The Two Opposing Sides of the Desk

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Athene Donald

At different times in one’s life one is more likely to be an interviewer or an interviewee, but these things are never immutable. As it happens I have been the subject of several interviews recently, something which has made me think a bit differently about how to tackle these things and reminds me what it feels like to be the one put on the spot.

I was never instructed in how to be an interviewer or, to be more accurate, half way through my career I attended a course which was more to do with the formalities and the law than how to come up with questions which are likely to be informative. From the course I learned that it was unwise to annotate one’s notes with comments like ‘hideous bloke with big nose‘ as an aide memoire in case one had to produce them. The diversity issues were ones on which I hope I was already up to speed; I knew not to ask how a woman was going to sort out childcare or enquire about intentions vis-à-vis pregnancy, even all those years ago. (It isn’t so long ago that I heard a colleague ask the former question and had to leap down his throat.)

So, not having the advantage of instruction I learned the hard way not to ask closed questions, the kind that only require a yes or a no by way of answer. So, asking a potential secretary if (s)he can use Excel is not useful; asking them to give an example of when and why they’ve had to use a spreadsheet and how it helped them rather more so. It was with secretarial interviews I learned just how limited my skills were; somehow the interviews I’d conducted up till that point with students and postdocs hadn’t highlighted my shortcomings so drastically, probably because it came more naturally to ask open-ended questions about research. But, that day when another novice and I tried to choose a secretary and constantly asked these uninformative closed questions stands out in my mind as a bad day (though, despite that, we made an excellent choice).

At the other extreme of questions are those I think of as ‘competency’ questions, beloved of many employers trying to sift out the sheep from the goats in the graduate milk round. Those are the kinds of questions which require the applicant to annunciate, possibly at some length, when they have persuaded a colleague to do something they didn’t want to do; or to give an example of when they have shown an entrepreneurial side. Mercifully, personally, I’ve never had to apply for a job which required me to answer these questions in paragraphs of waffle (or insightful prose, depending on your point of view).

However, recently I’ve been on the receiving end of rather similar questions in a series of different interviews – and I’ve struggled with them!  First there were those associated with the First Women Awards, for which I was shortlisted. Both at the actual interview associated with the awards and in an accompanying interview for my local newspaper, I was flummoxed by questions such as ‘what do you take most pride in?’ and ‘what is your next goal of something to be the first to do?‘ It’s not that they are in any sense unfair questions but they aren’t ones to which I have a convenient soundbite answer. I felt tempted to say, I don’t do things I don’t take pride in but I know they want some simplistic answer such as ‘it was when I cured XXX‘ or ‘that Eureka moment when suddenly I understood all the mysteries of the universe‘.   And my work doesn’t lend itself to answers like that.

To be the first female professor in the Physical Sciences at Cambridge was indeed pleasing at the time, but should I take pride in it when it was always going to be simply a matter of time for some woman to attain that accolade and it just happened to be me?  It’s not something that makes my chest swell with pride every time I think of it, it was just one staging post on a long journey for women in the university. Furthermore, since I hadn’t been aiming at that goal very consciously it isn’t very surprising that I haven’t got another ‘first’ goal in mind; I don’t operate like that. Perhaps, if I’m going to find myself in a similar situation again, next time I’ll try to have my soundbites prepared – when I’ll inevitably find it is a different set of flummoxing questions that are thrown at me.

The other recent interview I participated in is all too public under the gentle interviewing style of Jim Al Khalili  for Radio 4′s The Life Scientific. Here the challenges were of a different type. I find Jim (with whom I sit on a couple of committees through the Royal Society, so he is no stranger) a very easy person to talk to. Nevertheless, some of the questions were decidedly leading, including comments implying both that I excelled at music at school and personally transformed the whole field of biological physics. Both these concepts strike me as decidedly stretching the point, so I tried to pull him back a bit from these excesses.

