Embedding the Gender Agenda

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Athene Donald

I feel as if I have been involved with gender issues forever, but this is just the bad habit one has of reimagining personal history. Probably acting wisely, in fact for most of my professional career I just got on with my physics trying not to focus on the fact that, as a woman, I was invariably in a small minority in any given room. Not infrequently that minority consisted solely of me, particularly relatively early on. It was in fact only in 2007 I engaged in my first explicitly gender-related role when I became Director of WiSETI, Cambridge University’s Women in Engineering, Science and Technology Initiative. To some extent I took this on in a fit of pique, prompted by circumstances that I needn’t bore you with but which were undoubtedly, at least in part, down to my gender being the ‘wrong’ one.

This autumn I will be stepping down as the University’s Gender Equality Champion, a role which seemed naturally to grow out of my involvement with WiSETI and the opportunities that provided for me to speak out about local issues, imbalances and inequities. Relinquishing this role, which I have formally been doing for 4 years, is part of my deliberate rebalancing of my ‘portfolio’ as I take up the reins at Churchill College. However, 4 years is probably a sensible stint: long enough to familiarise myself with the problems and the structures in which they are embedded; time to persuade others what might make a difference and to identify mechanisms which might make these changes possible. However I hope not so long that I have become jaded and ineffective. Nevertheless it will be good to have new people coming in with fresh perspectives.

One natural consequence of moving on is to reflect on what has and hasn’t been achieved that might have been on my initial ‘to do’ list had I had anything as concrete as that in mind when I started. And a recent meeting of the Council of the School of Physical Sciences (to which I am co-opted as a member of University Council, another role I will be relinquishing this autumn) encapsulated for me both where significant pleasing progress has been made and where we are still stuck. I can’t help feeling this little vignette must be playing out in similar ways in many situations around the HE sector, although exactly where each organisation is along the implicit timeline will no doubt vary.

At some point before I was a regular attendee at these meetings, I was invited along to discuss gender issues. That dates it to after 2007 when I became Director of WiSETi and before autumn 2009 when I joined University Council, so let’s say 2008: 6 years ago. At that time it was clear that in Physical Sciences (which in this context includes Maths both pure and applied, Geography, Materials Science and Earth Sciences as well as Physics and Chemistry) we had problems. Low numbers at every level, a leaky pipeline to make things worse and, from my own experience, some fairly ill-thought through practices at appointments and committees in general. I presented some facts, statistics and observations to what was (I’m 99% sure) an all-male group and was listened to politely. Yes, they agreed, it wasn’t really good enough was it. And then they moved on to the next item on the agenda. (Again, I may be rewriting things a bit here because I have no documentary evidence, but this is my strong impression). Gender issues were something separate, special, needed to be given air time but not actually of sufficient importance to register highly with anyone or to need to be a recurrent topic of discussion.

Contrast this with my experience last week. By this point the School has an Equality and Diversity (E+D) Forum which meets termly to discuss these and other diversity issues. A paper was presented by the current Chair, Anne Davies (Professor of Mathematical Physics) recommending that all individuals (academics and academic-related) involved in appointments should be required to take – and pass – the University’s online E+D training module. Discussion around the table showed that everyone was absolutely behind this and indeed pushed to see this strengthened and applied to all appointment levels, not just for staff appointments. This, to their minds, was a no-brainer. Progress indeed from the passive response I had received all those years ago. There is no longer the need to explain gender issues as something special; everyone round that table ‘gets’ it and knows we need to work even harder to make sure everyone else takes it on board too. The actual actions may seem small, but their significance is much greater and demonstrate that thinking about gender has become embedded in the collective psyche.

