̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - lesbian

Celebrating Cambridge’s LGBT+ scientists and engineers

cjb250 — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 23:00:09 +0000

To mark the event, the ̽��ֱ�� has released a film in which staff and researchers from the ̽��ֱ��, AstraZeneca and the Wellcome Genome Campus discuss their experiences of being LGBT+ in Cambridge – and why it is important to be who you are.

"While we have witnessed an increase in inclusion and equality efforts in STEM organisations and companies, we have to recognise the many challenges individuals continue to face, especially members of the LGBT+ community," said Dr Alfredo Carpineti, founder of Pride in STEM and one of the organisers of the initiative. “That's why we launched LGBTSTEM Day. We hope for this to be a day of celebration, of reflection, and of engagement. LGBTSTEM Day is part of the global push to increase the visibility of minorities in STEM fields.”

̽��ֱ��celebrations highlight the need for more role models to help enable LGBT+ scientists and engineers to be able to express themselves and to encourage others to consider a career in STEM. As Dr Sara El-Gebali, Scientific Database Curator at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) says in the film: “Sadly there are very few [LGBT role models in science]. It’s not because we’re not here, it’s because we’re not seen. We’re not officially here.”

Anna Langley, Computer Officer at Cambridge’s ̽��ֱ�� Information Services, was one of the founding members of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s LGBT+ Staff Network. She works in an environment where diversity is a problem, but says that things that are changing.

“Working in IT is still a very straight, white, male, cis environment,” she says. “But generally, I think that the university is trying to do the right thing in terms of diversity. It’s trying to ensure that people are treated fairly regardless of their background, their gender identity, their sexuality.”

Having a supportive work environment is essential in helping staff both personally and professionally, says Christopher Fox, Associate Scientist at AstraZeneca/MedImmune: “I don’t think I’d be as confident as I am at work if I didn’t have people around me who were openly gay or openly lesbian, people who are happy to be themselves. It made me feel that I can be myself.”

Elizabeth Wynn, Advanced Research Assistant at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, adds: “I think it’s important to be who you are, to be able to live as your authentic self, because you’re never going to be truly happy or productive or complete if you’re trying to silence or hide some part of yourself.”

For Langley, being ‘out’ at work is important not just for oneself, but to support others. “If you’re not visible as someone who’s LGB or T, intersexual, queer, non-binary, whatever, then you’re making it that little bit harder for other people to be open about their experience too, […] to be comfortable in their skin in the working environment.”

̽��ֱ��film’s contributors all describe Cambridge as being a very positive, open city in which to live and work.

“There’s a real emphasis on ‘it’s what you can bring to the table in STEM rather than who you are’,” says Fox. “It’s about what you can achieve, not what your sexuality is.”

Michael Rivera, a PhD student in the Department of Biological Anthropology, agrees: “With such a diverse, knowledgeable population in Cambridge, I think it’s very likely that you will find many friends to make here with common interests to you. You will find lots of allies who are open to different backgrounds and different sexualities – and maybe you’ll even find someone very special to spend time with!”

For Dr El-Gebali, her move to Cambridge has made a huge difference to her life. “Being in Cambridge has helped me to come out, not just to my friends and family, but also to work,” she says. “It’s the first time in my long career when I can officially say ‘Yeah, here I am and I’m not the only one’. Cambridge has been really, really good to me.”

This year, staff and students from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, marched together as they joined thousands of others in the parade at Pride London on Saturday 7 July. AstraZeneca and scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute also marched together as part of the Proud Science Alliance group.

Cambridge celebrated the first ever LGBTSTEM Day on 5 July – recognising all those who work in science, technology, engineering and medicine and who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other minority gender identities and sexual orientations.

I think that the university is trying to do the right thing in terms of diversity. It’s trying to ensure that people are treated fairly regardless of their background, their gender identity, their sexuality

Anna Langley

Celebrating Cambridge’s LGBT+ scientists and engineers

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Families with a difference: the reality behind the hype

amb206 — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Over the past 40 years the family has altered in ways that few people imagined back in the days of the Janet and John reading books in which mummy baked and daddy mowed the lawn. In the 1970s, the ‘nuclear’ family (heterosexual married couple with genetically related children) was in a clear majority. Advances in assistive reproductive technologies, a rise in numbers of single parent and step families resulting from divorce, and the creation of families by same-sex couples and single people have changed all that. Today ‘non-traditional’ families outnumber nuclear families in the UK and many other countries.

When it comes to family, everyone has opinions – but they are just opinions. In her new book, Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms (published 12 March 2015), Professor Susan Golombok charts the remarkable changes that have taken place in the context of the empirical research that has sought to answer a series of contested questions. Are children less likely to thrive in families headed by same-sex parents, single mothers by choice or parents who conceived them using assisted reproductive technologies? Will children born to gay fathers through egg donation and surrogacy be less likely to flourish than children conceived by IVF to genetically related heterosexual parents?

Golombok’s contribution to family research goes back to 1976 when she responded to an article in the feminist magazine Spare Rib by conducting an objective study of the development of children of lesbian mothers. Spare Rib had revealed that, both in the UK and USA, lesbian mothers in child custody disputes invariably lost their cases to their ex-husbands. Courts argued that it was not in children’s best interests to be raised by lesbian women, not least because their gender development would be skewed. Golombok, and other researchers, have shown in successive studies that boys are no less masculine and girls no less feminine than boys and girls with heterosexual parents.

In 2006 Golombok was appointed director of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Family Research – a research centre known for its focus on family influences on child development. Modern Families brings together for the first time the growing body of research into the wide range of family forms, undertaken not just in the UK but also in the USA and around the world. Most strikingly, these studies show, again and again, that it is the quality of relationships that matters most to the well-being of families, not the number, gender, sexual orientation or genetic relatedness of the parents, or whether the child was conceived with the assistance of reproductive technology.

These findings fly in the face of the media hysteria that greeted the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978. Societal attitudes have since moved on. However, deep-seated assumptions of what is ‘right and proper’ continue to colour notions of what a family ‘should’ be in order to raise a well-balanced child. Real families are complex. Golombok is careful to be even-handed in her unpacking (family type by family type) of the issues, the arguments and the relevant research in a field that, by virtue of its human intimacy, demands a high level of sensitivity and diplomacy.

She also addresses the fact that research into so emotionally charged a field is bound to be imperfect. Parents willing to take part in research are more likely to be those who are functioning well than those who struggle. “It is important to study new family forms to find out what they are really like. Otherwise, all we have is speculation and assumption, usually negative, which simply fuel prejudice and discrimination and are harmful to the children involved,” she says.

Some findings are counterintuitive, others less so. One of the arguments most famously used against same-sex parenting has been that children may lack models on which to base their own gender identity and behaviour. In a study of play preferences, lesbian mothers chose a mix of masculine and feminine toys but their children chose toys and activities that were highly sex-typed. It seems that parents have little influence over the sex-typed toy and activity preferences of their daughters and sons.

In studies of children born through assisted reproduction, their mothers have consistently been found to show more warmth and emotional involvement, and less parenting stress, than natural conception mothers.

“Contrary to the expectation that parents of children born through assisted reproductive technologies would experience difficulties in parenting, research has found them to be highly committed and involved parents, even in donor-conceived families where one or both parents lack a genetic relationship with their children,” says Golombok.

“A key factor in the positive functioning of children in new family forms appears to be that they are very wanted children. Parents in new family forms often struggle to have children against the odds. Many experience years of infertility before becoming parents; others become parents in the face of significant social disapproval; and still others surmount both hurdles in order to have a child.”

When surrogacy hit the headlines in 1985 with the case of Kim Cotton, the furore about the payment made to her by the intended parents of the child she was carrying led the UK to outlaw commercial surrogacy. Although attitudes to surrogacy have softened, it remains the most controversial form of assisted reproduction. Studies report that relationships between intended parents and surrogate mothers are generally both enduring and positive. Children born through surrogacy sometimes form relationships with the surrogate’s own children.

Modern Families offers a measured appraisal of the broader issues that are likely to prove increasingly salient (and debated) as reproductive technologies offer novel routes to the conception of a healthy child and society’s understanding of what constitutes ‘family’ is increasingly extended. Last month’s approval in the UK for the use of a technique called mitochondrial replacement has rekindled accusations of scientists ‘playing God’. Perhaps, in time, society will be more accepting of techniques like mitochondrial replacement, developed primarily to avoid a child being born with a devastating medical condition.

Two generations ago, same-sex parenting was widely vilified as ‘against nature’. Today, same-sex couples and single people are considered alongside heterosexual couples as prospective adoptive and foster parents. “Attitudes towards same-sex parent families in the UK have changed enormously over a relatively short period of time. In less than half a century we have moved from a situation in which lesbian mothers were ostracised, and gay men were at risk of imprisonment, to a time where same-sex couples can marry, adopt children jointly, and become the joint legal parents of children born through assisted reproductive technologies,” says Golombok.