Of course, the story is so much better if I was a musical prodigy as well as a physicist, but the truth is I was a useful jobbing viola player surrounded by those who went on to be professional musicians. I would also say I have done my bit to get biological physics on the map, but it was an idea for which the discipline was ripe and many individuals were getting involved around the country and raising the subject’s profile. So, to go in for the ‘good story’ at the expense of precision bothers me. This is of course a standard complaint about scientists by the media in general. We are too concerned with accuracy to present a simple and exciting straightforward story about our science that is easy to pitch to editors or to present.

As with any activity, no doubt the moral of the story is to be well-prepared, whichever side of the desk one finds oneself. As the interviewer that really should be simple and, having mastered the art of asking open questions I ought to be able to carry out informative interviews. On the receiving end, there is always the danger that the questions asked are somehow at odds with who one is and how one thinks things through, so that reasonable questions can still become minefields despite preparation and even, I suspect, despite the best intentions of the interviewer. Practice, practice, practice is all very well as advice, but may still be insufficient.

 

 

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Fitting Interpersonal Skills into Academia

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Athene Donald

There is much talk in higher education about the importance of transferable skills. For a PhD student this means that you receive training in things beyond your own particular field of research. Typically this would include being required to consider your writing and presentation skills; additionally, maybe you would be exposed to ideas of project management or examining your entrepreneurial side and learning how to write a business plan. Seldom, at this level, does it mean considering people skills, handling negotiations or how to be persuasive in difficult situations. Role play may also rarely feature. Yet this latter group of subjects are also important skills, whatever field of employment you ultimately are destined to join.

A few weeks ago I was asked to give a presentation to Schlumberger’s Faculty of the Future on the topic of ‘Building a Career and a Team’ – their title not mine! Before I say more about the thought processes that went into writing that talk, let me say a little about this programme for early career women. Schlumberger, like L’Oreal with their For Women in Science International Fellowships, are investing heavily in young women in academia: young women from all parts of the globe, particularly the developing world. These fellowships are not intended for the richer nations where there are already many opportunities, but for those countries whose educational structures are not as well developed and where there is untapped and unfulfilled talent. So each year Schlumberger Foundation funds about 60 individuals to take up either PhD or postdoctoral appointments in countries in Western Europe and the USA. The workshop I was invited to speak at was for those working in Europe, who came to spend several days at a residential course in Cambridge. This was a chance for them to share experiences with others in similar situations even if widely diverse fields of research, to listen to speakers from different backgrounds and to get a little recreational time to explore Cambridge.

When I was invited to talk to them on my assigned topic, my first reaction of course was ‘what do I know about these things?’ Yes, impostor syndrome struck again, as it so often does. However, as I have made plain on these pages before, there is little point in giving in to that nasty little internal voice that can be so destructive, so I sat down to consider what should be included under the title of ‘Building a career and a team’. What pearls of wisdom could I summon from my singularly unplanned career to illustrate how one should actually plan? Of course, therein lies the first bullet point:

  • Many/most individuals at whatever level in their profession will have arrived there by a combination of chance, serendipity and luck, just as much as by forethought, brilliance and grim determination.

Scratch the surface of someone at the top of the pecking order and you are likely to find someone vaguely surprised by what has happened to them.

Following on from that is the corollary

  • Often the most important decisions are made without noticing.

By that I mean that incidents that with hindsight turn out to have been crucial and key turning points, may have been made by accident or without due attention. On what basis did you choose your PhD supervisor? A well-known professor of my acquaintance confided to me once that his decision had been made based on the fact that one particular potential supervisor smiled at him as he walked into the room. On such little things can one’s whole life turn (as, in a sense, it did in his case).

That isn’t to say that you can’t take some control for your progression. Thinking hard about what skills you need to master to accomplish the next stage, where to go for advice and trying to build up a support group of friends, peers and those just a bit ahead in the game are all things that are up to you to manage. Mentoring is all very well, but mentoring schemes may not work if you happen to be assigned someone with whom you have little in common and you rub each other up the wrong way, so finding less formal routes to get advice is always a wise thing to do. So point number 3 would be

  • Know who to go to for advice and build up a network of supportive friends and colleagues (not necessarily in your immediate group environment). If you can find colleagues at different levels of seniority, so much the better.

Then there is the team-building aspect, which is where the people skills I refer to above enter. I never had any training in this, but I expect there are courses out there. Some of it is common sense, but it does require an awareness of both yourself and your own natural approach. Consultants would no doubt devise psychometric tests to analyse one’s intrinsic style, but I think one can make some progress without such external labelling. The kinds of questions that I personally, in my amateur way, think matter when it comes to considering how to tackle a burgeoning group, include

–      Do you want to keep things formal or informal?

–      Do you get more out of people by being forceful or relaxed?

–      How are you going to handle the need to criticise someone?

–      Are you comfortable heaping praise on others, and do you think you know when to do this judiciously?

–      How friendly is it wise to be with the team? Do you socialise with them or does that damage your authority?

–      Do you keep brief records of conversations and progress or simply rely on memory and good will?

–      How can you keep the team working well together?

–      How will you handle interpersonal conflict?

Everyone will have their own set of answers to these and many more questions which defines their approach. But the one that I think is central to getting the most out of people is the one about praise. There are those who think the only way to get people to work hard is to criticize their attempts endlessly; there are parents who think that is the right way to bring up their children too. I am not of that school of thought. I think students need encouragement, just as much as young children, and that constantly saying in essence ‘pull up your socks, you’re not slogging your guts out hard enough‘ is simply demoralising. Of course sometimes one has to say something along those lines, but if at other times you are at least a little enthusiastic then I believe the criticism will have more impact when it comes. There is a third way of doing things on this front. Never to say anything good or bad, just grunt when results are presented and set the next round of agreed targets. I have never been comfortable with that kind of stiff upper lip neutrality, but it is far from uncommon.

Of course, there are students and students. Some may themselves react better or worse to these different styles. For some, constant gushing praise may just be embarrassing rather than uplifting; for some of the bone-idle variety, incessant criticism may be a requisite if any results are ever to be produced at all. Students, like supervisors, are people. They need to know where they stand: whether the data they have is likely to turn into a thesis chapter, whether their null results can be incorporated and are they on target to finish on time, for instance. Students should not be left uncertain as to their progress, but too often they are as PhDcomics frequently pillories graphically. Building teams is as much about utilising interpersonal skills to get the most out of people as sheer intellectual brilliance. Unfortunately, too often these facts are forgotten in academia.

 

 

 

 

 

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Book Prizes, Gender and Personality

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Athene Donald

The long-list for the Royal Society Winton Book Prize was announced last week which, if the publishers blurbs listed in the write-up in the Guardian are to be believed, represent a real cornucopia of delightful reading. As it happens, I am in the middle of reading one of the long-listed books at the moment (Life’s Ratchet by Peter Hoffman) and have already ticked another one off the list (Tim Birkhead‘s Bird Sense). I am keen to get my hands on a third book on the list, Frances Ashcroft‘s book The Spark of Life  too, having read her previous Life at the Extremes some time ago and enjoyed it a lot. Additionally, Frances and I share a lot in common: from being contemporaries at Girton College all those years ago, to being elected to the Royal Society the same year and having both won one of the L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science Laureates.

The Guardian write-up I mention above sparked some comments on Twitter. I think it was Stephen Curry who started it off, remarking that, despite the judges being predominantly female, there was a distinct lack of women on the long-list. In fact, Frances Ashcroft is the only woman on the 18-strong long-list. This list will be whittled down to a shortlist of 6 in the autumn before the final winner is announced. The odds must be that there will be a male winner at the end of the day, as has happened for every one of the last 24 years as far as I can see, having cast my eye over all the previous winners of the Book Prize  (which has gone under various names since it was first set up in 1989), with the exception of a joint husband-and-wife team which won. A 2011 article considered this theme too and, at that point, claimed that there had only been 9 women overall on the 144 authors on the shortlists (6 each year).

GrrlScientist, who had written the Guardian piece and who had been on one of the reading panels, entered the Twitter-fray saying that she simply didn’t notice the gender of the author as she read – no more had I noticed the gender distribution when reading the list of nominated books. But will every reader behave like that?  Perhaps there is a bias by gender about which submitted proposals are accepted for publication (in which case, blame the publishers). Or maybe the publishers are negligent in submitting books written by women for the prize (in which case, also blame the publishers). It’s impossible to tell. Uta Frith, chair of this year’s judging panel, said (again on Twitter) that there were 18 books submitted which had been written by women out of a total of 112. At that rate the women appear to have been under-represented on the long-list: if simple odds had been at play 2 female-authored books might have been expected to feature. That of course immediately shows us that we are back in the land of fluctuations and noise, where one book more or less makes a big difference: we shouldn’t draw any strong conclusions from the low numbers of women on the list.

While this discussion was going on over Twitter, I ventured to suggest that maybe the Royal Society’s Young People’s's book prize would have a different distribution of female authors. My instinct – or perhaps lazy stereotyping further influenced by the  knowledge that Frances Balkwill had won this prize some years ago – told me that might be likely. I have no statistics on the long- or short-list gender distribution, but out of the 27 winners on the Royal Society website I can identify 9 with female authors, although a number of the books had more than one author listed and the number of women represented is actually higher (some, no doubt, illustrators).  So I am assuming this bears out my suspicion that women are more likely to write books (or at least books which get published and/or submitted for consideration) for children than adults. Of course, as with Frances Ashcroft, not to mention other stand-out writers such as Rebecca Skloot (she of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks fame) or Lisa Randall, whose book Knocking on Heaven’s Door I reviewed a couple of years ago , there are some stunning female popular science writers out there. I hope that soon one of them will be accorded the accolade of the Winton Prize; I am sure it is just a matter of time, but it does no harm to pause a moment and wonder why this hasn’t happened so far.

My last post was about EO Wilson’s Letters to a Young Scientist. In it he said something (well many things, but let me just pick up on one) that I thought was odd at the time and, reflecting on the (extremely limited number of) books I have read on the long-list emphasises that he wasn’t entirely accurate in what he said. To quote

Few scientists write memoirs, and among those who do, even fewer are willing disclose the emotions, urges, idols and teachers that brought them into their scientific careers….a leathery, just-the -facts style confines most personal accounts of scientific discovery, and a good story often comes out reticent and dull.

Is this really true? It stuck out to me as not describing many of the books I’ve read and, looking at the Winton list, it certainly isn’t true of either the Birkhead or Hoffman books I alluded to above. Unfortunately I’ve lent my copy of The Sense of Birds (as well as its even more impressive predecessor The Wisdom of Birds, which I discussed a while back) to family members so I can’t quote from them. However, I have a distinct memory of Birkhead commenting on his lifelong affection for guillemots, the interesting places he has had to go to study them and other species, overall conveying a strong sense of personal identity along with his motivations (‘urges’, to use White’s word if you prefer) and his emotions on returning to some much-studied, much-loved seabird colony.

As I’m still in the middle of reading Life’s Ratchet, it is easier for me to pull out a statement to contradict that paragraph of Wilson’s above. Hoffman, it turns out, was a PhD student of John Pethica‘s.  John is currently the Physical Secretary of the Royal Society, in which role I interact with him quite a bit, but we go back a long way: once upon a time he and I were students together in the Cambridge physics class. Of John, his teacher, the sort of person Wilson claims doesn’t get a mention in books, Hoffman says:

John is an easygoing person but an exacting scientist. When I visited Oxford for my interview, an envelope with instructions was waiting for me at the hotel. John had written “Dr Peter Hoffman, Esq” on the envelope. I didn’t know that I was an Esquire, but it showed John’s respect for everybody, even a lowly postdoc looking for a job. When my wife and I finally arrived a few months later, it was the beginning of summer. John typically disappeared for extended periods, only to reappear with a bagful of new idea. After John’s return from his mysterious summer travels, I got into one of the typical – as I soon realised – conversations with him. These conversations always involved new ideas, connections and recent publications. Listening to John I would often be reduced to nodding and saying “aha, yeah ,mmmh” only to scramble back to the office to look up the papers he was talking about.

I think this paragraph provides an excellent lightning pen-sketch of the man, bringing in a little of the personal including how Hoffman interacted with his supervisor. Nor do I think such stories are that unusual. Briefly I considered whether this might be a new trend for the personal to appear in science books, possibly something not reflected in books of the past that Wilson would have grown up with. A moment’s thought of the other book I’m currently reading (a bad habit of mine, to have more than one book on the go simultaneously I know) showed me this is wrong. The book I’m reading is a composite republication of Island Farm (Published 1943 and Island Years (1940) by Sir Frank Fraser Darling, one of the early practitioners of ecology, who made the study of animals (red deer and grey seals notably) in their West Highland habitats his own. These two books, these memoirs, are written in an immensely personal style, with great lyricism and enthusiasm, demonstrating his abiding love for the islands he made his own (in all senses). Not for him any leathery, dry style. If you have any interest in natural history and/or the Western Isles, I’d strongly recommend these classic texts.

No new trend to get personal in science books and memoirs then. And some more fascinating books on that Winton long-list into which I aim to get my teeth soon.

 

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Advice from the Great and Good

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Athene Donald

Not so long ago I stumbled across a very enthusiastic review of a new book by the renowned entomologist EO Wilson. The book was not about ants as such, his speciality, but its content can be deduced from the title: ‘Letters to a Young Scientist‘. With such an elegiac review to encourage me, I bought the book (to read on my iPad) and looked forward to profiting from his words and admiring his wisdom. A man who has been so successful himself in his chosen field should be a good guide for those setting out (and those further down the road), I assumed. My memory told me that many years before Peter Medawar, a biologist of great distinction noted for his work on tissue rejection, a Nobel Prize winner no less, had written a book with a rather similar title. This book too I purchased (it turned out to be called ‘Advice to a Young Scientist‘ and was published in 1979; I clearly should have read it at the time). In the end, for reasons I will give below, I read them both in quick succession over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Wilson is famed as a writer (he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book On Human Nature, coincidentally published the year Medawar published his book of advice) as well as a naturalist. His style is easy to read. However, there was much in the book that irritated me. Firstly, although he tries to pay lip service to the idea that he is writing for ‘scientists’, he really isn’t. He is very much a naturalist observing and recording the (mainly ant) world and from his observations deducing hypotheses and models. He hasn’t the experience of building experiments in the laboratory, or even, in some senses, constructing experiments in the field. The advice he gives may feel of limited use to a condensed matter physicist or synthetic chemist, for instance, because the examples of how to set up problems and then solve them will feel very remote.

Furthermore, although the book is broken up into short chapters that look like they are going to convey pithy words of wisdom, frequently they serve as no more than window-dressing for stories of his ant-hunting life. Stories, moreover, that prove his cleverness; vehicles to demonstrate his perspicacity and wisdom. It is a very Whiggish kind of book, full of how careers (at least his) progress in an almost unbroken chain of successes. Again, this may not be recognizable by all young scientists! His advice is clearly to live a life as he has, a life where implicitly ambition (not simply curiosity or being driven to find out more) is a major driving force. His view is that ‘Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.‘ One feels he says this with approval.

This self-congratulatory, explicitly ambitious tone was not of the sort I felt at one with. So I quickly turned to the Medawar book, out of curiosity but also by way of comparison. I thought maybe it would feel dated, being written more than 30 years ago. In fact, aside from some remarks about presentations when even slides (that’s 35mm slides, of a kind never seen at a lecture these days) were regarded as dangerously modern, the book felt entirely up to date in its tone. It also felt very, very different. From the book I picked up some interesting philosophical and historical titbits but nothing about the massive achievements of Medawar himself. There were no anecdotes about how clever he’d been in this or that situation, but wise words about how best to interact with those around you by being courteous, ethical, thorough and other good things; what is and isn’t meant by the scientific method and how one should tackle one’s research, all written in a very personal style but without self intruding.

When it came to ambition, Medawar made his position very clear:

Ambition: Considered as a motive force that helps to get things done, ambition is not necessarily a deadly sin, but excess of ambition can certainly be a disfigurement. An ambitious young scientist is marked out by having no time for anybody or anything that does not promote or bear upon his work. …The ambitious make too obvious a point of being polite to those who can promote their interests and are proportionately uncivil to those who cannot.

I cannot imagine Wilson having written those words, nor even believing them if he’d read them. For Wilson ‘Real scientists don’t take vacations’. They also ought to get out of all administration work and, according to him: ‘Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade‘ to get out of this drudgery, but he does concede you may need to take weekends off ‘for rest and diversion‘. I suspect the scientist Wilson most admires might equate with some of the jerks I’ve written about before with disparagement. Medawar, on the other hand, himself headed one of the major UK Institutes (the National Institute for Medical Research from 1961 for 8 years, until he had a stroke). He was a very influential leader of research, an effective communicator with politicians and first-rate spokesman (and writer) for science. Not for him dodging and pleading to get out of that line of work.

I did wonder to what extent the difference in tone between the two books might also lie in their different country of provenance. It is possible that Medawar is a typical self-deprecating stereotypical Brit who resists the brash naked ambition of the colonies exemplified (again if I may stereotype) by Wilson. I can imagine that distinction has some weight. Wilson’s book, albeit women feature, is also a very macho book (he writes approvingly of a female PhD student of his who was ‘audacious’, indeed he devotes a whole chapter to her story). Medawar, on the other hand, has a whole chapter dedicated to ‘Sexism and Racism in Science’ at a time when such topics must barely have begun to feature in most scientists’ minds. It is written with great sensitivity and awareness of the challenges that minorities faced (and face) in science and still feels apposite today.

So my advice to young scientists would be to get hold of the older classic text. It has far more genuine, dispassionate advice and less personal anecdote of how one particular scientist/naturalist made their way. If you want a signpost about the do’s and don’ts of how to get on in (academic) science, peppered with historical context, a little Baconian thought and some useful epigrams I recommend Medawar. If, on the other hand, you want the brave Whiggish story of one’s man adventures with ants around the world – Wilson is the man for you.

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Impact for Women

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Athene Donald

Next week I am due to share a platform with Dave Delpy, CEO of the EPSRC amongst others, discussing the ‘Impact of Impact’. This is an event organised by a new student body, the Cambridge University Science and Policy Exchange. I will not (I am rather pleased to say) be discussing that controversial topic of impact as implied within Research Council walls – I’ll leave that to Dave to defend. My role is to discuss how research funding can and should impact on gender issues. If the money is tight, as it is, why should we use any of it specifically to support and promote women in science? As I’ve been pulling my ideas together, I’ve come across a recent article written by the US-based astronomer Meg Urry, who always has interesting things to say about gender issues. Although her piece deals specifically with issues in physics education, much of what she says resonates more broadly.

Perhaps we should start off by asking, what happens (and has been happening) when we exclude women from science, or at least deter them from pursuing science actively? There is the simple moral argument that this is wrong and it is indefensible to make life difficult for 50% of the population, but in the context of ‘impact’ we can go much further. It may be hard to quantify the value of some of the statements that follow, so I’m not going to put a pound sign against them, but the arguments at a qualitative level ought to be pretty compelling.

In the Board room, there is increasing evidence that a diverse team leads to higher profits. Why? Because different viewpoints permit a richer picture to be built of up of markets, consumers and hence of products that may make money. If the only viewpoint that is factored in is white, middle-class middle-aged men (for instance) then many potential customers may be left unsatisfied. Advertisers have appreciated this for many years (hence the use of focus groups targeting different groups to explore possibilities); it seems senior managers have been slower to appreciate the benefits of a multi-pronged approach to a problem.

Specifically in the area of innovation there are some very specific gender-related issues that may need to be considered when designing new products: ideas such as, what is the size/weight of the person for whom it is being designed or around whom the design is being configured. This applies, for instance and as I have written about before, when working out how safe cars are. It is not sufficient to use a standard male-sized crash dummy to work out safety features, the fact that women and children are also likely to be in a typical car must be considered. Yet for years this simple fact was overlooked. Much more on these issues can be found at the EU sponsored Gendered Innovations  website.

In science as in innovation, it is not one-size fits all. Having a diverse workforce, research or management team will, on average, be likely to lead to more creative solutions, whatever the project. Many projects need big teams to cover different aspects of a problem. This may mean diversity in discipline, an obvious example being the LHC. But diversity more broadly may, as in companies and in product development work, equally be beneficial in creativity and seeing problems from many directions.

What does this have to do with the ‘Impact of Impact’? Why should research funders care about these relatively intangible ideas? The answer to this is obvious. At the moment, despite girls getting good grades at school and frequently better than the boys on average, despite many courses (though not in physics or engineering) having equal numbers of boys and girls or even a majority of girls, the women aren’t sticking with the disciplines higher up the ladder or (even worse) they are being filtered out for reasons other than simple excellence: the atmosphere may feel inimical, working practices less than favourable and the challenges of achieving an attractive work-life balance may seem insurmountable. So, at the top of the academic heap, as well as other STEM professions, the numbers of women remain pitifully low. Yet, for the reasons I’ve just given, this is (economically) likely to be bad for science and the nation. Hence, there is a clear justification for spending hard cash on interventions to support the women who start off in the academic race and thereby encourage them not to quit.

An inimical workplace may not readily respond to mere injection of cash, but there are interventions that are relatively cheap yet demonstrably beneficial. As a specific example, consider the use of funds to facilitate returners from long term leave (typically maternity leave) getting back up to speed. A recent pilot ‘returning carers’ scheme’ in my own university has funded things like airfares for an additional person (be it nanny, the other parent or any other member of the family) to accompany the recipient to a conference or field trip so as to provide childcare. By enabling a young parent to attend a conference and so maintain an international profile in the first vital years of a child’s life, one of the perennial challenges for young mothers can be overcome at modest cost. The L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowships in the UK are another source of funds which can be applied in an incredibly flexible way that wouldn’t normally be allowable on a standard research grant. Perhaps Research Councils might wish to consider this.

Or, to cite another example of issues that can hold people back, particularly women, how about running workshops on confidence-building to facilitate making that application for promotion? Again, this is something Cambridge has tried out recently (and not just for academic women) finding it to be something for which there was a huge unsatisfied appetite. A little bit of money goes a long way on workshops and many individuals can be reached simultaneously. At an individual level one to one coaching may become valuable to train the leaders of tomorrow, but is obviously far more expensive.

Finally, if interventions are successful in keeping women in science – not just academic science although that is the context in which the above examples are given, but other settings as well – then we will benefit far more, as a nation, from the money invested in their education. To train so many young women who then walk away and end up unable/unwilling to utilise their hard-acquired STEM-based skills is illogical and wasteful. It makes no economic sense. We should do better.

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