Watching 'Andy's Dinosaur Adventures' on CBeebies passively this morning, a few things struck me.
An excellent, engaging female curator is head of the dinosaur gallery, but her male researcher, a bit of a charming chancer, gets access to a whizz-bang piece of kit, and 'borrows' her research equipment and publications when using it to do unapproved overseas fieldwork with no risk assessment or PPE. He then doesn't include his senior female colleague in his high-profile discoveries (despite her being vastly better-qualified to make good use of them) and - whilst she is doing the teaching, excellently, and expressing supportive surprise at his findings - says 'Shhh!' with a conspiratorial wink to the people who will provide the long-term funding.
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| Clanger. |
By the next time we see him, he's in charge of the prehistoric gallery, and his excellent female colleague is nowhere to be seen. Instead, there's a new female curator-manager and again, despite her being the expert, she's not allowed to know about the whizz-bang research kit either. The charming chancer now supervises a female researcher, but she's only partly allowed in on his research, and you know she'll not secure a higher-profile post for years, while he'll soon be in charge of his own institute.
Any accurately summarized parallels with the dynamics of UK academic science are bound to be coincidental.
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