But, where things are less rosy is that that damn pipeline has not had long enough to stop leaking. The women round the table were me (co-opted), Anne presenting the paper, the Director of Education (Rachael Padman, who also happens to be a University Council member) and the School Finance Officer Susan Wright; the core of the Council of the School is heads of institution who are a nice homogenous bunch of white men, with the only non-white attendee being the School’s Deputy Secretary Kusam Leal, who happened to be absent that day. There has been a female head in the School, Susan Owens who last year completed her term as Head of Geography, but I think she has been the only one. Which comes back, not only to the crucial need for appointments committees to be aware of gender issues and unconscious bias when individuals are first appointed, but for departments collectively to be aware of these factors when our wonderfully obscure and democratic Cambridge mechanisms for nominating new heads are whirring away. All the unconscious bias studies about the way women’s competence is judged are likely to be at play (see here for a recent summary of the head hunters view of the gender angle in senior appointments), making it that much harder for any woman to assume such a senior role.

Cambridge more widely has certainly had some very notable female heads of department, including Ann Dowling (Engineering, who is now taking up the role of President of the Royal Academy of Engineering). But we have a long way to go and not just in the sciences. As recognition of this fact, my gender equality role will be strengthened as I step down, by splitting it. I have found it well nigh impossible to be familiar with the practices and culture in all the different parts of the university. To make this task more feasible two Champions will be appointed, one on the STEM side, one on the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences side. These individuals will be supported by School Champions, two from each of the six Schools: a male and a female. In this way a much more extensive network will be able to continue to press both centrally and on the local issues they see as most important.

I genuinely believe we are constructing a structure where equality issues will be properly addressed and mainstreamed. The momentum is, and should be, unstoppable. The commitment from the top is very real and the support the gender work has had from both the Vice Chancellor and Jeremy Sanders, the relevant PVC, has been wonderful. Fixing the problems will not come easily or fast, but there is a recognition across the University that the problems are real and mustn’t be ignored. Once upon a time these issues would have been seen as simply down to a bunch of whingeing women who needed to be placated but otherwise ignored. As an example of this somewhat naïve view I will, perhaps unfairly, single out a comment made to me by the then VC, Alec (now Lord) Broers after an early WiSETI dinner which he was hosting (thereby clearly demonstrating his commitment to what we were espousing) in the early 2000’s. I had been having a bit of a moan about local issues and was confronted with ‘But Athene, I thought we’d sorted Physics out when we made you Professor‘. We have moved on. I am quite sure neither he, nor anyone else, would think creating a single female professor was a solution to any particular part of the problem these days.

As I get ready to step down I do feel some optimism about the direction of travel.

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Student Satisfaction Good, Student Learning Better

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Athene Donald

Reading the responses from students to one’s teaching is all too often painful. Even for a course that has gone reasonably well you will probably get as many panning you for making it too simple as complaining it was impossibly hard. Indeed, given a bunch of responses like that you can probably assume you got it about right, since it is likely to be impossible to please everyone regardless of their backgrounds. If you have made any slip-ups in the handouts, even ones as trivial as a missing bracket or subscript which have instantly been corrected in person in the lectures, you are still liable to be stung by received criticism, possibly even by invective. And then there are the casual insults. Some which have come my way may be more due to my gender than my teaching style. Two stand out as being particularly irrelevant, almost funny but not quite, commenting on my dress style: ‘where does she get her clothes, the Oxfam shop?’ and ‘she looks like a women’s lib officer’. If someone can let me know what such a person wears then I’ll know quite how insulted to be, though I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

Therein lies a key problem with using student questionnaires as a measure of quality of the teaching. Studies have shown (see e.g. Basow and Silberg for university lecturers and Potvin et al regarding high school students attitudes to male and female science teachers) that students tend to evaluate female lecturers as less competent than equivalent male ones. Likewise, black teachers are scored worse than white faculty (see here). In other words, unconscious bias is rife here whether or not explicit comments about dress sense – or any other attribute – are made. As a minority, individuals will be judged more harshly whatever their actual skill level.

