by Edwina Dunn
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I started in banking, which is a good job, but I found that it didn’t suit me as a person and, after a year, I knew I needed to do something different. I looked at museum work, at UN work, I visited schools and I volunteered to run a youth club.
I decided to go into education, but, after my first day of teaching in the school where I was placed to do my PGCE [Postgraduate Certificate in Education], I was worried. Next day, I went in to my university and everyone was talking about how brilliant teaching was and how much they were looking forward to taking it all on, and I remember sitting in the student bar and contrasting myself with this barrage of enthusiasm and optimism, and thinking, ‘I’m really not sure.’
I was concerned about how well I would manage challenging behaviour, because my way of leadership is reflective of the fact that I’ve never been extrovert. At that point I’d never been very assertive and I was keen to do things holistically, that is to work in a complex way with people, rather than go out front. But I went on to find that it is the generative side of things that is important in teaching. It’s not about being extrovert and assertive; it’s about creating knowledge and understanding with young people in a classroom, which is effectively your own domain, and that’s what I loved. When I saw students who had struggled with something suddenly get it or suddenly feel successful, I felt huge energy and excitement.
I chose to go straight in at the deep end and teach in London. I so wanted students who found it difficult to engage with education to learn, to get qualified and become economically empowered and independent. Being a generator of possibility underpins the approach that I’ve taken to headship at Mulberry. It’s important to me to bring down the barriers that exist for young people who experience alienation and exclusion because of their race, gender or financial circumstances – all the schools I’ve taught in have had significant proportions of students on free school meals.
Being a generator of possibility underpins the approach that I’ve taken to headship at Mulberry.
My whole drive to give young women the power of choice comes from my mother. She had me at 17 and she was a very brilliant, passionate, intelligent woman, who could have gone to university. She was a postal officer and later became a prominent member of the Communication Workers Union. She fought on behalf of workers who had experienced difficulty in their jobs because they had had accidents or been subjected to racism or sexism. I remember her fighting hard on behalf of a cleaner who had been injured at work.
Her early life as a young mother was dedicated, in some very difficult circumstances, to ensuring that I got the best education and had all the things that could equip me to be self-reliant. She always believed that a young woman should have the maximum opportunity to be financially independent and she really wanted me to go to university. I am inspired by her as a pioneer. She was a modern suffragette. The awful thing is that she died very young, at the age of 52, of ovarian cancer, which was diagnosed late. Sadly, she was not alive when I got my headship or my doctorate, but she did see me become a teacher and she was proud.
When the First Lady was looking for a place to launch her Let Girls Learn campaign in this country, our school was on the shortlist and we were visited by the US Embassy. With my team, I explained why they should pick Mulberry. We really needed her visit to our community because, at the time, a lot of the stories about Tower Hamlets had been about girls going to Syria, and the pressure on girls in this area was significant. So it was important that somebody of Michelle Obama’s standing visibly demonstrated that Mulberry students were important, chosen because of their achievements and who they were.
It’s not satisfactory that just 27 per cent of women are represented at board level in certain parts of business and industry, and it’s not enough to say that it needs to be 30 per cent. It needs to be 50 per cent.
Although girls are educated equally in this country, that doesn’t actually translate into equal opportunities later on. It’s not satisfactory that just 27 per cent of women are represented at board level in certain parts of business and industry, and it’s not enough to say that it needs to be 30 per cent. It needs to be 50 per cent. In secondary education, just 36 per cent of head teachers are women. I don’t think that’s acceptable. Since 2007, we’ve been holding women’s conferences to provide an opportunity for girls to have access to female role models in one huge injection. Wonderful women come to speak and, among them, girls are able to see someone whom they might like to be in years to come. Our aim is to create a partnership of equals. Young men and young women should have equal space, visibility and voice.
Vanessa’s Object
A mulberry tree. I strongly identify with the mulberry tree after which the school is named. The mythology about the tree is that it was planted by the Huguenots, the first immigrants to Tower Hamlets, but we have had a tree surgeon estimate its age at only 150 years. Nevertheless, the tree is a symbol for the school and the community, for groups of people coming from places of persecution, or coming with nothing to find a better life and seeing Tower Hamlets as a place where they could settle and find creative energy and resources to grow. Mulberry School has been on this site for 50 years but there was a school here before, which was built in the 1900s for the poor. So there has been a sense of social justice about this school for a long time.
The tree is in the courtyard where girls play, the leaves are heart-shaped and students use them to make cards. Sometimes we have Mulberry debates under the tree. It’s a place of significance to everyone and Michelle Obama’s visit began in the mulberry tree courtyard where we sang and danced for her and gave her gifts of art.
Everything I do for work is about Mulberry School. I don’t have children and, in a way, all Mulberry girls are my daughters. My husband feels that this is critical work and, by being supportive, he contributes, too. And recently, he bought a mulberry tree for our back garden!
