Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We want to talk about all things periods and how they affect our daily lives as chemists at Oxford. We would love to here your views and opinions:
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Instagram
Follow us on LinkedIn
Periodically, the podcast that covers all things periods and chemistry!
Each week, over this series of six episodes, we here at the University of Oxford will be taking a deep-dive into just how periods have affected us in tutorials, exams, labs and just generally studying at undergrad. We want to talk about how periods can sometimes just get in the bloody way!
Periodically is funded by the Royal Society of Chemistry Equality and Diversity fund.
Elba
Periodically, the podcast that covers all things periods in chemistry. How did the two overlap? Well, here at the University of Oxford, we've been looking into just that. How does having periods have an impact on studying an undergraduate chemistry degree? Over this series of six episodes, we'll be taking a deep dive into just how periods have affected us in tutorials, exams, labs, and just generally studying at undergrad. We want to talk about how periods can sometimes just get in the bloody way. We'd like to give a huge thanks to the RSC Equality and Diversity Fund for supporting this podcast. Your hosts today are...
Charlie
Hi, I'm Charlie.
Lottie
Hi, I'm Lottie.
Felicity
Hi, I'm Felicity.
Charlie
And today we're going to be talking about the experience of having periods and attending tutorials. Tutorials are a big part of the Oxford undergraduate experience. They're when we have small groups, usually two to three students with a tutor, and we'll normally have one tutorial per topic. It is usually structured around a tutorial sheet or a tut-sheet which we are required to submit beforehand. This is a really substantial piece of work that usually takes around 10 hours to complete and we then use it to scaffold our learning during the tutorial. This is the main academic event of the week, the culmination of most of the week's work. It is the point where most students have their understanding of a topic click so any hindrance due to periods can have a huge effect which is what we want to talk to you about today. Hannah Bruce a former undergraduate chemist wrote her dissertation on the gendered experiences of tutorials. Her main finding was that female students do more work in tutorials and she found that female students particularly struggled with three main areas; self-censoring, imposter syndrome and relatedness. We're going to talk to you a bit about each three. Self-censoring is when students don't speak up in tutorials for fear of appearing stupid or dragging tutorials behind for everyone else. Lottie and Felicity, is this something that you feel you might have experienced during your undergrad?
Lottie
Yeah, definitely. But it took me a long time to realise I was doing it when I got here because it definitely wasn't something I used to do very much at my sixth form and it's definitely got better as I've known the people in my college and my tutors better and I've also had overwhelmingly male tutors and tutorial partners, which isn't true across all colleges. It's also worth noting that I used to have lots of anxiety when I first started university here and so I don't think it'd be reasonable or very good science to attribute all of my reluctance to contributing tutorials just to gender. Lots of people across all subjects feel really intimidated by the environment at Oxford. It can be really high pressure and feel very prestigious and overwhelming so that I think there are lots of people from lots of different backgrounds who really struggle to contribute to tutorials. However, I could name to you lots of times I've had an answer in tutorial that I'm sure of and to be honest this is just because I've looked it up or it's a named reaction or I found in the textbook and I've answered a two partners question if they've asked what the answer is and they've ignored my answer and asked a male member of the tutorial instead and part of this could be that the male member is seen as cleverer than me or is getting better grades but I've witnessed similar attitudes towards other female chemists when they've been there and I also think I can see it towards female tutors when I've had tutorials with them and maybe this is just me being very protective and conscious of it. But I swear that sometimes my male colleagues feel the need to verify what a female tutor tells them in a way that I just haven't seen when it was a male tutor and maybe that's because they see them as less advanced in their field and maybe I'm being too cautious, as I said and it is really hard to know if it is gender causing this or whether these people just happen to be women. And in the name of good science, I am very reluctant to claim causation if it could just be correlation. However, I feel like my anecdotal evidence matches Hannah's findings and I really don't think it's intentional from male colleagues. It really is difficult for all of us to disentangle our association of clever chemist with male presenting.
