Pecking Orders Aren’t All They Seem

Posted on June 11, 2023 by Athene Donald

The term, pecking order, may have been coined in relation to poultry, the office boy kicking the cat clearly fits more into the domain of offices, but we all recognize the tendency to know one’s place in a hierarchy and hence know who can be (literally or metaphorically) sworn at with probable impunity. But sometimes the hierarchy is much more subtle and in the eyes of the beholder as much as in reality. That doesn’t stop it being felt very firmly.

When I went to the USA with my freshly minted PhD, completed almost exactly within 3 years – much more common then – I was a mere 24. I went to join a department where many of the students took 5-7 years to complete their thesis. They were older and far more knowledgeable due to all those extra years doing both taught courses and research. I did not feel in any sense higher up the pecking order, just somewhat embarrassed. I was taught the tools I needed (making silver bicrystals with carefully controlled relative misorientations) by an undergraduate who was employed to do some of the lab grunt work to help pay her way through her courses. Leaving aside the fact that, recently arrived as I was, I found her Californian accent almost incomprehensible, she taught me what I needed to know (albeit this postdoctoral position led me absolutely nowhere as the research simply did not work out). Did all those long-serving PhD students think I was higher in the pecking order as a postdoc? Somehow, I actually doubt it in this particular situation.

When I swapped to work with another professor a couple of years into my stay in the USA, within weeks my research was flourishing and I leapfrogged over another postdoc of much longer standing to be the person who led group meetings when my professor was away. I felt very uncomfortable about this. My guess is that this particularly laid back guy was indifferent, but we never discussed it although I shared an office with him. The students – some of whom were probably still older than me – didn’t seem to object to it either.

So, from my early experiences, hierarchies seem to be fairly fluid, not with the rigidity of some places of work. But the higher up the greasy academic pole one climbs, the more confusing it gets, certainly within Cambridge. Everyone arrives here with their own anxieties about how they will fit in. The Fellow of Trinity who, after a half century in the College, still feels he doesn’t fit in as he wasn’t an undergraduate in that college. The young professor from outside who is parachuted in from Europe to kick start a new research activity in the face of some opposition from the old guard, each of whom have years more experience both of research and Cambridge. The senior professor who still resents the fact that a colleague had once had some good fortune come their way when they did not. Not exactly about pecking orders as such, but certainly about interpersonal tensions, which erupt at unexpected moments. Typically, I fear, when money is involved.

As a head of house – the collective name for heads of colleges, to avoid distinguishing Masters from Provosts, Presidents, Principles, Wardens and so on – I am very conscious that some of my colleagues have come with amazing track records. I am giving nothing away when I mention that one (Lord Simon McDonald at Christs) has not only had a stellar career with the Foreign Office, but also had an important recent role to play in the (first) resignation of Boris Johnson and the later downfall of Dominic Raab. Another (Sir Laurie Bristow at Hughes Hall) was a career diplomat who had the unenviable task of overseeing the evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021. To listen to him talk about it is to make this particular head of house feel very inadequate, my life experiences seem so shallow and insignificant. Then we have the leaders from media, such as Roger Mosey (Selwyn) who, amongst other roles at the BBC, oversaw their coverage of the 2012 London Olympics that entertained so many of us. Or Dorothy Byrne (Murray Edwards) who came from being Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, where she oversaw many hard-hitting programmes.

I am also conscious – particularly when it comes to those who’ve worked in the civil service, but also more genearlly – how much more formal training they receive compared with a mere academic. Perhaps the University once offered me a course in change management, but if they did it passed me by, so the language familiar to those properly trained tends to make me very conscious how much my education in that area is defective. But my feelings of inadequacy are simply reflecting the pecking order, as it were, in that dimension. There are many dimensions which impact each and every one of us. For all I know others feel inadequate because I can talk knowledgeably about soft matter physics. It has to be said, however, that other than when trying to explain to someone what my research was all about and how it relates to the food we may at that moment be eating, this is a topic less likely to come up in casual conversation or formal meetings with other heads of house than change management or leadership.

That 31 colleges have 31 very different heads of house coming from many different walks of life (and Churchill College is, at the moment, in the process of choosing my successor to start in autumn 2024) is, of course, a strength when it comes to our collective brains. Diversity in this space, as in any other, is a positive. We don’t all approach a problem the same way, be it connected with student well-being or how to handle new government legislation, and that has to be a benefit to the whole university community.

