Getting Feedback

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Athene Donald

Academics do not necessarily get regular or even useful ‘performance reviews’, call them what you will. Businesses typically take this a lot more seriously, but a recent report highlights the many problems that can arise even with the best of intentions. Unsurprisingly, it turns out a lot of bias (around both gender and ethnicity) lurks within the feedback given to their teams, irrespective of whether by male and female managers.

If you’ve been appraised by your supervisor, or anyone else from your department, a few key phrases may stick in the mind. These may have been the most helpful or the least helpful/hardest to swallow. One of the most useful pieces of advice I was ever given, mid-career, was not to accept too many refereeing tasks but, for instance, simply to accept roughly the same number of papers to referee as I was myself submitting in any given year. It was a practical and actionable piece of advice, whether it was right or wrong, and it helped me put in context that to others I might have looked like I was being too much of a slave to duty if I was refereeing two or three times the number of my own submissions. By contrast, a colleague came out of an appraisal fuming. Having laid out what he felt were the problems he was facing in the fine balancing act of being a young academic, his appraiser had said ‘I can see you have problems’. Empathetic maybe; useful most certainly not, it only made my colleague feel worse and that, somehow, he shouldn’t have been having those particular problems.

In many businesses, receiving feedback is a much more regular occurrence, but it is clear that significant numbers of managers don’t make a good job of it, even if they are ostensibly ‘ticking the boxes’ required by their HR department. Two features stand out for me from this recent report from Textio: firstly, that comments are so often unhelpful and stereotypical, and secondly that men are more likely to internalise the positive and women, by a massive margin, the negative. It is hard to imagine these observations do not apply in academia too. An additional set of their conclusions relates to the highest performing workers, who appear to be given the least useful advice and who, the evidence shows, are therefore more likely to quit (and of course, good workers are more likely to be able to get another job easily).

In the past I’ve written about being accused of being emotional – not, as it happens, during an appraisal but over the phone. It turns out that this is a word (and no one will probably be surprised to hear this) directed commonly at women: the report states that whereas 78% of women in their survey had had that tossed in their direction, only 11% of men. (I wonder if people don’t regard getting angry or losing their temper as a show of emotion, but I digress.) Women were also more likely to be badged as unlikeable than men, although not by such a large margin. Ethnicity matters too. White workers were the most likely to be described as likeable (at 41%), whereas only 10% of East Asian and 11% of South Asian employees were described this way. Black and Hispanic/Latino employees were least likely to be deemed to be intelligent, and so it goes on. Bias was widespread.

What do you remember from an appraisal? It turns out women were seven times more likely to internalise negative comments than men, whereas men were up to four times as likely to remember the positives. This ties in with stereotype threat, a concept introduced by Claude Steele and described in detail in his book Whistling Vivaldi.  It is the concept that, if you belong to a minority (in whatever sense) you are held back by the fear of conforming to the stereotype of that minority. That might be about women in tech or black students doing maths exams, which was the situation Steele first studied. But the criticism that you are emotional, for instance, is exactly what women fear and so it sticks in the mind more than many other comments. This is as true at conferences as in appraisals, as many a woman will attest after a bout of hostile questioning implying – or even explicitly stating – that the speaker is stupid or ignorant, regardless of the capabilities of the questioner (who may too often simply be grandstanding for their own benefit).

As for the comments about high performers, which seem to have a particular definition hard to replicate in a laboratory setting, too often they receive unhelpful feedback perhaps in the form of a cliché, the examples given in the report being as ‘she left it all on the field’ and ‘he thinks outside the box’. What are you supposed to do with such phrases? They don’t tell you what you could do better or what specific goals you should or should not be seeking. The most useful feedback is that which gives you something to work towards and a timescale on which to do it. Generalised clichés don’t offer that opportunity and can be frustrating (again something many an academic will recognize, I’m sure). The report suggests employees are twice as likely to think about seeking a new job if the feedback they receive is unhelpful.

This is a US study of businesses, so the parallels are bound not to be exact for UK academics whom I take to be the majority of my readers, but there should certainly be food for thought here for anyone involved in leading or managing other people in any setting. We should not be wasting the talent of those coming up through the ranks in pointless exercises. Good feedback can, however, be immensely helpful at critical junctures in a career.