Felicity
I think interestingly, like I've had a really positive experience with tutorials in this regard. Like, I often feel really comfortable to speak up and ask questions and this is different from my experience at secondary school. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this. I felt absolutely petrified to ask any question and I also felt like my intelligence was something that I kind of constantly felt like I had to prove and I think at Oxford in the tutorial system, there's only two to three students and I felt that that was much more of an approachable environment for me to sort of speak up. But I do think that this is largely down to me being very lucky with who I do my tutorials with and also my tutors. So for those of you who might not know, Oxford is split up into 30+ colleges and within each college, there's a small number of students from each subject. So there's about six to eight chemists in each college, so there's six at my college and there's three to four tutors associated with that and then you follow through with those same students and tutors for the whole three years. So if you get lucky with those people which I have. I'm in a largely female cohort which I think really helps me personally. My tutors are split between female and male. My tutors are very encouraging, very patient and I think the people that I do chemistry with we gel with quite well and there's not a sense of competitiveness which I think I felt maybe more at secondary school. So I think I've been very lucky in that regard. I think that I kind of did experience at secondary school I can really like relate to Lottie and I can see myself doing this if I was kind of in a different scenario in terms of who I study with and also my tutors.
Charlie
I think it's really interesting how you both have different takes on this. Lottie I think it's really important how you say feel like you can be ignored sometimes in tutorials and especially when tutorials are such an important part of teaching here at Oxford making sure that the experience is the same for everyone I think is something that is really important for the undergraduate degree and Felicity I think your point about having a good tutor group and a good tutor is again it's really important. I think this might necessarily be an issue that's heightened at Oxford with the fact that you have the same tutor group all pretty much throughout your degree with the same tutor that you have throughout the degree, which is quite different to other universities. I can only speak from my experience at Edinburgh where I did my undergrad but we had different tutorials and different tutorial groups pretty much, well we had a different tutor every week and we had different tutorial groups every term so this was something that if you did have a situation where you weren't in a good tutor group or you didn't have a good tutor who was maybe listening to you and your experiences that this wasn't such a big issue because it was only going to happen for one week so I think that's quite interesting how the contrast between different universities on this aspect. The second part that Hannah brought up in her thesis was the fact that females experienced imposter syndrome and increased feelings of self-doubt and anxiety. Again Felicity and Lottie is this something that you feel like you have experienced in your tutorials?
Lottie
Yeah I mean definitely to begin with I would only answer a question if I had the exact answer from the lecture notes or I knew it was correct and I've had big difficulties trusting my instinct and just sort of for context here in tutorials here we are presented with completely new information and often we haven't actually had the lectures yet which means that you can't really know the answer or be sure of it like you can in A-level which is a huge huge difference from being in sixth form and how you feel in tutorials I think can be really really tutor dependent as you saying for this tea because some tutors are incredibly supportive and really value your input and makes you feel supported and comfortable and like you just you can learn, the answer you can get to it yourself even if you don't know it but definitely some tutors can make people feel like they're being stupid or asking quote silly questions some even will say things like this is in the lecture notes you really should know this which doesn't make you feel like it's a safe space to offer your opinions or your input and I think for me my anxiety around tutorials definitely increases during my period. I get to feel very spaced out during my period as if I'm drunk and no one would trust their drunk self to talk to their tutor. So I try and answer a lot fewer questions on these days and I have even given my two partners texts before some tutorials saying that I feel really spaced out and would they be able to help me if the tutor asks me any difficult questions and I'm lucky that they really do try to do this but it often means that I really struggle to follow the tutorial and so I miss out on understanding and I won't realise that I haven't understood something and won't be able to ask the tutors for help.
Felicity
I also feel like I've definitely struggled with imposter syndrome and self-doubt since coming to university. I think I still really struggle to kind of believe that I'm intelligent specifically in like a STEM setting, kind of seeing myself as a scientist. I really struggle with that idea. I think kind of throughout my life I've always been labelled as hardworking and I was hardworking and that's not at all a negative label but I think there is a stereotype that women are sort of studious and organised and kind of quietly intelligent whereas I think there is a more of a stereotype of men being sort of disorganised but sort of brilliant and more of that genius type. And I think that I really have absorbed that throughout my life and I think I do kind of believe that my academic achievements aren't due to intelligence, it's more due to hard work and I think that in a tutorial setting that really does become more of a problem because like Lottie was saying, you know, you're thrown lots of unfamiliar things, you're being asked things on the spot and it is about trusting your instinct and your intuition more and I think that with a tutorial, you can't prepare for it in the same way. So if you kind of feel like your intelligence is due to hard work, you can't work through a tutorial to get the answer because like we said, it's all on the spot or a lot of it is anyway. So I think it is much easier to doubt yourself in that setting and like Lottie again was saying, it is an intimidating, intense setting being around really impressive academics, other Oxford students. So yeah, I think in that regard, I definitely have had a lot of self-doubt and imposter syndrome.
Charlie
I think it's really interesting what you said Felicity about the fact that women are perceived more as hardworking, organised, whereas it can seem like the male equivalent of that is this genius type and I think that that's something that I've related to a lot. Even I would say to myself when I was revising for my undergrad exam, I just have to do more revision because I'm just not quite as good on the spot as everyone else and that was never true I still did really well in my exams same as like my male counterparts but I had this belief as well but you know I had to be even more hard-working just to be kind of up with them so yeah I think this is really interesting and I think something that kind of fits in well to our perceptions and also how our mental health is related to our periods as like Lottie said about how this can feed into our anxieties and then when we're on our period or we are premenstrual this can really affect kind of our outlook on the week and I think that that's something that's not talked about much is that we very clearly have to deal with mental health issues relating to periods, which is either due to the period itself or the pills that we've been taken and this is something that we don't talk about very much and I feel like something that we should talk about more and having conversations like this, like we are now, I think it would really help increase our understanding that sometimes it is just harder for us to perform as well as usual because our bodies are also fighting against us, whether that be physically with pain or with our mental health as well.
Felicity
Yeah I really relate to that and something that I find is that sometimes I do struggle with pre-menstrual kind of mental health symptoms and obviously confidence fluctuates with events that happen like you're always going to feel less confident or more confident depending on how things are going generally but my confidence definitely fluctuates with my cycle and sometimes I feel like really relieved when I get my period because I'm like oh god like the past three days wasn't, you know, those things weren't real I was just you know feeling down and you know insecure and whatever because maybe it's premenstrual symptoms and I and I think talking about it is really important so that you do realise that you might feel certain ways and it's not necessarily true or real about yourself, it might be your confidence fluctuating with your cycle. Because there are definitely parts of my cycle where I feel much more confident. So yeah I think it's important to be aware of that.
Charlie
Yeah and I think this definitely comes into what Hannah was saying about the self-censoring and the imposter syndrome is that like not only do we already have those kind of preconceptions anyway for other reasons such as the idea that women are seen as hard-working and not as genocides but also the fact that our brain is kind of working against us a little bit especially when we have dips in our mental health due to our cycle. So yeah I think that's really interesting. The final point that Hannah talked about was this idea of relatedness which is how female students relate to their students through shared experiences. For example, out of an academic kind of situation, I prefer to ask to see a female doctor when I'm talking to them about period-related problems and this is because I think they'll have a slightly deeper or more personal understanding of the kind of experience that I want them to help me with and this is something that can be related to in chemistry as well. In the main chemistry department, we only have 22% of the staff which are female and Hannah states in her thesis that the lack of female representation here threatens female students' sense of belonging and relatedness, perpetuating the leaky pipeline. Now the leaky pipeline is something that's referred to a lot in chemistry and it's this idea that yes we can get women into undergraduate and pretty well into postgraduate roles but as soon as we go further and further up, up until like professorships we lose out on women and where are they going what is this leak and I think that this relatedness that Hannah talks about is something that we find might be kind of important to talk about with periods. So Lottie and Felicity have you ever felt that you're missing this relatedness and is it something that you think is involved with having periods?
Lottie
Yeah, I've had I'm not sure exactly but I think about seven tutorials here with female tutors out of I think about 80 or so I've had in my three years here and it's of course incredibly difficult to be quantitative about how this has affected my learning or to explain with words why it would feel more comfortable with a female tutor however this is an experience I and many other female chemists have talked about. I would find it difficult to tell my male tutors about my period and I don't think I ever have. I'm really passionate about periods not being taboo and will be the first and have been the first to happily make people my age a bit uncomfortable if I think it's relevant to bring up my period. But the reality of telling tutors is quite different because I'd be worried about making them feel uncomfortable so that they subconsciously liked me or helped me less and it seems silly saying that out loud because we all know in theory that that shouldn't be the case. But when you're feeling like the odd one out anyway, it seems easier just to keep quiet and try to be like everyone else. Also it isn't like you're describing Charlie in Edinburgh, as Felicity was saying, here we see the same tutors for three years, so we want them to see us positively and have a good rapport. You don't want them to feel like you aren't hard-working and that you're just making excuses.
