Jess Wade: Physicist and Wikipedia Maven

Jess Wade: Physicist and Wikipedia Maven

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Jess Wade: And then I kind of got interested in this storytelling part, and much like everything Lost Women of Science does, in saying, hey, it's not just enough to say we don't have enough women, actually, we do have some really fantastic women, we just don't do enough of a good job of celebrating them.

Katie Hafner: I’m Katie Hafner and this is Lost Women of Science. This week we’ve decided to do something a little different. 

If you’re a regular listener of Lost Women of Science, you might have caught an episode we released in 2023 about my grandmother, Leona Zacharias. Leona was a biologist who conducted important research into a blindness epidemic affecting premature babies in the 1940s. 

But while I was growing up, my grandmother’s science never came up. It was my grandfather, Jerrold Zacharias, whose career took center stage. He was a prominent nuclear physicist who invented the atomic clock and headed the engineering division during the Manhattan Project. In 2007,  my grandfather got a well-deserved entry in Wikipedia. But to this day, my grandfather’s Wikipedia page makes no mention of my grandmother, not even in the spouse column! 

That didn’t sit right with me. My grandmother’s scientific contributions were significant. They deserved to be celebrated, which was why we did an episode about her. And eight days after we aired that program something miraculous happened. Leona suddenly got a Wikipedia page of her own. It turned out it was created by Dr. Jess Wade, the person whose voice you heard at the very beginning. 

Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who’s made it her mission to write and update the Wikipedia pages of as many women in STEM as she possibly can. And that got us thinking. We have a growing archive of information about the female scientists who we profile. We could help. So, with a grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, we’ve put together a team of people to update, elaborate, correct, and in some cases build the Wikipedia pages from scratch, of the scientists we’ve covered thus far on Lost Women of Science. 

Which brings me to today’s show…about the importance of getting the word out about women in STEM, both past and present. And who better to tell us about that than Jess Wade, who inspired our project, created the Wikipedia page for my grandmother, and who, we are proud to say, has recently joined the Lost Women of Science Advisory Board. So now I’m going to hand the mic over to Jess, to tell you what she does and why she does it. 

Jess Wade: Hello, my name is Jess Wade. I'm a research fellow and lecturer at Imperial College London in the Department of Materials. And I research new materials for electronic devices. So particularly thinking about how we control the shape and the symmetry of materials.

I guess the job of working in the university is, is really exciting because you get to do research science, like, you know, cutting edge, having great time in a lab and doing kind of fundamental discovery, but also you get to teach. So you're kind of surrounded by all of these absolutely fantastic students who come from all over the world to study engineering and physics at a university like this. And I guess that's kind of continuously inspiring and really motivating to try new things, both on the kind of scientific side, but also on innovations and teaching side and how do we teach a new generation of scientists and engineers, so they recognize that science and engineering is done by a diverse team of people from different backgrounds, with different experiences that they bring to the way that we do discoveries so we have, you know, we make breakthroughs faster.

So probably the biggest shock to me was going from, I did at high school, I study kind of sciences and arts. In the UK. You do five subjects at the end of school. You do A Levels and I did math, chemistry, physics, further maths, and art. And then I went to art school for a little bit.

So I did a year of art school before doing a physics degree and that jump from being in art school and being surrounded by diverse people from all around the world of all genders and ethnicities and whatever. And then going into a physics department, which is pretty much, especially a physics department where I did my undergrad, very high socioeconomic background, pretty much all white, and pretty much all men. Um, So we have a huge problem with diversity of demographics of people who study physics. And that was what really surprised me and motivated me to do more around trying to encourage more girls and young women to study and then stay in physics.

I don't think it's enough to just inspire people to come in. I think we have to fundamentally change research culture to keep women inside it and to make it more inclusive and beneficial for everyone. So that I kind of had started thinking about these things, you know, from when I started studying. How can we make these subjects more diverse, how can we make them more inclusive, how can we make them more equitable, you know, recognize that everyone needs different levels of support to have the same opportunity.

And then I kind of got interested in this storytelling part, and much like everything Lost Women of Science does, in saying, hey, it's not just enough to say we don't have enough women, actually, we do have some really fantastic women, we just don't do enough of a good job of celebrating them.

