We Haven’t Had Enough of Experts

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Athene Donald

When I talk to student groups, as I still do quite often, I talk as much as what else one can do with a science/Physics degree beyond the obvious, as about the research I used to do (quite a long time ago now). I like to encourage them to think about careers beyond the academic lab and roles for which their science education will provide an excellent base. Obviously, teaching is one where the need for more graduates entering the profession is crucial, particularly in Physics where the shortfall is massive: in 2023 only 17% of the target for trainee teachers in the subject was achieved, ‘up’ (if one can call it that) from 16% the year before. But I also like to highlight the policy arena, both politics itself and the civil service.

Angela McLean, as GCSA,  has stressed the desirability of having more scientists in the civil service, with a specific science and engineering fast stream, which is steadily growing. There were 113 participants in this scheme in 2023, compared with 18 in 2015. The more generalist fast stream entry now has a (Cabinet Office) target of 50% of their new entrants being scientists, a figure that was achieved, and even exceeded, in 2023. However, having achieved that, it is important that their scientific expertise, their numeracy and analytical thinking skills, are put to good use. Reading an account of how the Civil Service is deployed in Ian Dunt’s 2023 book (How Westminster Works….and Why it Doesn’t), may make one question whether that is, in practice, the case.

Dunt discusses the history of the civil service from its reform in the 1850’s, following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. At that time, civil servants were expected to be generalists, coming typically from Oxbridge with an arts degree, but expected to be able to tackle anything. My grandfather – who read Classics in Cambridge before the first world war – would occasionally talk about the Indian Civil Service exams he sat after his degree. My memory is imperfect of the things he said to me during my teenage years, but these exams involved something like fourteen separate papers covering different topics over three days. I assume the questions were similar to those old types of name the principal rivers in Mesopotamia or list the kings of England in the thirteenth century, but I never pressed him on that. Not necessarily, however, knowledge particularly useful even to an Edwardian civil service – or India come to that. I don’t know if he ever intended to go to India (I often think of the questions I wish I’d asked him, but wasn’t interested in at the time, plus I had zero appreciation of the consequences of colonialism back then), but he ended up as a clerk in the House of Commons instead, where he formed a dim view of both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The war put an end to that position, as he headed off to France.

But enough of the personal detour, although recalling his account of the exams he sat may have mislead me about the more modern civil service. Dunt points out that many people over the last 50+ years have raged against the lack of specialist knowledge the civil service system utlises (and it is the structure he is railing against, not the individuals serving). He quotes an essay from 1959 by Thomas Balogh entitled The Apotheosis of a Dilettante and the 1968 inquiry led by Lord Fulton, who highlighted the issues around generalism and churn. Then, as now, people get moved on as the obvious way to gain promotion, so that knowledge gained in one sphere becomes irrelevant a couple of years (or less) later. For, according to Fulton, scientists and engineers – and yes, even in 1968 there were such people employed –

‘get neither the full responsibilities and corresponding authority, nor the opportunities they ought to have.’

I suspect Dunt doesn’t believe much has changed since then, and he rails against the widespread use of consultants instead of constructively using what experts they do have. He states:

‘On a very basic level, government departments have no idea what skills, knowledge or experience their staff have, because no one bothered to track it. Many departments do not collect basic workforce data…’

There are government departments where science sits squarely and centrally in its policy-making and their teams include many scientists. But, as I discovered some years back when I became chair of the Science Advisory Council for the Department of Culture Media and Sports in 2015, that particular department had precious few scientists on its staff, about one as I recall. (It didn’t even at that point have a CSA, only a deputy who was an economist.) That position changed subsequently when it assumed responsibility for digital, between 2017 and 2023 until DSIT took on that responsibility.

Talking of DSIT reminds me of a visit I made to its predecessor, BEIS, soon after the creation of UKRI. The primary focus of that visit was to stress the importance of UKRI making progress on interdisciplinary funding, for instance through the newly announced Strategic Priorities Fund, and I was talking to some of the staff assigned to UKRI from BEIS as it got going. I may have thought I was going to talk to those who knew what was going on, but ended up realising I was instead giving some new and junior staff a tutorial about how grant-funding committees worked. I was disappointed that the direction of knowledge transfer was from me to them, not vice versa, but I hope they found it useful. What I do recall was the insertion of various Latin epigrams into the conversation by one of the civil servants, and I left feeling that he, like my grandfather, had a Classics degree from Oxbridge, but that it didn’t mean he had a good grasp of how UKRI could or should operate. I had to hope I had inspired him to do more homework.

Now I work with another Department (the Department for Education) as chair of their newly formed Science Advisory Council. They have now, and for the first time I believe, a CSA (Russell Viner, a paediatrician) and a small science team, actually populated by scientists, one which probably could usefully be larger. I am excited to be working with them, and excited by the signs of genuine cross-departmental working under the new government’s missions. I am also encouraged by the willingness of those in Whitehall and elsewhere to talk to me about their work and potentially mine. I hope Dunt is wrong in his pessimistic analysis of the way Westminster works, or doesn’t; and that the vital place of STEM within Whitehall is fully recognized in our increasingly technologically-led society. We live in a world in which innovation and growth are crucially important for our economy and consequent societal wellbeing but which can only be delivered with a well-functioning education and skills system. All of which requires an appropriate spread of scientists and engineers across government departments.

 

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Praise and Possibility

Posted on December 15, 2024 by Athene Donald

Anyone who watched the final of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing will have heard words like ‘resilient’, ‘belief’ and ‘self-confidence’ thrown in the direction of the four finalists by the judges, with all contestants having been on a ‘journey’. It got a bit boring, all this waxing lyrical, but perhaps being told that this or that finalist had demonstrated to the general public that ‘anything is possible’ is just a tad over the top. Yes, the overall winner was blind comedian Chris McCausland, and what he had achieved was indeed truly remarkable, not least because he had started out with little self-belief. Furthermore, his professional partner Dianne Buswell, must have had extraordinary skill and patience to work out and carry through the tricky art of teaching someone the look and execution oof a dance when they cannot see what they are doing, or even meant to be doing.

However, this is an academic blog and there is a point to that opening paragraph beyond revealing Strictly is a secret pleasure of mine, that does bring a smile to my face. I worry that being told ‘anything is possible’, with the best of intentions, is a bit of a lie. If you are doing an experiment in a lab with inadequate equipment, then you aren’t very likely to make a major breakthrough. If you are setting out on a PhD, however determined you may be and however dedicated to research, the sad truth is academic careers are a pyramid and just because you believe in yourself does not mean your journey will end up with you winning a Nobel Prize, or even a permanent position as a professor. Sadly, there are more people setting out than become tenured and although it is ‘possible’ it is by no means certain and keeping trying is not an infallible route to success. In reality, many things can intervene, ranging from bad luck (e.g. results being scooped) to bad supervisors. More on the latter to follow.

However, a so-called growth mindset is undoubtedly going to be helpful, the belief that being good at a subject is not simply about innate talent, but also about a work ethic and putting in the hours to build on the strengths you do have. Not giving up the first time something goes wrong, but keeping going until it is clear that, for whatever reason, success is not going to meet your endeavours. So, words of encouragement to keep a student going through the inevitable tough days, reinforcing resilience and self-confidence are definitely helpful, but that does not mean that an academic career beckons, even if the award of a PhD does.

One of the things that angers me most about some of my academic colleagues is that they may say, sometimes in totally blunt ways, if you don’t end up like the boss you are a failure. In other words, that any career other than academia is beneath their notice. Which is rubbish. We need scientifically-trained people in many parts of the economy, from journalism to Whitehall, from heavy industry to the classroom. Just because a PhD student leaves academia does not make them a failure. On the contrary, they may be using their skillset in wonderful and productive ways, which cannot be said about all academics.

Very often something professors don’t say to their teams is that they are doing a good job. A student may be struggling for all kinds of reasons, personal or professional, but if they are sticking at something, that in itself is a positive and should be celebrated. Such kind words may help someone progress and develop more confidence. A recent article in the FT spelled this out in a very different context (of course, a more financial setting and language), articulating that praise may help to offset lower pay, encouraging someone to stay in a job rather than move on elsewhere dissatisfied with their lot.  As the article said

Once you earn enough to meet what you deem to be basic needs, you are more inclined to value non-remunerative aspects of work, such as praise and appreciation.

The same may apply in academic science. Praise shouldn’t cost anything to the supervisor, but can be received as something of real value by the recipient and help them to go on to better things. But, that doesn’t mean that if every supervisor praised every student they would all stay in academia. Of course not, it doesn’t work like that.

Nevertheless, I think academic supervisors should pay more heed to encouragement and devote less time to trying to convince a student that quitting the lab for some other profession equates with failure. Goodness knows, we need more physics teachers in our classrooms, more scientifically-qualified civil servants and more journalists who can readily explain exponential growth, to take a specific example. The scientific training acquired during a PhD is a wonderful basis for many careers that don’t have science in the job title. Each student who takes their skills into a different sphere is helping to improve our nation’s scientific literacy, the benefits of which may be uncertain, but are certainly important.

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Living in Silos

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Athene Donald

When I first started writing this blog in 2010, I imagined I was going to write about the science that interested me, the latest papers in my field that caught my eye, and specifically highlight the excitement and challenge of working across boundaries in interdisciplinary areas. I was troubled by the difficulties scientists who worked, as I did back then, in areas that crossed research council boundaries faced in obtaining funding. Specifically, I worked at the interface between physics and biology and saw, despite the good intentions of those working at EPSRC and BBSRC (there was no UKRI back then), who regularly assured me that every grant would find a home, that what was meant by a ‘home’ was a panel that would evaluate an application. And this was not, and would not be now, the same thing as finding a panel that was able to judge it fairly because of the breadth of their expertise. I saw a grant I had written for EPSRC be rejected by them and sent to a BBSRC panel for which it was totally unsuitable, something I knew full well as I was the chair of that particular panel. Of course it failed, as I wrote about previously.

In time, my vocal raising of this issue wherever I could, did not lead to any more success in grant funding, but it did lead to me chairing the REF2021 Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel where I hope we were able to do a little to change the monoculture of panels involved in decision-making during the process. In particular, we stressed that excellent research could be done which did not need to be cutting edge in all or indeed any of the component parts: the excellence could lie in the overall integration. I hope some similar approach will inform the current REF round, in which I will play no part.

It is a long time since I last wrote a grant proposal, successful or not. During the last decade I served on the European Research Council’s Scientific Council (across the Brexit referendum) and discovered that a single overarching research council does not solve the problem of grants that transcend any particular boundary imposed between panels. UKRI faces exactly the same issues only now with two tiers: gaps between research councils and gaps between panels within a single research council. In an attempt to solve this problem, there is now an explicit interdisciplinary research strand, the cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme which has recently closed its second round. Although I was involved in training panel members for the interdisciplinary college for this call, I have no information on how well the first round progressed or was received. I would be interested to hear from any readers who know more.

But the disjunction that occurs when people work in silos can be found in many places far beyond academic research. Now much of my work is in the policy arena, rather than research science, I have been rereading Roger Pielke’s classic text The Honest Broker. I was struck by the following text inserted into a section on the failure of the so-called linear model, in which it is naively assumed that basic/pure research leads to applied research leads to product in the market. Apparently a reviewer of an early draft of the book said there was no need for a discussion of this because ‘the STS (science and technology studies) audience know all this already’. I remember I got a similar comment regarding my own draft manuscript in which I presented data about gender and science from the social science literature and was told this was all well-known to social scientists (although I cannot immediately lay my hands on the exact quote). The idea that an author might be writing for those who already know the stuff seems to me to be a strange way to approach a book draft where, surely, the whole point is to reach those who don’t know the stuff. But reviewers can be narrow-minded – as anyone who has ever received a referee’s report will know only too well – and not appreciate that an important point of working across disciplines is to bring solid facts to new audiences and to new problems. In my case, I wanted practicing scientists to learn about what the social scientists could tell them about gender issues in the classroom and whether specific interventions might work. I was not aiming my book at the social scientists who knew their own literature already.

However, the reality is, any organisation – be it a university, a UKRI, a business or a government – has to structure itself into some sort of units, and there will always be joins with friction or gaps between them. A recent HEPI blog by Gavin Miller took exception to the whole of the concept of silos as being inappropriate, claiming ‘The term ‘silo’ invokes a mystifying metaphor – that of the university as a living, intelligent organism’ (I’m not sure most readers would claim a university as intelligent, although they are often organic). But nevertheless, whether an organisation is considered to be living or not, there can be no doubt that junctions between units can be problematic and the need for keeping them as frictionless as possible is vital.

In a different guise, but arguably a far more important space, the new Government has recognized this in identifying its five cross-departmental missions, instead of relying on individual departments to solve the myriad problems of the day (subject, of course, to Treasury approval). There is no doubt that science will have a major role to play in just about all these identified areas, but how easy it will be for different teams to share enough of a common language (often a problem in interdisciplinary university research, where local jargon and acronyms can rule the day), or shared goals of both a short and long term nature, will remain to be seen. In the not-too-distant past, universities benefitted from having a minister (notably David Willetts and Jo Johnson at different times) who had a foot in both BEIS, now of course defunct, and the Department for Education. Sometimes a minister who sat in Cabinet. Now that formal linkage is gone, but if the ‘opportunity for all’ and ‘growth’ missions are to succeed the linkages will be more important than ever across different groupings of departments (issues far beyond universities themselves). Breaking down silos, departments, disciplines, whatever language you want to use, does really matter.

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When to Say Yes

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve been writing this blog for more than fourteen years now, incredible though that sounds, at least to me. I rarely look back at what has gone before and if I do, it’s mainly to check I’m not repeating myself. But, looking back recently I was struck by one post I wrote more than twelve years ago about the challenges of saying ‘no’. I can well recall the conversation with AN Other that prompted it. My own situation has changed a lot since then, having been a College Master for ten years and now formally retired. However, trying to make one’s mind up about what to do and what not to do is as much a challenge as ever. I recall one friend saying their choices were made on where their personal contribution could make most difference. The danger with that approach is that one can end up staying in a narrow area in which you are already an expert (although that wasn’t in fact true of him). In my wider work as in my research, I have always wanted to keep expanding my horizons.

Much of what I have done in my life has happened by accident rather than by conscious design. When I give talks about my career I try to stress that this is not always such a bad thing. Sometimes it kicks you out of a rut, sometimes it opens up new opportunities that you might not have actively sought out. In my research, I always tried to keep a ‘safe’ research strand going while I plunged into something new. This meant I had something to fall back on if the new departure failed to ignite for one reason or another. Sometimes I felt stretched beyond my comfort level and there is no doubt I started a number of lines that went nowhere. But, on the whole, I feel it was a good strategy.

So too with what might term extracurricular activities. I may be frequently described as a ‘champion for women’, but I had to start somewhere other than simply with a feeling of annoyance with the little things that were tossed negatively in my direction (many of which I’ve written about previously on this blog). This formal championing arose because I had been interacting with more senior women – notably Julia Higgins and Jocelyn Bell Burnell – about the disadvantages many female scientists operated under; I then found myself being nominated by them to take on chairing the Athena Forum (now I think no more, but it was about promoting women in science). And, in due course, Julia passed on to me an invitation to talk in Austria about the topic of women in science. I wrote about that meeting very early in the lifetime of this blog, and it was a fairly weird experience as I and other externals got caught up in their own internal Austrian issues, but it was also something of a baptism by fire to talk on a subject I had barely begun to master. However, necessity is the mother of invention and that first talk – and all the work I put into preparing it – stood me in good stead as my visibility in this space rose.

I say this as I try to get to grips with new issues in my retirement. The only way to get on top of a new topic is to put in the hours reading the literature, as any new PhD student will know. Often the challenge is where to begin, how to find out what is the ‘right’ reading given the volume of potentially informative material out there with a mere click of a mouse. How to get to the essence of a new problem when there are many voices, not all of which will be helpful or indeed trustworthy? Learning how to critique others’ writing is of course another skill the freshly minted researcher needs to master, but it is not easy from the get-go.

Again, as with trying to work out what tasks to take on, trying to work out whose writing or interviews to trust is something that can be facilitated by talking to others. They don’t need to be people who are in any way closely connected with you, but simply people who are willing to share wisdom and their own experience. In my current situation, they are likely to be the very same people who’ve roped me in to the matter in hand, but as a student they are likely to be your peers as much as your supervisor.

I always feel I ‘fell’ into policy when I was asked, to my surprise, to chair the Royal Society’s Education Committee, a role I took on in 2010. I had to do a crash course then, but it certainly stood me in good stead when I became Master of Churchill College, since I had learned a lot about school education (not something all professors are au fait with) during my 4 year stint as chair. The importance of a good education system for all ages and all abilities is something I continue to be both concerned and interested in. Hence my pleasure when appointed chair of the Department for Education’s Scientific Advisory Council recently, but also my involvement with other activities (such as chairing the Science Policy Educators’ Alliance, a grouping of relevant learned and professional bodies). In particular, and locally, I am currently exploring the situation regarding apprentices in the region in conjunction with key players in this space.

With the creation of Skills England, it has to be hoped that policy – and indeed funding – covering  the whole gamut of education and post-16 skills training will become more coherent. As has frequently been pointed out by many another expert, this is not currently the case. A recent HEPI blog is a case in point. I won’t be writing specifically about the work of the DfE SAC, as that would not be appropriate, but other aspects of the important topic of skills may well find their way into future blogposts as I delve deeper. Who knows?

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Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Athene Donald

Back in 2019, The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship was published, spelling out just how bad the environment was for would-be female entrepreneurs. She was blunt in the opening words of her introduction

“I firmly believe that the disparity that exists between female and male entrepreneurs is unacceptable and holding the UK back. The unrealised potential for the UK economy is enormous.”

There is no doubt that, in essence, excluding half the population from innovating and helping grow productivity has to be bad news. The Review stated that £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as UK men. Even with a more modest aspiration of matching best-in-class comparator countries, if the UK were to achieve the same average share of women entrepreneurs, this would add £200 billion to the UK economy.  A guide from the British Business Bank directed at would-be female entrepreneurs, highlighted the biases of society that may make it so hard for them to obtain money from the Venture Capital sector. Whether VCs (approximately 90% men) are aware of their biases when making decisions is less clear.

In the five years since the Rose Report, it isn’t obvious that a great deal has changed. Indeed, if anything things seem to be going backwards.  According to data from the Invest in Women Taskforce, all-female founded businesses received just 1.8 per cent (£145m) of the total value of equity investment in the first half of 2024, a fall from 2.5 per cent in 2023.  But this group is not just collecting statistics. This week they have announced a £250M pot for female-led businesses, with allocations being decided by female investment decision-makers across the UK. When the call to create this fund was announced last September, it received strong backing from Rachel Reeves, the first woman to hold the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, who will be attending Task Force events.  The money in the new fund has come from major companies, including Barclays and Aviva. It should kick-start many an enterprising woman’s new company, opening up novel avenues and creating value for the economy. One has to hope that it will also kick-start all VC funders to start thinking seriously about who they fund and who they reject (and why).

Ensuring that aspiring female entrepreneurs have the same access to venture capital funds as their male colleagues, is not just a question of moral fairness, although it is obviously that. It is also important for the growth that the Government is committed to, by creating new businesses and solving problems that may be particularly important for the female half of the population, no small number of people. As one of the Vice Presidents of the European Innovation Bank, Lilyana Pavolova, stated in 2020

“it makes economic and business sense to ensure that women entrepreneurs gain access to the same opportunities for success as their male counterparts.”

Also back in 2020, A PNAS study showed that underrepresented groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, produced higher rates of scientific novelty than their majority counterparts. Worryingly, their novel contributions were shown to be more likely to be devalued and discounted. Without in any sense implying there is a ‘female’ way of doing science, every scientist, engineer, technologist and inventor will approach problems based on their whole life experiences. Sometimes this means they will tackle an issue from a different angle from their (male) neighbour because of their view of the world, and they see areas where innovation can make a big difference that others may perhaps miss. Whether it is underpinning science or upstream technology solutions, perspective will colour any individual’s approach.

One such upstream area is so-called femtech, an area in which companies focus on technology-driven products, services, and software designed specifically to address women’s health and wellness needs. These are typically headed up by women who spot the need and the niche for the novel product. The evidence shows that fundamental research into health problems that predominantly affect women – think endometriosis, where the data has been analysed – are under-researched and underfunded. This underfunding occurs despite the significant economic burden of the disease in terms, for instance, of days off work for those women who are badly affected by the disease.  Women will be very conscious of areas such as this, but femtech reaches far beyond disease. Data shows that slightly over 50% femtech companies are fully female-founded, a figure that can be compared with the 6% of high-growth UK companies which are fully female founded in other sectors. It is a high growth area but could grow more if venture capitalists were more willing to invest in such start-ups.

The money announced by the Invest in Women Taskforce is a welcome addition to the funding portfolio. While many women may not want to be treated differently and, in this specific case, in a sense more advantageously because they are women, the reality is that currently they are being treated differently already, but in the opposite direction. It is to be hoped that, as more people realise that women really are capable of becoming successful entrepreneurs, we will see wider VC funds investing in female-led start ups. And this will be to the benefit of everyone, including the Treasury. Rachel Reeves sees the value in funding female entrepreneurs for growth, innovation and productivity.

 

 

Posted in Academia, appraisal, ASSET 2010, Athena Forum, Austrian science, Book Review, Careers, Equality, Evelyn Fox Keller, gender, History of Science, professional training, promotion, Science Funding, Women's Issues | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs