did you know? I worked with Seagas. It was amazing because it was Susan Scott who was involved in the Discovery of Gabitas in a Way.
And it was just amazing because we had all these people from different backgrounds doing so many amazing things. And it was just like Chris Sol of cultures and knowledge. And the fact of being an Antarctica, I think that it has this thing that does not have people that have made from Antarctica, but everybody that goes there gets to be studied by it. And it has this kind of democratisation effect with people, that you have a boat full of people of women from all across the globe, different cultures, different backgrounds.
Some of them weigh more people, then others, different social classes, statues within academia, outside of academia. And then you realise that you face them with Antarctica and they all become three-year-old people. You're like, whoa, look at that. And it's amazing because it creates a community that other ones would be.
Well, we saw lots of wildlife. We saw killer waves, games of penguins, scene-stopping wings, humpback whales, other tourist patterns. I mean, the wildlife there is extraordinary. But for me, the most striking thing was the high-spec, the double-rise-wise.
It was like seeing a building floating in front of you and white building drifting away. So you were with a Nobel Prize winner. He was female, that's quite rare, isn't it? So tell us a bit more about the inequalities in STEM research because obviously there's a huge dichotomy between Nobel Prize winners that are female versus men and right across the board through science.
Yeah, well, it was not actually a word of the Nobel Prize. The project that C had been working on had been a word of the Nobel Prize. So there were three men that were awarded that Nobel Prize. And if you're looking to the history of Nobel Prizes and kind of like the state structure within the dynamics of the prize, it's about 7% of the prizes through history that have been awarded to women.
And that does not mean that women were not involved in this course because there's a few cases that are very well-documented where the person doing the main work was a female scientist, but they were completely oversold by their peers. If you're looking to universities and research institutes for quite a long time, we have had natural science disciplines, more or less 50% female, 50% male, and PhD students are early career researchers. But as you go up into more responsibility positions, what you see is that females disappear. And across Europe, only 19% of the leadership positions within academia, there are women.
19%. And some fascinating research studies are just in eight sexism that we all have in us about the value of women. Can you describe some of those studies? Yeah, very interestingly, there was a study that kind of gathered all the information about the projects that had been, all the applications that had been submitted to projects in funding in Canada.
And what they found is that when the committees had to account only the science, they were as likely to give precise funds to female and male scientists. However, when they accounted for the CV of the person, therefore knowing they were female or male, they were less likely to be funds to females than males. So that reduces the opportunity for females a lot. That's another one that is quite famous, is the famous John and Jennifer article that was submitted to different journals and review processes.
And what they found out is it was that Jennifer, so the article signed by Jennifer as first author. People submitting a paper to a journal. It is a study that what they do, they mimic the submission process and they ask people to review it as if it was a submission. And the only thing that changed is the name, the first name in the office.
So John had a significantly higher probability of getting the paper published than Jennifer, and that was the only difference. Exactly the same paper that only changed in the fact. The male ones were all males, or there was a mixture between male and female. So are you saying that those of female reviewers can actually be biased towards men?
Yeah, in fact there's another study that looks at what are the chances of researchers getting employed or not. And they did pretty much the same. It was the same CV, the thing that changed was the gender of the applicant. And what they found is that normally the gender of the person that was evaluating the application, it was the male applicant that got more chances of getting hired.
It is. We have some challenges ahead. We do. So you ran a workshop here in the Institute yesterday, which was excellent.
So thank you for that. And you asked us to write down steps that we can take to help close the gender gap in science. And you asked us to do this from the individual level, like what we personally can do, from the lab group or the institute level, and then also at the level of science in general. So what key actions come up repeatedly when you're running these workshops in Spain and here?
When you ask people to do this in your workshops, what are the repeated answers? What on earth can we do about this? The repeated answers that we get in the workshop, I usually at the individual level, I think that people get like a waker call that at least lasts for their hour or hour or hour. I want to have that at the workshop last.
