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Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. ̽��ֱ��author of numerous books and articles (including Pompeii: Life of a Roman Town, which won the Wolfson Prize for History), she is a Fellow of the British Academy and a regular contributor to both radio and television.

At school I remember being part of a small Oxbridge class taught by this deeply eccentric guy. He used to bribe us to learn poetry by heart; the going rate for ‘ ̽��ֱ��Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was 50 pence and 10 quid was up for grabs for anyone who mastered ‘ ̽��ֱ��Wreck of the Deutschland’.

But bribery was also a joke and like all the best teachers he showed us how to learn and how to express an opinion. It was incredibly exciting to start to appreciate how extraordinarily open-ended intellectual enquiry could be.

Many years later it’s either been my good or bad fortune to have ended up in academia and making television programmes on the Ancient World. That’s inevitably raised my profile and I was recently a panellist on Question Time. After that appearance I started to receive the vilest Twitter and internet abuse. I could’ve chosen to ignore it but I decided not to. For centuries women have put up with this sort of thing in the hope that if you shut up it’ll go away. It doesn’t work. I’m also such an academic that if somebody says something I don’t agree with, my autopilot response is to answer back.

“For centuries women have put up with this sort of thing in the hope that if you shut up it’ll go away. It doesn’t work.”

There’s a tremendous advantage to being quite resilient and fifty odd. Those Twitter comments were bonkers blasts of aggression and I wanted them to stop but I wasn’t sitting there feeling personally attacked. I’d feel much more attacked if someone said, ‘Look, 50 per cent of the footnotes in that article are completely wrong.’

It would be a lie to say that gender has held me back in my career; but it has sometimes been a case of feeling in a foreign country. As a graduate student the ̽��ֱ�� seemed to be a man’s place and for a long time my mates and I would say, ‘How can we get around this?’ We tried mimicking the men and the way they spoke, but I came to see that the pretence was always deeply unsatisfactory. You can’t pretend to be a bloke, and the most important thing is to find a way to talk and write that feels to be YOU. ̽��ֱ��best thing for me was stopping wanting to do things ‘properly’ and feeling able to focus on questions such as, what do I want to say here? What do I want to show them? How do I want to change what they think?

It may be deeply old fashioned, but I used to like the idea that there wasn’t much promotion in the ̽��ֱ��. Occasionally people were plucked out for advancement but it wasn’t part of a career plan. It freed you up to value different things. There was greater collaboration, and success was something embedded in the community rather than the individual. It’s a more egocentric environment now. I must be very careful not to be hypocritical though, because I’ve been successful within the terms that are laid down. If I’m in that race, I’ll play the game. But if I look back I think it has set us apart more than it’s brought us together.

“I find that the people who are most talented in helping me to rethink my ideas often don’t measure up to the more usual marks of success.”

I don’t really know what it means to be successful. I’ve written a lot about Roman history and I’ve enjoyed doing that. But I do find myself wondering, of those of us writing now, who will be big in fifty years’ time? We can’t know. I think the measurement of success is deeply problematic. It is very nice to get a promotion; it’s very nice to get a pay rise and that makes all kinds of things more pleasant. But you’d be mad if you thought that it was the be-all and end-all of success. I find that the people who are most talented in helping me to rethink my ideas often don’t measure up to the more usual marks of success.

When you look at rewarding success the debate inevitably becomes deeply gendered. There’s still a sense that women are the carers. If we are really serious about wanting to promote the careers of women there are ways we can do it. Like most men, I didn’t want to have kids and put my career on hold; I wanted to keep on having both. Two people make children and I don’t see why my career options should be worse or better. But childcare was cripplingly expensive, so I bought my choices at a very high price. When my male colleagues are getting a bit arsy as they look at some woman’s CV, I suggest to them that they ought to credit women with one book for each child. It’s not quite what they have in mind!

I don’t think improving the situation is about going for simplistic answers like only working nine-to-five, not having talks outside those hours, or just setting up some job shares. I call these ‘male quick-fixes’ and they’re quite clunky. We’ve got to get around to really thinking about what an intellectual community is when it’s a mixed one with kids.

Amidst all this, it’s important to acknowledge progress even if we haven’t got everything right yet. People often seem set on proving that Cambridge is a socially rigid environment, a dinosaur stuck in the nineteenth century. They’re wrong: the ̽��ֱ�� has changed dramatically in an incredibly short time. When I was an undergraduate in the seventies only 12 per cent of students were women, there was clear gender discrimination and we had to be cleverer than the men to get in. We’re in a very different place now.