There’s nothing wrong with an old boys’ club
If there's one place where gender is non-negotiable, it is in that historic institution, The Royal Society, home to scientists since the seventeenth century. Sir Paul Nurse , its new president, is undoubtedly a man.
And that's precisely the problem for some of the members. He has just been reappointed as its president – the last time was fifteen years ago (he's now 75) – and is just one more man to add to the succession of men to lead the institution since Viscount Brounckner in 1662. That was when a group of 12 men decided to set up a "College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning". Later presidents included Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren. These presidents were diverse in their interests and personalities (though most were rather grand) but they were men, every one of them.
Sir Paul seems conscious that he's running counter to the spirit of the age by virtue of representing maleness at the head of an elite institution. "I don't mind being criticised for not being a woman," he says. "That's fine. I'm not a woman."
Well there's no arguing with that. But when word got out a few months ago that Sir Paul was being considered to lead the institution again, The Guardian reported that "fellows are divided over the prospect, with some arguing it gives the impression the organisation, which claims to be the world's oldest independent scientific academy, is a "boys' club". The Royal Society has never had a female president."
Ooh. In contemporary Britain there is no more wounding slur . Sir Paul takes exception to it. It's easy, he observes, "to say, 'the fellowship are a bunch of old boys'." But as he points out, three of the five vice-presidents and most members of the selection committee and governing council are women. Moreover, his candidacy was put to the members of the Society of both sexes and only six per cent were opposed. That seems pretty conclusive.
All this fuss seems at odds with the nature and purpose of the Institution. Are the fellows who anonymously complained to The Guardian suggesting that the election should have been rigged to favour a woman, perhaps like the all-women shortlists in the Labour Party? Are they in fact suggesting that the best candidate should have been discriminated against? Are they saying that all other considerations – his Nobel prize in physiology for instance – should be subsumed in the great, overarching issue of gender?
There are of course distinguished female scientists who would be perfectly eligible – Athene Donaldson, the Cambridge physicist, is one, but she's probably too busy to run the Royal Society. And I would hesitate if I were the governing body to tell her that she'd been chosen on account of her gender as well as her record. But should we even be thinking in these terms? It's not Sir Paul's fault he's a man. It's not his fault his predecessors were men. Funnily enough, from the website of the institution, you'd think it was almost entirely peopled by women, but then nowadays most institutions present themselves in a similar diverse fashion.
It does not, frankly, affect most people's perception of the Royal Society that its president is an elderly white bloke – outside scientists, not many people know about it. As the saying goes, those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind. What's more, it won't matter if his successor, and his successor after that, are also old, white and male . As Sir Paul's supporters have pointed out, he's also a working class elderly white bloke and in that respect rather different from many of his predecessors – he ticks a different box on the EDI checklist. But even if he were posh plus male plus white, he should be considered by scientists as a scientist for the job of representing a scientific institution. Of course other elite bodies have taken the diversity and inclusion route, and not always with happy results: the Royal Society of Literature appointed as its president Bernadine Evaristo, who is neither male nor white, and that turned out badly.
This old boys' club slur is itself discriminatory and offensive. And this debate is tedious and should be discontinued. Let's drop it now.
