Why High Achievers Still Feel Like Frauds (Anne-Marie Imafidon)

hello and welcome to doing it anyway the show where we build up confidence overcome challenges and learn how to do it anyway today i'm talking to dr anne maria maffedon she's a world-renowned computer scientist she's someone who as she herself describes it has always been the youngest the womanist the blackest person in the room and i really wanted to talk to her about how she overcomes that feeling i loved this conversation i think you will too i'm so excited to share it with you we touched on her tactics for not feeling like a fraud honestly it's advice that i wish i had had in my 20s we talked about how important it is to build a sense of community and lean on other people's experiences remember that you are not alone in going through the same thing you are not alone in going through the same thing you are not alone what you're going through and we talked about using mistakes to help build up your own confidence and how you can actually do that so if you've ever felt that you're in 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scholarships funding options tools and guidance all in one place and if you need a loan sally has options for different families and different situations college is only worth it if you do it right so don't just help your kid go help them go smarter sally dot com slash go parents dr amory emafadon welcome to doing it anyway it's so great to have you on the program thanks for having me your story is so exceptional you you've really been this child prodigy academically in school you were doing things in primary school passing two gcses at eleven you became the youngest girl ever to pass an a level you started a degree at oxford university at the age of seventeen you became one of the youngest recipients of a oxford masters in mathematics and computer science i could go on and on amory and it made me think that you ought to be somebody who from a very young age because you were such a super achiever was supremely confident and i was wondering if that was the case sorry to disappoint no um i have esteem i was saying this to someone the other day i have esteem you know there's this notion of i have self-esteem there's a notion of high self-esteem there's low self-esteem i have esteem and what do you mean by that what do you mean by esteem i join it to the confidence so i'm very i have a very good sense of self so i i don't talk down to myself i don't talk up to myself i talk across to myself as it were and so this notion of confidence it was never i definitely can do this and i will ace this it was more i i could do that i could i could give it a go it was what's the worst that could happen you know and it's not something that then it gets attached to me that if i fail my driving test the first time around or if i forget to brush my like all the other things that could go wrong that they're never things that i'd ever said okay cool now that's going to be a complete reflection on me it's more on that day that thing didn't go wrong it's more on that day that thing didn't go wrong it's more on that day that thing didn't go wrong that day that thing didn't work so passing the gcses i always end up telling the story of i didn't know like it wasn't a given for me that i was going to pass or get the grades that i did i just was like hey i enjoy doing this i'm gonna give it a go this is an exam setting okay we'd have to do it quietly where normally i'd probably talk my way through it and i think i was as surprised as anybody else when the results then came back and it was like wow okay i think at one point i definitely would have wondered the person who was going to pass would have wondered that read this did they know it was it was obvious to them that a 10 year old had written these answers but you know it was great for me not just because of the grades but you know as i as i say i got to go to mcdonald's and i didn't have to wash the dishes for a week right so i think there are other things that have come but as i've got older i think i've definitely been able to have a confidence from i did that i tried that and that went okay and so this might be something that i probably can do and can give a go and can learn as i go and so and so i'm not this is what i mean by kind of esteem i'm not a super high self-esteem as in i must i can do everything i can conquer everything and i know all the things nor am i oh gosh lowly me could never ever possibly look into trying to do that i kind of fall in the middle with it being feeling like esteem rather than feeling like confidence necessarily there's like a hundred things there i want to unpack um and i love geeking out on the difference between kind of self-esteem and confidence and all of that because i think you're right there is a difference between kind of self-esteem which is basically intrinsically thinking you're a good person i'm kind of in the kind of universe of people i'm a kind of good person and if i have a knock and if i have a setback and if i don't achieve things i'm still a good person and then there is what i love what you've about your description there of when you tried something and you didn't know you were going to succeed and all of the work i've done on confidence has shown this that confidence is this weird kind of transferable quality so it actually can transfer across disciplines i mean you know you have a success in learning to cook it makes you think actually i could probably learn a language but what you found was so concrete right you did something you didn't know if you were going to succeed you got the results and then presumably that then gave you confidence to try something else because actually look i tried something and i took a risk and it worked out for you does that resonate with you it definitely does um it definitely does so yeah so it meant that i was going to succeed and i was going to the base from which i knew i was jumping off from for the next thing definitely was was heightened and it's so interesting what you were saying just there about the transferability of that confidence across subjects so the the two subjects i did were maths and ict in primary school but it's so interesting how you're right like then it was almost like a okay cool like i've understood that and so the level of language perhaps in the gcict meant that something like english i came at it with maybe a slight newfound confidence and i was like okay i'm going to do this i'm going to do this and i was like okay i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this of well if i got that then actually this is the same kind of language that was in those exam papers and so maybe this english is something that i can then attack with that kind of view or there are there's learnings of things that i've done in maths that then apply in other subjects and so now something like physics is something i want to step into a little bit more and try the as for example on that because i know that there's the maths mechanics that applies and shows up there and so i can jump off from that so definitely that's something that i i do remember actually in primary school happening did it ever though feel i mean to flip this to think kind of people who are thinking of taking big risks and who have big successes and then want to achieve more did it ever feel like you had this pressure on you to keep achieving did you feel as a child well i've done these extraordinary things that other people haven't done so now wow i almost have to be kind of like a super achiever forever did you ever feel that no and i and i think this is why i come back to the esteem of in being as grounded as sure of myself the achievements are things that i can kind of tap into but they haven't really been they still aren't such a big sense of you know like if i meet someone down the pub or on the tube i don't start with hey i'm amory the child prodigy it's more like i'm amory right and so and so i think you need somebody else to do that introduction for you i'm gonna go i'm gonna be your body man and come in ahead of you and say here's my child prodigy yeah i have those but i i so for me it was less oh i did that so now i have to top it it was more yeah i did that so if there was something else i was going to try could give that a go but actually i i again i don't feel that pressure mostly because i think it's other people's expectations rather than my expectations of myself how do you do that how do you keep your i always think the definition of happiness is when your reality outweighs your expectations and the definition of unhappiness is when your expectations outweigh your reality oh that's good i know isn't that good isn't that good i came to that unfortunately terribly late in life i wish i'd learned it in my 20s how do you keep your expectations for yourself in kind of in the bounds of what is possible it's better to have no expectations god katie this is great so another question that i get asked all the time is what would you tell your 13 year old self and i always say there's an there's an amory answer to that question and then there's a public facing answer to that question go on let's have the answer where it's like the amory answer is only useful for people like me and the other answer is useful for normal people mine is always i should have i could have taken myself more seriously interesting and so to answer your original question i actually don't have that many expectations for myself i'm really fortunate that life is a series of journeys and paths and experiments and explorations and so i see most things that i do as an experiment and the beauty of that may be is that you know if you set a hypothesis and it is a true experiment you don't know what will happen next right it's the hypothesis that's being proven or disproven not you what like if you already know what it is and it's not really an experiment you're just kind of running it again and so for me there's no expectations because that i don't take myself as seriously maybe as i should um and so whatever happens then that set of expectations is so low that there's not a great upside that here i am having a great conversation on a podcast that you know is is to be released without knowing what's gonna come so i'm always i'm in it the the kids call it now kind of doing it for the plot or i'm kind of following along for those side quests and then it's like oh and who'd have thought i'd have ended up on this side quest and sally tucci is there sat across the table from me so for me i i kind of i do i'm quite fortunate i kind of just take life as it comes without really having a master plan but knowing that i enjoy the process of experimentation the process of discovery the process of curiosity and i see that i'm able to still manage to do the do and get bills paid i mean this is there's this phrase that applies i think uh in some of the research that i've done to women but also particularly to younger women and and actually to teenage girls as well as this kind of tyranny of low expectations um and to anyone who's actually in a minority and you have been somebody who's always been in a minority you have been young when older people succeeded you are a woman of color in a world that has found it much harder to reward and give power to women of color you um have been a woman in a field that is very male dominated i mean tick off all of those incidences where you have been an outsider yeah in historical and kind of numerical terms and yet you don't seem to have let that make you feel isolated or hold you back i mean this you know the kind of the the phrase imposter syndrome is used a lot and i don't know what you understand by that phrase having been in a way an outsider in a kind of a insider's world for so many much of your career did you ever feel that imposter syndrome held you back or being an outsider held you back because it doesn't seem to have done no and again i i maybe i use humor a lot on this but i joke about this quite a lot often many times there have been many times in my life that i don't realize i'm the outsider or i don't realize i'm the odd one out can i just tell you you are the odd one out in so many of the positions you've been in and i mean that in the best possible way well thank you but but i don't see because i'm when i talk about founding estimates it's one of those things i was working as you say in this male-dominated space right and so i'm in a meeting and as you've said i'm the youngest i'm the blackest i'm the womanist in the room you're talking through these things and in one of the companies i worked in you know it was typical kind of corporate boardroom would be that you've got kind of glass it's like a glass pane right and always say this that i'm looking out across the room i'm not the person walking past the room thinking this there's one there in the middle um i also say that it's almost it's ended up in some ways being a bad thing that kind of lack of perception or kind of awareness of my surroundings that i'm so deep into this database or so deep into this coding thing that i'm trying to sort out that i've never i've not looked up and thought oh wow here's you know the light is now off because i started this before it got dark and i'm still working through and it'd be the same thing if i'm looking around and nobody here is like me the one time i felt the most like an outsider was as you said in the intro i did i i went i studied at oxford i was at keyboard i did maths and computer science and at one point our senior tutor for our subject was the university like you have to have a senior fellow be the sponsor for your society so he was the sponsor for the ou bell ringing society and there was a guy in the year above me who was a member of the ou bell ringing society and i didn't know before stepping into that space the bell ringing was a thing i'm an east londoner i know what bow bells are i'd never really thought that there were people that ring the bells i don't know what i it just wasn't anything that never come into my head i was incredibly curious but not about bells and so it was really funny being in rooms where the bell arrangement or i still don't even know what the terminology is was what folks were using as their references to talk through groups or whatever it was that we were kind of covering in that class and at times like that i'd be like jeez i have literally no idea what's being said and what's going on here this sounds insane right you're talking another language of course i'm the other in this room because i don't ring bells right and so i think i'm quite um fortunate or unfortunate or it's a good thing it's a bad thing that i end up not being that perceptive of the of the environment around me um but i take it back to it shouldn't be that you have to be like me to be able to thrive step into exist in a space where you are the other and so for something like tech which is the space that i'm in it's incredibly important actually that it's not just women like me who have never noticed that they're the only woman in the room who are able to thrive and contribute to those spaces because as much as i know the database is really well as much as i know a lot of things very well there'll be other things that i'm clearly missing in the room that might also impact the quality of what my contribution to is going to be yeah the being the odd one out is not something that i end up perceiving often i mean it's amazing i mean i wish i could bottle what you have and give it to every young woman who walks into a meeting and or older woman who walks into a more senior meeting and could use that because it happens often i mean i had a incident not long ago i was invited to the risk of name dropping i was invited to the white house for this briefing on middle east affairs and i thought oh my god there's 12 women and 12 men we've all been there and i look around the room and i realize oh my god all of these people speak arabic speak farsi they actually know the leaders of these countries they're experts i'm just a kind of generalist what am i doing here and i had that kind of you know the f word the fraud word and i thought if i say anything they're all going to realize that i'm not as smart as they are so the national security staff give their presentation it gets time for questions and answers and the men start asking questions actually they don't even put their hands up they just jump in with questions and i'm sitting there and i'm looking at this other woman who is an expert and thinking are you going to ask a question and in my head i'm thinking i can't have it that it's only 12 men who ask questions somehow a woman has to get into this conversation and but if i ask a question they're going to realize i don't know as much as they are and then i'll probably sweat and then i'll probably blush and then they'll all look at me and then i'll stutter and then they'll realize that you know i shouldn't really be there and all of this is going through my head it would have been a lot more useful for me to be listening to conversation but i have this alternative meeting that's going on inside my brain of ruminating about what and in the end i do put my hand up i'm a kind of good girl and i ask the question and it wasn't the most intelligent question in the history of questions about the middle east but it wasn't the most stupid either and the amazing thing was that the sky did not fall on my head and the earth did not actually open up and swallow me whole look at that look at that i was still standing and then the next time i was in a meeting it was easy and you live to tell the tale right and i live to tell the tale and more importantly i had kind of banked a little bit of confidence that was my you know brick in my wall of confidence and i had banked it and no one could take it away and the next time i was in a similar situation it was the same but what i'm hearing from you is a slightly different strategy for dealing with something that women always face women of color face even more so and young women face all the time but your strategy is so much more effective i want your strategy which is not to really notice and not to give a damn the given not giving a damn part might be intentional but the not noticing is not intentional something that folks could do intentionally that i've ended up working through with other people is when we talk about imposter syndrome there's a sense of privilege you might have maybe in order to do this but if you're in those rooms in those spaces then then you're privileged to be welcomed to be invited to be you know allowed in those spaces the other side of it that i end up seeing is let's say that scenario that you just spoke about you i mean I might be wrong you didn't place yourself in that room you might have applied but you didn't run the invite list for that room or did you no god no somebody far more senior than me in the white house did well this is it so someone else who is not you who wasn't and isn't a fraud because they got that invite was real and you really were in that room and you really were able to ask that question when the time came for you someone else has co-signed has invited has welcomed has wanted has desired you in that room and in that space that's genius and so as much as you might think you're you're a fraud if you really want to in the extreme they also cannot be a fraud to that extreme that you then didn't have that invite and you weren't in that room and so i always end up saying okay let's reflect on it for real now whether it's a school you know class whether it's a meeting whether it's a team whether it's a job you didn't give yourself the job someone else used their agency and had their own decisions and you didn't give yourself the job someone else used their agency and had their own agency and had their own decisions and you didn't give yourself the job someone else used their agency process to bring you into that room and so fine like maybe let's cut the imposter syndrome in half because if you really are there as a fraud then it's also on them for inviting someone that shouldn't have been in that room into that room in some ways that lightens the load maybe a little bit for folks are fine if i'm the fraud they're not the fraud and they thought there was something for me to contribute here i think the other thing the other side of that in in those spaces and i i find this maybe easier to say for technology versus some of the other domains that listeners might find themselves in there's a lot of innovation there's a lot of technology there's a lot of things that we are hearing about in the press that we are getting excited about that we're getting to see at work that we're seeing deployed in our normal lives and for most of that technology when you sit down and when you use it or when you engage with it especially if you are different right numerically historically whatever there will be times plural that you're engaging with the technology you're engaging with the technology you're engaging with the technology you're thinking huh something's not right something's missing here one of the examples i love to give i don't know if i've done it to death but here we go is that of every couple of years the health tech industry discovers the period for the very first time genuinely they're like hey folks we discovered this thing apparently it happens to people some people and some people that are parts of our users and we should do something and this is cyclical so every four to five years it happens to people and some people that are parts of our users and we should do something and this is cyclical so every four to five years it and i wrote about this in my book one company a couple of years ago discovered the period for the first time and released this feature to everyone that had this um kind of fitness tracker and allowed them to track 10 days of their period and i love talking about this because it's so great to get on a really serious stage at a very big tech conference with really hard and make all the men feel super uncomfortable just say period and i did for effect like a period period pregnancy menopause period and i did for effect like a period period pregnancy menopause period and i did for effect like a period period pregnancy right and i and i almost spit it at them right and and folks are then sat there and some are squirming because they think oh gosh this is why we don't let women into this space of course she's come with the microphone she's talking about periods and others others are thinking 10 days in a period 10 days did i hear and i'm like yeah no you heard me right 10 days they allowed people to track 10 days of their period and so you have to ask yourself the question in a health tech company right every couple of years is it that there's not a single person that has ever met anyone that has ever had a period or is it that there's not a single person is it that they had a couple of them because i feel like people and human beings are here because of something to do with periods maybe right but that in that process where they went from the research they did the development they implemented it they tested it they released it out to all of their millions of users that in that entire process there was not a single person who knew anything about a period that could be heard could be listened to that could ask what would have been a silly question it would have been a silly question 10 days on the period what does that what does that actually mean would have felt like a silly question to say out loud but would have saved so much effort and wasted time egg on the face of the company just by asking what you'd feel was a silly question but that actually ends up not being that silly because not everybody in the room knows what you know has the experience that you have and i've got to add on top of that that if someone in that room would have known about periods there's also other things they might have known about that aren't even related to periods by virtue of being in that room being invited to being employed in that company and so we have to bear that in mind as you're going through if you're thinking it's a silly question you're thinking you're not supposed to be there if you are not supposed to be there that means that there will definitely be questions and perspectives that you can bring into that room that wouldn't have been there if only the people that were supposed to be there that said all the things that were already being said by those that were already running those spaces were going to say and so you have to bring your difference if you do notice because you're either being like me you don't notice or you do notice your difference you then play on the difference and say okay cool have we thought about this have we considered this what are the implications for this type of group how have we thought about this for the future like all of those kinds of things so stand on it own it and you're making the case which academics have studied i mean there's a great guy at the university of michigan who's done algorithms i don't understand but that have made the case professor page has made the case for a diversity of opinion around a table and i think that is something that we can all lean into if those women hadn't been in the room or if they had been in the room they would have saved the company money and trusting that you are there for a reason i mean i would say to younger women if you are having a moment of self-doubt or if you're not speaking up with something that you have to offer or you're not speaking up in client meetings or you're not speaking up in managerial meetings your company's not a charity they're not putting money in your bank account out of a grace and favor program i mean they're they're hiring you and paying you because you're valuable and therefore your opinions and your voice is valuable um let's which is an organization to encourage more young women to get into stem uh something that you've obviously done throughout your career that it's similar my daughter who's a at the risk of bragging about my daughter's a phd astrophysicist has worked in girls who code and i think it's similar from my reading on stem it's a similar girls who code is perhaps more american-based and what you've been doing with stem ets is similar in my research when we were looking at confidence and girls we saw uh data that showed that the drop-off in girls in school in stem subjects happens around kind of 11 to 13 in the states it's kind of what we in the states we call middle school do you see that do you see a drop-off around that age and if so what do you think's going on so there's a number of places that the drop-offs happen and i should say as well that we so we're so girls in girls who code sorry is is tech and is is more about that teen age range with stem ets we go slightly broader in terms of stem and steam so set stem being science technology engineering and maths and steam being that we add the art and design in there because that's where we believe is the true heart of innovation uh but also you know to your question the the drop-off begins fairly early actually so we see kind of gender stereotyping how that impacts what the girls uh see that they are able to do so sense of identity as well as sense of confidence in the in technical and kind of five so we we estimate start from five five yeah yeah you've got to get in there early because it's about the sense of self it's about those formative years of them having those confidence you know having those bricks those confidence bricks right to add to their wall of life of i built an app about a talking unicorn on a weekend and it was fun and people clapped when i presented it and i won a prize like those kinds of things we start from as young as five and we go all the way up to 25 so we we do a kind of a cradle to cradle to start of career almost life cycle because those drop-offs happen kind of throughout those so when i started estimates we did our initial literature review and it was around primary it was around those teen years and then it was again when they're making decisions around university which again will be different for the states because you you don't choose your major you choose your university whereas in this in uk you you choose your major basically at 16 if not 17 years old and you're fixed into that for the duration of your first um degree if you choose to to to follow a degree or you've also got the apprenticeship route and there's lots of different ways to get into industry we see the drop-off happening kind of across they they call it they tend to call it a leaky pipeline here in the uk that as soon as all the different junctures where those decisions can be made the girls drop off due to confidence due to lack of belonging and due to not feeling this sense of identity that overlaps with them doing something technical or leaning into a technical pathway whether that's going into career going to further study or even you know starting starting a business based on on the tech i'm so glad you're doing it because having kind of talked to my daughter a lot and i only understand a small fraction of what she does but i do understand that if we don't have women in stem we're basically screwed because all of the companies that are working in this field are shaping our world and shaping the products that will impact us and impact our futures now perhaps more than ever if we don't have women at the table or if we aren't represented at the table then we're going to be excluded from how all of these programs look and sound and feel in the future okay we're going to take a break here and then i want to come back and ask you what you'd say anne-marie to a 15 year old girl today who wants to get into the sciences this podcast is supported by anthropic the public benefit corporation behind claude everyone's got a hard question about ai your job your kids where it's going and the answer is yes i'm going to take a break and then i'm going to come back and ask you Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai.spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai.spotify. Or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install? We have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now, get up to 45% off site-wide, plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. Welcome back to Doing It Anyway. So, Anne-Marie, I'm sure you get asked this all the time, but put yourself in the position of a parent of a young girl who is thinking of getting into sciences, but might not feel like doing it. And I'm sure you get asked this all the time. They might not feel they're good enough, might not feel it's cool enough, might somehow be discouraged from doing something that actually they have the capacity to do. What would you tell those parents? Maybe it's too late. Maybe we should be talking about 10, 11-year-olds. Well, I was going to say, I mean, I was about to add the caveat of kind of 15-year-old in the UK system has already made some big decisions, right? Unfortunately, that mean that the pathway that your young person would take might be slightly alternative, which is not a bad thing at all. We are root. Absolutely. I mean, it's not a bad thing, but it's not a bad thing. I think it's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. So, for a 15-year-old, it would be have an understanding. You know what your 15-year-old likes, what they're interested in, what maybe drives them away or drives them as well, kind of in the positive sense. And so there will be spheres of STEM, of STEAM that overlap with what they are interested in. And so wherever that is, I mean, the example I always love to give is a couple of years ago, we hosted a hack in Oxford. There was a data hack. So this was taking a big Twitter data set and giving it to the young women, showing them how to kind of play with it, manipulate the data, understand, take trends, sentiment analysis, all those kinds of things out of it. And that's them to build an infographic, you know, around something interesting they discovered in the data. And this was, again, like five up to about 18. We had one girl who was obsessed with One Direction. So this tells you how far back we're going. She went through the Twitter streams and the data from the directioners and analyzed that and came up with her own set of conclusions and infographic. Her mate supported Chelsea, the football team. So she went through the Twitter feed of all the Chelsea players and came up with her own infographic, whatever. And then there was another girl who was five. And if you know five-year-olds, you know that they don't follow instructions. So the five-year-old went and collected her own data on Build-A-Bear, which she was obsessed with from those in attendance around the room and built an infographic on Build-A-Bear. So it's the same data, right? Same, use the tech, same, be creative and tell a story with the data. And they're at the same event in the same room at the same time with the same set of volunteers. But because we've been asset-based and girl-led in what they're interested in, and it's girls and young non-binary folks, and brothers also can come along sometimes and cousins. But it's about then saying, this is what you're interested in. And here's how tech or science, engineering, the arts, the maths is enabling that thing to be a thing. It's why I started Stamets. I thought it was really weird back in 2013, the disconnect between what we were calling kind of computer science education and Instagram that all these teenagers were spending their whole lives on. And I was like, but the Instagram is the tech. Is tech driving the Instagram? Have you ever thought, what do you not like about Instagram? If you were going to build your own Instagram, what would it look like? And that was literally the premise on which Stamets started to say, hey, like it's part of your life already. Don't think it's this thing on the side, just because the curriculum doesn't have enough room, right, to show how this is showing up in society at the moment. What is it? I mean, we live in a moment, Anne-Marie, it's part of the reason I wanted to do because I feel like we live in a moment where there was this huge push to encourage more women's networks, more girls' networks. And there was girls on the run and girls who code and Stamets and kind of women's networks in corporations. And now, at least in the States, there's been like this big, cold, freezing hand of don't go anywhere, put on all of that. And we're not even going to mention the fact that anyone is a girl or a woman. And let alone that the playing field is not level, even though we all know the playing field is still not level. How do you respond to that? I mean, I literally had somebody come up to me at a conference recently, a women's networking conference. And it was a guy who said, you know, I think it's, you know, so great. My wife took my daughter to this kind of group of CEOs of women CEOs. And, you know, that's really great. But I also worry that it's all gone too far. And, you know, I should be able to have a seat on a board, but now they only want women. And I was like, I was about to pull my hair out. I could have slapped the guy. But, you know, how do you respond to this kind of backlash moment that we're in where we had a few years of trying to think we're going to try and level the playing field. And now it's like, nope, we'd rather actually have the playing field at 30 degrees and not have it level. And we don't want to actually mention that women or girls or any other minority or people of color exist and, and more than exist have faced barriers to entry to power. It's a great question. I mean, I ebb and flow, I go through cycles. I think I feel very fortunate and privileged that I run Stamets, the organization. We still have supporters in the work that we do. Of course, we could have much more support as with any charity in this, in this environment. And that's true of all charities, whether actually they're focused on equity and gender and equality or not. And so I think for me, there's a couple of things that I end up kind of clinging to. One is I'm there with them. And so I know what the young women are going through, what our young non-binary folk are going through, what the barriers are, what the barriers are, and what their realities are in the here and now. I know what they're experiencing in the classroom. I know what the volunteers are seeing in the workplace. They do exist. These barriers exist. As much as some people don't see them because they've never encountered them, because that's the nature, that's how privilege works. As much as they want to claim they don't exist, that doesn't change the reality for other people for whom those barriers definitely exist. And we're not a fad. I mean, I had this recently, we, International Women's Day was kind of a couple of months ago, not to kind of age this podcast in any way, shape or form, because it comes around every year. But it's really interesting, reflecting on 1975. Did you know 1975 was the UN Year of the Woman? That is quite a long time ago. And you know, good luck to you if you, I wasn't there. I missed, I missed it. How dare I be a woman that wasn't there in the Year of the Woman? And so I think a lot of these things you have to be heartened in. Again, so much of this is cyclical. And so this isn't forever, which you do also have to hold on to, right? And have that perspective. But also, I think we have to be really clear and kind of honest with ourselves on, this was always, always going to be a journey. This is always going to be an ebb and a flow, a back and a forth. And if it was going to be easy, A, it almost wouldn't have been worth it. And B, someone would have done it already, right? And so these are complex, these are complicated things. A lot of them are intentional and have been hard coded and hardwired into the way society works, into the way that power is established and maintained and transferred. And so we have to get smart, right? We have to work together. We have to get smart. There's a new government job that I've taken on recently looking at how we do this systemically, which is so different to how I operate as an individual or as an Anne-Marie, right, in this space. And so we have to dig deep and really do our research and be very intentional with how are we going to evolve, right? We're not unpicking the power structures, but how are we going to evolve those power structures in the way that things are at the moment to ensure that this isn't something that then we're just at the mercy of the goodwill of people, at a certain part of the cycle. So how do we codify this? How do we make this part of policy? How do we make this the way people do business? How do we make this the way that folks do admissions to universities? How do we make this the part of the way that the curriculum is put together? We had a curriculum white paper a couple of years ago, looking at the fact that, you know, across the whole of English, GCSE and A-level syllabus and curriculum, you had 14 names. All of them were dead and only one of them was a woman. And so this is something that's hard coded, right? And so it meant that something like one in three hadn't even heard the name of a woman, or two in three hadn't heard the name of a woman scientist in the classroom in the last two years. And so you have to then start to hard code, right, and pop these things in so that then it's inevitable. It's not that we're, again, waiting for it to be the thing that's in fashion that everybody now wants to talk about, but it's stuck in people's faces. What is the culture like? How do we allow women to thrive in these spaces? How do we allow different types of people to thrive in these spaces? And is there laws that support this? Are there laws that get in the way of that? And so that's what I'm having to take. It's like, okay, have that conversation. Slap him if you wish. And what is the upshot of the actions that we need to be taking to ensure that he also is given the space to fall in line on what good looks like? You're clearly a believer. I mean, you've set up a STEMET, which helps young women getting into sciences. You always speak about the conference that you attended, or you've often spoken about the conference that you attended in Baltimore in 2012, that was a big celebration of women in computing, the Grace Hopper conference. What do you think the value is today of women's networks and women's groups? And I'm thinking particularly, maybe you could talk to young women who are working and who are interested in joining women's groups or starting women's groups or maybe even doing it kind of informally. What's the value, do you think, of being in that space where you hear from other women and their experiences and do that kind of networking? Yeah, this is the public answer to this. What's the advice you'd give to 13-year-old Anne-Marie? I love this. We have the real answer and then we have the Anne-Marie answer. Okay, the public answer. public answer first of all let's do that the public answer is there's strength in numbers don't do these things on your own because you're not the first person ever to do them even if you are pioneering and you're the first person to do that particular thing you're not the first person in this field in this space in that company in that whatever and so do it with others there's strength in numbers where you can celebrate with someone else you can commiserate with someone else you can compare notes with someone else you can organize with someone else and so it means that the burden and the weight of being someone in that type of space ends up being lightened right you you lighten that load by knowing oh my goodness i'm not the only person that has been proposed to today you know in this space oh my goodness i'm not the only person that's finding this difficult i'm not the only person that wanted to ask that silly question did you say proposed to i mean like literally proposed to i did this is this is an exclude this is the first thing so i get to talk to lots of different people in lots of different scenarios and spaces so this is probably the first time i've said this on a podcast i was talking to somebody last week i'm not going to give any more context on this and they were talking about a particular environment that they'd gone in to speak and do an edi talk and they'd asked someone that we both know for some notes or some tips or some help on entering that space and what they told me was that the intel they were given was that this is a great department for you to go and say that to and i'm going to give away a little bit what kind of department it was because there's definitely a senior academic there who is on his marriage to his to a third phd supervisee and i don't know how many he hadn't entered but this is the third one to someone that he's supervised their phd in that department and so if you're in this network if you're talking to these other women in these spaces you're able to understand the lay of the land so that then when these things are happening you have context you can celebrate you can give away a little bit of context and you can give away a little bit of context give a different answer this time around and help nudge that in the right direction or you can really get the real okay cool is this the kind of space i'm going to be able to thrive in is this the kind of space i'm just here to build the skills and then go somewhere i'm going to be celebrated is this somewhere where actually i can be more than tolerated if this is what i lean into and so it gives you that intel because you shouldn't have to be doing all of these things on your own because they tell you what the people that aren't in these networks the people that are safe space it's just that their safe space is outside they are also mentored they are also sponsored and so why not give yourself what everyone else has anyway and this is one of the fast track ways for you to give yourself a higher chance of having those kinds of connections it's not a guarantee not every women's network is the same so it's not a guarantee that you'll have that but it increases the chances of you having that kind of community where you can build that sense of belonging you can have that sense of community to compare those notes and also you can reach up with the space that you're in i've been asked and all of my research shows that you know women less in the field of stem but increasingly here in the u.s in the field of stem 2 are better educated than men we get more degrees we get more postgraduate degrees we get more phds than men do we're increasingly earning more than men do i'm convinced that women are huge contributors in the workforce as well and yet i have also been asked by guys well if women were so useful at work literally somebody said this to me in a meeting recently a couple of years ago if women really were so valuable then market forces would have sorted this out and companies would all be run by women we know that actually only about 12 of ceos are women i was kind of flummoxed by this i didn't quite know how to respond to that if somebody said that to you or you got the impression that somebody felt that because they're probably not going to say that to a younger woman but you might get the sense that that's actually how somebody feels yes yes yes all very good but actually market forces would have sorted this out and if you're not all running things then there's a reason for that what's your reaction to that how naive yeah to think that the boys club is not powerful how naive to think that market forces always do what's supposed to happen how naive to be able to ignore the history i mean that you'll have seen it folks will have seen it across instagram not that long ago it's been 50 i think it's 50 years since women have been able to have mortgages and credit cards so talk to me about market forces was that a market force or it wasn't a market for explain this talk to me well i would be like okay so explain the joke but why don't you explain the joke because i'm not getting the joke explain to me how market forces just just you know give me more details on on this i would have laughed in their face i mean you might have slapped i would have laughed i would have i would have burst out laughing do you know the fca so the folks that regulate the financial industry as of september 2026 there's new rules that they've got coming coming in and they're going to be coming in and coming in under something called non-financial misconduct so these are things that in other industries have been seen as hr issues as part of the suite that in fca now the folks who run the markets who look after in the uk have decided no no it's so important for the integrity of our market that now misconduct harassment like they've got a long list sexism like they've got a long list of things now that they are watching you like a hawk and the minute you do anything that contravenes you're no longer compliant this is not a hr matter this is a compliance this is your license to play in the markets it's a business matter it's a bottom line matter i mean there's no more words what more what more am i going to say so i'd have asked i'd have i'd have asked him to explain the joke to me i love that i want to slap somebody and you want to laugh in their face your strategy is so much more effective than mine was my blood was boiling okay amory before we go this has been just a great conversation um and super helpful and you've this has been cheaper than therapy for me uh you've you've i've learned a lot i want you to give one piece of confidence code advice to our listeners before we go the one piece is almost repetition of what we've said already life is a series of experiments you have to be open to making mistakes and making high quality mistakes because that's where you get the high quality learning that is able to supercharge and power you and that's where you get the high quality learning that is able to supercharge and power what you do but also allows you to separate what is being done over there from your sense of self which is incredibly important to maintain in a in a world and in a space and in your careers so make those mistakes note them down note down what the experiment is as you're running the experiment and go and iterate and see how you go can i tell a real like a go on give it yes please do i asked before we started recording kind of who the audience is so i'm hoping that maybe the top end of this audience will understand this and then everyone else go and ask you go and ask someone older than you what we were talking about katie you will remember a time when you'd open microsoft word and you'd type your document in piece and then you'd either save or you'd flick a switch and then you'd have all these angry red squiggles and green squiggles appearing all over your document right at the same around the same kind of timeline there'd be times when you'd be working diligently on a document and then microsoft would do this wonderful thing where it told you that the file had been corrupted do you remember this yes i do remember this yes i remember those damn squiggles i'm so sorry listen i'm so sorry katie for taking you back to this world but you then say oh gosh this file has been corrupted and microsoft word has not even remembered half of it so now i have to go and write the damn thing again i've lost all my work i've lost all my work and this time as you type you compulsively ctrl s ctrl s ctrl s as you go because you're not going to lose it again microsoft word you're not going to get me this is not going to be corrupted it's going to be saved you ctrl s all the way to the end you finish the file and you save it as final and then because it's all been so stressful you go you use the loo while you're on the loo you remember something you change in the conclusion so you come back and you change the conclusion and then you now save this as final final and then your mom calls you and she's talking through whatever she wants to talk about at that point and i don't know she says banana and you think gosh banana wait hold on something about yellow i had something in the introduction and so you go back and change the introduction and then you save it as final final final and what do you know the deadline is here now and you're going to have to go back and now so you go and you email to your boss to your lecturer to your whoever to your editor final final no final final final is the one you should have sent right and so the next time you're like i'm older i'm wiser now i'm gonna call this final insert the date right in the name of the file and then you know and it happens again and then you're like no actually why am i using the word final let me just call it version three right and then you're like no actually why am i using the and now what's so funny about this story katty is there are some people who have no idea what i've been talking about because everything auto saves now in the cloud because what do you mean it was corrupt fairly regularly to the point that this was almost a universal experience but anyway we now have versioning on our files where if i say version 3.1 you know and understand what the journey has been on to get to that version so that is a high highly sophisticated naming convention we now have across files and things that we're working on and we're going to be able to do that as a result of those early days those dark dark days when files would get corrupted all the time and you'd have to save and you'd have to know which was your latest file that is a high quality mistake a big mistake that you made that became an even higher quality mistake that has led to high quality learning that is now a convention across all that we do and in your career you cannot be you should not be afraid to make those mistakes you should be afraid that you're not unlocking that high quality learning and you should not be afraid to make those mistakes And you have to lean into that in making high quality mistakes. And that is my little compliment. confidence tip for folks. I love that. I love the idea that it is a really annoying design flaw in the human species that we're going to make mistakes. You're going to make them. I'm going to make them. Your mom's going to make them. Your professor's going to make them. Your boss is going to make them. And then it's a question of how you deal with the mistakes. But if you're not making mistakes, honestly, you're not stretching yourself enough. You're not learning enough. Exactly. Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon, thank you very much. Thanks for the therapy. Thanks for the tips. Thanks for the advice. No problem. I'm going to stop wanting to slap people and now I'm going to want to laugh at them instead. You're going to throw your head back. You're going to laugh in their face and ask them to explain the joke. Just one more time. Explain the joke you just said to me. Anne-Marie, thank you so much. I love that. Thank you so much for listening to Doing It Anyway. 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