Students from the University of Bradford were so ticked off by the antics at a “sexist and inappropriate” awards ceremony that they’ve handed their prize back. And the woman who discovered pulsars 50 years ago explains why she’s OK about the Nobel Prize for her work going to someone else.
Makes you wonder whether the organisers of the Digital Entrepreneur Awards have heard about the fallout in Silicon Valley regarding sexist behaviour, gender pay gaps and how few women work in tech?
Women receiving awards at the Digital Entrepreneur event were regaled with sexist jokes against a backdrop of women who were almost wearing some clothes. Mark Garratt, External Affairs Director, University of Bradford said in a statement, “It was like going back to the days of Bernard Manning…We thought afterwards and we couldn’t possibly keep the award. The whole ceremony didn’t sit comfortably with what, as a university, we are trying to promote.”
Faced with a social media backlash, the organisers stated, “Our aim was to celebrate tech and never to undermine the incredible women in the industry or do anything to negate the work everyone in the industry is doing to promote equality and redress the balance”. Wonder what they’d have done had that been their aim? Tar and feathers?
No Nobel prize
Fifty years ago today a young PhD student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, made what one of her colleagues described as “the greatest astronomical discovery of the 20th century”.
She had identified pulsars: small spinning stars only 19 miles across that are left behind when a normal star dies. The discovery was deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize in Physics but it was awarded to her [male] supervisors, not her.
She was asked how she felt about that on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She replied, “There is no Nobel Prize in Astronomy, nor for Mathematics…This was the first time the Nobel Community had deemed astro-physics to be good enough, if you like, to be given a physics prize. I was a student and they don’t recognise students, or they didn’t then, they have subsequently, but at that stage they were just the dross.
“I think I’ve done extremely well out of it because if you get a Nobel Prize, no-one gives you anything ever again as they feel they can’t match it, whereas if you don’t get a Nobel Prize, you get everything that moves, so there’s a party every year, more or less.”
She’s not kidding: Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Visiting Professor of Astrophysics, Department of Astrophysics, University of Oxford,
Pro Chancellor, Trinity College Dublin. Class act or what?
The Persistent Woman 