Felicity
I think I've also really struggled with the idea of relatedness throughout my degree and I think I agree with everything that Lottie was saying, you know, not wanting to kind of kick up a fuss in quotation marks and I think everything that I was kind of saying about the imposter syndrome in the previous question is basically down to this lack of relatedness, not only in the chemistry department at Oxford, but just like, you know, society as a whole, all the little ways in which women might be presented slightly different in the media versus men, I think all have an effect on your self-image. And I think having more female tutors is really important, but I think something else is the lecturers. I think I'm in second year now, and I think it has been more split, which is really nice. But I remember in first year, it was kind of like a very positive surprise if it was a female lecturer and it does make you realise how nice it is to see someone that looks like you or dresses like you in that role and something else is that the lecturers often go into the history of science. You know, they'll have a slide covering kind of who made really profound findings in the concepts that we're learning about and it's nearly always a white male and obviously, you know, Oxford can't go back in time and put more women in STEM. But I do think it kind of needs to be acknowledged, you know, what kind of effect that has on the females in the room, you know, constantly seeing again and again, that it was men that discovered the things we're learning about, you know, constantly having textbooks written by overwhelmingly men and it's just, that is gonna affect our psyches and how, you know, our ability to see ourselves in that type of research role and I do think in terms of tutorials specifically, it would be great to have more female tutors. Obviously, I think it's really important, like we've said, to have role models to be able to kind of relate to them more free shared experiences. But I do think it's important to say that female tutors, just like male tutors, just like all of us, have unconscious bias and I think that even if there was 50-50 miraculously tomorrow in the Oxford Chemistry Department female to male tutors, there will still be issues with this type of thing if we don't talk about it and if tutors aren't aware of their unconscious biases that we have. So I think having more women in these decision-making positions and being, you know, more female teachers is really important, but they can also have these unconscious biases as well.
Charlie
I think it was really interesting what you were saying Felicity about how firstly, even when we're taught chemistry, we are taught a lot about these findings that have been made in the past, usually by white males, and how that does affect us because if we're constantly being shown that it's not going to give us too much of this idea of relatedness, we're not going to see many female role models. This is something that I actually had the opportunity, which I'm very grateful for, at Edinburgh to do a bit of work on, where we were given some money by the RSC equality and diversity grant again, to look at how there is representation in A-level textbooks or A-level equivalents across Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England and we talked a lot about this, about these both images and names that we perceived and we kind of like analysed first and saw what the kind of percentages were and we basically found that in the AQA one in the English book that there wasn't any mention of male or female names or there was no difference in the pictures that were shown and all the pictures were shown were basically very concentrated on the science and this gets away I think it's quite good because it shows like it doesn't matter for the learning like you don't need to necessarily name these people or show pictures of them but you can still get that teaching across I think that was really interesting but again it also lacks this relatedness because there aren't any pictures of females and stuff and there aren't any female names so it's like it helps in one way but also I can see that the other side of the argument with that, so I think it's a really interesting point that you've brought up again here and even extending it to university lectures. As well, I think Lottie what you said about this idea that you don't want to create a fuss, you don't want to stand out, is something that I think a lot of us with periods can relate to. The idea that we don't want to be perceived any differently because we're feeling slightly different. I found it harder to talk about period-related stuff, even with my PhD supervisor who is really supportive and I eventually got the courage only a few months ago before we were making this podcast where I decided to Tell him the reason I have to take these days off for illness is due to my period. But that took me basically having to do this podcast and not wanting to sound like a hypocrite to be able to do it. So I think that's yeah, I think it's a really important point I think quite a lot of people can relate to and it is a very hard point for people personally I think all of these points are something that you guys as listeners can hopefully maybe relate to and think about too and we're really interested if you have any ideas that we haven't talked about yet. So in addition to what we found around Hannah's thesis, we also talked about how feeling unwell and the possibility of missing tutorials is something that worries us as I mentioned tutorials are so important in the Oxford undergrad that missing one just can have a huge impact on your understanding of a particular topic. Lottie and Felicity, have periods ever impacted your tutorial learning and how has that made you feel and maybe what could the department do to improve tutorials in this regard?
Felicity
I think for me my periods have affected my learning and tutorials but just due to the nature of my period pains probably maybe not significantly as others. I know that some people kind of get sudden pains or cramps. On my period I just tend to feel like generally a bit sick, a bit achy, just a bit uncomfortable. So definitely like you know it's really good to feel comfortable in tutorials so I'm sure I do kind of absorb a little bit less on those days when I'm feeling ill and things. But I think it probably has more of a significant effect on my work prior to the tutorial. You know, struggling to like go to the libraries, not wanting to like sit at my desk and work prior to tutorial. So I think it's probably more of an effect in that regard. I think one of the main ways that the department could improve tutorials is honestly just making these conversations less of a taboo. I think hopefully this podcast will help with that. But obviously, the department currently is largely male-dominated, and it might be something that just doesn't cross a lot of their minds. And I think with a lot of the things about Hannah's thesis that we were talking about earlier, it's again, it's about being aware of those unconscious biases. It might be something that simply the tutors haven't considered and it's really important that these conversations are had so that tutors can go away and think, you know, do I treat my female students differently to my male students? I think also allowing students to choose their tutorial groups is really important. I personally like my tutors let us choose our tutorial groups but I think there are certain tutors that don't and I think there are maybe certain people in your cohort that you feel more comfortable with so I think having the freedom to do that is really important.
Lottie
Yeah, I spoke about how my tutorials were impacted earlier and I do think this has generally contributed to me lacking knowledge in certain areas. This is especially true about content we covered in first year and part of this is because our tutorials were online then which I found really difficult as a format to ask questions. I think the impact on periods on tutorials is much less straightforward to mitigate than other areas we've talked about such as labs. I think the flexibility on groups as you were talking about Felicity and about timings as well could be useful if there was a choice of days for example, as well as increased representation of females but also all minorities generally. I think as you said the increased conversation around these topics so students can just be honest with their tutors and for that to be normal and for them not to have to worry about what the tutor might be thinking about them. Crucially from the tutor side, I think a good bit of old-fashioned compassion and taking the time to check in with students and working towards creating a supportive tutorial environment and one that fills students with self-belief is just so crucial. I think it's also really important not to underestimate how these tutorial experiences scale up. The two ways I think are most crucial are firstly the effect on students' self-perception. If women, and this goes for minorities in general, in chemistry, think that they aren't being as clever as their peers, they opt out of becoming academics. So this can begin with belittling comments from a tutor or a tutorial partner. Secondly, the contribution to the attainment gap between male and female students. If women get lower grades than their male colleagues, which is currently the situation faced by the department, then it simply just becomes more difficult for them to enter academia, where often you are asked not just for your class of degree but for your position in the year. This can lead to a destructive cycle and means that despite the increase in female undergraduates, the number in academia just struggles to increase accordingly and thus future years still don't see themselves represented. I think it's really important to reiterate how this 'leaky' pipeline doesn't just magically appear after graduation but has its seeds sown right from the earliest days of our education.
Charlie
I think that's really well put Lottie. I think all of this that we're trying to talk about in the tutorial episodes is that based on Hannah's thesis the reason we actually kind of looked to do this podcast in the first place was when she was asking students about their experiences a lot of the time even though it wasn't directly brought up in the questions students tend to bring up that the reason that they were finding troubles could have included periods and periods came up quite a lot and that's why we eventually decided to make this podcast to look into it in a bit more detail. So as Lottie said, you know, we really want to kind of reduce this leaky pipeline and that's I guess the big dream and to do that we have to consider more people with different experiences and try to be empathetic and understand their situation and one of the ways we can do that as how we've talked about today is by creating a more supportive tutorial environment where people feel like yes they can tell their supervisors if they're not feeling particularly well and also that if this is the case and you haven't been able to do the work at the beginning of the tutorial as well as you wanted that that is also noted as due to you feeling ill because of your period. So with that I would like to say thank you very much and we hope that you enjoyed our talk about tutorials today.
Elba
Thank you so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed our discussion and hopefully it was relatable for those studying with periods and for those listening that don't experience periods, we hope you can understand a bit more about the day-to-day issues they can cause. Please feel free to let us know your thoughts and opinions. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @periodically_ox. Again, we would like to give a huge thanks to the RSC Equality and Diversity Fund for supporting this podcast.