British chemist: “I’m in the same year as Ian Fleming and Tony Kirby (fellow emeritus professors). I’m a Fellow of New Hall, now Murray Edwards. I think there were three women doing part 2, if I remember rightly. Then when I became a graduate student, I was probably the only one, I couldn’t swear to that. But I stayed at Newnham College where I’d been an undergraduate, so I had a lot of friends who where doing PhDs, although not in chemistry - in other science departments and the arts. For me the women’s college, and there were only women’s colleges then, provided a very good support and was a very different environment from the department. But it’s also true that if there’s only one of you, you don’t notice you’re different. It’s when you get more than one you start to notice! “My research supervisor, Norman Sheppard, who died last year at the age of 93, was always very careful to make sure when we had visitors that it was clear that I was a graduate student, to make sure people realised. And the other thing is that being a member of a women’s college, the people who supervised us were all people who wanted to teach women and were quite prepared to treat us equally. It was only later, in the 70s, when there were a lot more women and there were mixed colleges that some women felt that they didn’t belong. “I would say my generation never had any feeling that we didn’t belong. I think that was one of the strengths of the women’s colleges. We could see successful women academics. All the fellows were women and they were academics. It was important for me as a research student to have the network and the social life of the college, to meet other research students in college as well as here in the lab.”
