Sandi Toksvig is not in a joking mood. Though as warm and witty as anyone who’s grown up watching her present QI or the Great British Bake Off would imagine, she is, as she prepares her Darwin College Lecture, the Sandi who left Radio 4’s The News Quiz in 2015 to launch The Women’s Equality Party, who has for decades been a vocal and visible advocate for women and the LGBTQ+ community. And she’s angry.
“The way computers function, is they function fundamentally by algorithms. And all of those algorithms are proving to be misogynistic,” she explains. “Ordinary women’s bodies are being objectified, and it’s having this huge knock-on effect on women’s profiles, on their businesses, and indeed just basic education. We are getting a wrong view of history, we are getting an incredibly skewed vision of the present, and nothing less than the way in which people are educated – knowledge itself – is at stake, I have come to realise. And with the tech bros saying that what we need is to masculinise the boardrooms more, we are in terrible trouble.”
Sandi has been partially based in Cambridge for the past two academic years, initially as the inaugural Q+ Fellow in the Sociology Department, as a result of which she was made a Bye-Fellow at Christ’s College. Intended to provide opportunities for LGBTQ+ alumni to spend time at the University developing an idea, the role provided an opportunity to research her ambition to rebalance gender representation online. She began with the goal of creating an interactive “Mappa Mundi”, to present data and statistics on the challenges and limitations imposed on women across the world, acknowledge and celebrate their successes, and provide a platform to share their stories. But the scope has broadened.
“I was working on the Mappa Mundi project, which was to look at Wikipedia and see what we can do to show that the world isn’t 85% white, middle class and male. But what I’ve realised is that the situation is much more dire than that. I feel the urgency – the more I look into it, the more I read, the more my computer tells me what to think when I ask it a question, the more the information is skewed.”
Cambridge, in Sandi’s view, has a collective responsibility to respond.
“We can only do it if we join together as large organisations. From the person who is genuinely interested in computers to the person who only cares about Etruscan coinage. It has to be the full range of subjects at the University, we have to get together and stop the masculinsation of knowledge, otherwise nothing less than knowledge is doomed.”
Saving the world from misogynistic algorithms doesn’t pay the bills of course, or keep a multifaceted 40-year entertainment career going. While pursuing her research, Sandi is also promoting her new novel, Friends of Dorothy, shooting the new series of QI and writing a musical and a play.
“Normally I’m quite cheerful,” she reassures me. “As soon as I’ve finished with you I shall be sitting here writing jokes.”
But it’s clear that the reinvigorated relationship with Cambridge has been hugely emotive, not just for the chance to ponder how best to right the wrongs of the internet, but for the opportunity to reset some more personal associations. Sandi has been open in the past about the impact of being ostracised as an undergraduate after she was outed as a lesbian.
“It was awful,” she says now. “The way they treated me was a disgrace. But in a way, what it’s done, is made me much more of a champion of the underdog. Because I know what it’s like to be marginalised.”
As Q+ Fellow she turned this experience on its head, offering both representation and personal support to the LGBTQ+ community.
“It was hugely important. I can’t tell you how many people, not just students, but people who had worked long service at Christ’s came out to me, and felt that they hadn’t been able to do that before. I had a wonderful LGBTQ+ dinner where a young man came over to me and said that it was the first night of his life that he had felt comfortable in his own skin. He looked like a boy who could conquer the world. And so I will carry on being visible and available.”
And as for her Darwin College Lecture, while it will be, as she puts it “a call to arms”, the intention is not to fill the audience with despair. Far from it.
“I want them to leave enthused. Determined to do something. I will be painstaking in making sure nobody leaves the room under any misapprehension about how it works. Somebody is not only designing the bookshelves; they’re telling us what books get to go on the shelves.”
Join us for Sandi’s lecture, Eve’s Byte of the Apple, at 5.30pm on Friday 21st February.
