Tackling the Intangible

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Athene Donald

A couple of weeks ago I attended a brief talk given by Baroness Ruth Deech at a careers evening for law students at Newnham College (all female). Her talk was followed by others from two recent graduates from the college who had moved into different branches of law. It was an interesting evening, not least to compare how the legal profession operates in comparison with science. Baroness Deech made many interesting remarks. For instance her view was one should always say yes to anything one was asked to do and apply for any opportunities going (to which I’d say yes, but within reason; sometimes saying no when asked to do yet one more task is the better response!). To illustrate her point she told us that she had actually become a Baroness because she had simply put in an application (I didn’t even know that such a process existed), although it took about five years for the application to bear fruit.

As she went through her life story she mentioned that she had produced a report  about the position of women in medicine (published in 2009) ‘Women doctors: making a difference’  at the request of the then Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson.  I took a quick look at this report. Law and medicine are often cited as examples of professions – in contrast to academic science – where the gender issue has been ‘solved’. I think this naïve view stems from the fact that the number of women entering these professions is comparable to (or even greater than) men (I wrote briefly about this for the BMJ blogs a while back). However, look at the top of the tree in either law or medicine and it is clear that senior women are still in short supply. So this Report was meant to consider why and what could be done.  In her introductory letter Deech states:

There have been several reports on the progress of women in medicine in recent years. We asked ourselves why the situation had not changed, why there was still discontent, and we have surmised that previous reports had focused on the desired outcomes rather than on the necessary levers of change to achieve them. So our report focuses very much on the implementation of change.

Her ‘cures’ for enabling women to stay in the profession are all concerned with practical actions around support for women (and men) who want to work flexibly, have a good work-life balance and so on. These are hugely important issues, but I note – at least in her list of recommendations; I must confess I haven’t read the full report – there is no attempt to identify, let alone tackle, cultural issues such as those around what contributes to success, the concept of patronage or the existence of a sexist workplace. Maybe I’m wrong in assuming that the medical profession is no more immune to these issues than other fields, or maybe she simply felt that it was better to tackle the tangible rather than the intangible obstacles, but certainly any discussion of women in science always seems to involve issues to do with workplace culture as well as the purely practical matters: I suspect the two are irrevocably intertwined.

Any time I go to a department or a university to talk about Equality issues, or if I simply get into a discussion with a bunch of researchers (men and women), similar topics always quickly bubble to the surface.  People bring up instances of bad behaviour that they have either suffered or seen others suffer. The selfish PI who gives insufficient credit (or even attention) to their team or who has favourites so that the rest get short-changed; the student or postdoc who bullies or intimidates other team members and no one does anything about it; the pressure to publish leading to dubious practices and the skimping of checking data; and the derogatory and/or sexist comments freely bandied around in casual conversation or even in group meetings that no one attempts to prevent.

In what I might term a ‘healthy’ department, people know who to turn to for advice and support when these sorts of problems arise. The problems will then not normally go on to become endemic and, where rogue behaviour occurs, it can be quickly stamped upon. In some cases, when I have participated in conversations like these, someone senior from the appropriate neck of the woods has heard the anxieties being expressed by the more junior members and leaped into action to attempt to bring them to an end, or at least attempted to explore the facts so that appropriate action can be taken. But, where such things go on and on, in the sort of place I recently heard described as a ‘Wild West’ department, anything goes, little gets done and the deeply unpleasant atmosphere persists. People may know what is going on and yet the leadership chooses either to look the other way or are themselves offenders.

