The Dangers of Brilliance

As the detailed criteria of REF2029 are being worked through, the issue over the research culture part remains unclear. There are those who think research culture is an irrelevance in the pursuit of excellence, that it is a touchy-feely kind of thing, that woke stuff the last Government didn’t like, and who believe it is obvious what excellence is. This, I believe, is a profound mistake. We need all hands to the pump, as it were, in solving the many global challenges we face, from climate change to the dangers of AI, from (un)healthy ageing to food security. If we assume that the only way to succeed is to continue on the same trajectory we have been, at least throughout my lifetime, we are limiting ourselves. An academic world where success is determined by funding pulled in or space occupied, or even (although less true now than it once was ) the citation index of where you’ve published or the sheer weight of – figurative – paperwork you have produced, then we will never change or become a truly inclusive academic world. Yet the evidence shows diversity matters, and hence replacing like with like in the academic pyramid is short-sighted. Although the business world may slowly be waking up to the benefits to the bottom line of a diverse board or employee base, academia continues to have pockets of resistance. PNAS may publish a paper spelling out that

‘underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty.’

Yet this same paper depressingly goes on to say

‘However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted….are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities…equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups’

In Physics (as in maths, computing or engineering, but less so in chemistry or the life sciences) there is a great imbalance of the sexes all the way through the system and almost universally around the world. Increasingly, researchers are exploring the belief that you have to be brilliant to be a physicist; and also the belief that brilliance is something that boys (males) have more of than girls (females), a belief that seems to set in really young. Or, as the title of a relatively recent paper puts it “You need to be super smart to do well in math!”, based on studying children in (US) grades 1-4, roughly five to nine year olds. What messages are we giving our children so early on that leads to this belief?

Any physicist, male or female, is likely to have been greeted at some social occasion, when having disclosed their profession with ‘oh you must be so clever/I never could do maths at school’ or some variant of those phrases. It’s boring and embarrassing and I have always felt wide of the mark. I couldn’t do biology at school, my French pronunciation was atrocious and geography left me cold. I admired people who could speak fluent French and easily took on board concepts of frog development or the principal exports of Marseilles (a topic that seemed to take an inordinate amount of time in my geography lessons). It never crossed my mind that I was ‘smarter’ because my abilities lay elsewhere. Yet, apparently, on average, that’s how children and adults alike seem to think.

And this is unhealthy and unhelpful, and it feeds into a research culture many years later that is also unhealthy and unhelpful. It means we have an academy that is weighted in favour of those allegedly (more) brilliant male physicists and, as another recent paper put it, a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment in Physics departments.  They complain that

‘An emphasis on brilliance is harmful because assumptions about who has it are gendered and racialized: when we think of a brilliant person, we tend to think of men and white individuals, not women or people of colour’

And furthermore that this dog-eat-dog competitive culture arises because

‘brilliance is inherently comparative and hierarchical, so the more brilliant one person is perceived to be, the less others are.’

Interventions to alter our children’s attitudes towards the stereotyping of brilliance as a white male trait need to start early in our primary schools. These may be beyond the arena in which the typical academic is likely to get involved (I believe teacher training has a key role to play here, but children learn about cultural attitudes from far beyond the classroom.) Interventions to what and how we value being smart, at the expense of being supportive, generous, willing to do outreach and pastoral care as well as taking on a fair share of ‘departmental housework’ would all make for a better research environment and will be driven by attitudes around recruitment and promotion and, inevitably, REF2029. What incentives do we need to change the mindset we collectively currently inhabit and how can we avoid the perverse incentives that years of thinking about ‘excellence’ as a one-dimensional and easily recognizable criterion too often deliver?

Of course, it isn’t just Physics that has this ‘brilliance’ tag attached to it. In other areas, both Philosophy and Economics tend to get labelled this way too. These are also hugely male-dominated in unhealthy ways. In Philosophy a paper from last year stated that ‘people who identify as women internalize a gender stereotype and perceive themselves as less brilliant, but also share with others (i.e., men) the stereotypes of philosophy as for people who have brilliance and psychology as for people who do not have brilliance.’ The consequence, as they saw it, was that women were more likely to opt for Psychology as a discipline, where brilliance does not factor in in the same way and which ends up having a substantial female majority. As for Economics, my College colleague Diane Coyle has identified this major problem of gendering, both in her book Cogs and Monsters and in an article in the FT (so I hope many economists have read about the issue in one or other place). She highlights one version of the unfortunate ambience of what we value in the seminar room, stating

‘economics seminars are hostile occasions for point-scoring and aggressive challenge’

and in Economics journals where she says

‘Peer review rewards peers, and they are mainly men.’

So, how do we as a society, change our attitudes towards brilliance so that children do not believe that males are more brilliant than females which, in turn, could lead to both a more pleasant work culture and a more equitable gender split across the board? If anyone has any good answers….do let the world know.