“In my education gender never came up, which had its advantages”

For Lenka Zdeborová being a woman in STEM disciplines wasn’t something she ever contemplated about as a student. Most other people around her were men but, she says, she always had good friends among them as collaborators, tutors and role models.

Now an Associate Professor ofPhysics, Computer Science and Communication Systems in the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory - part of the School of Basic Sciences (BS) and School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC), Zdeborová says that more recently she has thought a lot about having more equal representation in the field and it’s been something particularly important to her in building her own group of students.

“When I had one or two students perhaps it didn’t matter so much but with six or seven students, for collaboration and group dynamics I realized that if there are only men it just doesn't feel right. It’s always better if there is diversity, both in terms of gender but also where people come from, the kind of personalities they have, the perspectives they bring. It’s so much better when people don’t think the same way, they inspire each other.”

“I grew up in the former Czechoslovakia before the fall of the Berlin Wall under a school system that was designed by the socialist regime. While people’s freedom was oppressed, in terms of gender balance, the system had its advantages. I was good at maths and the communist system didn’t care if you were a boy or a girl so long as you were good at that given thing. You were picked, you were trained and you were sent to the Physics and Maths Olympiad,” she says.

Having two daughters, who were born in France and now go to school in Switzerland in a very different system to herself, has therefore been an eye opener for Zdeborová, “I have been surprised to see how gender biases have become entrenched in their heads. From very early on they were coming home from a public preschool in France saying they wouldn’t play tennis because that’s for boys or that they had been mocked for playing with a car in afterschool care. So, I try to compensate for that.”

On reflection, Zdeborová thinks her education worked for her because gender never came up, particularly at a young age and when she was deciding where to direct her career. She says there are obviously many things that universities can do to increase gender diversity but to her mind, this work needs to start much earlier, “fundamentally, if the origin of the problem is that girls are discouraged from maths or science when they are say 5 or 10, then when they are 30, and applying for faculty jobs, it is hard to fix.”