DR VANESSA OGDEN
Head teacher, Mulberry School for Girls
DR CORI BARGMANN
Neuroscientist Dr Cornelia ‘Cori’ Bargmann leads the Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at Rockefeller University, New York, where she is a Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She studied biochemistry at the University of Georgia and went on to do a PhD in cancer biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with cancer researcher Robert Weinberg. Bargmann’s thesis research went on to contribute to the development of the drug Herceptin, which is used in the treatment of breast cancer. As a post-doctoral researcher, she began to use the roundworm as a model system and went on to make discoveries that explain how genes, the environment and experience shape behaviour. In 2013 she was appointed co-chair of the advisory committee for Barack Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which investigates brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, depression and traumatic brain injury.
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I was a child of the 1960s. When I was eight years old, a man landed on the moon. It was a great period for children to be inspired by science. I wanted to be an astronaut and I think all of my friends wanted to be astronauts, too. I remember looking at the moon to see if I could notice a spaceship. I even remember kind of realising that maybe getting really sick on airplanes, which I did, might be a problem for this ambition! I liked to read. I liked to know everything and, in retrospect, that was great for being a scientist. That said, I also loved music and for a while I thought I wanted to be a pianist, which has nothing to do with being a scientist at all.
I want to understand everything – that’s why I am a scientist. Now, instead of outer space, I am interested in inner space.
My father was a professor of statistics and computer science. My mother was a teacher. They both spoke five languages and had been professional translators. My mother was born in 1920 and I realise that she would have been able to play out many more of her intellectual i
nterests now than she did then. She stopped working in paid jobs after I was born. So, during my childhood, she did all the things that women did for free back then – she made recordings for the blind and she did Meals on Wheels. She also took her energy as a teacher and a scholar and focused it with laser-like attention on her children. I am the third of four girls and my parents always communicated to us that we could grow up to do anything. One of my sisters is a doctor, one is an English professor and one works in law.
Competition is a creative force. There is nothing that focuses the mind better than a smart competitor, and that’s true in any part of life.
Overwhelming curiosity is the driving force of my character. I want to understand everything – that’s why I am a scientist. Now, instead of outer space, I am interested in inner space. I feel that, in our era, the brain is the focus for exciting exploration of the unknown, in the way that the moon was in the 1960s. I am one of the people who helped plan the BRAIN Initiative. On a small scale, in my own lab, I hope we might have something useful to say about mental health, about depression and the way that emotional and motivational states make the brain function in different ways. On a large scale, through the BRAIN Initiative, my role is to help thousands of scientists in different places to do something for brain disorders. They say one person in three – that’s one member of your family – will have some sort of serious disorder affecting the brain during his or her life, whether it’s Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, schizophrenia or autism, so the medical need is tremendous.
I wouldn’t pick out one person as my greatest influence – I would say that every day one person makes me think about something in a new way or try something that I wouldn’t otherwise have tried.
People say leading a group of scientists is like herding cats, but it’s more like being the leader of a wolf pack. You are working with people who are very intelligent, independent, a bit unconventional. Everyone wants to go in the same direction but there are a lot of strong opinions about what that direction is, so a certain amount of growling and tussling occurs along the way. The goal of all scientists is to learn what has not been known, but it is a human endeavour, so sometimes several people are trying to do the same thing and it ends up being a race. Competition is a creative force. There is nothing that focuses the mind better than a smart competitor, and that’s true in any part of life.
I feel most proud that some of my students have gone on to be spectacularly successful scientists. I don’t have children so maybe my desire to nourish people and help them grow has been channelled into the graduate students in the lab. Another very satisfying thing is that the work I did as a student contributed one step on the path toward the development of one of the very first rational treatments for cancer – Herceptin. Many people were involved, and I was one of them. I am very happy to think that studying something just because you are curious can actually have an impact in patients.
My worm work continues. In your brain, there are 86 billion nerve cells that are processing information at the speed of electricity. There are also 25,000 genes that have built the brain structures, and chemicals travelling through the brain to help it function. Trying to understand how all the different levels of the brain connect to form a single coherent set of actions is something we can do in the simple brain of the worm but not yet in the complex brain of a human.
I think that the secret of my success in science is that I have very good taste in people. I’ve worked with really smart people at every stage of my career, starting with those who advised me when I was a student and going on to the people who work with me now. So I wouldn’t pick out one person as my greatest influence – I would say that every day one person makes me think about something in a new way or try something that I wouldn’t otherwise have tried.
Cori’s Object
My seven-foot grand piano. I have an attachment to the piano because it reminds me that, besides science, there are other parts of life. My husband is a neuroscientist, too, and, like me, he started by working on other aspects of biology, including cancer biology. We found each other later in life so that makes us appreciate each other more. We both love music and the opera. It’s good when you and the person you live with feel the same way about the opera! Everyone in my family played the piano – my sisters, my mother and my father, who was by far the best of us all. My happiest childhood memories are of lying in bed listening to him play Beethoven far into the night. You can take pleasure from music without being a great performer. Now I hardly play at all, but the piano as an object still matters to me.
DR CORI BARGMANN
Neurobiologist, Rockefeller University, and co-chair, BRAIN Initiative
HELENA MORRISSEY
Helena Morrissey graduated in philosophy from Cambridge University and began her career in finance at Schroders in New York. She joined the Newton Investment Management company in 1994 and was appointed CEO in 2001. In June 2014 she was appointed chair of the Investment Association, the UK’s industry trade body, the members of which manage £5 trillion between them, and in 2015 she was appointed by the Chancellor to the UK’s Financial Services Trade and Investment Board. In 2010, Helena founded the 30% Club, a cross-business initiative aimed at achieving 30 per cent women on UK corporate boards. She has been named one of Fortune magazine’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, and she was appointed CBE in the 2012 New Year’s Honours list.
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My philosophy degree has turned out to be much more useful than people might give it credit for – being philosophical is sometimes quite important in the financial world! I fell into my career. I had done double maths and physics at A-level, but after graduating I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and at the time it was fashionable to apply to the City. I didn’t really know what I was applying for, in all honesty, which is a bit shocking today when young people research their jobs so carefully. I liked the people I met at my interview with Schroders. There was a mix of men and women, and one particularly likeable woman – and I have since learned that if you like the people you are with, you are more likely to enjoy your work. Schroders offered me a job – they took about 20 graduates each year, and didn’t designate exactly what you were going to do. Shortly after, I had a call from HR saying an opportunity had arisen for one graduate to go to New York for two years and would I like to do that. So I got a bit of a break, an opportunity to do something different and a chance to learn – sometimes the hard way, by making mistakes. And that’s how I fell into fund management.
Maybe it’s partly to do with the way the recruitment process works today, but it seems very hard, hyper-competitive, more formal – you need work experience. Back then, there was more emphasis on finding the right personality. I had an unusual background, but my colleagues did too, having studied subjects such as English and history. I think at that age, you can’t always know your forte exactly, and some degree of luck is always involved. I think it’s a shame a lot of recruitment processes are a bit narrow. We [at Newton] try to take people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just those with one particular degree – we want lateral thinkers rather than people who have mastered one subject, and we are not alone in that.
It’s slightly ironic, given that people are expecting to work longer and longer, that we agonise so much over the initial job-finding – it takes away some of the spontaneity, the openness, the not knowing quite what the job will be like! I would encourage young people not to worry about not being sure what they want to do, but rather to be open to opportunities. Something will appeal and resonate. Your first job isn’t a lifelong commitment. A career might feel fulfilling at one point, but things can change. If we are going to be working for 40, maybe even 50 years, that should give us a bit more confidence to take risks, to accept that we might have several careers. I would like to see things a bit more fluid.
I believe strongly that you can create your own opportunities and one way of doing that is by asking for help when you don’t have the answers. Ther
e are different ways of achieving and learning, and playing to your strengths, but asking for advice and making sure you don’t feel completely on your own is important. It’s difficult to generalise, but women do tend to take the whole burden on themselves. For men, how they ask for help might be discreet, but they generally have a network they can call on if they’re missing something. I’ve never had a formal mentor, but I believe strongly in the power of mentoring. I have lots of people whose opinions I’m comfortable seeking, who will correct me if I’m wrong – again, openness is important.
I would encourage young people not to worry about not being sure what they want to do, but rather to be open to opportunities. Something will appeal and resonate. Your first job isn’t a lifelong commitment.
I totally subscribe to the idea of meritocracy – but the definition of merit can be very narrow. Men develop networks and allegiances; women have a different approach. The 30% Club was born out of frustration that so many women are so capable and that isn’t recognised. The homogeneity of boards and management teams was definitely a contributory factor to the financial crisis. People were too insular, they weren’t questioning each other, they had been to the same schools, they were friends. This isn’t just about women. Men are involved in the 30% Club, too, men on boards who want to see a different boardroom dynamic. We want to further a cultural shift in businesses and organisations.
Our Schoolroom to Boardroom campaign came about because we can’t wait until people are one level below the boardroom and hope they haven’t left! It’s about creating a continuum. It’s important to speak in schools – boys’ schools as well as girls’ schools. I have sons as well as daughters [she has nine children] and it’s important to make young people conscious that this issue hasn’t been solved yet. I had a few knocks in my earlier career related to my gender, including doubt over my commitment when I had just come back after having a baby. I was shocked! It never occurred to me that my gender would be a factor.