It is of course always difficult to deal with such offending behaviour. If someone is out of line it is so much easier to pretend not to see what is going on than to confront it. If a senior professor is bringing in the cash, it is a rare (and confident) head of department or fellow professor who will attempt to bring the error of their ways into the open. But it should be done. I believe the only way to transform the workplace – for men and women – is to exercise zero tolerance. Let’s run courses for all the academics in errant departments so that they can be reminded of their responsibilities, their possible implicit prejudices and assumptions and, not least, the law. Let’s make sure the young PI’s are not allowed to ape any wayward seniors they’ve met along their way by developing an attitude of machismo, selfishness and the cutting of professional corners. I hope the leaders of tomorrow will not develop the wrong kind of soft skills. The kind that can lead to (as I heard tell) a head of department who was weak enough to allow themselves to be bullied into giving in to the he – and it was a he in this case– who shouted loudest; the HoD then attempted to deflect another professor’s wrath about this by starting the ensuing conversation with ‘how long would you like to rant for?’ rather than tackling the mess that had been created. Hardly a satisfactory response to an intolerable problem the head of department had created for himself.

I suspect the law, medicine and science all share comparable problems. Solving the practical ones, as the Deech Report attempted to (and it would be interesting to know with what success), is hugely important. But this must go hand in hand with stamping out selfishness, sexism and bullying in those whose only thought is the glittering prize of a Nature publication or an FRS and they don’t care how they get there or who gets trampled on en route.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

The Ghost of Oneself on the Web

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Athene Donald

Comedians complain about it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t too. They complain because U-tube, iPlayer etc mean that their jokes can’t be repeatedly recycled the way they were in the good old days. Once they’ve told one that’s actually funny it will lurk in the aether (or do I mean Cloud), pulled out by chance Googlers or determined followers time and time again; its novelty value will be gone. Another performance, another place, another year and a constant supply of new material is required.

Now I’m not one for telling jokes of the comedic kind. My style of humour tends towards the self-deprecating aside when I give talks but nevertheless, just as for the comedian, a lot of work goes into those talks. For all, as I said in a recent post, I don’t think one should recycle whole talks over and over, that is not to say that one will never reuse any material, mixing things up to suit the audience. However, if the organisation you are speaking to puts your slides up on the web (or worse, posts a video) as they seem increasingly keen to do, then it can become only too plain just how much recycling may have occurred.

I’ll illustrate why this concerns me using as an example the ocassion of a talk I gave recently at the University of Kent in their Open Lecture series. It was a general talk – my title was ‘Citizens, Science and Citizen Science’ – rather than something specific about my research.  As an aside I’ll point out that things got off to a very shaky start as my computer threw a tantrum on the train down, at which point I realised that my over-confidence in technology meant I hadn’t got a copy on a memory stick by way of a back-up. Mercifully that story has a happy ending, as the laptop finally got itself out of the non-responsive loop it had entered just in time, shortly before I reached Canterbury station. The experience should have taught me a lesson which I shouldn’t have needed teaching anyhow – but more on this below.

Before my talk I was invited to meet up with some of the Athena Swan departmental and university leads and members of the HR team for an informal discussion about gender issues. I was greeted by Twitter acquaintance Cindy Vallance, who had clearly been doing her homework about me. She had found on the web a previous talk I had given on Athena Swan issues (and no I’m not going to tell you where she had found it) and had printed out the slides to provide useful background material for the attendees at the discussion. This brought home to me the dangers of allowing one’s Powerpoint slides to be put up in perpetuity; at the time of the original talk the request to be allowed to do so for internal consumption in the university concerned had seemed harmless enough. Now I know that in principle even if I recycle just some of the material it may be rather obvious. This has been very much on my mind as I prepared a talk on Athena Swan for Swansea University which I’m giving tomorrow. They have anyhow asked for the slides in advance to circulate to attendees, but at least that only means a defined set of keen individuals not that the world at large will have access to them.

However, this experience meant when after the Kent formal lecture I was asked if I could supply my slides, I was more circumspect. Yes, I said, but only to be handed out to those who specifically ask for them, not simply to be made freely available on the web. I work hard at my talks and in that particular one I had a goodly selection of quotes taken from across the centuries. I worry that my attempts at apposite quotations or words of wisdom will just become stale and obvious if they are there for everyone to see, but maybe I’m just being mean by not wanting to make them available to all and sundry.

So the long term availability of one’s carefully crafted talks is part of the spectral legacy my title refers to. But there is another aspect that concerns me, although I have considerably less control over this. This refers to inaccurate reporting and out of date information continuing to circulate so that ‘facts’ become established that are anything but.  Statements that were once true can become annoyingly outdated yet still be taken at face value. For instance, it is some years since I stopped being Deputy Head of my department in Cambridge, but that tag still crops up in descriptions of me. I can keep my own web pages up to date, but others are unlikely to do so and references won’t be checked for current accuracy. Worse, there is a problem (which I wrote about a while back) in the way the media can twist and alter facts. I discussed this as the problem of Chinese Whispers when an originally correct statement gets sloppily reworked by a journalist. Anyone can suffer from this fate, no doubt celebrities to an extent no average scientist could begin to imagine. Nevertheless, as the errors and misinformation get propagated from an original source to multiple others, it is impossible to eradicate the misleading statements and general inaccuracy.

This very problem cropped up in the context of an event I was involved with last week at The Other Club, a ‘pop-up’ temporary club for professional women existing near Carnaby Street in London.  (There is an interesting Churchillian connection there, bearing in mind where I’ll be living this time next year.) Paired up with the wonderful Uta Frith, whom I’ve written about before, we each gave vignettes about our research and then jointly discussed issues connected with women in science. We had a great time, it was standing room only (the organisers were I think surprised by the popularity of a science evening) and the debate was lively. But I noticed that the advertising write up about me on the web had the offending sentence about how I research ‘unconventional areas of physics such as revolutionary treatments for Alzheimer’s‘, exactly the commentary I worried about in the earlier Chinese Whispers blogpost because it is so wrong. This mis-description lives on several years later, because the description in the Guardian is still there to be Googled. Clearly I should have requested a correction at the time and, had I had any idea that this would continue to be quoted, I most certainly would have done. But, naively, I had imagined the misleading statement would quietly vanish, as it once would have done when only available through print media.  Since I was talking to an audience containing journalists I did point out, in precisely this context, the dangers of carelessly misquoting earlier text.

As I say, the evening was great fun – something Mary Beard said too when she wrote about her own appearance at The Other Club – but I was reminded, again, that I should not be complacent about technology. I turned up with my laptop, a PC, only to be greeted with anxious sighs: they only had connections for Macs (this was not a formal lecture theatre after all, just a room over a shop). Luckily Uta had both a Mac and a memory stick, so disaster was averted. Yet again, despite my recent experiences at Kent, I had managed not to bring any back-up. I should, like a naughty schoolchild, write out 100 times lines to the effect that  that ‘I should always travel with a copy on a memory stick of any talk I am going to give‘ to drum it into my thick head and then maybe I won’t continue to skate on thin ice with my presentations.

Everything I write about here refers to mere trivial annoyances. I don’t like the fact that facts about my life may be inaccurate or out of date and I am nervous about my talks being too easily available making repetition of parts of them embarrassing. However, this is not at all the same thing as people being subjected to vitriolic personal attacks, rape threats, challenges to their scientific competence or other kinds of cyber-bullying. There is too much of this viciousness out there on the web. But that is a different and much heavier story.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Why are Scientists off the Radar?

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Athene Donald

There are those who believe that one should never have “women-only” lists of anything and that even the venerable BBC programme Woman’s Hour should be banned because there isn’t a Man’s Hour on Radio 4. This viewpoint has it that all such actions are inherently sexist.

I understand this position although I personally don’t subscribe to it. It seems to me that so often lists of the top 100 people in business, technology or whatever basically mean men and that equally good women often get overlooked by the list-makers. Just as I see prizes for women as having their place in our world as a way of reminding people that we can be hugely successful and should rightfully be celebrated, so I see lists of the top women in one field or another simply as a way of flagging up the many contributions made by this slightly-greater-than-50 per cent of the population.

Recently this argument has been revived in the wake of the BBC’s 100 Women project, which culminated in a day of discussions in October around the current status and role of women. I, however, had a different beef with those preparing the list of “female trail-blazers”. Along with a number of others, spearheaded by my colleague Val Gibson, professor in high energy physics at the Univer­sity of Cambridge, I was a signatory to a letter about the project to The Times. Our complaint was that there wasn’t a single practising scien­tist on the list. The BBC tried to claim (responding not only privately to us but also publishing its own rebuttal in The Times) that the list did feature “eminent contributors from scientific and technological fields such as Claire Bertschinger, director of tropical nurs­ing studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Russian-Finnish-Indian engineer Irina Chakraborty and the technology entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox”.

Without wanting to denigrate these people, who no doubt do wonderful work, the reality is that none of them is a practising scientist. The worry is that the BBC does not recognise what this means and anyhow confuses science and technology. One can even question whether a mere three representatives (even if they were representative) is an appropriate balance in a list of 100. This question is part of a cultural bias that remains endemic. The 100 women selected are skewed towards activists and journalists. Those who created the list no doubt chose the people with whom they feel most comfortable or with whom they network regularly.

The same problem was identified by science writer Martin Robbins in a recent Guardian article about the BBC’s Question Time. As he pointed out, the programme has featured regu­lar appearances by other non-political profes­sions, but with barely a scientist in sight; for instance, the proportion of comedians to scientists is 14:1 over the period he considered. Likewise, The Independent on Sunday’s most recent Pink List of influential lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people contains many journalists and writers, but only one scientist. Somehow scientists simply don’t feature on the radar of the people who dream up these lists and so consequently vanish from the public’s daily diet of reading.

This is a problem on many fronts. In the case of the 100 Women list, I felt it was disap­pointing if those chosen, however splendid, were taken as representative of suitable careers for girls. It seems an uphill struggle to remind people – teachers, parents and journalists – that science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects are entirely suitable for schoolgirls to consider, leading to a wide range of interesting career options. But the other examples given above demonstrate that over­looking scientists is not about gender: this is an issue about the mainstream media more generally taking the easy way out and always choosing to focus on areas with which their own journalists appear to be familiar.

This, I fear, is a direct result of our education system and cultural values. Chancellor George Osborne and Vince Cable, the business secretary, know that science and technology are key to the UK’s economic recovery and future growth. They frequently make comments to this effect, as in the discus­sion of the “eight great technologies” they like to highlight. However, I do wonder, when discussing the need for research on energy, whether Osborne could distinguish a watt from a volt, or whether he appreciates (in the field of regenerative medicine, another of the “Great eight”) the distinction between pluri­potent and multipotent stem cells; perhaps a good Etonian Classics education helps him with that particular distinction. The Royal Society, among many other organisations, has previously stated that it feels our education system narrows student choices too much. We are at the mercy of too many people making too many easy choices that effectively write science out of many people’s lives.

Note added 1700 on November 7th. This piece first appeared in the THE on November 7th 2013 under the title ‘Evidence of Absence‘ but the title was subsequently changed. Consequently, to be consistent, I have changed the title of this post also to the revised version Why are scientists off the radar?

 

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Recycling Talks

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Athene Donald

You know that sinking feeling. You have a talk, at a conference or another university, coming up in fewer days (possibly even hours) than you feel comfortable with and the temptation is great to dig into the files and simply reuse a previous one perhaps with a modified title. Is this a good idea? In a certain sense yes, you will indeed have a talk that is (one hopes) coherent and thought through. In another sense I would argue it is unwise. Recycled talks, particularly if recycled time and time again, go stale; furthermore they rarely entirely fit different audiences equally well.

As a young postdoc and research fellow newly returned from the US and finding my feet on the UK academic scene, I didn’t appreciate this point. Armed back then with a heavy bundle of overhead transparencies (if you remember these) plus a few interspersed 35mm slides (again practically museum pieces), I travelled the country giving identically the same talk time and time again. I am sure in part this was a confidence issue. I had put a lot of effort into writing this talk, thinking through the logical flow and making sure the talk was of an appropriate length. I had it word perfect, didn’t fall over unpronounceable words or forget my lines in any other way (in other words I had ‘practiced, practiced, practiced‘). If I were to deviate from this tried and tested version I suspected it might all go horribly wrong. So I didn’t. Instead I got bored. I got to the point of losing all interest in my own research because I had heard those same words too often inside my head. The quality of the talk, although so well prepared, was insufficient to make up for the tedium I internally felt. How could I excite an audience when I was myself so unexcited? So I stopped. Rewrote the same material in subtly different ways and learned the lesson that a multiply-given talk is unlikely to be an exciting one.

These days, the world of Powerpoint (alternatively, substitute here whatever non-Microsoft package you favour) makes modifying slides and indeed whole talks an easy task. Instead of having to rewrite or redraw each transparency from scratch when you merely want to change one line, it is so easy to cut and paste diagrams and text from one slide into another. A quick refresh of an old talk so it doesn’t feel stale is now a trivial task. For an old hand like me it is therefore reasonably straightforward (although always time-consuming) to mix and match material from several previous talks to construct a new one. I have several different categories of talks, notably my own (or rather my group’s) science; diversity/Athena Swan/careers and my ‘life story’; and more general ones such as formed the basis for the Sidgwick Lecture I gave a couple of years ago. Additionally, one’s  audience may range from school children to specialists in the field and each audience requires a different angle to be taken. Plenty of scope then to move slides around, make them more or less complex or to find new general images and up to date quotes to spice up the message. Each talk is therefore tailored to the audience (I hope) and suitably reworked to fit my brief and to keep me on my toes.

I think the problem may be more acute for those early career researchers who, like me back with my pile of transparencies so many years ago, have their own results to talk about with no one’s else’s data to insert and interweave. That makes it much harder to chop and change in order to rejuvenate the talk. Nevertheless, I would still recommend trying to find a means of changing things around so that you cannot operate solely on automatic pilot. In general I think it should be possible to find new data from the literature either to reinforce your own findings or to set your own work in a broader context. Or simply to change the order in which different sets of data are presented (subject to logical flow of course) or – if, like me, microscopy is your bent – to  find different images to illustrate a point. And, bearing in mind that audiences differ in their experience and interests, it may also be possible to shift the emphasis between different techniques or the amount of background and literature material that is included. I suppose all I am really saying is that by forcing oneself to look in detail at the talk before each presentation, rather than think ‘have talk, will travel‘, even if all the tweaks are entirely minor, it will still feel fresh and clear in one’s mind.

There is no doubt that preparing a talk is – and should be – always time-consuming. It can feel a drain on limited resources of time and energy as the date approaches.  But the satisfaction one gets from a talk well delivered, a good buzz and a stimulating, possibly even challenging set of questions from the audience can make it all feel worthwhile, however exhausting.

Posted in Communicating Science, Research | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Retrospective Impact

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Athene Donald

Recently I participated in a so-called ‘speed dating’ event for schoolgirls, organised under the auspices of Inspiring the Future: Inspiring Women campaign which this event was launching. Spearheaded by Miriam Gonzalez (aka Nick Clegg’s wife, who is an international lawyer in her day job), she had invited a further 9 of us to join her as the ‘mentors’ to the girls in the speed dating event. The way it worked was that we each sat with a table of 8-10 girls, 15-16 years old, who rapid-fired questions at us for about 10 minutes before we moved on to the next table. These girls were bright and sparky and the questions were no-nonsense and searching including how we had got to where we were, the obstacles (if any) we had faced, what made us choose our particular paths and what advice we would give them. I was the only scientist amongst the lot, Bettany Hughes was the other academic, plus Barbara Stocking recently appointed President of Murray Edwards College in Cambridge; Fiona Bruce was probably the best recognized face of all. Strange company I keep these days, was one of my reactions; sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind myself I’m really an academic physicist.

