Update: BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze discussed the ethical issues on Nov 25th, listen here (until Dec 2nd)
A week ago, if you’d asked someone to name a famous woman scientist, chances are they would have said Marie Curie. Now, they’re more likely to name Brooke Magnanti.
Magnanti, for those who missed the news, is a 34-year-old cancer epidemiologist working in Bristol, who was unmasked last week as ‘Belle de Jour‘, the former prostitute who wrote Diary of a London Call Girl.
It was while trying to make ends meet, so to speak, as a PhD student, that she worked with an escort agency, earning £200 an hour take-home pay.
Or to be precise, not strictly while as a PhD student: rather, for a year between submitting her thesis in 2003 and being awarded the degree in 2004, which subtlety means that the University of Sheffield is probably cleared of benefiting from the proceeds of prostitution.
In the interview with the Sunday Times, Magnanti is reported as saying:
“I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva; and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would. . . I started to think: what can I do that I can start doing straight away, that doesn’t require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that’s cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in?”
It’s hard to know what to make of all this. Clearly, Magnanti is happy to continue making money off the back of her previous career, with a new book out now. For the moment, her Bristol colleagues (an all-woman team) remain supportive. But what about the long-term career implications if she wants to stay in research? And what does this all tell us about PhD funding?
Whatever about her personal circumstances and decisions at the time, online comments from numerous other contributors in recent days suggest that many PhD students struggle financially and, depressingly, that several have turned to lap dancing, strip clubs and prostitution.
Hardly the message needed at a time when governments want to increase the number of PhD students.
As I write this, Science Foundation Ireland is about to announce the winners of this year’s Young Women in Engineering awards, aimed at encouraging more women on to engineering courses. The scheme is one of a number which SFI introduced in response to a campaign by the Women in Technology & Science network (WITS) to improve women’s participation in science and research — Getting the Balance Right in Irish Science (2004), and which I was actively involved in.
At the time, women made up just 11% of SFI grant recipients. Today, I’m pleased to see that, based on SFI statistics for its ‘research frontiers programmes’, women made up approximately 23% of recipients in 2008 and 29% in 2009. (With no information on the size of the awards, I’ve not been able to calculate what % of the funding women receive.)
So, there is some good news, and perhaps some stereotypes have been broken.
If young girls are worried about being branded as nerds for choosing science, they now have Dr Brooke Magnanti as a career role model — although, given that she had to strip off her whitecoat to get there, it’s hard to know what kind of role model she is.
I suspect that, if stereotypes are changing, the main outcome from all this will be that people now realise, not that women scientists can be sexy, but that call-girls can be smart.
