Do not wait to be tapped on the shoulder in the hope your university will recognise your work. They are watching their budget, so will only wait for you to ask for recognition. They also make it hard once you do; seek help from those you trust.

Women of colour scholars are frequently asked to pay for their own travel and accommodation when they are a keynote speaker, but funds are somehow found to cover the cost of the other white male keynote speakers. Protect and respect yourself.

‘Gaslighting’ is a term that has gained recent traction. It occurs when victims of social injustice question whether they really are victims. Your body will tell you by getting angry or sad (hopeful or hopeless for change). If you feel these things, there’s nothing more to question.

No matter how young you are, if you did most of the work, make sure you are first author. You do not owe senior academics (especially males who benefit from a team of junior female researchers) later-order authorship just for the sake of honouring age-old norms not designed in your favour.

The neoliberalist system risks women turning on each other and their old shamed self, and human nature risks privileged men crying ‘me too’. Everyone needs to check themselves.

Allies of gender equity are unpredictable; you will not know from gender or colour, for example, who they may be. Exercise caution, but allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised too.

If you are applying for funding and need help crafting the narrative around research performance relative to opportunity (ROPE), consider contacting The GrantEd Group. They also offer broader career coaching, as does Embrace Change.

Ask for flexible work arrangements such as working from home and at any time that suits you. There is no good reason why universities cannot accommodate this. Micro-managing intelligent intrinsically-driven adults is not one of them. Technology further enables it. Collegiality and ‘corridor conversations’ are possible without daily physical presence.

Double check manuscripts accepted for publication. In-house copy editors have been known to edit or delete parts of titles, paragraphs, and punctuation intentionally selected without bringing it to the authors’ attention. Publications are a scholar’s creative artwork; words and thoughts, and the tempo they get put together, are their paint. Maintain final say. (Did Picasso let someone else touch up his work without asking? If that were to happen, he would probably never look at it again, failing to recognise it as his own, with all joy, pride, and satisfaction stolen). Make sure all suggested changes are in track - sometimes copy-editors have good ideas and catch things you have missed - but you are still the gate-keeper of your work.

If journals are rejecting your work, ask yourself if it is really about the quality of your paper. Journals are vested in protecting their reputations, and their impact factors go down the more they publish women [5], so a study’s rigour, merit, or fit are not always enough. Pick who you work with (unfortunately only learned by trial, error, disappointment, disillusionment, and disrespect).

Excessive scrutiny of one’s work - bore more by women through higher rejection of it by journal editors and reviewers - is workplace bullying/harassment, but universities can slip free from their complicity with this psychological battering because it is not they who are doing it directly. Meet your publishing KPIs, and protect your mental health and intellectual freedom, by choosing not to publish in journal articles. Try books and book chapters instead.