Each group had its own character: I think I talked to five in all, but it became a bit of a fast-moving (not to mention exhausting) blur.  Some conversations worked better than others: the fact that I was a scientist may have deterred some from relating to me, whereas on other tables there were several girls who expected to progress to A levels in the sciences. The group that stood out for me was the one which asked me if I had always known what I wanted to do. The answer is of course ‘no’ and when I pointed out that most successful people hadn’t got to where they were in a straight, inevitable and unerring line the group visibly relaxed and said that was very encouraging to know. It is a message I think that can’t be said often enough. Whereas it is reasonable to encourage those setting out to have dreams and ambitions, we shouldn’t convey the message that if you don’t have clear goals you are already a failure and your life will be rubbish. On the contrary many visible success stories, in all walks of life and way beyond academia, have fallen into what they are ultimately respected for doing by a series of accidents or a bit of good fortune.

Goodness knows what the young women who participated in the event will take away from it. They were girls from fairly underprivileged schools (as far as I can judge from the percentage of free school meals we were told each had as a proxy for any other form of characterisation) and at the very least maybe they will feel encouraged to pursue their dreams and to aim high. None of us, the mentors, will ever know if we said anything helpful to them or not. That is of course a prevalent issue. You never know what the impact of your words can be.  Sometimes they can come back to haunt you many years later. Sometimes (as a previous post shows you) people will remember you in ways that are completely unexpected. But, when talking to those just setting out, perhaps the responsibility is all the greater.

For those of us in academia, feeling frustrated by the REF’s last gasps, David Willett’s latest comments about us not spending enough time on teaching, or having just received some insanely vitriolic comments from the referee of your latest paper, it is too easy to let this frustration show. If at the time you are talking to this year’s new intake of graduate students the frustration may spill over into comments with more of an edge than is desirable. I have never forgotten the time, many years ago, I talked to a journalist when I had just had a row with someone in the department. All my discretion vanished and the stories I told had more than an edge. Luckily only a fraction of that showed through in the actual published article but that was more than enough to be regrettable. In that particular case the whole story was so inaccurate that the central player (not me) in the piece demanded its removal online so there is only a lingering ghost of the offending quote from me still traceable but it has taught me to be more careful.

Such an occasion, involving a journalist, is one that is reasonably well-defined and is of the kind that should immediately raise an amber warning light. Occasions when you are just engaging in conversation with random people are harder to maintain constant vigilance over – after all, you really don’t want to have to be constantly vigilant. Yet, the reality is things we say may stay with people and, when it comes to students, we should be aware of this. So often with interviews, with scientists or anyone else, there will be a quote along the lines of ‘my teacher/parent/priest/lecturer/great aunt told me I should….’ but I wonder how many of those people will actually have intended their words at whatever that particular point was to be taken so to heart.

As it happens, by a not very fortunate coincidence of timing, the day after the speed dating event I found myself talking to another bunch of school children. This event was part of the Speakers for Schools charity’s push to get speakers into schools, this being a sister charity to Inspiring the Future and spear headed by the BBC’s Robert Peston. Standing up, talking to a group of 15 year olds about what life in science is like, one is concentrating on the message one wants to convey. It is a moment to offer pearls of wisdom that maybe you do hope will remain with them, comments along the lines of research is about not knowing the answer to the experiment you are about to do and that science opens up many different career directions.

However, what some of my recent experiences have shown is that you simply don’t know when you will happen to say something that will strike a chord with the listener (or raise a hackle) and so the words have a lasting impact that was not anticipated but which may have many unintended consequences. These may range from the trivial (so that 20 years later they are thrown back at you over the dinner table), to the more significant when you set a child off on a career direction – or equally deter them from taking up something that up till that point had seemed a possible future for them. We, as practicing scientists, should not forget this.

Posted in Communicating Science, Education | Tagged , , | 3 Comments