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Does Working from Home make you more Productive?

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Athene Donald

Does working from home (and hybrid working) improve productivity or the opposite? Two recent reports have come to slightly different conclusions, and I suspect this is not surprising because the answer almost certainly is ‘it depends’. Clearly if you are a waiter or a bus driver, a night-club bouncer or a hairdresser, the question really doesn’t arise. You have to be at the appropriate place of work to carry out those roles and no amount of negotiation with management will change that. The jobs that lend themselves to hybrid/fully wfh are the ones available to those with higher levels of education, but certainly not all. If you are a researcher carefully tending a cell line, bacteria or some GM mice, you may well need frequent attendance, perhaps even at anti-social hours. If you are the researcher looking at the fluorescent images taken from these same organisms, you are quite likely to be able to do that from home. So, that different research gives different answers may not be surprising, since like should only be compared with like.

The study in Nature published in June looked at behaviours in a specific Chinese technology firm. It concluded – as its title says – that hybrid working improved retention without damaging performance. In other words, workers felt happier when they were allowed to stay away from the company site on agreed days, and there was an accompanying reduction of a third in workers who quit. That would definitely look like a winning formula. However, the wider-ranging US study covering many different kinds of employer, came to more nuanced conclusions. Firstly, whether working from home made workers more or less productive depended on who you asked: the workers thought their productivity had gone up, but the managers disagreed and thought it had fallen. The Stanford researchers meta-analysis showed that the managers were right, and productivity did fall by 10-20%.

However, it does depend on what you think you are measuring. If you are a worker who no longer has to commute every day, you may well believe your productivity has gone up because the total time you spend to complete your work has decreased for apparently the same output. But, because the manager doesn’t factor in that travel time, all they may note is the output has dipped because the worker spends more time surfing the web, making additional cups of coffee or playing with the dog. In this context, the outcomes of a pilot experiment in my local (South Cambridgeshire) council is interesting, because they found that nearly all measures (22/24 measures) showed improvement when the working week was cut to four days – this was not about working from home, just about working at all.  This didn’t stop the last government trying to forbid the four-day week as ‘not value for money’, even if there was no evidence of this, just an assumption that five days work had to be better than four. Once again, recruitment and retention were found to improve.

How does improved retention factor into productivity? The loss of a worker has significant implications for a firm, the more skilled the worker is the greater the cost, some of which is real financial cost, some is more indirect due to knock-on effects on other workers. The CIPD lists four types of effect, and firms should consider these when contemplating whether a slight loss in daily productivity of a worker on a hybrid pattern of working is more than offset by the less obvious costs associated with losing the worker. These four are related to the administration of resignations, costs associated with recruitment and selection, sorting out and paying for cover during the vacancy and induction and training for the new employee when recruited. This last factor also means there may be an extended period of training when the new employee simply isn’t able to contribute fully to the required work. Loss in productivity due to the high churn of employees through job dissatisfaction, may therefore be helpfully offset by facilitating a hybrid form of working to increase the happiness and well-being of employees. The Nature study of the Chinese technology company explicitly calculates savings due to the reduction in employee loss, based on the figure of US$20,000 cost per employee lost.

However, if considering fully remote working, working from home for five days a week, there are some other factors that need to be considered. Induction is obviously one. How does a new employee learn about their role and who the key individuals they need to interact with are? This was a lesson many people had to face up to during the pandemic and it won’t have been easy. How do you mentor someone you’ve never met if you’re their manager? How do you build new relationships or find a common interest with someone if you’re not bumping into them in the tearoom? As scientists, those chance and perhaps interdisciplinary interactions can be incredibly fruitful (not to mention the challenges of dealing with committee dynamics over Zoom, as I wrote about previously at the height of the pandemic). Fully working from home may be particularly attractive for those with caring responsibilities or disabilities, so there is a real danger that these people will end up more marginalised and disadvantaged when it comes to progression due to the lack of face-to-face contact. A very recently published study from the University of Durham also highlighted that gender stereotypes in the home are alive and well, and women working from home are far more likely to struggle to separate work from their family needs than men, with all the obvious downsides.

All this goes to show that there is no single answer to is working from home good or bad for productivity? It depends on so many factors from the individual to the sector, from the type of work to the pattern of working from home. Employers need to factor in the cost of losing employees against any possible loss of productivity. Researchers in the academic sector probably have more choice than most. Presenteeism is enforced by only a sub-section of professors – although undoubtedly there are some who judge the worth of a student by how long they are prepared to spend at the bench – and for the professors themselves there is likely to be a lot of flexibility. It is hard to think that hybrid working isn’t here to stay, but we should make sure we optimise how that plays out and recognize the costs and benefits for different sections of the workforce.

 

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More Than A-Levels

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Athene Donald

Last week saw the annual media interest in A-Level results (at least in England). Commentators noticed, for instance, the substantial increase in STEM subjects, with over 100,000 students taking Maths. This figure was remarkable as it was the first time any discipline has exceeded that significant figure. Depending on their positioning, in some cases this led to a bemoaning of the fact that arts and humanities subjects are not thriving in the same way although, bucking the past few years’ trend, foreign language take up had increased. From the opposite perspective, others picked up the fact that there was a substantial increase in those taking Physics A-Level, although little improvement in the percentage of girls taking the subject.

However, the mainstream media glossed over the results for qualifications other than A-Levels, although they were not the only results announced that day. You have to look in the more specialist press to find any reference to BTECs or T-Levels. It is true that several times as many A-level exams were sat as BTECs (over 800,000 compared with slightly over 200,000 exams respectively), but nevertheless, there are a lot of students whose futures will be determined by their performance in these latter exams. As for T-Levels, despite a huge amount of money and effort having been put into what the last government hoped would be a transformation of vocational studies for the 16-19 age group, a mere 7,380 students sat these exams. Perhaps even more worryingly, over one quarter of those who started a course at this level did not complete it. In contrast to the relatively young T-Levels, BTECs have been around for a long time and are recognized by many universities as an appropriate entry path. Nevertheless, the Tory Government was in the process of ‘defunding’ these courses in favour of the unproven T-Levels; Labour has already said it will put a pause on any changes while it considers the wider landscape.

There are various issues that underlie the problems with T-Levels: the requirement of a 45-day relevant work placement is hard to accomplish if the local area can’t provide an appropriate employer; course lecturers seem to struggle with the demands of the course and universities don’t (at least yet) seem willing to recognize the qualification in the way they do BTECs. The spread of courses is also still quite limited, with only about two thirds of the planned subjects yet being rolled out. But one issue stands out, that is symptomatic of so much of our society, and that is the incredibly uneven gender split across the courses. T-Levels in construction were overwhelmingly taken by men (albeit only 318 students in total started the course): building services engineering had just 9 women enrolled this year – 3 per cent of the cohort – and onsite construction had 5 women, i.e 4 per cent of the total students. Construction (perhaps surprisingly, since it must happen everywhere) was also an area where placements seemed particularly hard to find and drop out rates were around 10%. This should be contrasted with the education and early years T-Level, where the cohort was almost entirely women: 94 per cent of the 1,533 enrolled students. This was similarly true for health where 91 per cent of the 1,044 students were women. Just as with A-Levels (as with the percentage of women taking Physics), societal expectations seem to have driven an unwholesome gender split across the courses.

There is no doubt that the area of post-16 education is somewhat incoherent, particularly if you are not following the ‘standard’ linear path that does not consist of A-Levels followed by University. It is incoherent in terms of both funding and regulation. If you want to get a sense of the complexity facing students, colleges and employers of what this landscape looks like, last month’s report, Augar Reviewed, from the EDSK think tank is a good place to start. A Government review published a year ago looks specifically at T-Levels and why they have not got off to a good start.

This all is rather serious for the economy. If we want, as a nation, to drive growth, improve productivity and be the innovative nation every Government wants of us, then we need not to waste the talent of many of our teenagers by providing an incoherent system which is likely to fail them. Skilled and semi-skilled workers are in short supply, for instance in the construction industry, and technicians who understand how to get the best out of equipment or use spreadsheets to help with logistics are vital to small companies wanting to thrive in the current market-place. Employers frequently bemoan the lack of workers like this when trying to fill posts, yet we seem unable, as a nation, to create a system which trains and values such individuals.  Schools are not provided with the wherewithal to create a careers service that helps young people make the right decisions, or indeed what decisions actually need to be taken. It is to be hoped the Skills Commission, promised by Labour in their manifesto, brings coherence and logic both to the qualifications landscape and to the funding regime which supports this, bringing employers, education providers and local government together to create a better framework for post-16 education. It is a positive step forward that a unifying structure is at least being considered to try to remove the fragmentation and ‘them and us’ landscape we currently occupy in England, where only A-Levels are deemed worthy of mainstream media attention.

