Seventeen years ago, when Becky Lunn told her head of department at the University of Edinburgh that she was pregnant, he told her she was a fool. As a postdoctoral student in engineering she did not have a permanent position, meaning that her chances of an academic career were over, he said.
Today, as head of the department of civil engineering at the University of Strathclyde, and one of Britain’s leading experts on groundwater engineering, Professor Lunn can look back on that moment as a turning point in her career.
“I was quite upset at the time because he was one of the main people who could have employed me, and he clearly wasn’t going to,” she says. “ I suspect that even then, if he’d been on the record he’d have been fired.”
It was not the only challenge that she faced as a woman in a male- dominated profession. “I had an incident when I applied for promotion in one institution, and because I had three children I wanted to make a statement about my periods of maternity leave.
“I was told by the then head of school that if they thought I had three young children, they wouldn’t take my application seriously, so I should leave it out. Then I got a response back saying ‘it looks good but there are gaps in the publications record’.”
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Later on, she solved the problem of balancing her role as a mother with her research projects at university by persuading her head of department to allow her to bring her baby into work.
“I said ‘I know this is not what the law says, but I would like to come in once a fortnight, bring the baby with me and meet my postdoctors and students’,” she said. “I said I wanted to add it to the end of my leave, and they agreed. So I got the time with the child, and I kept in touch with my work. The last thing you want, when you’re building a research team, is to lose contact. It was my research idea, and I didn’t want it handled by someone else. And it’s not good for the students either. So it was the best option. None of them bothered that I had a small baby with me — they were just keen to get the work done.
“What I’d like to see is a bit of funding to support women when they come back in after maternity leave, which buys them out of their teaching for a little while, and allows them to get up to speed in their research. It would be in the university’s interest to allow women to pick up careers and go on to be outstanding.”
Professor Lunn has used those experiences to do all she can to reverse what she describes as a “societal” prejudice against women joining her chosen profession. In Scotland today, barely 15 per cent of civil engineering undergraduates are women. But in her department, the figure is 40 per cent.
“That is really unusual,” she admits. “It’s the best in the UK, there’s nowhere close to it.” She points out that a determined government can achieve gender equality if it wants to.
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“The Finnish government did it 30 years ago,” she says. “They said that if Finland, as a small country, was to make it, it needed a high-tech manufacturing industry, and so they deliberately encourage and targeted women.
“The result is, they completely turned around the balance of their engineering degrees, and now have slightly over 50 per cent of women in civil engineering.”
The Scottish government could do the same, she argues, but a persuasive report on the subject from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in which she was involved, has prompted no response. “It is a lost opportunity for Scotland,” is all she will say.
Perhaps, with a woman as first minister, that decision might be worth revisiting. Professor Lunn is a hard person to ignore. Not only was she chosen in a poll by the Saltire Society last week as one of Scotland’s ten outstanding women — the work she is involved in now could revolutionise the construction industry.
Her latest research project involves developing a means of sealing rocks or concrete structures underground, making them impermeable to water for hundreds of years. The implications for the storage of nuclear waste are obvious — she is on the government’s committee for radioactive waste management — but there are far wider possibilities for industry in a process that could make deep foundations almost perma-nently water-resistant.
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It is known, prosaically, as grouting. But Professor Lunn’s research is about as far removed as it is possible to be from filling the gaps in the kitchen tiles.
It uses bacteria as a catalyst and minerals to create a rock-hard seal binding cracks and fissures. As a natural process it would take millions of years to achieve. She wants to do it in a day.
She explains: “The advantage of the bacteria is they’ll stick on your fracture surface and then you will precipitate your mineral, and you will seal it up — like the white veins you see on rocks at the seaside, that’s what you are trying to re-create.”
Professor Lunn’s grouting has obvious advantages over cement, which has a high pH and can react chemically with the ground, making it unsuitable for use over periods of more than 50 years.
Downstairs in her laboratory she shows us a slab of rock, lying underwater, which is being sealed using bacteria injected into the cracks. At present the process is taking three days to complete. She wants to do it in one.
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And there is more. She is developing the world’s first “detector grout”, which can indicate how much material is needed to when building foundations, or filling holes in the ground.
“One of the problems with cement is you just inject it into the ground, but you don’t know how far it goes, it just goes until you can’t get any more in,” she explains. “On the Commonwealth Games site, they used five million tonnes in the Emirates arena to seal up mine workings. We now have a patent out for the world’s first detector grout, which can see where it’s gone. This would allow you to see where you’ve injected material.”
Not only would this reduce CO2 emissions, it could greatly reduce costs. The benefits for companies building dams, sea barriers, wind turbines and any structure using deep foundations are obvious, and already Professor Lunn is talking about spin-off companies developed by the university to exploit the potential.
It is all a long way from the student who was told she could not combine life as a parent with a career in civil engineering. Edinburgh must be kicking itself.