“But it’s important to remember that these laws are far from universal. Lesbian and gay relationships remain a criminal offence in some countries of the world with lesbian and gay people still living in fear of their lives.”

Families aren’t self-contained units. How do parents handle the prejudice they and their children are almost bound to encounter and how do children cope with what are perceived as ‘differences’? Sometimes the attitudes of the wider world make things hard. While children of same-sex parents are just as likely to flourish as those with heterosexual parents, children with lesbian or gay parents have to ‘explain’ their families in a way that their peers don’t. ̽��ֱ��need to explain can be burdensome.

“It’s stigmatisation outside the family, rather than relationships within it, that creates difficulties for children in new family forms,” says Golombok.

Children born through egg or sperm donation grow up with a realisation that they have a biological mother or father who may not live with them. ̽��ֱ��research covered in Modern Families shows that the question of disclosure – informing children conceived through donated gametes about their genetic parentage – is a foggy one.

Legislation that took effect in 2005 gives anyone conceived with donated gametes after that date the right to have, at the age of 18, access to information about the identity of their donor via records held by the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). Not until 2023 will it begin to be apparent how many donor-conceived young people might seek information about their donors from the HFEA. If adoption law is any guide, the numbers will not be insignificant.

As the legislation stands, young people will not know that they have been donor conceived unless they have been told – and only those with this knowledge will have any reason to seek access to the information held about their donor. This situation puts the onus firmly on the parents to make the decision about disclosure. Interestingly, although many parents profess the intention of bringing their children up with the knowledge that they were donor conceived, significant numbers of parents never find the right moment to broach the subject.

Golombok says: “Parents fear that telling children about their donor conception will jeopardise the loving relationship that has developed between the child and the non-genetic parent. However, our research has shown this fear to be unfounded. Parents who are open with their children when they are young – before they reach school age – say that their children accept this information and are not distressed by it. Finding out in adolescence or adulthood appears to be more difficult to accept.”

Modern Families is a timely reminder that every family is different – and that families are both fluid and flexible. There is more variation within family types than between them. Many of the newer routes helping people to fulfil their desires to have a family are still in their infancy. Progress is never smooth – and, quite rightly, innovations in conception are bound to be, and need to be, a matter for public debate. Research by Golombok and her colleagues, at Cambridge and beyond, provides a firm and informed basis for discourse to take place.

Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms by Susan Golombok is published on 12 March 2015 (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press).

Top two inset images from Flickr Creative Commons

Families come in many guises. Some parents are same-sex; others are single by choice. Growing numbers of children are conceived through assistive reproductive technology. What do these developments mean for the parents and children involved? Professor Susan Golombok’s book, Modern Families, examines ‘new family forms’ within a context of four decades of empirical research.

It’s stigmatisation outside the family, rather than relationships within it, that creates difficulties for children in new family forms.

Susan Golombok

Cover image from Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Ex-BP chief explains why coming out is good business

jfp40 — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 10:48:12 +0000

Drawing on his experiences as a closeted gay man in the oil industry, and the experiences of other prominent executives from around the world, Lord Browne argues that coming out is best for employees and the companies that support them.

“I wish I had been brave enough to come out earlier during my tenure as chief executive of BP. I regret it to this day. I know that if I had done so I would have made more of an impact for other gay men and women. It is my hope that the stories in this book will give some of them the courage to make an impact of their own,” he said.

̽��ֱ��Madingley Lectures are a series of free public lectures given by leading authorities in their fields. They take place at Madingley Hall, home of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, and are an important part of the Institute's commitment to public engagement. Previous speakers have included Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

For further information, see: www.ice.cam.ac.uk/madingleylectures

Today gay men and women in the Western world enjoy greater acceptance and legal protections than ever before. Yet an alarming number of businessmen and women choose to remain closeted at work. Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive of BP, will give a public lecture at Madingley Hall today (8 Oct) about his new book, ̽��ֱ��Glass Closet.

I wish I had been brave enough to come out earlier during my tenure as chief executive of BP. I regret it to this day.

