Ottoline Leyser

Professor Ottoline Leyser CBE FRS is the Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory and a Fellow of Clare College. Among her honours are the Society of Experimental Biology’s President’s Medal (2000), the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award (2007) and the International Plant Growth Substance Association’s Silver Medal (2010).

As a developmental biologist, the whole basis of my science is about seeing patterns. I am a ‘connector-upper’ of things. There’s a kind of magpie collection of information and ideas, and then you stick them together in different ways and see what it looks like.

I’ve noticed myself doing the same thing when I’m sitting on committees. I can see the complex system and I can see the interactions going on which generate a pattern. If you want to change that pattern – perhaps because it’s not supportive of women
– then you have to find the levers that will shift it.

“If the overall culture of an organisation is constructed by individual interactions at different levels, then everybody really does have power.”

My mum is a big influence on me, and she has the view that if something’s not right, then you do something about it. It’s completely normal and it’s almost required. There’s a kind of responsibility to act, especially if you have any kind of influence and actually all of us have more than we think. In science there’s a lot of, ‘Oh we’re under terrible pressure to do this and that’ and ‘I’ll never get a job unless I have this kind of CV.’ Everybody complains about it, but we’re the people sitting on panels, making judgements and shaping the system. I think if everybody were just a little bit more positive about what they could do, it would make a big difference. If the overall culture of an organisation is constructed by individual interactions at different levels, then everybody really does have power.

Although I have a strong belief in the importance of exercising influence, I still have quite a hard time with the idea of being successful or important. Acknowledging that you’re important is inherently un-British! But at the same time, you have to admit it, because people respond differently to you because of your position. I hope that I just get on and do things, and I don’t think my ego is particularly invested in my own ideas. Of course it’s nice if you have a good idea and you might well feel pleased with it, but that’s not the point. It should be completely about the outcome. I don’t care whose idea it is as long as we get the right outcome and I do think there’s some connection to gender here. When you sit on a committee, people seem to be absolutely astonished if you say their ideas are better than yours. That’s not the rules – you are meant to fight hell for leather to hold your position.

I want to break the mould of what you need to be like to be successful. I think success needs to be about collegiality and recognising that the whole should be far more than the sum of the parts. Of course it’s nice if you’re elected to the Royal Society, but it’s a by-product, not the object of the exercise. The current system favours the individual agenda, so you wind up with people with big grants and fancy publications, who can be doing very little for the system as a whole. I want this place to be different. I want it to be a really exciting, collaborative, open place to do science. I dislike the hoarding of ideas and unhelpful competitiveness – these are behaviours that to me are totally antithetical to what science should be about. I want to prove that by working together you can be even more successful in terms of what you actually deliver and the impact you have on your discipline.

I hate this notion of work-life balance; I just can’t see that segregation. The idea of conflict being all about your family versus your job doesn’t work for me. I really do feel that they can feed into one another in a positive way. Of course there are only twenty-four hours in the day – I get that, and you have constant time pressures and competing priorities. But I have time conflicts within my job and within my family, not just between them. You know, should I do the washing up or should I play Scrabble? I chose to buy a dishwasher and stopped buying clothes that needed ironing! My feeling is, if you can work out what matters most to you, which isn’t always straightforward, then it’s not so hard to know where to make the compromises. For me it was everywhere else except those two things – family and work. If it’s you and your partner and it’s a good relationship, I think you should be able to work it out, even if you’re both pushing careers. It’s very personal and at some level it’s about what you want out of your life.

“I hate this notion of work-life balance; I just can’t see that segregation.”