Of course students like lecturers who make them feel comfortable, make them think that a high class lecture is being given regardless of whether they are actually learning anything. A classic experiment in 1970 (giving rise to something known as the Dr Fox effect) charged an actor to give a lecture full of meaningless jargon but in a very ‘expressive’ way. The students thought he (I assume it was a male actor) was great, despite the fact the material covered was meaningless junk. (Sound a bit like Alan Sokal’s considerably later spoof during the Science Wars?). Thus a satisfied student audience is no recipe for learning success.

A culturally out-of-step lecturer can receive scathing feedback because the audience don’t feel at ease with an alien style. As an example I’d cite a British lecturer I knew with a well-developed sarcastic wit lightly laced with irony who was loathed by an American audience who did not understand the implicit humour at all; loathed to the extent that he was nearly denied tenure regardless of any underlying excellence. Furthermore, some courses are inherently more interesting to their audience than others simply because some are there as necessary scaffolds on which to build the more interesting material. Those giving the latter will almost inevitably fare better than the former regardless of how charismatic or competent (not the same thing) they are.

And, as the Dr Fox experiment and later equivalent studies demonstrate, whether a lecturer is liked has little to do with what the students actually take in or how they will do in any subsequent assessment. This was neatly summed up in an email I received recently from a relatively early career lecturer who sadly said ‘but I got some horrible horrible student feedback on my teaching, but now I am marking their exams and they have done really well….so although they hate me they actually learned a lot…which makes it more bearable.’ I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is an inverse relationship between student evaluations and exam performance but I’m not sure there is any neat direct correlation either.

Which means that a VC who introduces a policy saying that lecturers whose feedback falls below some specific numerical score will be required to attend an ‘informal capability meeting’ is going to be on shaky ground. This, according to the THE, is what is being contemplated at the University of Surrey. As the sub-header to the article says, lecturers will be ‘at [the] mercy of students‘ if this plan goes ahead. Of course any university leadership should wish to push up the standards of their teaching and it is reasonable to expect lecturers to pull their socks up if they are doing badly. But simply using a crude average of some hostile students’ feedback may not be an optimum strategy.

Now of course feedback can be constructive. I will ever be grateful to the student who (many years ago I hasten to say) mildly pointed out I had written an equation containing the letter ‘c’ on both sides: in one case I was using it to mean some constant, in the other the speed of light. Amazingly I hadn’t noticed what I was doing since both seemed so naturally ‘right’, but the students had every right to complain; it was incompetent. Other feedback may be similarly constructive when something that seems natural to a lecturer is all wrong, particularly if there is a generational change in expectations. Additionally, everyone knows a lecturer who is inaudible beyond the first two rows (who should certainly use a mike), or who is invariably late and disorganised, either of whom may – or may not – get slated in evaluations. But the ones who really need attention are the ones whose lectures are full of undefined jargon, utter an incoherent stream of consciousness tirade or who assume far more knowledge than the class actually has been able to acquire. Simply using some raw numerical metric, without digging beneath the surface to analyse what factors are feeding into the score, strikes me as unwise and unlikely actually to lead to better outcomes for the students or the university.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Mood Music

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Athene Donald

‘Are you dead or just revising?’ was a telling question I remember seeing as graffiti on a wall in Cambridge many years ago. This is the time of year when that question seems particularly pertinent. Signs abound in college courts and corridors reminding passers-by to reduce noise to a minimum and many areas are out of bounds to visitors and tourists alike. To revise is to require a hushed environment without the intrusion of voices or crashes and bangs. Is that right?

I suspect many students actually work with loud music thudding through their earphones. Voices are most intrusive when the conversation is audible – maybe even intriguing – and intermittent. (I write this on a train when a small family drama is unfolding behind me, with sad words, suppressed tears and an attempt at covering up to reassure the accompanying young children: it’s deeply distracting, even disturbing, and I have resorted to my own earphones and some Villa-Lobos to try to obscure what’s going on.) However, the white noise of a persistent lawnmower or steady traffic flow is unlikely to be nearly so bad for the solid thought required for revision as brief bursts of giggling tourist laughter or the on-off noise of a pneumatic drill.

Nevertheless, excessive quiet isn’t necessarily conducive to concentration in my view. Having many years ago slipped into the (bad) habit of working in my departmental office at the weekend, I have tried out various strategies. I love the fact that I can work without the distraction of meetings, phone calls or people dropping by. Even the flood of emails is reduced at weekends. It is my opportunity to have several hours of solid concentration, at least in principle. In practice it doesn’t always work out like that and the web is as much a distraction for me as for anyone else. But one of the ways I use the web is to listen to streaming radio from a classical music station in the US. It, unlike our very own Classic FM, has few advertisements and plays long works in their entirety. At the hours I’m listening to it it also doesn’t run to interviews with performers, plays or operas like Radio 3. It simply plays long chunks of charmingly eclectic music – not simply recycle a limited selection of the same old chestnuts – with occasional interruptions for brief news and weather reports.

I like it and often have it on as background. If I’m concentrating hard I hardly notice it until I suddenly become aware that it is playing something that is maddeningly familiar but that I can’t name, or else that their weather forecast is predicting something strikingly different (warmer or colder) than our temperate climes. Nevertheless, there will be many Saturdays when I feel no need for this stay and comfort and am perfectly able simply to plug away at Powerpoint, manuscripts or email without the need for uplifting music. The general quietness around me does not disturb me.

Compare that with my current situation. Despite being advised I would soon be moving office (with the consequent angst I described here), the move has now been deferred for a couple of years. The clear-out I had started was unnecessary, although I now have several empty filing cabinets which potentially I could start filling again. However, although I personally am not moving there are moves afoot. As a result the large open plan office off which my own office opens has been cleared. Cleared not just of people but of furniture. Redecoration is in hand, but for some weeks this stalled. Outside my office was a large, empty and echoing chamber. I felt as if I was working in a morgue and most unpleasant it has been, made worse by the poor state of repair and decoration of the space being exposed by the emptiness. This unfortunate state of affairs has definitely impinged on my ways of working. Steady silence, echoing footfalls if anyone does pass, day in day out for some weeks has been depressing. During the working week I feel embarrassed about tuning in to my streaming radio and so I don’t. I sit there in an uncomfortable distracting silence constantly aware of the surrounding nothingness and feeling much less able to concentrate than usual.

So, for all you students sitting with head allegedly down revising (but clearly playing on the web or you wouldn’t be reading this), find your own correct level of silence. Getting attuned to the right tunes or simply being happy to hear the chirruping of birds outside, find out what makes you most effective. Don’t be fooled by college attempts to make you sit in stony silence if that’s the wrong thing for you. Mood music matters.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Past Women in Science, Present Digital Age

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Athene Donald

Following on from my last post I’d like to discuss experiences of a very different interdisciplinary meeting which I went to after immediately after the STS one I described there (I suspect I will return to that theme another time). I should say at the outset this was a much more upbeat experience. Organised by WiSRNET (Women in Science Research Network) it was entitled Revealing Lives: Women in Science 1830-2000 and the primary research question it sought to address, according to the website, was ‘ How are we to recover, interpret and understand women’s experiences in science?’. It brought together approximately equal numbers of scientists and historians (of science) all sharing common interests. Unlike the Nottingham conference, this second meeting was conducted in an entirely convivial atmosphere, with a great buzz in the room.

My role was to give a keynote about the present state of affairs for women in science, not least as regards women and the Royal Society, the location of the meeting (for more on this topic see one of my recent posts). As I said as I started my presentation, it was unusual to see so many women in the building (and only a sprinkling of men, which was a shame), in a room whose portraiture showed only men, in the form of recent past Presidents of the RS. There were a variety of sessions, including ones on narratives of individual women. The other keynote was by Cambridge colleague Patricia Fara, who gave a talk on female scientists around the time of the first world war appropriately titled ‘A lab of one’s own?’, something few of the women she described could have aspired to let alone attain.

I’ll just focus here on the session headed ‘Doing Women’s History in a Digital Age’, which was a panel discussion involving a representative from Trowelblazers (Brenna Hassett), Rebekah Higgitt from the Guardian’s The H Word blog, Jacy Young  from Psychology’s Feminist Voices, the University of Leicester’s Sally Horrocks from the Oral History of British Science and Charissa Varma  from the Darwin and Gender Project (part of the larger Darwin Correspondence project based at Cambridge). They came from very different backgrounds – 2 historians and 3 scientists – doing very different projects in very different ways. Ranging from the well-funded Oral History project, which had all the resources to handle large volumes of audio data plus the delicate issues about copyright and permissions effectively, via the Darwin project where the gender aspects were just one part of a huge whole, to the projects largely led by early career researchers who had fallen in love with tracing women past and present in their fields (archaeology, paleontology, geosciences and the like for Trowelblazers and, rather obviously, psychology for Psychology’s Feminist Voices) and ending up with historian Rebekah Higgitt, writing for Guardian Science blogs (and not specifically about women in science).

The contrast between background, scale, finance and medium made for an interesting panel session with such a wide range of perspectives to share. But it was also clear how much enthusiasm each brought to their respective projects, almost in an inverse relationship to the money they had to hand! The debate focussed on how their use of media affected their scholarship and how they handled the public sphere. Interestingly, misogyny did not seem to have affected any of the individuals perniciously despite it often being prevalent in online discussions.

To my mind, the Trowelblazers is a particularly interesting project. It simply grew out of the fascination of 4 early career women (from 3 countries, communicating via Twitter) and has blossomed into a wonderful archive of early women ‘wielding trowels’. For instance, an amazing diagram was shown of the connections between many female researchers and Dorothy Garrod, who became the first female professor at Cambridge when she was elected to the Disley Chair of Archaeology in 1939. (This at a time when women were still not admitted to full degrees at the university, but it was an election which served to illustrate just how irrational that position was. They were finally admitted in 1948, before that being only able to hold titular degrees and rejoicing in the unfortunate appellation of ‘BA Tits’.) I can’t find this diagram on the Trowelblazers’ website but it demonstrated just how many women made up the network spiralling out from Garrod at the centre. I did wonder whether my undergraduate tutor at Girton, Joan Oates, was to be found within the network, a woman who did much work in modern Iraq and Iran where she mingled with Agatha Christie amongst others.

Two questions stood out for me from the discussions. Firstly, Trowelblazers had organised a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to train up new editors focussing, at the session, on some of the women missing from Wikipedia or with incomplete entries. I have myself been involved with two similar events (see e.g. here), which are great fun, although I have not been able to stick around long enough actually to get trained up myself. I would like to know how effective these sessions are in the long term in meeting their aims. The events are certainly proliferating but is there evidence to demonstrate that those trained up continue to use the skills they’ve acquired and that, beyond the time of the actual events, women’s entries are being improved systematically? One member of the audience suggested this was the case, but it would be good to know the facts.

My second, not unrelated question, is how representative the narratives being told are. We, inevitably, can only learn about those women for whom there is a substantive record (probably a written one), the more the better. It was noticeable that a few names turned up in several talks but will those women who don’t get onto Trowelblazers or Psychology’s Feminist Voices, for instance, vanish even more effectively because researchers will turn to these collections and not look elsewhere? It is the standard ‘only look under the lamp post’ problem but the more information that is readily available, the more the rest will be in danger of disappearing.

Why was there such a buzz at the meeting? I suppose because everyone present just wanted to share their knowledge and there was no undercurrent of history being better (or worse) than science. As a scientist I may not use the knowledge I gained within my daily working practice, but I learned some neat stuff. For instance Patricia Fara introduced us to Helen Gwynn-Vaughan , a botanist/ mycologist who was a leader in the WAAC‘s during the first world war, thereby becoming the first woman to obtain a military CBE, and who complained about the absence, indeed the interdiction, of pockets in the uniforms for women. (The standard absence of pockets in women’s clothes still irritates me greatly!). There was the heady and tabloid-worthy story of Hedy Lamarr, a story of sex and beauty, Hollywood, Nazis, music – and patents – which deserves a post of its own. I was reminded more than once that we should not think in terms of heroines in science, because none of them operated simply on their own or could possibly have thought of themselves in the way it is too easy for us, decades or centuries later, to consider them. Ada Lovelace, she of Ada Lovelace Day, was particularly singled out as someone we should avoid thinking of as heroic or indeed as a computer programmer.

But I think the buzz was also because it was in general uplifting to learn about these pioneering women, many of whom had to contend with huge obstacles and negative messages and yet still managed to get serious work done. It is good to reclaim these historic figures and realise there are really quite a lot of them out there, particularly by the early 20th century. I’m not sure they necessarily serve as useful role models for today, but they do serve as intriguing examples of where a bit of bloody-mindedness and determination in the face of opposition can get you.

 

Posted in History of Science, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Social Scientist for the Day?

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Athene Donald

This week I attended what was probably my first serious social sciences/STS (variously Science and Technology Studies or Science, Technology and Society) conference in my life. I was only able to attend the first day and I came away not quite sure what I felt about the experience. It was certainly interesting, but was I any the wiser? The conference (Circling the Square) was organised by the Nottingham STS Priority Group headed up by Reiner Grundmann. Its aims were stated as twofold:

  • To explore the opportunities and challenges involved with the development of policy-relevant evidence.
  • To foster a much-needed conversation between researchers, decision makers, journalists, and engaged citizens.

These are laudable if sweeping aims. I won’t discuss those parts I saw relevant to the first aim here since my own small part was to serve on a panel designed to fit into the second. (If you’re interested Philip Moriarty has discussed this part of the day here.) Under the banner of ‘A Good News Story from Science? Researchers facing the Media‘ I shared a platform with emeritus scientist and ace-blogger David Colquhoun, Felicity Mellor (who leads on the science communication course at Imperial)and science writer Jon Turney. Personally I took that session title at face value, wanting to stress the positives of interacting with the media, as well as some of the pitfalls. However our session was preceded by an excellent if somewhat downbeat keynote lecture on the state of science journalism from Andrew Williams which had something of a dampening effect on the debate with our panel. If I had been a young researcher wondering whether to dip my toe into the waters of science communication, I might well have felt discouraged (another attendee’s write up can be found here).

Andrew Williams has done some illuminating research on the triangle between individual researchers, an institution’s Press Office (however designated but the body that puts out an institutional press release) and the media, mainly as represented through print or mainstream TV/radio rather than simply an online presence. He identified a number of faults in this operation which can have the effect of leading to excessive hype verging on dishonesty or the exclusion of those caveats which the research warrants. Interestingly his findings demonstrate no correlation (he can’t comment on causation) either between exaggerated claims and the take-up of a story, or the inclusion of caveats and a corresponding lack of take-up. This, particularly if he can proceed to demonstrate causation as the next stage of his study aims to do, should reassure individuals drafting press releases to stick to what they can honestly say without either overegging their findings or avoiding the mention of any limitations or underlying assumptions.

Another facet of this researcher-media interface that Williams has been exploring was the process known as ‘churnalism’, the rehashing of press releases with little original input from the journalist concerned. In this way there is no external scrutiny or tensioning of any ‘spin’ the initiator of the story puts out. In large part he believed that this was down to the way the workload of journalists has increased and the consequent lack of time they have to reflect or investigate further any claims made. Certainly this is a view I have heard expressed with dismay by senior science journalists, in one case remarking that they feared his ilk were a dying breed (as exemplified in the loss of Susan Watts as science editor for Newsnight, for example).

What I thought was unfortunate was that the sum effect of all his interesting and informative studies meant that it was easy to take away the message that the system was broke and there was no way to fix it. I don’t think this was his intent, but he left us with no optimistic message that if we (at least the ‘we’ that are researchers; I can’t speak for journalists or press officers) recognized the failings we could do better. We could (and should) write our press releases so that they aren’t just sexy but also accurate and truthful. Of course much research will never be of the kind from which a press release will spring fully armed, but there are so many ways of communicating science that don’t simply stem from the publication of a paper in a glamour journal that most researchers should be able to communicate their science sometime, some place. That aspect didn’t get aired in Williams’ talk.

I tried to put this more optimistic view across when we got to the panel discussion, but not before David Colquhoun had had an opportunity to blast said glamour journals (I think he wanted to ‘ban’ both Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier – I think HEFCE too for all the distortions their emphasis on impact is causing, but as I wasn’t taking notes at this point I can’t be 100% sure on this front. I’m surprised he didn’t include Science, Cell and PNAS too but perhaps he didn’t want the list to be too destructive.) However it wasn’t just the glamour journals he wanted to damn, he was strongly of the view that researchers had only themselves to blame for signing off inaccurate, hyped up and incautious/injudicious press releases which they then found themselves having to defend. From his perspective, the buck stopped firmly at the researcher’s feet.

Felicity Mellor, focussing on her analysis of science reporting on the BBC, reinforced much of what Andrew Williams said only concentrating on the specifics of what her study found. Jon Turney reflected on how things have changed, and not always for the better, over his career. Again, I don’t believe it was his intention but by highlighting the disappearance of science journalists with the time to find their own stories not prompted by HEI’s press releases or challenge what these might say by finding counter opinions, the impression I was left with was of a rather poor state of affairs.

So, as I say, it was left to me to try to say that it isn’t all gloom and doom, there are lots of opportunities to communicate your science in ways of your choosing and, particularly if you seek out media training, to tell your stories in the way you want without getting doorstepped or misquoted. Declaring myself an interested party, I also spoke up for online opportunities to spread the word through blogs such as the Guardian Science blogs.To my mind places like these blogs provide great opportunities not just to avoid the fate of churnalism, but also to tell those continuing stories that aren’t arising from some fancy publication that week but reflect more on the interesting tales of ongoing science – this is still science that matters both to the public and the researcher. These also provide a chance to write about the process of doing science (or, as one of the questioners put it, to demonstrate that most scientific results are subsequently shown to be wrong, or at least inaccurate), thereby providing a way for those who don’t practice science get some feel for what we actually do day by day.

To be the optimist, despite being the amateur communicator amongst that bunch of professionals, felt a slightly strange place to be. It tended to confirm what one of the social scientists said to me, that there was a clear fault line between the social scientists and the scientists. To bridge that gulf was one of the aims of the meeting, and I suppose you can only do that when you have its measure. Day 1 of the conference perhaps exposed its magnitude. It would be nice to believe that by day 3 there was some skeletal structure able to reach from one side to the other. But I won’t be there to see it because I will be presenting at another and very different interdisciplinary meeting on women’s historical experiences in science, where historians, archivists and scientists will get together. Two conferences in one week so different from my normal fare: an embarras de richesses indeed.

Note added 25-5-14

Just to bring together the blogposts (that I know about) regarding this conference.

  • Philip Moriarty (one of the organisers) was first off the mark where a very interesting comment stream developed. He later followed up with this.
  • Also on OT Sylvia McLain has written of her frustration with some disparagement between the different communities.
  • Another of the organisers Brigitte Nerlich wrote of her own slightly puzzled response to some of the debates here. She has also written a summary of the various responses .
  • Some of the interactions have also been discussed here.
Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments