We want to put our members in the spotlight! For the Meet the WISE series, we interview WISE members in different stages of their career across the university. We hope that their stories, experiences and career paths can be an inspiration to other women at 果冻传媒.
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and the research that you're doing?
My name is Marta Costa Figueiredo. I work in the chemical engineering and chemistry department. I'm an assistant professor there since 2019. I do research in electrochemistry and electrocatalysis. I look at electrode materials and interfaces in electrochemical environment ant try to understand the fundamentals aspects of the reactions, such as active catalytic sites and reaction intermediates. I'm a very fundamental researcher, despite being in the chemical engineering environment.
Is your background also in chemical engineering?
No, I'm a chemist by background. I studied in in Portugal and I did my PhD in fundamental electrochemistry in Spain. Then I moved around. I was a postdoc for five years -- two years in Finland, three years in Leiden. That鈥檚 how I came to the Netherlands. At the end of my postdoc time, I moved to Denmark for a short period of six months, but by then I was a little bit demotivated with my academic career and with moving around. So I got a job in industry, in a company based in Amsterdam. Since I love the Netherlands, it was not difficult to come back. And it was actually crucial in my career to be honest, because I had to have this break from academia, to work somewhere else, to then feel ready to come back.
You've worked in many different contexts in STEM. What has it been like to be a woman in those environments?
It's a very interesting question, because I think that for most of my career I didn't reflect on it much. Maybe I was lucky for the environments where I was. I didn't have to think about me being a woman. I was just a PhD student or postdoc there. Always in group with a very good gender balanced. Pure coincidence, now I think about it. I think I realized that I was a woman more when I arrived at a more senior position, at 果冻传媒. I believe this is not particularly related to 果冻传媒, but instead to an engineering faculty. I was always in chemistry groups, which, in general, have more women. Then suddenly, I am in a male dominated environment.
How do you notice it in your surroundings?
The majority of my colleagues are male and Dutch. Female professors are scarce in chemical engineering. I'm frequently the only woman in consortium meetings, for example. There are female PhD students, but when you go to professor level, there's basically no representation. Then I'm the only foreigner AND female. I did not encounter these problems before, but now they are more evident. This is also visible in education. For example, student evaluations for my lectures and courses are extremely biased in male dominated environments, so I never get as good evaluations as my male colleagues.
When did you realize that your student evaluations have been relatively underrated, and was there anything done about it?
I realized it because we have teaching evaluations every year. I teach together with a male colleague. Don't take me wrong: he's an excellent teacher, so I'll never have the same grades as he does, with his years of experience. But when there is the space for adding a comment, the comments to me are really harsh. If there were harsh comments about him, they were about the subject. But I had comments about my voice tone, or that I don't care. Really passive aggressive. And that's shocking, and it was emotionally draining for me at the beginning. Now have build quite a good wall, and after looking around, I realised this happens more often and it is a known bias. To better receive feedback from students, nowadays, I use feedback teams. This way I still get the feedback to my job, to my work, but I remove comments such as 鈥測our voice annoys me.鈥�
We hear this quite a lot.
I think we need to teach how to provide feedback. Students should learn at an early stage that feedback is not about offending someone, or telling someone what they don't like. It's about reflecting on the things that can be improve.
You mentioned that, once you got at 果冻传媒, you started to think about what it means to be a woman in this environment. Is that one of the things that led you to WISE?
Yes, that was one of the things that led me to WISE.
Is there a WISE event or activity that you found valuable?
For three years in a row I joined the WISE writing retreat. Always virtually, but it's extremely nice for me. I book that week for writing and it's so nice to talk to other people that face the same challenges. We share a lot of thoughts and how to deal with stress and frustration, or writing.
I also appreciated the talks very much. It is not always in your field, but I don't think that's what matter the most. I think it鈥檚 more about the experience and how people live through science than actually the scientific topics.
Do you have any ideas for initiatives WISE could perhaps pay more attention to?
I think women need more visibility. Maybe some initiatives to put someone within 果冻传媒 in the spotlight. I don't think we have a female prize, for example. I used to hate this type of initiatives, but nowadays I don't, because I think they are needed. While equity is not there, you need to push. We have a lot of very, very good females in this community. For example female teachers. Most of the times, men get the prize for best teacher. We are a technical university, so that is not surprising. But until we reach the moment that everyone will be looked at the same, we also need to say: 鈥渋f you had to choose a female, who would that person be?鈥� When I say females, I use it as a representation of minorities.
Do you have a personal role model that you look up to?
I have many, in different aspects. Being a chemist, Marie Curie is always a reference and someone who inspires me. Then I have very strong women around me in my life who have nothing to do with science. My mom and my grandmother are an inspiration to me. And I have some more in the scientific world. I'm not going to say names, but there are people around me that I consider mentors and inspirations. Many of them are 5, 10 or 15 years older than me. I think that we live through change, and 5 or 10 years makes a big difference. They went through challenges probably even bigger than what we face now. They are an inspiration, because of their resilience, strength and persistency through their career.
Are you mentoring other women in your environment at the moment?
Kind of. Surprisingly enough, in my group we have a majority of females. I get some comments about it every now and then, but I don't care. I'll always go for the best candidate, but being a female professor, I have much more female applicants than my male colleagues. It's just statistics. I try to do my part of mentoring there. I try to not only be PhD supervisor but also make sure that they can talk to me if they come across some issues.
If there was a junior career researcher who was joining academia tomorrow, what advice would you give her?
To be yourself. Don't let people change you because certain behaviors are 鈥渇emale behaviors鈥�. They are your behaviors, not female or male. You are the person you are, and you can be emotional or non-emotional. Just stay faithful to yourself.
There is a book that I recommend. It's a book called Dare to lead from Bren茅 Brown. It's one of the most inspirational the books I have read about being yourself. I got to know about her from one of my PhD students, who told me to listen to the podcast. I'm not very good at podcasts, I'm better at reading. So I got the book and I really liked it.
Do you have any hopes for the future?
I think the future should be a place where we don't think about gender, orientation, believes or origins. We should not need associations to support us or to help us. There are several committees for diversity, equity, but I'll be happy in a world where that is not needed anymore. I know it will take a long time for that to happen, but at least we are working on that, and it is already better than 10-15 years ago.