And I think that does two things. It means that women who are phenomenal scientists don't get credit for the work they've done. And often that credit is misplaced on male scientists. But actually also you don't do that inspirational, here are some incredible role models part, because no one sees people who look like them.

 So, so I think certainly from kind of day one of studying physics, I felt we should better tell these stories. And then the movie Hidden Figures came out. And that movie obviously showed you these phenomenal African American mathematicians whose stories had gone largely untold. And then the U. S. State Department set up this program, which was called an International Visitor Leadership Program, an IVLP. Specifically based on that movie, Hidden Figures, they called it Hidden No More, and it was 50 women scientists from 50 countries, and they took us around America, and like, I was the UK, and then there was someone from Guatemala, and someone from Mongolia, and someone from Nigeria, and, you know, just being amongst these sensational women in so many different disciplines and career stages. And, you know, UK and U. S. are not that dissimilar in lots of the challenges we face. So I was by far the most boring person on this trip, and I'd meet all these incredible women who were so inspiring, and you'd kind of look them up, and I'd just think, if I go to a search engine and if I type these people in, if it's a male scientist, they've always got a Wikipedia biography you know. 

Wikipedia instantly indexed by most search engines, so it floats to the top of a search. If you do a search on, on a search engine, if there's a Wikipedia page on that, it will be at the top of that search. Actually, there's usually a knowledge panel on the side of the search, so you've got some basic facts and figures. And if you ask a question to Siri or Amazon Alexa or Google Home, it's that knowledge panel that it will call from when it gives you an answer. So being on Wikipedia doesn't only give you that kind of check of credibility and notability when someone looks you up or help a journalist find you or help someone putting together a conference, find you or help someone writing a textbook or a teacher putting together whatever they're going to teach a class.But also it means if you ask a home assistant a question, that information is what they pull. So it's really important. And I'd look all these phenomenal women up and all of the amazing American women scientists we met. And they just invariably would not be on there. And so I guess that year I had met so many great people. I thought this was really important.and then I found out how easy it was to edit Wikipedia. Then I just thought I'll start writing these Wikipedia biographies. You know, much like pretty much every encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a huge issue with the representation and celebration of women. If you look at all of the biographies on English language Wikipedia, which is the biggest language Wikipedia, about one in five are about women.

So despite women making up 51 percent of the global population only about 19 percent of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women. And that's not just women scientists. That's women in all professional areas. That's anyone that the internet has deemed notable. Only one in five of them are women.

And, and I suppose that just angers me. And for most gender inequalities that you see in the world, you can't do anything about it, but for Wikipedia, you really absolutely can. And so, so I, I, I kind of started editing then, and I guess I haven't stopped. And, and, and the beautiful thing about it, I guess there are many, but it's like the impact that it has having these biographies and these profiles on Wikipedia and like people win prizes, people are on, you know, people get invited on news networks, people are invited to speak at conferences. 

You know, if you put a biography on Wikipedia, it will be translated to a bunch of different languages. People add to it, you know, dissimilar to a normal encyclopedia page where when it's published, even if it's incorrect, it's published. AWikipedia page is dynamic. You can update it. You can put in things about their personal life.

People can pull from that in Nepal, they can pull from that in Argentina. You know, everyone uses this and I find that really beautiful. So yeah, I love the idea that you put these stories on there. You tell a whole new generation, a whole new community about these phenomenal women scientists, and, but they go on, there's like a multiplier effect of their  impact, which is just, which is just absolutely amazing.

And the other incredible thing about Wikipedia is. Most people don't go on there and type in a scientist name like they don't go on there and type in, you know, Gladys West, who's this mathematician who did loads of the early programming for GPS. Actually, what they do is they go on there and they're reading about GPS and then they look at the people who discovered it and they find there was this African American mathematician who contributed to that.

And I love that idea that you kind of stealthily teach people about women scientists, you know, you lead with what they're inspired by and what's exciting them and what's making them curious. I like the idea that one day it takes you back to a page about a woman's scientist.

So how do you choose who to focus on? I guess it starts. I started actually writing about women physicists in the UK because I thought I could write about that. I understood that subject, you know, to the best of my ability, and they were in the UK and I could find their academic profiles or whatever, but then, you know, quickly you realize that physics in the UK is very white, especially leadership of physics in the UK, so you're doing a little bit for diversity but not very much for diversity.

And so then you've got to go further afield to different disciplines, to different nations, to different times in history. So really, there was a large part of my editing career when I could just pick a university and go through their science faculty and then pretty much write the pages of women scientists. It's harder to do that now because I've written quite a few pages. And so I go to like, lists of who's become fellow of somewhere, or who's got awards, or who's giving a keynote speech somewhere. But I think sometimes, you know, you are at a risk that Wikipedia has defined criteria for notability, which are called “notability criteria.” And for academics, they pretty much select for figures of merit we know are biased.

So we know men win more awards. We know men are more likely to be made professor. We know men get big research grants, and they're all criteria for excellence on Wikipedia. So how do you change it so that excellence actually incorporates the things that women do really well? Or how do you make sure that women are celebrated in the same way to their male counterparts?

So actually, a lot of when I'm not editing Wikipedia, when I'm not teaching and when I'm not in the lab is thinking, how can we nominate women for more prizes because actually pretty much every learned society in the world, whether it's, you know, the Institute of Physics or the AAAS want more women to be made fellow or want more women to be nominated for gold medals, but not enough people put that work in and that time in to nominate them.

And so that's a really big part of it, too, that we have to get these women recognition so that we can write their stories on Wikipedia, so they can get more recognition.

They take, well, maybe an hour to two hours is probably the average. If they're really hard to write about, it gets very frustrating. So if it's really hard to find information about them, if they, for example, change their name, and then it's impossible to find their PhD thesis or where they did their undergrad, I go kind of crazy. It's a process of much like any kind of big literature review type thing you do of having like 30 tabs open on your browser that go from like when someone was at high school to when someone retired, or whatever it is. And then you just try and populate all the space and you try and read the outlines or the beginnings or the conclusions of all the big scientific papers they've written, so that you can get a sense of what they did or look at the impact of those science papers and how it shaped a whole field or whatever.

So yeah, it kind of starts like that. It takes a few hours. And then, and then how many have I done? I've done, like, I don't know, between 2,200 pages so far. I was really adamantly and carefully doing one a day. And then I became a lecturer last October and then just got so much more. Jess, will you just do this at night time, all this extra writing.

My parents are both, my parents, both medical doctors. My mom is a psychiatrist and she was academic and clinical when I was younger. And I think that probably taught me a lot about, well, I think a, the need to do a job that contributes to society. I feel that very strongly that I, you know, it's hard living in London because you can make a lot more money if you didn't do anything like work in science or work in a university.

But actually I feel like I am best placed doing something that makes the world better. And then also that women can do anything. You know, my mom had, she moved to London when the AIDS epidemic was really happening in London and she set up all these needle exchanges so that people who were using drugs had clean needles, because that was a huge issue with the AIDS community, which was massively criticized in kind of gentrified parts of London that didn't want to admit that  drug addicts existed. And I think it's pretty cool that my mom came down from Manchester and set all that up. So certainly that motivated me and probably made me think women can do anything. and also that, uh, I like doing, I like doing things properly.

I like doing science properly. I like thinking, how can we do outreach or education properly? I like thinking, how can we better celebrate women properly? And that I think keeps me going a little bit because I'm just doing it because I want science to be better and more robust.

And I genuinely do believe science is better when diverse teams of people are doing it.

Katie Hafner: Many thanks to Jess Wade for taking the time to come on Lost Women of Science. You can find out more about our own Wikipedia Project on our website – lostwomenofscience.org – and on our Instagram page @lostwomenofsci. 

This episode was produced by Sophie McNulty. Lizzie Younan composes our music and Keren Mevorach designed the art. Thanks to Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. Thanks also to my co-executive producer Amy Scharf and senior managing producer Deborah Unger. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX.  If you go to our website - lostwomenofscience.org - you can subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. That’s lostwomenofscience.org. And do not forget to hit that all important donate button, on the top right corner. See you next time.

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