The Odd One Out
Dr Laura Chaubard, Director General of École Polytechnique, talks about closing the gender gap in STEM and how lifelong learning as a philosophy can make university life more enriching – and relaxed.
By Claudia Civinini
"I was profoundly impressed by how teaching could be so much more fun and interesting by telling good stories."
A lecturer brings a Big Mac to an 8am English language lesson in one of the food capitals of the world, Paris. This could easily be the start of a hilarious comedy of errors, but for the new Director General of École Polytechnique, it was quite an unforgettable experience during her days as a university student.
That module was one of the defining moments of her education, Dr Laura Chaubard recalls. It made her discover writers such as Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo, and also inspired her to see the power of storytelling in teaching.
“[During the class,] as we read horrific things about what was going on in the food industry, the Big Mac was going cold, the lettuce was being cooked – a metaphor for what we were learning and talking about. I was profoundly impressed by how teaching could be so much more fun and interesting by telling good stories, and this is also true in sciences, and fortunately, this kind of method has become more common throughout the world and École Polytechnique as well.”
Last October, Dr Chaubard was appointed as Director General of École Polytechnique, one of the most prestigious Grandes Écoles in France. It’s the first time in the school’s history that this position is taken up by a woman – a formidable former graduate who, in a relatively short career, managed to climb the ranks in a dizzying array of different fields.
Another crucial educational experience for Dr Chaubard was her PhD. The most important lesson it gave her was finding her motivation, she says. For the first time, she confesses, she was faced with problems she had to solve by herself; problems with no solution on the other side of the page. It was frightening at first, but it encouraged her to find an answer not just to those problems, but to her own questions as well.
“When you have a blank page, if you don’t find what motivates you in the morning, well, you just do nothing,” she says. “I had to answer important questions – why do I want to do this? What motivates me? And that’s something that I kept with me throughout my career, in choosing my positions and in exercising them.”
École Polytechnique is one of the most prestigious Grandes Écoles in France. (Photo: École Polytechnique official website)
"Students ... have the ability and the chance to make new choices, keep learning in different fields and stay curious."
Staying curious
While Dr Chaubard didn’t a pursue a career in research, she admits that her PhD experience made her grow and realise that she was more capable of doing other things as well.
And she did go on to do other things. Dr Chaubard’s career, spanning from defence to arts policy, is a great argument for supporting transferrable skills. After her degree at École Polytechnique, she joined the Corps de l’Armement, an engineering and public servant body in charge of the French State armament policy, and pursued a PhD in algorithms focusing on the theory of formal languages. She then held a plethora of diverse positions and responsibilities. In one of her roles she was an expert in big data and artificial intelligence at the French defence procurement agency, in another job, an advisor for innovation and digital technology in the cabinet of the Minister of Armed Forces, where, among other things, she drafted the ministry’s Artificial Intelligence roadmap.
Finally, before taking up the position of Director General at École Polytechnique, she was the CEO of a cultural complex, the Établissement Public du Parc et de la Grande Halle de La Villette, an urban park dedicated to culture.
All this professional diversity, a resume with a list of jobs that she brands as having “little to do with each other, in appearance”, is a real strength that she hopes to inspire students to pursue. Lifelong learning, she maintains, will become even more prominent in the future, and there is a crucial role for universities to play in upskilling critical roles in society, especially those at the top strategic level in sectors such as cybersecurity or climate change.
She explains: “I think universities have a role to play in lifelong learning for scientists and engineers and decision-makers – public and private: policymakers, but also industry leaders whose business is being transformed by climate change, cyber threats, or generative AI.”
But a focus on lifelong learning is also something that can enrich students personally and make their university experience less stressful, which is what Dr Chaubard hopes to pass on. “My comfort zone is progressively expanding and this is so rich – I hope to transmit to our students that nowadays, a professional life is actually many professional lives, and that they have the ability and the chance to make new choices, keep learning in different fields and stay curious,” she explains.
“Young people are really anxious that they are not making ‘the best choice’ in internships or specialisations, but actually, they have the privilege to be able to change in a few years. So, I want them to be more relaxed about it.”
"[My parents] never told me or made me sense that maths was not a good choice – or not a choice for me."
The odd one out
Dr Chaubard’s field, computer science and maths, is traditionally male-dominated. Reflecting on what supported her throughout her education, she recognises a few key figures, first and foremost her family, and attributes having met such support to luck, as this is something not all talented women have easy access to.
The first stroke of luck was that she was raised in a family where she was told that everything is possible. “My parents were not scientists. They were history and philosophy teachers, so they couldn’t help me with maths,” she says. “But they never told me or made me sense that maths was not a good choice – or not a choice for me.”
The narrative in schools, universities and the labour market, can, in fact, sometimes be very unsupportive of women. Gaining admission into one of the Grandes Écoles in France is not easy. Students need to take a rigorous two-year preparatory course and sit a competitive exam, and while the course is difficult for everyone, Dr Chaubard acknowledges it was much tougher for some. “I observed that people would say to the boys: ‘Hang on, it will get better, you will do it’. And they used to say to the girls: ‘Be careful, if it’s too tough for you, you can still quit or you can go back and change degree.”
It was not intentionally biased, she concedes. There wasn’t a scheme to purposely exclude girls from science, but its effects were powerful nonetheless. “The effect of this gendered discourse was that some of the girls were discouraged,” she recounts.
“I was lucky that a teacher said to me: ‘Hang on, you can do it – it will not be easy, but you will get there’.” Another stroke of luck, she says, came from finding a supportive environment even in a male-dominated education and career. “Throughout my studies, there were about 10 percent girls and 90 percent of boys, and then I spent most of my career in the army – another non-mixed environment,” she recounts.
She observed that these environments were not explicitly hostile to girls, but that girls were more easily identifiable within them. “That could be an opportunity, but it could also be a heavy weight to bear. If you are exposed to a supportive environment, then it could be an opportunity, but if the environment is hostile, then it can be very hard. For me, it’s been an opportunity.”
Dr Chaubard says that closing the gender gap in STEM is a major preoccupation of hers. École Polytechnique has worked in the area for a while, with programmes targeted at ensuring that young women and students from disadvantaged backgrounds are supported to undertake studies and a career in STEM. One of the lines of action, Chaubard explains, happens “upstream” and involves working with over 20,000 high school students every year with targeted tutoring, mentoring and support activities such as science camps.
“École Polytechnique is committed to this, and so are other engineering schools in France, because we are all now aware of the problem that there are so few women in our courses. That’s the positive point,” she says. But there are challenges as well. “Despite all these actions, the numbers are not going up quickly enough and it means that the cultural bias and self-inhibition that we are fighting are quite powerful,” she comments.
While nobody has cracked the ultimate solution to address the factors that foster the gender gap in STEM, Dr Chaubard explains that some of the cultural biases are widely documented. “I did a PhD in computer science – and this is really the field where there are even fewer women than in maths,” she recounts. “Part of the explanation for this is how computer science and technology are marketed.”
The personal computer, for example, was originally marketed just like a car: an instrument of power, a complex technology that has to be mastered, and marketed to men. “Before the PC, it was women who worked on computers, because it was mentally connected to being a secretary or an assistant. But as soon as we went from corporate computers to personal computers, the image changed drastically. It’s one element, it doesn’t explain anything, but the image of maths in France is also marketed in this way: as something complex, theoretical and abstract, and it’s male-dominated. And this is perpetuated in academia and in families.”
In France, young women don’t flee science as a whole, she explains, rather, it’s more the maths-dominated sciences that see fewer women. “Maybe it would be worse if we hadn’t acted already against these biases, but still, maybe our actions are not strong enough to reach the ambition of a mixed environment for science students,” she comments. However, she is still confident that progress can be made with structural actions. “I don’t think the situation is irremediable. But it will take time.”
This article was published originally in QS Insights Magazine 6.