Pecking orders are all very well if your internal structures are rigidly hierarchical, but for most of us in academia we each bring different strengths which we need to bring to the table, be it for research or running an institution of any sort or size. When feeling dismayed that Dr X seems so knowledgeable about something which is a closed book to you, remember that Dr X may similarly be intimidated by you when you’re discussing your own speciality.

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What Should I Say to my Kids?

Posted on June 4, 2023 by Athene Donald

As well as attending the Hay Literary Festival, I’ve been involved with a number of interviews and podcasts over the last couple of weeks relating to the publication of my book Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science. I’ve been asked essentially the same question a couple of times, one I haven’t had posed before: if a parent was themselves no good at maths, what should they say if their own child is struggling? At Hay, this question arose because I expressed frustration when mothers give off the message to their daughters that it’s OK to be no good at maths because they never had been. This gave rise to the challenge of what should a mum who herself couldn’t do maths say to her 10-year-old child.

On Radio Cambridgeshire, when I’d had a bit longer to think about this but more or less the same question was put to me, I said that it ought to be possible to differentiate between any individual not themselves being good at a subject (any subject, not just maths) and it intrinsically being difficult. Although I didn’t say this on air, I think this is where cultivating a growth mindset – as opposed to a fixed mindset (terms introduced by Carol Dweck) – may be helpful. The message that a child who is struggling has no hope of improving would tally with the latter categorisation, but giving them a belief that with work and attention they could certainly get better at the subject aligns with the former. Practice makes perfect. Maybe they will never be a budding mathematician, but that is rather different from being enumerate and closing their mind off to the idea that maths can be both useful and fun in their daily life.

So many of the attitudes pupils have to different subjects will be driven by the messages they receive from teachers, parents and the whole spectrum of the media. Tell a child they are rubbish at something – as my French teacher did regarding my accent at the end of a single year of learning French – and they may give up. I know in my case I simply stopped trying to improve how I spoke, despite the fact I was perfectly competent at written French. I remember the conversation vividly, despite it being more than half a century ago. How many children up and down the land are put off arithmetic and later maths because of an unthinking sentence or two, possibly even one that was well-intentioned.

At Hay I encouraged the mother to work with her child, both to help the daughter but possibly also rebuild her own confidence. That is something that would be harder to do with an older child for most parents who had previously struggled, let alone by A Level, but still they can admit their own failings without wishing the same on their children. The BBC interviewer tried to draw me out further, describing a situation when the parent is feeling grumpy and pressed for time (a not infrequent state of mind for many a parent after all), but that really shouldn’t need to change the basic message a parent can give: maths is important, can be fun and there is no need for you to be bad at it just because I was.

Clearly how the question should be addressed will depend on the age of the child, but almost at any age a schoolchild is going to have to get to grips with money (perhaps less obviously so now so much is paid for virtually) so that is probably a good place to start: be it pocket money or, at a later age, how compound interest impacts on the mortgage payments and how important it is to be able to budget. The kitchen is another place where everything from fractions to weights come into play. But at any age it ought to be possible to combine the messages that maths is useful and it can be fun to play around with numbers, even while admitting that the parent found and finds it non-straightforward.  Children do know their parents aren’t perfect and probably are capable of working out, from quite an early age, that they often live by the ‘do what I say not what I do’ motto.

The trouble is maths is one of those subjects where intrinsic brilliance is assumed to be needed by far too many people. I’ve written previously about the links that have been established between the numbers of women pursuing PhDs in a particular subject (both STEM and non-STEM) and how people consider that subject in terms of this intrinsic brilliance. Physics, philosophy and economics all fit into this category of few women alongside an assumption that brilliance is needed for success in them, as well as maths. I discussed the topic with my Churchill College colleague Diane Coyle in a podcast earlier this year, and she and I will be joining forces to continue the dialogue with Tabitha Goldstaub at an event in Cambridge this coming November.

