Jessica Wade: evaluation

Transcript context

…More fair, more balanced — does it give better outcomes? People are just as innovative, just as creative, and just as wonderful at doing the science. There was a really interesting paper recently that looked at the impact of institutional privilege on generating the number of science papers. It wasn’t that people were making more breakthroughs; it’s just that they had more opportunities to make those breakthroughs because you’d given them so much money to be able to do it. So, I’d get people to judge based on the research that was being proposed, and the infrastructure or support that they’ll get to be able to do it. I’d also think we probably need to have . . . I think this is starting to happen. We have a national quantum technologies program here. There needs to be a really serious look about how we create materials and technologies that are actually going to benefit society and not just be these things that we have to cryogenically cool or do in extraordinary vacuum chambers. Get a little bit more creative and forward-looking at looking at new molecular materials and thinking about these new challenges to make sure that we make these technologies. From a very personal . . . I’m not being very responsible for everyone else working on materials — I’d say we need to invest more in molecular materials. But I’d also say we need to get rid of these biases. Things like making sure everyone has equal opportunity to prepare for interview, making sure everyone has equal opportunity to put the time into writing a proposal. I wrote a bunch of proposals last year, which completely exhausted me, but it would take a month to write this perfect science proposal. Sure, but isn’t that totally wrong? Shouldn’t we make the proposals three pages?…

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