It's kind of like the feeling that they have to start speaking up, both the female scientists saying when I have to start saying that these things have happened to me. And the male scientists usually say that they have to speak up themselves to call these kind of things. I don't know how long does that last after the new workshop because that's kind of the challenge to keep that in mind and the social pressure and the peer pressure that is around. Very often people look for responsibility into higher levels of responsibility.
So kind of PIs should lead, by example, PIs should get involved in this kind of message. Many times there's kind of the hope of creating a committee that drives forward some of their measures. What happens very often is that we do these workshops and they take one hour when I have to start with. But the ideal process to work through these is more than they are.
So you start with the base, the sellers of what you want to do within your institution, one hour when I have. And that's not enough so you should work one day, one week, working groups to see that everybody agrees that this is a problem, that we have to tackle it and how are we going to do it with more concrete actions. If we don't get to define those concrete actions, it's very hard that even though everyone has the intention of changing things, that things actually happen. Because everything becomes very vague and we need short, consistent actions to tackle.
We have a scheme called the Tina Swarn here in the UK that tries to put the objective by a committee or university committee and trying to tackle some of the problems about gender equality and how an institute actually goes to the silver one. So the whole thing is small. It's a bronze silver in the gold. So yeah, we are trying.
I think you can come back to the more workshops. So apart from the Homewood Bound programme that you've been part of, what are the initiatives are there, especially in Scotland? There's an initiative in Scotland that is called Engineers Woman in Scotland that was founded by Janet Wurkin-Sohn and Syr-Sington. It has run four times in the University of Edinburgh and they are running workshops on across the Scotland.
And they are pretty much the same as Homewood Bound and it's kind of empower women to science and STEM to step up and try to make themselves visible and maybe transfer to industry and promote their own ideas and train them to be the best they can. In the workshop yesterday you talked about how each individual woman can maybe speak louder or be more confident and you talked about imposter syndrome. Can you tell us what that is? So the imposter syndrome is this feeling that everyone has that you feel that you're not good enough and everybody else is better than you are.
And I think that for most of the sciences this is especially acute when you go to a conference. And this happens across ages, gender, but it looks like there's some sense that says that male scientists suffer more from imposter syndrome and they're very, very, very stressful conditions. However, the normal conditions is female scientists that suffer it more. This topic is slightly tricky because it's kind of setting a baseline that somehow you assume that women are guilty for the situation in science because they don't speak up.
And that's not true. The situation that women have in science and wherever you go is not the fault. It's a consequence of their cultural constructs and history of undermining women through history. However, while we're working on fixing this, one of the things that we discussed in the workshop is that for instance women usually only apply to jobs when they fulfill 100% of the requirements of the application call while men apply when they only fulfill 60% of the requirements.
It is a huge difference. But there has also been some studies that show that if you reward the applications in different ways, you can easily increase the probability of women applying for those jobs. So there's some work from both sides. It's not only that we have to put the weight on women saying, oh, you have to apply or you have to put yourself on the system, it has to provide the support that women need to sign and raise in science as much as their male peers.
I would also believe in ourselves anyway. Easy, second term, but you've been undermined since you're born. So you've come down to Glasgow from Aberdeen to give a seminar on your scientific research and to give us a workshop on the women and men in STEM research. So you've been here for three days now.
How have you found it? Have you found the Institute in Glasgow? I have loved it. I have been making lots of interesting research and people.
There's a lot of interesting research going on in Glasgow University and the Institute. I'm overwhelmed with all the things that I have been able to interact with. It has been great. That was amazing having you.
Thank you. So thank you very much for sharing all your research and also your outreach experience. It's covered so much of you both as scientists and women. But just a trend I watch out, please.
Could you share a fun fact about yourself that maybe not so many people know about you? A fun fact about me. Maybe a fun fact about me is that back in Spain, I used to do stand-up comedy. Stand-up scientific comedy.
So I was doing a serious comedy. Yeah, basically it's one. I was kind of communicating my research to general public through this stand-up comedy. However, it happens that when you change the language and you move into English, I'm not that funny.
I have to learn how to build the jokes again. I wish you the judges. Can you tell us the joke? We can give you.
Thank you very much for this amazing chat. Thank you Lucy of course as well. Thank you Anna. Thanks for having me.
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