Lord Browne of Madingley

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Rainbow flag : banner, Harvey Milk Plaza, Castro, San Francisco (2012) - cropped

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I’ve got two dads – and they adopted me

amb206 — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:00:00 +0000

In-depth research into the experiences of adoptive families headed by same-sex couples suggests that children adopted by gay or lesbian couples are just as likely to thrive as those adopted by heterosexual couples. It also reveals that new families cope just as well as traditional families with the big challenges that come with taking on children who have had a poor start in life.

A report outlining key findings from the research – which was carried out by a team at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Family Research – is published today by the British Association of Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) to coincide with LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week. ̽��ֱ��study is the first of its kind in the UK.

̽��ֱ��research explored in considerable detail the experiences of 130 adoptive families, looking at important aspects of family relationships, parental wellbeing and child adjustment. ̽��ֱ��study compared three kinds of adoptive families: those headed by gay fathers (41 families), those headed by lesbian mothers (40 families), and those headed by heterosexual parents (49 families).

“We worked with more than 70 adoption agencies across the UK to recruit families. ̽��ֱ��participating families were similar in terms of ethnicity, socioeconomic status and education,” says Professor Susan Golombok, director of the Centre for Family Research and co-author of the report.

“Overall we found markedly more similarities than differences in experiences between family types. ̽��ֱ��differences that did emerge relate to levels of depressive symptoms in parents, which are especially low for gay fathers, and the contrasting pathways to adoption which was second choice for many of the heterosexual and some lesbian parents – but first choice for all but one of the gay parents.”

̽��ֱ��study took the form of home visits to the families, written questionnaires, and recorded parent-child play sessions. All but four of the children studied were aged between four and eight years old, and all had been placed in their families for at least 12 months prior to being interviewed. All families had two parents.

Each year adoptive families are needed for some 4,000 children. Same-sex couples have had the legal right to adopt since 2005 but remain a small proportion of the total number of adopters. National statistics show that annually around 60 children are adopted by gay couples and a further 60 by lesbian couples.

̽��ֱ��bill that brought about the change was fiercely contested and took three years to pass through parliament. Issues raised in the debate included concerns that children adopted by same-sex couples would face bullying from peers and worries that children’s own gender identity might be skewed by being raised by parents of the same sex.

Responses from the same-sex parents, adopted children themselves and the children’s teachers indicates that these issues do not appear to be a significant problem – although the researchers, and some parents themselves, acknowledge that problems of bullying could become a problem as the children become teenagers.

̽��ֱ��majority of the children in the study appeared to be adjusting well to family life and to school. Face-to-face interviews with parents, and with those children willing and old enough to take part, showed that parents talked openly with their children about adoption and recognised the value of children maintaining contact with their birth parents.

Some interesting differences emerged in parents’ wellbeing across the three types of family. Gay fathers were significantly less likely to report having depressive symptoms than lesbian mothers and heterosexual couples, most probably reflecting the lower levels of depression shown by men than women generally. However, it should be noted that the level of depression reported by lesbian mothers and heterosexual parents was below, or in line with, the national picture for mental health.

Gay fathers appeared to have more interaction with their children and the children of gay fathers had particularly busy social lives.

Pathways to adoption also differed across the three groups. While most heterosexual couples expected to become parents as a matter of course, fewer same-sex couples expected to have children. This was particularly true of gay fathers many of whom had viewed their sexual identity as incompatible with parenthood.

Most of the heterosexual couples, and a significant number of lesbian couples, had experienced fertility problems. Many had undergone IVF treatment with no success. In contrast, only one of the gay couples had tried (but failed) to conceive with the help of a surrogate. For the remaining gay couples, adoption was the first choice.

Most parents across the family types had had positive experiences of the adoption process with many speaking warmly of the support they received. A number of same sex couples, however, reported that agencies lacked experience in working with gay and lesbian parents and that this showed itself in awkwardness. One gay parent described having the phone put down on him when he said that his partner was a man.

Being adopted makes children different to many of their peers: being adopted by same sex couples could add another dimension to that sense of being different. Interviews with parents showed that they were well aware of the extra challenges they and their children might face – and that they hoped to raise children who were secure in their own identity and valued diversity.

For more information about this story, please contact Alex.Buxton@admin.cam.ac.uk

Research into adoptive families headed by same-sex couples paints a positive picture of relationships and wellbeing in these new families. ̽��ֱ��study, which was carried out by Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, suggests that adoptive families with gay fathers might be faring particularly well.

Overall we found markedly more similarities than differences in experiences between family types.

Professor Susan Golombok

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