Despite some advances, men still dominate science but one academic is working hard to get women and peers of colour the recognition they deserve
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.”