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In Transition

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Athene Donald

Readers may think I’ve given up on my blog, but the reality is more prosaic: as my ten-year stint as Master of Churchill College comes to an end (at the end of September), I have been moving out of the rather wonderful and spacious Lodge provided by the College for the Master and back to our newly refurbished and significantly smaller house of more than 40 years. Despite the house being extended during the refurbishment, there still seems not to be enough space for the life-time’s accumulated detritus of a couple of academics. Maybe others have long since thrown away, not only the lecture notes for the first course they ever gave, but also their own undergraduate notes, but not me. I am always amazed by the neatness – not to mention legibility – of the notes I took at pace during my own student days, but I have definitely subscribed to the view you never know when they will come in useful. Just occasionally (for instance, when setting exam questions) they have – although that is not a task I will have to face up to in the future.

I have spent an inordinate amount of what one might term ‘creative’ time, time that could have been spent writing this blog for instance, trying to work out where furniture might fit in rooms that aren’t quite the same size as they used to be due to large amounts of additional insulation being introduced (we’ve come off gas and are now running an air-source heat pump, which really requires extensive wall insulation to be effective). Further complications arise from the fact that, during our ten-year absence more furniture has been acquired. This dates from when I emptied my late mother’s house and brought back some ancient, familiar, solid-if-battered items which fitted neatly into the Lodge. Sadly, they fit less neatly into our house, and that only after endless drawing and redrawing of room layouts. I have to offer most sincere thanks to the hard-working team who managed to get my grandmother’s lovely old desk (probably more correctly termed a bureau) up two flights of twisting stairs to my new office location in a loft conversion. It was no mean feat, but they accomplished it with great good humour, if also a lot of sweat.

During this move into the next, and completely uncharted part of my life that amounts to full retirement, I have spent many, many hours going through my belongings and throwing out what I can. Clearly this wasn’t enough to get the volume down to the point needed, and the process will need to continue, although perhaps a little more slowly now the move is actually accomplished. I do feel as if my headspace has been full of moving logistics for months. Various items have still to find a home, and several rooms contain an extraordinary number of boxed-up books for which we still lack bookshelf space. These may definitely be first world problems, but problems they certainly are.

I have learned over the past month or two that my strength is no longer that of a young person, nor is my stamina. But that doesn’t mean I want to sink permanently into an armchair by the fire. I will definitely be wanting to use, at least in some part-time capacity, the different skills I believe I have acquired during my career. So, I am on the look-out for challenging opportunities in areas where I hope I have gained expertise, both as a professional scientist and as a leader of an institution. Mentally I have been trying to work out what I enjoy and what I can do but with less enthusiasm. Everyone who has been through a similar process has warned me not to take on roles just for the sake of it, but to be sure anything I do take on genuinely aligns with my interests and strengths.

In the meantime, the net effect of this transition has meant that the creative time and mental bandwidth that I used to put towards writing this blog regularly have not been available to me recently. Time will tell whether, now that phase is mercifully over, I revert to writing as frequently as I used to. It was always a task I found satisfying and, in some ways, liberating, as I moved away from the formal prose of paper-writing to something a bit more personal and free-form; where I could choose my topic and approach, building on whatever matters of interest (and sometimes dismay) crossed my path.

Those of you who read this frequently in the past (and I note I am approaching the 14th anniversary of starting this blog next week) will know that one topic I often used to write about was the issue of women in science. Having written a book on the subject published last year, it would be nice to think that everything that needs to be said about this I have said. Sadly, that is clearly not so, and the issues have not gone away (see this year’s A Level results, for instance, which show how the proportion of students taking A Level Physics who are girls remains stubbornly low). More may yet need saying here, although I doubt I will be writing another book on the subject. Nevertheless, I think in the back of my mind is the feeling that, on the assumption I keep writing, I will broaden the topics I write about. Watch this space to see how this pans out….

 

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Role Models for Girls?

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Athene Donald

Recently I received an email from a young girl (aged 8 and a half, as she signed herself off, with overtones of Adrian Mole) complaining about the lack of representation of women in STEM. As she says ‘If you want to be in science you need to see yourself represented.’ – a view heard often, but it is interesting that a pre-teen has already worked this out and sees it as a problem. It is always a pleasure to receive a note of thanks for the work I do and have done around the whole question of women in STEM, and particularly so when it becomes apparent it is reaching readers of essentially all ages.

For someone of that age, there are increasing numbers of books describing women from the past who made significant contributions in science aimed at young children. Very often these are about Marie Curie and, as I discuss at some length in my book, I am not sure she is the best role model since her life was so extreme. Is it likely to be attractive to a young girl to hear of someone who was consigned to a cold outhouse for her research, simply because she was a woman? The trouble is, most women from the past who ‘made’ it had so many challenges to overcome that I wonder if any of them make good role models. There are those who weren’t able to get to university till they were relatively mature because their fathers forbade it; those who never got past being an assistant or unpaid because, well that’s just how it was for women in their day. Even for Nobel Prize winners like Barbara McClintock, who did her main research for love not (any) money.

These really aren’t the images I’d like an eight-year-old to take away about how science is done. Rosalind Franklin – another woman whose life story can readily be found in children’s books – had a rubbish time with her colleagues and died tragically young. Also a bit of a downer of a life story. For Jocelyn Bell Burnell, people seemed to think her engagement was worth more of a celebration than her discovery of pulsars. That discovery was anyhow not rewarded with a Nobel Prize for her personally: it went to her supervisor Anthony Hewish and his colleague Martin Ryle. When Dorothy Hodgkin did win the Nobel Prize (still the only British woman to do so), in 1964, the Daily Mail celebrated this triumph with the headline “Oxford housewife wins Nobel“. Again, not a very positive message to give a young girl.

It is not irrelevant that, as late as 2018, laser scientist and Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland remarked that she wanted the story to be about her science not her sex. Surely in the 21st century we have reached a point where it ought to be possible for the science to come first, rather than ‘oh look, here’s a woman who is quite successful’. Yet we still do not seem to have got there. Young girls may not be inspired by the typical emphasis on gender, not success, for women in the world of science.

As we look to a possible change of Government, it would be nice to think that we might see some better (female) role models appearing in the national curriculum, coupled with a national curriculum that actually needs to be followed by all state schools; currently academies can opt out. The former was a recommendation that Greg Clark’s Commons enquiry into Diversity in STEM made, but to no effect (at least as yet). It would be interesting to draw up a list of potential role models to include. Using Nobel Prize winners might be one option, a clear label of ‘success’ that would distinguish the Donna Strickland’s of this world in a way an eight (or indeed eighteen) year old could understand.

On the other hand, the fundamental flaw in the way these awards are made, so that team science is not rewarded, just that illustrious but generally illusory lone genius, does not reflect the primary way of doing science in the 21st century. Recognizing that collaboration is an important part of progress in science, that it’s OK to enjoy interactions and often that’s not only the best but the only way of making progress, is a fact that the Nobel’s continue to ignore by their way of doing things. Given that the Peace Prize is often given to groups (think of the IPCC in 2077), it’s not immediately obvious that the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will actually forbid awarding one of the science prizes to a group, although that is the argument typically advanced. I believe that the ongoing failure to recognize the importance of collaboration in science by the Nobel committee is detrimental to science itself. We know in our universities, promotion is often likewise based simply on an individual’s contribution rather than the part they play in collaborative science, and this too is a major problem. Although everyone is happy to believe that excellence in science should be rewarded, why should team science not be ‘excellent’ (of course it is!) and hence get the accolades?

To return to the eight-year-old girl I mentioned at the start, as she grows up what will attract or deter her from following her current dreams? Our schools should think much harder about this, as should the committees that make decisions about promotions and prizes for later years. Only when this happens will she be able to see ‘people like her’ represented across the board, encouraging her that she does belong in whichever field she chooses.

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