The courage to connect: how belonging builds better leaders

In August 2026, we spoke to Dr Claire Davies about her thoughts on connection and leadership. You can watch it back here, or read our summary below:

Physics is, in Claire Davies’s words, “white as heck” and male-dominated. As a gay woman working in the field, she spent years as the only person like her in the room. What she built in response, a small regional network that started as a stall at a Pride festival, has since grown into awards and a curriculum partnership with a national charity. But the story she told was not one of smooth progression. It was a story about how belonging has to come before confidence, and confidence before courage, and how none of that arrives without real risk.

The maths of isolation

Davies grounded her talk in numbers before she got to the personal. The Institute of Physics’s most recent demographic survey, from 2019, found that 17% of respondents identified as female, 96% as cisgender, and just 1% selected gay woman or lesbian as their sexual orientation. In a typical physics department of around a hundred people, that 1% is effectively one person. It was, for a long time, her.

The gap widens with seniority. While 25% of early career physicists are female, that falls to 8% at senior level, meaning the further you progress, the less likely you are to have female peers, let alone women to learn from. Davies has been taught or supervised by only four women physicists in her whole career, was 22 before she knowingly met an openly LGBTQ+ physicist, and still has not met a queer female physicist more senior than herself.

She linked this to the legacy of Section 28, the law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in UK schools from the late 1980s until its repeal in the mid-2000s, with little done since to undo its effects in education. Davies argues this has denied generations of LGBTQ+ young people the aspirational and relatable role models known to protect against stereotype threat. Through PRISM Exeter, she has tried to close that gap: producing postcards and posters featuring the astronaut Sally Ride and the astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala, distributed to schools and science museums via the charity Schools OUT UK.

Belonging before confidence, confidence before courage

Davies described her own path to belonging as a spiral staircase rather than a straight line: belonging built confidence, which gave her the courage to seek out more belonging, which built more confidence again. Her first real foothold was a mailing list run jointly by the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society, which grew into a national conference for LGBTQ+ people across STEM. She followed it from a distance for a year before attending in person in 2017, and even then, she nearly talked herself out of it.

“I’d got to the point where I’d contextualised my belonging as being queer and a physicist, and they were two distinct elements. The idea of bringing them together was so foreign that I doubted that to be in one camp, I’d have to lose the other.”

The conversation that resolved it, about whether she was “gay enough” to attend a queer conference, happened as pillow talk with her now-wife. It is why she titled the talk The Courage to Connect: true belonging, she argued, only comes after participation, and participation takes courage that has to be found before any confidence exists to draw on.

The interactive exercise that followed bore this out. One participant, the only trans person in her workplace, described how her manager’s response to an incident of transphobia, an open “what do you need, what would help you”, gave her a rare sense of allyship. Another described watching the film Love Me Tender the day before and feeling, unexpectedly, that she “walked differently” afterwards, having seen a lesbian writer on screen who felt close to her own life. Davies’s own list of what helps included having your differences actively celebrated rather than merely tolerated, shared values standing in for shared identity, and a sense of connection to place.

From self-protection to community building

Davies traced the moment she became a leader to a shift in thinking: from asking how she could survive her own isolation, to asking how she could stop anyone else experiencing it. That meant volunteering for her department’s EDI committee, then approaching the Institute of Physics’s southwest branch to coordinate a stall at Exeter Pride, in exchange for being co-opted onto the branch, “a back-scratching deal, effectively, but it’s something that I definitely don’t regret.”

That stall produced the volunteers who later met for the first International Day of LGBT People in STEM, and from that meeting, PRISM Exeter was founded: Pride and Representation in STEM Matters, a backronym worked out after the name. The whole arc, from her partner encouraging her to attend her first conference to founding a functioning network, took eighteen months.

Visibility, vulnerability, and what leaders owe their teams

Davies is deliberately, fully out, describing her media profile as “full on BBC levels.” She recounted appearing on a Sky at Night special in 2023, suggesting LGBTQ+ representation be added to Voyager’s Golden Record, and being so nervous beforehand that she sought approval from producers and fellow panellists first. The moment was met with spontaneous applause. “I don’t think you can have visibility as an LGBT individual without vulnerability.” For those already leading people, she was direct: you cannot control who sees you as a leader, and some of the people who do may need explicit assurance from you before they can risk their own visibility.

Her clearest message to leaders, though, was about funding and supporting affinity groups even where impact cannot be neatly measured. PRISM Exeter’s newsletter reaches around 300 subscribers, many of whom have never engaged directly but report that simply knowing the network exists has mattered to them. “Belonging is a form of infrastructure, and it’s not a perk.” People deserve access to mutual support and understanding as standard, not as something sold to them as a bonus.

She closed on harder ground: the toll of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex in the Equality Act and the Office for Students ruling on freedom of speech, both of which have “completely knocked the wind out of my sails” over the past year. She described a lifetime of having her womanhood questioned and finding only partial reassurance in EHRC guidance. Her closing advice matched the honesty running through the rest of the talk: if the current climate has reduced your own capacity to support others, that is okay. And if it hasn’t, or if it has lit a fire instead, it might be time to pick up the baton.

About Claire:

Dr Claire Davies (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Exeter. Claire is a gay woman and an award-winning advocate for supporting under-represented groups into science through outreach and equality, diversity and inclusion work. She founded the PRISM Exeter network in 2018 to increase the visibility of LGBTQ+ scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians and medics. in the summer of 2024, she forged PRISM Exeter’s partnership with LGBT+ education charity Schools OUT UK to develop classroom resources for UK LGBT+ History Month 2026, which integrate LGBTQ+ identities into the Key Stage 3 and 4 maths and physics curricula for the first time.