Muddled Mess or Merely Work in Progress?

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Athene Donald

What do our surroundings say about us? If we choose to work in an office strewn with bits of paper, open files, journals and other debris, is this a testament to the fact our minds are on higher things and we are misunderstood geniuses? Or does it simply indicate that our parents didn’t berate us enough as children to keep our rooms tidy? Here I’m not referring to an office full of decaying banana skins or mugs decorated with interesting strains of bacillus. That’s just unhygienic and only indicates slovenly habits. I’m talking about the office with piles, neat or otherwise of ‘work in progress’.

I’m driven to ponder this question by some remarks written about me recently. An interview in our local newspaper (the Cambridge News) described the room that I inhabit as a ‘quaintly chaotic office’. (I can’t post a link to this since, as far as I can judge, the interview was deemed interesting enough to take up 2 pages in the newspaper but not interesting enough to be put online. That seems a bit strange, but no doubt they understand the reading habits of their clientele).  I can’t say that I think this description is unfair, or at least I understand the chaotic bit although I’m less clear why it is also described as quaint. Perhaps because they feel that this is what an old-fashioned professor’s room ought to look like. Whatever, it has caused me to think about the way I operate.

I blame the REF – don’t we all, for everything!  But the truth is that, right now, I am stuck in the midst of trying to bring together the various bits of documentation and the necessary number of these ‘bits’ is depressingly large. I have the unenviable task of chairing our ‘unit of assessment’s’ REF panel and so it is my responsibility to keep track of everything. Being a large unit, encompassing both the Cavendish Laboratory itself (the Physics Department) but also the Institute of Astronomy, we have around 16 impact cases to submit, which are each going through multiple iterations. I keep meaning to file them neatly, but that requires a clear stretch of time to sort through them that so far my diary has not permitted. So they simply pile up on the table, along with spreadsheets of who we are entering and what their outputs are, plus drafts of the necessary impact and environment statements (again in various annotated iterations). As I say these are sitting on my table, the table that is supposed to be kept clear so that students are able to spread out their results (on laptop or on paper) when they come to discuss them with me.

REF desk2

My office this Sunday afternoon, as I battle with the mountain of paperwork that represents the REF to me.

But, easy though it is to blame the REF, that can only explain away the piles on the table. My desk, the other ample surface in my room, no, that is my responsibility and is customarily little better. So what is my excuse for this? As a child I was a floor dweller. I used to do my homework on my bedroom floor and I always knew which pile of books corresponded to which subject. Once a week I had to pick them up and place them on some surface so the floor could be vacuumed, but immediately thereafter everything would return to their proper place on the carpet.  Unfortunately, that is not a sustainable way of working in an office environment. Nevertheless, I still try to work by piles – the separate piles corresponding to papers associated with different research topics, for instance – but, since they are on my fairly large desk and no one dusts its surface, they never need to get moved.  Then there is the post (not much of that these days, but still some) that I’m always going to answer but since I haven’t worked out what the answer is yet, it can linger on my desk a little longer. Indeed, each letter or invitation can linger there until it’s past its sell by date and when I next encounter it I can throw it away with a clear conscience. There’s the teaching material, the stuff I’ve come across I want to incorporate next year or lists of tweaks I want to make to existing slides; these notes can sit around from the end of one course to the start of its successor a year later. Finally, there are the papers associated with committees. These do get moved along quite fast, since I have to take them to the committee meetings and then they can get either shredded/chucked or filed, depending on circumstances.

What this indicates, of course, is that I haven’t caught up with a paperless office. I am still trying to adjust to using an iPad for committee meetings, as previously directed, and having tried for a year or so I am firmly of the opinion that I can’t operate that way when I am chairing meetings.  I can’t switch fast enough between the different agenda papers when they’re virtual, or keep track of where the agenda is going. Some committees likewise haven’t caught up with the electronic age and insist on sending papers in envelopes. Emails I can usually handle without generating any paper copy. Unless, that is, I want to remind myself of their content on a train (when 3G may still not be sufficiently reliable to permit instant access) in which case they get printed out for ease of reference. I still prefer to annotate student papers and draft theses in hard copy if I can, so that is another form of paperwork that spreads around. Paperwork that I’m going to work on during that next trip to London accumulates in its own happy pile, although not for long in this case since my trips are so frequent.

So what’s the moral? Is the problem that I am just irredeemably untidy, or that I’m trying to juggle too many balls? Is a clear desk policy, beloved of some organisations and meant to indicate that each task is successfully completed by the end of every day and no potential privacy issues can be breached by material being left accessible (in my locked office? Hmm.) really the ideal I should be striving for? I have always felt a clear desk is symbolic of nothing going on that takes more than a day to complete. Nothing in my life feels like that is an accurate description. I am sure a tidy office is a new trick this old dog can’t be taught. I’m sorry if visitors find it chaotic (even if quaintly so) but for myself I can’t imagine another way of working despite now being armed with an iPad.

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Will This Look Good on my CV?

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Athene Donald

This is a question I was asked recently in the context of outreach work (I answered yes), but it applies across the board. For those climbing the academic ladder specifically, it perhaps amounts to ‘does anything other than research count?’ I would again say yes. So what follows are some thoughts on career progression provoked by a variety of recent conversations concerning different levels of seniority.

Let’s start with outreach, a topic that many students and postdocs get involved with out of sheer love for the subject, but then start to worry it will make them look as if they’re not serious about research. Unfortunately there are PIs who will reinforce this anxiety, wishing their team to be, metaphorically, chained to the bench/computer or whatever. Nevertheless, this position should be resisted. I have written before about a couple of recently-appointed lecturers who were told that their outreach activities were viewed very positively when they were being considered for posts. I believe outreach develops some of those transferable skills so valued by employers outside higher education but perhaps less visibly so by a fraction of my research colleagues. Being able to explain your work simply to the public ought to be part of research training and, it should be remembered, should also stand you in good stead at any future academic interviews when, let’s face it, those who interrogate you may not themselves be specialists in your immediate field.

Later on in your career outreach may retain an anxious question mark in your mind, but in all probability there will be other issues that niggle or leap out at you at you as you contemplate your CV. This is where your university’s mind set, culture and promotion criteria become important. These are issues Cambridge’s Gender Equality Group has been wrestling with – we’ve been looking at the outcomes of various consultation exercises carried out across the university –  so that we can make appropriate recommendations, although these issues are undoubtedly not gender specific.

One trouble is that what a department may want of individuals and what is in the individual’s best interests given the academic structures may be poles apart. A department may think it is totally splendid if one of their staff members devotes much time to going into local schools, or mentoring its junior staff, overhauling practical classes or sitting on every committee going and doing the donkey work. But the individual has to determine whether such a path of devoted service is the optimum course of action for them. What is ‘optimum’ of course is not an absolute. It will depend on many factors including individual taste and degree of ambition. Regrettably, though, the selfish in the department may decide optimum for them means being an awkward cuss, refusing to sit on any committee whatsoever and neglecting to set the promised exam questions. The argument that I have heard used, that ‘the best thing I can do for my department is to concentrate on my research’ and by implication therefore, not waste time on the fripperies of life that are teaching and service to the greater good, needs to be stamped on swiftly.

The issue is likely to become gender-specific when it is a question of higher-level committee work; this was the context of the recent discussion with which I was involved. How do you demonstrate your leadership potential to the powers that be if you have never been exposed to and involved in decision-making processes at departmental or above level, or if you have never served on some national committee of significance such as for a Research Council or a professional membership body? These things take time and energy, taking you away from your research group and grant-writing activities. There is an interesting balancing act to be had, with probably no one obviously to hand to proffer advice either as to which committees may provide useful experience or how many is wise.

For women there are even more twists. You may be asked to join a committee to make up numbers, to fill some target and/or to make the organisation look good. Such a request may be intensely irritating, that sense of only being asked because you are a woman not because those doing the asking actually have any confidence in your abilities. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t necessarily reject the invitation out of hand. It may provide just the impetus you need to raise your profile and enable you to try out your wings in a new sphere. On the other hand it may equally be a deadly dull, useless sort of committee where you are merely expected to be a speechless makeweight. The wise thing to do when a request comes your way is to ask around so that you can establish which of those two scenarios apply.

So far so good. But of course if your organisation is actively seeking to fill its committees with a moderately respectable number of women, you may not simply get one invite – particularly if you turn out to be a half-way decent committee member. You may suddenly find there is a deluge of requests. Then it gets difficult: which to accept? Perhaps the first one that came along wasn’t the most interesting or desirable one but you don’t want to turn down the others so you have to work out how to extract yourself gracefully….again, seeking advice would be wise. A thoughtful Head of Department or equivalent, ought to be willing (but won’t necessarily be) to engage in this debate.

The alternative scenario is an organisation where little thought is given to the composition of the committee, or that many of them are filled ex officio by, for example, heads of institution who all just happen to be male. I hear tales in Cambridge of how our 30-strong Estates Management Committee was, for just that reason in the not too distant past, entirely male but apparently is so no more. In any organisation where gender composition is ignored, as I alluded to earlier the women may never get an opportunity to demonstrate their skills. This oversight happens all too often but should be a source of significant worry to the leadership and a prompt to change their processes.

Career progression should be on the minds of the leadership as it thinks about succession planning and the pipeline all along the route. Having the interests of all members of the organisation at heart as committees are filled should be a no-brainer, but it isn’t necessarily the way it pans out.  A committee on committees should consider which committees are good places to bring on young talent, whatever their gender, to make sure that the less obvious names are considered and not just the usual suspects. Equally, for those contemplating their CVs, if there are obvious gaps beyond research excellence they should take note. Research excellence is all very well and may be a sine qua non when it comes to promotion, but it ought to be a case of ‘necessary but not sufficient’, as the mathematicians say.

So, what looks good on that CV beyond the hard-hitting papers and the grant income? A little bit of everything is probably the right answer. Remember if you aspire to be a leader of some sort ultimately, you must not simply keep your head down and avoid all committee work or you are hiding your light under a bushel and no one will notice what you’re doing.

Posted in Equality | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The Viva Experience

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’ve seen a few posts around recently from anxious PhD students approaching their vivas in fear and trepidation or discussing the experience in the immediate aftermath. For instance, here is @hapsci discussing things after the event in a state of post-exam exhaustion and fellow OT blogger Erika Cule sought advice from her OT colleagues over twitter and posted some of the responses here. So what’s it like from the other side of the desk? I thought I’d pass on some thoughts from the point of view of someone who has examined a good few theses in different universities, even in different countries, as well as across a range of disciplines.

Firstly it is worth pointing out the failure rate is tiny! The expectation on the part of the examiners (at least in science subjects; it is possible this isn’t true in arts and humanities) is that the thesis will have had a good going over by the supervisor and is likely to be acceptable. So, the primary point of the viva exam itself is to check that the student has done the work and understands the words they’ve put on the page, not just copied them from elsewhere.  Those two statements are not trivial. I have participated in an exam where it was clear from the outset that the work was not all the candidate’s own. The internal examiner (not me) knew the background and so knew that a significant part of the work – some computer simulation – was based on a computer programme that the student had had no part in writing: they were merely using it. In itself that was no big deal. That the student took the best part of an hour to admit that they were using the work of others without attribution was the problem. Once they’d made that admission, and agreed to make this fact clear in the text, we could move on.

‘Understanding the words they’ve put on the page’ is even more frequently an issue. If your thesis is about X-ray scattering and you can’t explain the basic principles, you can expect a good going-over from the examiners. If your key experiments use NMR and your description about precession or relaxation processes is woeful, expect problems at the start of the viva. The candidate may believe the exam should be about the work they have done; many will be prepared to discuss the minutiae of their experiments until the cows come home. They should realise the examiner may not be an expert in some of the techniques described but be anxious that the student can place their work in context and explain it. In my experience, those of my students who have had a hard time at their viva have suffered at the start of the exam because they can’t do this clearly for the basic ideas or have never actually sat down and read the primary literature they quote so glibly. Be warned!

So, what’s the best preparation for the big day? Firstly, don’t worry about what you wear. The examiners don’t care as long as you turn up looking like you’re taking the exam seriously. I would not recommend a T-shirt and jeans, nor would I feel a 3 piece suit or a little black dress is a requirement (unless in Oxford sub-fusc is still required; I don’t know about that). Smart and comfortable are probably the watchwords. Secondly, undoubtedly read your thesis carefully. If there’s a gap between submission and the viva, which may often run to some months, you have probably forgotten details which you need to get stuffed back into your brain. Additionally, do think where the obvious ‘big’ questions are. I’d include in this category

  • Why you did this work?
  • What were the most important things you found out?
  • What are the basic underlying principles?
  • What would you have done differently if you were starting again?
  • What do you think are the next experiments that need doing to follow up on your work?

These questions are all pretty obvious, but can still flummox people. By the ‘underlying principles’ I mean all those basic ideas about the techniques, as I mention above, but also how thermodynamics, genetics or whatever is relevant. In my field, if discussing polymer mixtures, for instance, you need to understand concepts such as entropy of mixing. Even if the phrase barely appears in the text, you should be able to go back to first principles. Often students can’t. They’ve taken the basics as read and can be made to feel very uncomfortable.

Examiners try to set candidates at their ease, but if the first questions asked – why did you do this piece of work and what are the key things you learned – cause the student to go red in the face and mutter ‘I don’t know’ the viva gets off to a very rocky start. But  by and large examiners do not ask trick questions. I have never yet been paired with one who is simply out to trip the student up, look aggressive and display their own brilliance. On the other hand I have, not infrequently, been paired with one who talks a lot about their own work, thereby giving the candidate little opportunity to open their mouth. I find this sort of behaviour frustrating, but it may make the examinee’s life easier since if they don’t open their mouth they can’t put their foot in it.

I suspect the most common reaction to a viva is in fact a sense of anti-climax. Was that it? After all those months of slaving away, it’s all over in a couple of hours. (When I set out, PhD exams were customarily more like 4 hours and often more; the average time seems to have plummeted and the guidelines my own university offers examiners make this expectation clear.)  Maybe you will come out of the viva feeling like Groucho Marx:

I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member

Certainly I recall one student quoting that to me after his viva, but as he is now a highly successful professor I doubt he actually meant it. Some students feel cheated they weren’t given a harder time of it, I’ve heard that view expressed too, but then there are at least as many who come out sweating about the errors that were uncovered or the pressure they had felt under.

So what do I think the point of the process is? Definitely to establish that the work is the student’s own. If substantial plagiarism had occurred, I think it would readily become apparent and that has to be a crucial component during the examination. It is also important, I believe, to get an external objective view to help the student put their work in context. That is why, at least in general, the supervisor is not part of the examination process although in some universities they may be physically present in the room. It is useful to get an outside view as to whether some new hypothesis or interpretation looks convincing and to check there are no glaring errors or omissions (what, no error bars! That omission I’ve seen too often to count). It is unusual for there to be no corrections to be made, from basic typos, to missing citations, to something more fundamental. In general these tend to be easily fixed. You shouldn’t feel bad if you’re given pages of corrections to be made, that is pretty much the norm.

What if you yourself discover an error before the exam? Turning up with a list of the typos you’ve found is often to your advantage: it saves time and looks as if you’re taking things seriously. But if the mistake you’ve found is more fundamental – perhaps you’ve screwed up your statistics or misinterpreted a line in a spectrum – then being open about it, preferably in advance, is a good idea. Send the examiners a note of what the problem is, whether it makes any difference and a statement of how the problem can be sorted out (even a completely rewritten few pages you’d like to replace in the text) means that the difficulty can be faced head-on without embarrassment. These things can happen, but they shouldn’t be too serious – unless of course it undermines the whole thesis. I have never seen that happen.

Vivas in other countries can be very different from the UK. They are often done in public and are much more of a formality (in The Netherlands requiring full academic dress in my experience), less of a serious conversation about the science. I have found that quite frustrating myself, as it becomes a performance for all parties rather than an exam. In the UK I would say they should be regarded as an important staging post but not an anticipated nightmare that makes you sweat for weeks in advance. Probably few people (on either side) actually enjoy them, but they nevertheless can stimulate an interesting debate about your research of a kind you may never get again.

Between writing and posting this blog I came across a post entitled ‘Are PhD examiners really ogres?‘ from entomologist Simon Leather. Its angle about vivas is rather different from mine, in that it concentrates on how examiners behave rather than what they might expect, but it also covers some similar ground: your viva should not be something to fear.

 

 

 

Posted in Research | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Once Absence of Impact used to be the Fashionable Thing to Claim

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Athene Donald

Up and down the land, academics from Vice Chancellors down are sweating over 3 letters: REF. This dread acronym, standing for the Research Excellence Framework, must be absorbing a fantastic number of hours of time for many people and it is not something to be taken lightly. Many millions of pounds are at stake, as well as departmental honour. Some aspects merely require simple metrics – such as on PhD student numbers and grant income from different sources – but others are much more challenging to construct. Long narratives are required about the environment in which we work and how we ensure it is an appropriate and supportive place for everyone. HEFCE guidelines make it very clear that they want to hear about diversity issues this time around and have acted sensibly (in the end) about reducing outputs for women who’ve had time out on maternity leave. We need to describe our strategic plans and how well we’ve accomplished what we said we’d do in 2008 during REF’s predecessor the RAE (Research Excellence Framework). Staff have to choose their ‘best’ 4 outputs, without using journal impact factors as the crude measure of what makes ‘best’ – although not everyone is convinced that institutions are abiding by the rules on this one (see here and here).

Most of this is comparable to what happened in the RAE, although with some shifts in the emphasis and detail required. What is different is the new section on ‘impact’. Impact in the sense of something rather tangible coming out of research carried out in the previous 15 years. It isn’t sufficient to say that a patent was forthcoming unless that patent spawned a spin-out or a product on the market. Simply having done a lot of outreach isn’t going to count unless you can show somehow the outreach led to a measurable change: a fiendishly difficult challenge to link attendance at a splendid school’s talk or an evening at an observatory to an upturn in astronomy degrees awarded, for instance! So, impact in the REF sense is very different from impact in the RCUK sense of ‘pathways to impact’. REF wants impact signed and delivered, with a stress on both ‘reach’ and ‘significance’; RCUK grant proposals only require the alleged promise of impact tomorrow.

I chair my local Unit of Assessment’s REF panel and my summer will be consumed, I fear, by sorting out the details of our submission. I guess it makes a change from the summer I spent reading everyone else’s outputs because I was on the RAE panel itself, but I’m not sure it’s actually an improvement. I had thought that summer of 2008 was difficult (it also involved some extraordinarily wet stays in the Lake District where our panel meetings were all held. I couldn’t savour the location because the location was constantly shrouded in low cloud and horizontal sheets of rain) but this time the weight of responsibility feels very different, indeed even more substantial.

Recently, what has struck me forcibly is what the passage of years can do to transform acceptable behaviour.  I am currently reading a rather old (1992) book by Jan Golinski called Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain 1760-1820. The first main chapter discusses William Cullen  and Joseph Black, two early professors of Chemistry in Scotland during the 18th century. Both were determined to be free of any taint of ‘projecting’, a word in its day associated with the sordid practice of making money, doing nefarious deals and taking out patents.  Projecting was seen by many as something associated with the mercantile class rather than as an appropriate activity for men of intellect; the kind of dodgy deal people associated with this sort of action might be exemplified by the South Sea Bubble, clearly a distinctly dubious operation. Nevertheless it is striking that these early professors of chemistry felt their reputations would suffer if they did anything that could smack of projection. Despite the importance of chemistry for fields such as agriculture, dyeing and bleaching, all very important to 18th century commercial activities, it was not regarded as comme il faut to get too close to these practical matters. Projectors were not gentlemen and could not expect to receive aristocratic patronage, important to impecunious academics, so the practical side of Cullen and Black’s research had to be played down, to be made to look as if it was less useful than it was, so that their standing was not damaged.

Golinski says the following of Cullen

‘Practical achievements were highly problematic, and a maladroit insistence on the relevance of chemical theory to practice could be taken for arrogant projecting or self-serving puffery.’

As I read the book, it must have been a very fine line to tread between being thought to be not-quite-a-gentleman who was at risk of ostracism, and actually doing something useful with the subject. For chemistry, a discipline that was barely taught in English universities (i.e. Oxford and Cambridge) at the time, the usual emphasis was on chemistry as relevant to medicine – something that was of course acceptable although extremely empirical.

Times have changed radically. Now we all are scraping around trying to prove, not only that our research has potential for the future, but that we already have done something significant with it. Not everyone will view it as a badge of honour to have produced a tangible outcome from their research, as comments on this blog make very clear. It is, however, something likely to find favour with a head of department in the current climate. Even more so if it is an outcome worth quite a bit of cash – whether that cash is for the originator/inventor or someone else. Funders also are putting a high premium on such matters, because they see the demonstration of impact of funded research as a powerful argument with Treasury, rightly or wrongly. It is of course the case that I doubt any academic worries over much as to whether they are considered to be gentleman (or ladies of course), so that particular pitfall has ceased to be relevant. But the attitudes of the UK powers-that-be to doing something useful has been totally transformed into a world view where utility may sometimes seem to override any other consideration.

 

Posted in History of Science, Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Changing the Departmental Mind-set

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Athene Donald

Another bumper batch of Athena Swan awards have just been announced: ever more universities and departments are participating. With the hint of financial consequences looming from RCUK funders for those STEM departments that don’t demonstrate commitment to improving the climate for women (indeed, regarding diversity in general) to add to Dame Sally Davies’ unequivocal statement regarding Clinical Schools, the increase in engagement is unsurprising. Nevertheless, fewer than two thirds of the HEIs with STEM courses are signed up. But does an award really mean a department has its culture sorted? And what does it take to get an award?

Last week’s post about preparing Athena Swan applications over on the Guardian HE Professional blogs by Cardiff’s Paul Brennan sparked some debate on Twitter, probably far more than the tweets I actually saw myself; I thought I’d chip in with my own thoughts about the importance of the awards.

There are 3 points I’ve heard raised I’d specifically like to consider:

  1. It is a tickbox exercise for a department that actually makes no real difference on the ground.
  2. It is difficult for a department to do things different from the central policies, so it’s hard to make a convincing departmental case.
  3. The problems for women aren’t down to the University, but inherent in the nature of an academic’s job.

If you/your department thinks these awards are merely tickbox exercises you’ve either not read the submission template or you’re setting yourself up to fail. Maybe you’ll get away with it this time, but if nothing changes before you apply for a renewal things will go pear-shaped for you and the award will be removed. This is already happening to departments so the evidence is there. A submission requires an analysis of statistics at every level from undergraduate to professor: how many women do you have at each grade and how has this changed over recent years? Out of these numbers should come some suggestions for where trouble spots or bottlenecks are and that should inform the action plan that needs to be produced. If undergrad numbers are healthy but perhaps there are practically no postdocs – why not? Thought needs to be given to what can be done. Sometimes it’s the little things that make significant differences: induction to settle newcomers into a department and thought given to the timing of seminars so that everyone feels welcome coupled with inclusive social events. Some things take more time and energy: setting up appropriate mentoring systems and a work-load model may be quite labour intensive for someone but have pay-offs down the road. Each department has to think what needs to be done to eradicate their own particular problems. It’s most certainly not one size fits all.

Presumably those who complain it’s a tickbox exercise imagine that some HR person can simply jot down a few ideas and get the Head of Department to sign it off without any intention of seeing the action plan through. My experience within Cambridge suggests very strongly that committed academic leadership is crucial and that if it is only administrators who get stuck in then change will not happen. In that case the submission should fail; if it doesn’t fail the first time it is hard to imagine a convincing case could be made 3 years down the road that the action plan had been carried out leading to improvements in culture, so a renewal should be out of the question. The very fact that the template requires thought to fill in, means that – unlike a benchmarking exercise when you are simply asked something like which of the following do you already do/intend to do – a tickbox mentality will get you nowhere.

The second point above was one I saw on Twitter and one I now find a little strange, although I can recall a time when I thought like that too. In Cambridge we have central bodies and committees that make policy decisions: these would cover items such as parental leave, rules about applying for part-time working, how additional circumstances like having young children are to be factored in promotions applications and E+D requirements for members of departmental REF panels. These are not department-specific actions but university-wide policies, all of which can be made more (or less) beneficial to women. These are the sorts of things that would be entered into the University submission for an award. At the departmental level actions should be planned that reflect what local policies are likely to work.

I mentioned the timing of seminars. It might be possible to have a University policy that no seminar can occur after 4pm, but it makes more sense for a department to work out timings that their staff find convenient. The type of support that may be most effective is likely to depend on the make-up of the workforce – lots of postdocs or practically none, for instance. If there are lots of postdocs, local policies should make sure they get appraised, informed about training opportunities and given some career advice. Those sorts of issues have nothing to do with central ‘policy’, all to do with considering what members of the department, including undergraduates, find good or bad about the specific place; a local questionnaire might be a good place to start in order to find out.

Turning now to point 3, this is perhaps the most subtle of the list. I think that what the person who raised this is implying is that an academic job is basically incompatible with things they value, such as work-life balance, or possibly being a mother (but presumably not with being a father). That may indeed be the way many places operate. But need it be? What does ‘excellence’ mean? It shouldn’t simply mean being prepared to work all hours of the day and night, travelling insane distances just to prove that you can stand up in all the continents of the world during a single year to give conference presentations and building up a team of PhD students you have no time to treat as more than bench monkeys. A neat phrase I heard expressed at a meeting recently was that ‘you shouldn’t use airmiles as a proxy for excellence’ and I agree with that. No more than you should use a journal’s impact factor (groan) as a proxy for the quality of the papers published therein.

If a department/university is to be serious about improving the working environment for everyone, but particularly women, then careful thought needs to be given to promotion criteria to ensure that someone who works less than a 100% contract, for whatever reason, is judged on the work they do in that time, not against some notional norm of the over-committed. If someone has caring responsibilities that mean travel is difficult, then that should be able to be stated; perhaps as an alternative to physical appearances at meetings, invitations received could be counted. If someone is particularly good at pastoral care or outreach then there should be an appropriate value put on it, relieving them of some other ‘chore’ or administrative task or by reducing their teaching load. Let’s face it, many individuals don’t want to take on pastoral care (and some shouldn’t be allowed near it). It isn’t a task that should be regarded merely as an optional extra but as a positive benefit to a department; those that take it on should therefore get appropriate recognition.

The meaning of ‘excellence’ leading to progression needs to be reconsidered at a senior level, moving away from the traditional narrow definition to something more all-encompassing. This will not only be to the benefit of the individuals concerned, but also to the long-term benefit of the department. That stage of being sucked dry by young children (or elderly parents) is usually only short-term; on the other hand the benefits of supporting individuals through that stage will be felt for years thereafter. Staff members relegated to second-class citizen status and made to feel unwelcome and sub-standard because of a short-term reduction in productivity will be likely to give up. Then their worth, as well as their sense of self-worth, will be correspondingly reduced, to a department’s detriment.

If an individual can be made to feel that a department is supportive but the needs of the job make progression impossible, then something is sadly awry. I suspect this is just another manifestation of the deficit model: fix the person not the system. Athena Swan applications are just the moment to challenge this mind-set, and should be used to push for change. However, there is no doubt that change will only happen if the senior leadership are really committed to it. It all comes down to that, at the end of the day.

(By the way, for anyone who is confused, my name is Athene and I have nothing whatsoever to do with the awards. The similarity of name is an unfortunate coincidence, although it’s fooled some eminent people into thinking the awards are somehow ‘mine’. Nor have I ever sat on any of the judging panels, so what I’ve written above is my personal perspective having been involbed in the process in my own university and department, as well as talked to others elsewhere about their submissions and aspirations.)

Posted in Science Culture, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments