Without full details of how to submit to the Research Excellence Framework, UK university staff had two broad options: (1) to guess the requirements and work towards them; (2) or to ignore the whole exercise until the actual criteria were published. Nobody could account for the enthusiasm for a third approach that was spreading fast across academia: male colleagues raiding the contents of female professors’ soap bags. One day, while I was out hunting for wedding dresses, a secret mission from the University of Sheffield was apprehended in my office rifling through some of my most personal belongings.