The message that certain subjects are inherently more difficult than others is one that baffles me. We each have different skills and interests, driven by a multitude of factors of which we are in general unaware. If maths seems a painful black box, it may be because of how it has been taught rather than because of an intrinsic difficulty or personal stupidity. Some children will cope well with rote learning – which was how I was taught my times tables, a method which certainly enabled them to be firmly embedded in my brain – but others need to understand what is going on before their memory will take over. No one regards reading as requiring brilliance, but some children fare better under a system of phonics than others (and this is an approach that appears to go in and out of fashion in English schools). Although most people become fluent readers, a depressingly high number remain functionally illiterate because they never gained confidence in the basics for whatever reason. Yet a politician will not be standing up saying it’s OK not to be able to read.

Other cultures pay different levels of attention to numeracy. Somehow, our country remains stuck in a mindset where being bad at maths is something to laugh about rather than weep, yet – as clearly our current Prime Minister understands – being comfortable with numbers matters ever more in 21st century life.

 

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Not Letting the Bad Guys Win

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Athene Donald

An editorial in Nature this week highlighted the widespread failure of academic institutions to deal with reports of wrongdoing and its consequences, published alongside an extensive set of articles about the problems associated with poor mental health in research labs in our universities. The journal wants to see structures put in place, akin to those in many industrial labs, which permit anonymous reporting of bad behaviour; and also recognition that having a single point of failure at the top of a hierarchy of graduate students and postdocs, in the form of the PI who holds the purse-strings as well as acts as the arbiter of letters of reference and future career prospects, is not healthy.

Whistle-blowing, anonymous or not, comes with its own cost. As Mark Geoghegan highlights in a different article in this week’s Times Higher Education, discussing his own experiences and those of others who have taken that route, it can lead to the whistle-blower being impacted far more than the perpetrator. Geoghegan discusses being gaslit for three years by senior colleagues, whom he discovered could not be trusted to do the right thing. It is a difficult decision to make to decide to call out someone’s behaviour (publicly or privately), but not to do so comes with its own cost.  It can be corrosive to watch something going horribly wrong but to feel unable to act.

Everyone has to make their own decisions about whether to speak up or not; whether to call in other colleagues to try to generate an unstoppable momentum (think Harvey Weinstein) or to look the other way. I once was asked essentially to give ‘permission’ to a younger woman not to report some vile misogynist emails from a senior professor – so she had written evidence to hand – because she couldn’t face the fallout of making a complaint. I think anyone is entitled to make their own decision, whichever way that falls. In her case she was the only victim of the particular email chain, although others may have received comparable versions at different times: the danger of not reporting is that the perpetrator goes on to offend multiple times, each individual being unaware of the other occasions.

In that instance, the evidence was concrete, black and white in an email chain, but that is far from always the case. Where the behaviour is verbal (or, even worse, physical) the action may be transient, whilst the consequences are far from it. In my book, Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science, I discuss actions each of us can take to improve the work place for women and other minorities. Undoubtedly everyone stepping up to the mark when they observe name-calling, bullying, inappropriate touching or subtle discrimination favouring majority status, can only improve the situation. If you are not the victim, say, of having your name moved down the author list to reduce the credit accorded you, then it is so much easier to speak up. Have you ever asked your supervisor why a fellow student or postdoc isn’t in first author position when they deserve it? Have you ever challenged a colleague over excessive criticism or sarcasm directed at one poor individual in the tea-room or group meetings? And if not, and you’ve seen that or comparable behaviour, why not?

Such confrontations never get easier, in my view, however senior one is. It is uncomfortable to call out a colleague, but how much more uncomfortable for the victim. The last time I called out someone’s behaviour, admittedly in writing after the event, I got a fulsome grovel back, perhaps to my surprise (the time before involving a different individual, I’d been met with stony silence). Whether the guilty party actually has changed their behaviour on the back of that I cannot tell, as I rarely see them, but at least I felt I had not ignored the incident.

Whistle-blowing is of course a very different matter from calling out someone, privately or publicly, about a specific event. Whistle-blowing is much more likely to be the result of ongoing and long-lasting misbehaviour or malpractice. The stakes for both sides are therefore correspondingly higher. Which is why it can be so painful for the whistle-blower when the evidence they have accrued is somehow dismissed. In Geoghegan’s article, he tells a story of a whistle-blowing event which led to an investigation headed up by the very individual identified as being at fault. This seems incredible but it would seem, with no regulatory requirements on how investigations are carried out, this is permissible. In that particular article, all the allegedly guilty parties were senior managers. In the case of bullying, my personal observations would suggest they are often senior research academics who bring in too much money for an institution willingly to apply sanctions. With bullying hard to define, it is too easy to look the other way and say this person just had high standards.

Yet it is always the same small group of names that get discussed in the context of bullying, certainly that is so in my own institution, so there is plenty of anecdotal information even if no formal complaints are ever laid or explicit evidence put on the table. It is a frequent worry here, amongst graduate tutors for instance, who see – within their College – the price some students pay in their wellbeing for bad behaviour on the part of a research supervisor. I am not convinced anonymous reporting (anonymous on the part of the reporter, the alleged perpetrator or both is not made clear in the Nature editorial) is the solution to this problem. What we need is a willingness for sanctions to be applied when persistent rumour and evidence of distressed students is manifest, so that the next generation of students are spared the emotional turmoil of ill-treatment. Collectively, academia ought, indeed must, be capable of cleaning up its act.

 

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Anxious Times

Posted on May 21, 2023 by Athene Donald

I can still remember anxiously waiting for my first paper to appear. It must have been in 1976, because I know I had submitted the paper under my married name, although at the time the wedding was still some weeks (possibly even months) away. Someone remarked I must have been very confident to do this, but – of all the anxieties I may have felt about my first journal article appearing in print – I don’t think fear of being jilted figuratively at the altar was one of them. I was right on that front, and I think I was also right – given I got married during my PhD and hence very early in my scientific career – to make a clean sweep of changing my name. Not for me the concerns of having a string of papers under one name and then having to make that decision about whether to keep a professional name separate from the married name. I know it is an issue that troubles many (women of course, less prevalent for men) who marry at a later stage.

I may now have many papers under my name and even a co-authored technical book on liquid crystalline polymers, first published more than 30 years ago and its second edition 17 years old, but it is a departure to worry about a so-called ‘trade’ book. Until recently I hadn’t even heard of this category of non-fiction written for a general audience, but that is the grouping in which my new book Not Just for the Boys, why we need more women in science – all of 10 days old in the market – sits. It is providing me with a whole new set of worries regarding its reception. These go beyond the standard set of worries for any publication about the discovery of typos and other errors. A couple of minor inaccuracies have already been pointed out to me, which is annoying but not worse than that. As was said to me, such can be corrected in the paperback: I wish. No surety that will ever happen.

But for a book which aspires to a wide readership, not just of practicing scientists but of those who will influence the practicing scientists of the future, or (alternatively) deter them from ever setting out on that path, I worry that it may fail to make its mark. That it will, like so many others before and no doubt hereafter, vanish into deserved obscurity. As I prepare for my first book shop talk in the Edinburgh Toppings (a pleasantly independent shop), I fear I will meet with the common fate of authors of having no one turn up, or only what one might term ‘Rabbit’s friends and relations’. This, I believe, is only too common and it’s hard to see how it could be anything other than gutting. All that emotion expended in preparing a scintillating talk, as one hopes, and no one to hear it.

So far, the three reviews that I have seen have been kind but – let’s face it – I am still waiting for the axe to fall. It is hard to imagine any academic, possibly any author or creator of any description, not waiting for harsh criticism. After all, in our regular publications or grant applications, criticism is exactly what one expects, sometimes justified but quite often not. We may not be as fearful as Dmitri Shostakovitch when he wrote his 5th symphony. In the face of prior criticism from Stalin to his previous creation Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, at that point he probably feared for his life, exile to a gulag or retribution falling on his family, and so he allowed the symphony to be described as ‘“a Soviet artist’s creative answer to just criticism.” Those fates are not close to the top of my mind right now. But there is still plenty of scope for vitriol and scorn. People being enthusiastic about the scope of the book as written up in the publisher’s blurb is not the same thing as people actually enjoying it or the book reaching its mark of stretching the thinking of policy-makers, parents and teachers.

I had hoped that my appearance on Woman’s Hour this past week might enable the book to reach a different sort of audience than I can achieve though Twitter or a couple of bookshop appearances but, perhaps inevitably, my contribution was truncated from what the producer had indicated due to a lengthy discussion of the incredibly important if harrowing topic of eating disorders and their treatment (or lack of it). I’m hoping my appearance at the Hay Literary Festival (event 188 on May 30th) in 10 days time offers another opportunity to reach an audience consisting of not-my-standard followers (as well as scope to fall on my face, metaphorically if not literally).

Maybe prolific authors of whatever genre shake off these feelings of being an impostor and being found out as the creators of drivel or inaccurate old hat, but I doubt I will write enough books to reach that happy state. So, I approach each appearance and interview with apprehension, and I suspect I always will.

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On Being Unnerved – Get out your Velcro

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Athene Donald

Not infrequently I find myself having to give after dinner speeches in my College: to alumni as well as to different parts of the student body. The first time I had to talk to the Freshers, I suspect I was as nervous as they were, only in my case it was regarding my speech rather than worrying about which knife to use that preyed on my mind. I kept clear of most of the alcohol on offer that evening, as the idea of tripping over my words appalled me. After eight years, such speeches no longer seem so daunting, but I haven’t forgotten the nerves. It is all part of what seems to be a recurrent theme in my life, as in most people’s I would guess: doing something for the first time always has the potential to be nerve-wracking. I don’t think those of us of a mature age should be ashamed to admit it, or to remind the nervous young, that this is a feeling that can assail anyone at any stage of their lives. What changes with experience is that you may build up more confidence that, if things do go wrong, you’ll be able to pick yourself up without it wrecking everything for evermore.

For scientists, embarking on research, something similar applies. The first time one does research, it probably isn’t nerves so much as not knowing what one’s doing coupled with that same fear that things will go wrong. I recently came across a (quite old) commentary highlighting a not dissimilar problem: that of feeling stupid because research does not come easily, while assuming it does for everyone else. If one survives the first years of a PhD, and possibly a postdoc, then it gets to seem more natural that research is challenging and to realise that if the answers were obvious, you wouldn’t be doing the research anyhow. But that takes time, and many people feel that time could be better spent in some other sphere and consequently leave research completely.

This has all been brought back to me this week when I’ve been at a conference where an after-dinner speech from me was required. This was to a very different audience from undergraduates – one where wit rather more than exhortations to get enough sleep was required – and my nerves were reawoken, I think very obviously. I was once again moderate on the alcohol front as a result. It all seemed to go OK (no one laughed in the wrong place at least), and I hope when I have to do a repeat performance next year (in my capacity as chair of the organising committee), I will have a little more confidence. We shall see. I don’t think it should be as hard next time, or at least I hope that will be the case.

However, I am conscious that any compliments I am paid this year on the back of my words will have been erased from my memory by next. An article I read last weekend expressed this very clearly, albeit in the context of stress of a different kind – jumping out of an aeroplane.

“There is a great metaphor for this which borrows from the material technology of Teflon and Velcro. Most of us have minds like Velcro for the negative aspects of stress, which stick with us long after high-pressure events. In contrast, our minds are like Teflon for the positive aspects, which can slip away all too quickly.”

You don’t have to be a materials scientist to recognize what is meant. Switch the words ‘negative aspects of stress’ for ‘criticism’ and ‘positive’ for compliments and the message is clear: any words of criticism, from referee 3 or over Twitter or wherever they emanate from, will stay lingering unhelpfully in the mind for months if not years. The upbeat compliment that gave 30 seconds of pleasure and a sense of well-being will, as often as not, evaporate in a trice. Certainly, that is how my mind works, something my mother used to bring to my attention right back in my teenage years. Age has not transformed that propensity.

I think – just like discussing impostor syndrome – an old hand like me should point out to the rising stars the reality that life will continue to throw up challenges that are unnerving; that many of us are not so arrogant to believe we are always on top of our game (although unfortunately perhaps too many academics are, victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence). And that any new challenge may provoke anxiety, however much one may be up to the job required. However, it clearly also behoves those of a nervous disposition to keep hold of that Velcro/Teflon analogy, so that the positive words of referee 1 at least do something to compensate for referee 3’s vitriol: whether or not the paper is ultimately accepted, at least someone found something good to say. There will always be people out there trying to score points or salvage their own ego by deflating someone else’s. Sometimes their words may be unkind but their conclusions correct, and sometimes they’re just plain wrong.

However, no one ever said research was easy – or indeed giving an after-dinner speech (I cannot comment on jumping out of an aeroplane, but it doesn’t sound like my idea of fun). It is good to push oneself, and to learn from criticism, but not to the extent of letting it eat you up inside, even when there are plaudits as well as Velcro-inducing negativity tossed in your direction.

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