Within minutes of meeting the multiple award-winning British physicist and feminist role model, Dr Jess Wade, I learn two things about her. Number one: she walks and talks fast, as if she is running out of time. Number two: she is incredibly modest. So much so that she would rather conceal from a colleague who I am and what I am doing in her lab at Imperial College London, than reveal that she is being interviewed for this magazine. As we take a tour, she pretends she is just showing me around and enthusiastically tells me all about her colleague’s work, as well as her own. Later, when we are alone, I ask why she didn’t explain that she was being interviewed by a journalist. “Because it was embarrassing,” she says, and laughs self-consciously.
We are in the bowels of the university, popping in and out of basement rooms with huge, noisy machines attached to computers and getting particularly excited at the sight of a highly precise “superconductive quantum interference device” that reveals the magnetic properties of materials. “It’s called a ‘squid’,” she tells me, almost reverently. “It’s nice.”
As we walk through the corridors, numerous young women stop the 34-year-old scientist to say hello, wave or give her a hug. It is like walking around with a national treasure – and to many scientists, especially women and those from under-represented backgrounds and minorities, that is exactly what she is.
Since 2017, when Wade was in her late 20s, she has been campaigning tirelessly to raise the profile of female scientists and scientists of colour. After realising that many notable women working in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) and others from minority backgrounds did not have Wikipedia pages, though they were deserving of them, she decided to start them herself, one every day. Each one takes “a few hours” to write, she says. It’s a task, she confesses, that she somehow completes while simultaneously watching real estate shows on Netflix in the evening. To date, she has contributed more than 2,000 entries.
“I’m constantly astounded by who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page,” she says. “You expect these people to have one, because a much less significant male counterpart would. And that’s because of who edits Wikipedia.” Every night, she still finds herself wondering: why is this person not on Wikipedia already? “I’m always amazed by it.”
The gender gap in Stem subjects is stark. At the top of the career pyramid, women (particularly women of colour) are vastly under-represented among Nobel prize winners and professors, and at the bottom, girls (particularly from Black Caribbean backgrounds) are far less likely than boys to choose Stem subjects at school. This is despite the fact that, at GCSE, A-level and as undergraduates, female students generally outperform their male peers in these subjects. Black scientists are also massively outnumbered: a recent parliamentary report found that only 8% of undergraduates, 1.4% of lecturers and postgraduates, and 0.4% of science professors living in the UK are Black.
This means there are just 25 Black UK professors working in Stem, out of a total professorship of more than 6,600. “I don’t even think there’s one Black female physics professor in the UK,” says Wade.“If I had one big aim, it would be to make science a more inclusive and fair place to be.”
Since Wade works full-time as a lecturer and research fellow in the Faculty of Engineering, teaching undergraduates about nanomaterials and investigating new materials that could be used to make more sustainable electronic devices, she pursues this aim in her spare time. And she does it relentlessly. As well as her Wikipedia work, she does outreach work in schools to engage young people in science and make it feel more accessible, coordinates conferences to enable under-represented groups to network and shine a spotlight on their research, and serves on various committees that are trying to increase equality and diversity in science.
Recently, she has started spending her Sunday afternoons nominating top female scientists and scientists of colour for major prizes and fellowships. A leading member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organisation that aims to speak up for marginalised communities in science, and with nearly 60,000 followers on Twitter, she is connected to a huge network of scientists from under- represented groups. She started nominating people because she got sick of seeing scientists “doing awesome things and not getting credit for it”, she says.
“Alongside Wikipedia pages and big grants, women and people of colour are less likely to be nominated for – and in turn, less likely to win – big shiny awards.” I realise she is speaking from bitter experience: thanks to her work on diversity committees, she has observed this vicious circle first-hand. “I’ve been in places where people are like: ‘We desperately want to give more awards to women or we really want a Black scholar to win this, but we don’t get nominations or applications from those particular groups.’”
In Wade’s opinion, women and ethnic minorities are often under-represented in senior faculty positions in science “because they’re not put forward for them or because they don’t have the confidence to go for them”. She adds, pointedly: “It’s not because they’re not brilliant.” The fundamental problem, Wade says, is that “so much of science is about your privilege”. This is not just bad for science, it’s bad for the survival of the planet and the human race: “Science has so many huge open challenges – from sustainable materials for electronics to climate change, antibiotic resistance, ethical dilemmas in AI and Covid – and I think we need really diverse teams working on them, to solve them and improve public trust.”
Recent figures from UK Research and Innovation show that when senior researchers from an ethnic minority apply for funding applications, they are less likely than their white peers to succeed and, when they do succeed, will receive significantly less, on average.
Through her work on Wikipedia, Wade is keenly aware that one award or successful application can be a stepping stone to another, and then another: “It’s like, if you’re going to get a gold medal, you have to have a silver medal and you probably have to have a bronze.” As a result, far too often, she thinks institutions nominate – and judges esteem – academics who have a track record of winning big awards and research grants, while overlooking more deserving scientists from historically marginalised groups. The challenge is both individual and institutional. “There are exceptional scientists all over the UK who don’t have the support network around them to realise they’re exceptional.”
The dearth of public recognition for the achievements of female scientists – which often results in their groundbreaking work being attributed to male colleagues – was first described by the suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870 (it became known as the “Matilda effect”). Skip forward 153 years, and Wade is finding little progress has been made. “Most of the time, I have to get in touch with the people I’m nominating, because I have to get their CV or tick a box to say I’ve asked them. So I’ll write to these extraordinarily eminent women or really distinguished scholars of colour and I’ll say, ‘Have you been nominated for this before?’ And usually, people are like, ‘No!’ No one’s thought to nominate them for that prize.” And the problem is not just “who’s being nominated – it’s who’s deciding. Lots of those judging processes in science are quite opaque.” Science institutions and societies that offer prizes and research grants need to do more to show potential nominees how to put together a successful application and then hold their judging panels accountable, Wade says: “Even just making sure the professors know their names are going to be out there, so they have to actually behave – they can’t just give the prize to their friends’ students.”
We are sitting outside now, in a quiet paved courtyard, away from the hustle and bustle of the university canteen. Wade isn’t wearing a coat and there are heavy rain clouds threatening on the horizon. But I have already learned she isn’t the kind of person who allows a bleak outlook to put her off doing anything: “I’m fine,” she tells me, brushing off my suggestion we move indoors. “I’m very resilient.”
She is also formidable. Wade’s own Wikipedia page lists accolade after accolade for her work as a campaigner, including a British Empire Medal for services to gender diversity in science, and she gets up to three requests a day to give talks or participate in events. To relax, she goes running and hangs out with people who are not scientists (including the actor Daniel Radcliffe, who is a childhood friend). She has also written a nonfiction picture book for children about nanoscience, Nano: The Spectacular Science of the Very (Very) Small, which has been translated into multiple languages.
She hasn’t read her Wikipedia page, she tells me. She doesn’t even know how many awards she has won and when I try to bring up her accomplishments, she immediately changes the subject. She bristles when I try again. “I don’t like talking about it,” she says, and again, I get the impression she is embarrassed. I think about how young and driven she is, and how much of her life she spends trying to help other people and change science and academia for the better. Is it paying off? I ask. All these hours you are devoting to nominating other scholars for awards? Excitedly, she tells me that yes, 10 times so far, the scientists she has nominated have won “big prizes, that come with lots of money”.
She has even successfully nominated people outside her discipline. “I like a challenge,” she says. “And I think writing Wikipedia has made me a lot better at writing proposals and applications.” Her successes give her a “special buzz. If I write a prize nomination for someone and then they get the prize, it’s truly awesome. I love that so much.” It is rewarding, she says, to help brilliant scientists get recognition for the “cool things” they are doing, but that’s not the only reason she does it. “I feel like it’s progress, and I feel like that does not only impact them.”
Wade has noticed that, after a scientist wins a major award that she has nominated them for, their university will often send out a press release, highlighting the scientist’s achievements in the face of historic prejudice. She can’t help wondering, at that point, why no one in their department or support network thought to nominate the scientist in the first place. “You just think: what a mess this whole world is in.”
Of course, what makes Wade special is that she doesn’t “just think” these things. She actually tries to do something about them. I ask her what motivated her to create that first Wikipedia page, what personal, racial or sexist injustice lit this desire for equality within her. “I’ve had a very privileged upbringing and I came through life thinking no one had barriers,” Wade tells me. She is the daughter of two doctors, she grew up in the leafy north London suburb of Hampstead and attended South Hampstead High School, a selective private school for girls. “I’m not an idiot – I knew racism and sexism existed. But I didn’t think young people in the UK faced barriers studying subjects. And then I got to university at Imperial and everyone was ferociously bright, but very privileged. A lot of students went to private school and in my subject, physics, it was extraordinarily white and extraordinarily dominated by men.” She got quite a shock when she first walked into her department. “It’s not subtle. You notice it straight away – there’s 250 people in a year group and 20% are women and there’s one Black person.”
Wade started to think about how, as an academic, it affects your sense of belonging in your department, “to look around and not see many people who look like you, to look at the lecturers and see almost no one who looks like you”.
The more she progressed in her career, the more she realised how unjust it is that “fiercely bright young people” do not get the same opportunities as their more privileged peers and end up unable to see science as a career for them. “I’ve been very lucky to have what I’ve had. And I think realising not everyone has that makes me very angry.” What calms her down helps her to carry on, is reaching out to young people and changing their perspective about science and scientists. “That motivates me a lot. It compels me to keep going.”
We have been talking for two hours now and it’s time for me to leave. But before I go, I want to know how she manages to stay so positive – what enables her, mentally, to take decisively optimistic actions every single day. What gives her hope for the future? It is the knowledge that she is not alone, she says. “There’s a whole community of us, of outspoken people who are really proactive about changing academia. And it’s not a small group. It’s big.”
One day, she promises me, “We’ll get to the stage where I don’t have to keep doing the things I do, because I won’t need to.” She smiles, gives me a quick hug – and rushes off to change the world.
Nano: The Spectacular Science of the Very (Very) Small by Jess Wade is published by Walker Books at £12.99. Buy it now for £11.82 at guardianbookshop.com
• This article was amended on 3 October 2023 to correct one of the honours received by Dr Wade; in an earlier version we mistakenly said she had an MBE, when the intended reference was to the British Empire Medal (BEM).
