In Academia, Pats on the Back are Rare

How are you doing? I don’t mean either mentally or physically, but are you keeping up with the Jones’? Are you doing as well as you should for the stage of career you’re at, and how do you know? The reality is, in academia we’re not very good at helping each other understand how we’re faring. Certainly, in Cambridge over my career, it has seemed that silence is the norm on this front.

I am reminded of this while preparing for an interview about what my life was like ‘mid-career’. Of course, that term is indeterminate: my mid-career might be someone else’s later or earlier depending on a whole range of individual circumstances. After all, if you’re like Carol Robinson and take a seven year career break to have three children immediately after your PhD, you would be starting your first postdoc considerably later than the average. (I’ve just been reminded of her unusual yet spectacularly successful career trajectory, having been listening to my own interview with her from a few years back.) It isn’t simply a question of age, that is irrelevant, it is also about experience and maturity, so that those seven years are likely to have made a big difference in ways other than simply publication output.

Thinking back to the stage I think of as ‘mid-career’, that bit between my first permanent position and becoming a professor, I remember a survey being done of the (still relatively few) women academics across the University on behalf of the University. It was never published, too damning I think, and of course I don’t still have a copy 25 or so years on, but I do remember the surprise with which the interviewer reacted to being told time and time again, by women, that they found the lack of feedback on their progress disconcerting or worse. Unlike the business context in which the interviewer worked (I guess they came from a consultancy), such feedback just didn’t occur in the normal run of things. Perhaps if they’d interviewed men they’d have heard the same anxiety expressed.

I well remember struggling with the concept of what was ‘good enough’, be it in terms of research outputs, looking after my students, attendance at conferences or teaching and ‘service’. It was an eye-opener to be told, during one of my infrequent appraisals that, as a rule of thumb, I shouldn’t expect to referee more papers than I myself submitted. That it was OK to decline some requests. Naively – is this a gendered thing, or merely down to personality? – I had felt a sense of obligation to accept all papers or grants to referee as long as I felt competent. (Actually, ‘competent’ itself raises all sorts of issues derived from impostor syndrome, but that’s another story.) I always suspected – because no one told me otherwise – that I wasn’t up to the mark in my service, not doing my ‘bit’. I’m sure this was exacerbated because I felt I was cutting corners while I tried to bring up two small children.

It was only when the department introduced a workload model, possibly on the back of its Athena Swan application, that I realised that my service load was far higher than most people’s – but by then I was a senior professor and I suspect already deputy head of department at the time. It was a bit late for me, although a sense of guilt about whether I was doing enough was still never far away from my thoughts. I am glad that people can get some sense of their contribution through such models, albeit how a department weights teaching versus serving on a university committee, or turning up for open days versus organising lab classes, will always be debatable. There is unlikely ever to be a standard ‘scoring’ system for such a model.

However, it is the question of ‘good enough’ in terms of issues related, not just to service but to research, that is likely to eat at people most early in their careers (possibly later too). It is good that the tyranny of journal impact factors appears to be receding, but that doesn’t stop people – namely promotion and appointment committees – silently valuing a Nature or PNAS paper higher than one appearing in other journals, however relevant and appropriate such a journal might be for a particular piece of work. When I was mid-career I felt the appropriateness of a journal was far more important than having to go through the hassle of arguing with an editor/referee multiple times, but that is a luxury the ECRs of today probably do not feel they have. There are plenty of other metrics that an early-mid career academic may fret about. How many grants, from where and worth how much, are ‘enough’? Who is the judge? Is my sub-discipline sufficiently comparable to Dr Bloggs down the corridor that the fact that they have two minor grants from (insert funder of choice) trumps my one large grant from (insert another funder)? I would guess that, male or female, most of us have worried about ‘enough’ in this sense.

The trouble with academia, as has been said over and over again, is that it is inherently competitive. We are unfortunately only too likely always to be looking over our shoulders at those coming up behind us, as well as our peers, to try to work out how we’re doing. I know how much I would have benefitted from someone telling me that I was well within the bounds of ‘acceptable’ and, given I had two small children if I wanted not to gad all around the world presenting my research at international conferences, that was fine. If my grant applications failed this round, just keep going and try again. A single (or even multiple) failure was not terminal, particularly if elsewhere the students I acquired, through whatever route, were producing good stuff. But no, such messages were rarely given to me in the normal run of things or even at appraisals.

I’m sure people are now better prepared to carry out such conversations than those who appraised me ever were, in that training about how to do this is likely to be provided by the institution, and mentors may more routinely be allocated to new staff and postdocs. I don’t think I ever fared quite as badly as the colleague who went to his appraisal with a list of issues on their mind to raise and came out saying their appraiser had indeed agreed this was a list to worry about, without offering a single word of constructive advice.

On the other hand, I was very taken aback by the reaction I got from my own appraiser (possibly the same professor) when I raised the fact that my scientific credibility had been publicly and totally inappropriately trashed at a departmental meeting. I felt, both that others at the meeting should have pointed out the unreasonableness of the criticism laid against me, and that the person who’d been out of line should have apologised thereafter. It was perhaps, as has been said more recently in another context, only the ‘normal cut and thrust’ of (departmental) politics, regretted thereafter. Instead, I was told I was the one who should have apologised. I never worked out for what and it seemed strange advice.

I hope early-mid-career researchers now do get much better advice and mentorship regarding their progress and standing. We don’t all need to be superstars, but everyone wants to know they’re not lagging unreasonably behind, in that other, much feared word, failing . More feedback and support can only benefit us, at any stage in our career. Why should academia be quite so niggardly in providing this? Maybe the world has moved on from my day, and everyone, whatever their gender or skin colour, gets this support automatically and professionally. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that.