Levelling the European Playing Field

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Athene Donald

One of the good things about (certain) committees is that one learns so much. That may not be everyone’s experience but over the years I personally have found many committees – though most certainly not all – very educational. I learnt a lot of the biology that I hadn’t had any occasion to use personally in my own research through chairing BBSRC Committees. I appreciate that is possibly a comment that retrospectively will not inspire confidence in my chairing abilities. Nevertheless, I do feel joining the right sort of committees, allowing one to expand one’s horizons can only be a good thing. This week it was the turn of the ERC’s Working Group on Gender Balance *(a sub-group of the Scientific Council) that I found illuminating as, I hope, others around the table equally did too.

We are a group all committed to trying to create a funding environment that is as level as we can make it for both men and women. As yet things within the ERC would appear not to have reached this happy position despite everyone’s best efforts, as I wrote about before. The statistics show that overall women applicants have lower success rates than men in practically all parts of the disciplinary landscape. What is going wrong (which it must be unless you actually believe women on average are more stupid than men)? What can be done to improve the situation?

A study is currently being carried out on behalf of the ERC to look at some aspects of this question. During the discussion this week it became clear how many of the things each of us ‘knew’ might in fact only apply in limited circumstances. For instance, I have always thought that the issue of the style of CV writing was quite often a gendered issue, along the lines of women being less assertive – or immodest if you prefer. This is the reason my own University runs CV mentoring to help women not only ensure they are applying for promotion at the right time, but also that they are giving themselves the best chance to do so by the way they present themselves in their CV’s.

However it turns out this problem is of broader importance. I learned that this assertive style of writing is commoner in the Anglo-US world than elsewhere. When it comes to judging track records based on CV’s, it seems that some parts of Europe may fare better than others. Another working group, although one on which I don’t serve, looks at widening participation issues but it is no secret that the UK fares considerably better than many of the newer EU members. For instance, as I’ve written before (based  on 2012 figures so they may not still be quite the same) the University of Cambridge, with 95 grants, hosts rather more than the whole of Ireland, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic combined. Some countries may have no awards at all under a particular call. Although it is clear some of these have less well-developed infrastructures than countries such as the UK or Germany, are their applicants also being affected by a more modest tradition of writing their CVs? It’s an interesting question that I hadn’t come across before.

When it comes to maternity leave, the ERC rules state that the effective elapsed time since the award of the first PhD can be reduced by 18 months for each child, rendering an applicant eligible for a Starter or a Consolidator grant for a longer chronological time. (Paternity leave is accounted for only by the amount of time actually spent on leave.)  This can seem quite generous since in many countries this far exceeds the statutory time that can be spent on leave and so would seem to be taking into account some of the additional limitations to one’s working life that are often introduced by small children. However, what happens if – as I would expect would be a not terribly uncommon working pattern in the UK, for instance – a woman takes 6 months maternity leave and then comes back part-time for some years. She still gets the ‘credit’ of 18 months, but her part-time working life is not factored in at all. But, someone asked, who would work like that and why? In their culture this seemed to be an unimaginable mode of working and yet I know people who work less than 100% for many years because that is the pattern that makes sense for them. So this is an example of something that may look like generosity in one part of Europe but appear to be less than satisfactory in another. I hope this is something that can be looked at in more detail in the future although any allowance scheme would need to ensure it didn’t merely become a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork proof.

A final point about maternity leave is something that echoes issues in Cambridge.  Should one declare a period of maternity leave or not? Just as I have heard it expressed in the past that women applying for promotion locally have been (badly in my view) advised to suppress the fact that they had had time out for a child –thereby rendering any apparent gap in the production of papers or the award of grants mysterious and suspect – so it seems from the evidence currently being gathered through inter views etc, that some ERC applicants feel that there is a question mark over whether they will be disadvantaged by mentioning the fact they have become parents. This is troubling and the ERC will need to do all it can to promote the message that there is no ‘stigma’ attached to having a family. Here I suspect Scandinavian attitudes are probably very different on this point to those in other parts of the EU, but it is important that all hear the same reassuring message.

The ERC Gender Balance Working Group undoubtedly has an important task ahead to do all it can to make sure that neither country of origin nor gender are inherent disadvantages to applicants wanting to obtain funding. Work remains to be done (and of course there are other issues too, including ensuring the panels themselves always operate to the highest standards), but there is clearly the appetite to get things as right as possible.

*24-10-13 The link to the Gender Balance Working Group has just been added to the ERC’s Organisation pages, along with those for other working groups, and has now been inserted on this post.

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

Jettisoning One’s Past

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Athene Donald

When you have been inhabiting any space for a substantial length of time it tends to be somewhat dispiriting and challenging to move out and move on.  Quite unconnected with any of the other moves I’ve written about recently (here and here), I am also going to be moving from one rather large office to what I suspect will be a rather smaller one in the weeks ahead. So, it is time for a clear out.

After around 10 years in this office, according to one of those well-known laws of Nature, I have expanded to fill the space available. Some of the space is occupied by mounds of REF paperwork, which should soon be unnecessary as the die will have been cast upon submission. Some of the space is occupied by kind gifts from Oriental visitors, which have no obvious home other than a corner of the desk. Much is occupied by material I am loth to throw away, yet equally know that I ought to. This category includes details of many past conferences attended, reports (hard copy) that I feel sure will one day come in useful and paperwork (and, if going far enough back, artwork in the form of glossy micrographs and line drawings) associated with journal papers long in print – or worse those that never quite saw the light of day for one reason or another. I know as soon as I throw them out I will regret it: I will suddenly receive a request from someone requesting to know was it 1988 or 1989 that that memorable debate happened at conference X or I will want to reproduce a figure electronically of one of those old glossy photographs that demonstrate what one could do with an electron microscope before the digital age. All these categories of material I will linger over and keep as much as I can because, well, you never know when it will come in useful do you?

However, much of my office – about 3 four-drawer filing cabinets worth to be precise – I think can usefully be used as landfill. This consists of a fairly long career’s worth of Xeroxed or printed papers from the era when they weren’t available on the web. Papers dating back to my PhD days on grain boundary embrittlement are unlikely to feature in my future research and even if, for some obscure reason, I suddenly felt an urge to remind myself of the intricacies of faceting in copper grain boundaries, I would not need to rummage through my filing cabinets when no doubt I could find the information on JStor. So, a drastic pruning of anything metallurgical looks as if it is called for. But as soon as I commit that to paper I realise that a current project on organic photovoltaics is suddenly turning into a study of what’s going on at the metal electrodes, so maybe even that would be unwise.

Then there are the papers dating back to the days when I transformed myself into a polymer physicist, when I read voraciously (because I was so pig ignorant of the field) and finally fell in love with research; this, note you, was during my 2nd postdoc –  I was a late developer. These papers, (many of which are preprints because that was how they were circulated when Papers ASAP did not exist, nor preprints come in virtual web-based form) I will throw out with regret. I regard those years as the key formative ones for my career, when I felt that I never knew what exciting things lurked just  around the metaphorical corner of my research or what puzzle each new sample might throw up as I imaged it in the electron microscope. That was a heady period as I found my researcher’s feet and, as I see it, grew up into a serious practicing scientist. It will be hard to throw all that away even if I haven’t looked through any of the papers in years.

There are also drawers connected with random bits of my more recent work. Brief forays into areas that never quite took off. Areas such as plant cell walls, resulting in a not very exciting thesis or two rather too full of null results for much enthusiasm, however competent the students; or papers covering the story of chocolate (or rather the absence of any story for the student), where much X-ray beam time at the synchrotron source at Daresbury never did reveal any secrets as to why chocolate extruded at room temperature was so very different from the normal melt-processed variety.

Finally there are the more substantial areas which nevertheless are behind me. Notably this includes the years of papers on starch, when my own research seems to have been very productive however bizarre a topic for a physicist this may seem to be. These years continued until I realised I couldn’t see how my kind of physics could provide any further insights; the idea of examining yet another cultivar or mutant just couldn’t excite me any more.  All of these – and many other topics – I think can readily be dispensed with. But it will need an awful lot of bin bags to get them out of my office. It will be time consuming and a wrench, but will have to be done. A necessary task and one that will neatly, albeit briefly, plug the gap in my life I will shortly feel as the REF burden passes on to the official committees.

Posted in Academia, Science Culture | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Cold-calling in the Job Market

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Athene Donald

A week ago there was a minute cause for celebration with the news that the number of women on FTSE100 Boards of Directors had reached the stunning level of 19%. At least that figure is heading in the right direction and, although I am opposed to quotas, the threat of their introduction still hangs over the City.  (In case you’ve forgotten, the goal proposed 2 years ago was a figure of 25% by 2015.) Six boards still have not a single woman on them and fund managers at Legal and General are threatening to vote against the chairmen of such companies. How do boards decide who is going to join them? How do they draw up a list of plausible candidates? My guess is that, as with many other high level appointments in universities, companies or a new Chief for a Research Council, head hunters are employed. If they come up with no women with strong credentials who are interested in the position is it the fault of the head hunters, or is it simply that women don’t want these jobs or lack the courage to pursue them?

Over a year ago I wrote about the apparent absence of women on a couple of high profile guestimates of shortlists for high profile posts and pointed out that one should be careful about reading too much into such absences. I’m not going to rehearse those arguments again but I’d like to build on that post in the wake of some discussions I have had with head hunters in the time since in various situations; this includes discussions initiated by one of the major companies (let me call it company A for shorthand) specialising in hires in higher education who approached me to ask for my thoughts in the context of work they are doing around diversity.

If you are a graduate student you probably have never had one of those mysterious conversations where a complete stranger rings you up cold from one of these firms – or sends you an email asking if you can find a time when they can ring you. When it first happens it can seem very strange. In my experience the conversation usually starts by the disembodied voice giving you a few details about the position they are handling – sometimes the description can be quite exhaustive and you start to wonder if they will ever get to the point – after which they ask you if you know anyone whose name should be considered.

Now at this point there is a potential bifurcation of response. If you are supremely confident you may assume they are really covertly asking if you are interested. If on the other hand you are of a more modest disposition you may take the question at face value and dredge your memory trying to think of anyone plausible who might want to become a dean of engineering in Kazakhstan or the CSA or whatever it might be. Based on my own suppositions and experience, coupled with a straw poll of one man and one woman over a glass of wine, I think not uncommonly the difference in response will align with gender. I think there is a coded message, a sub-text, in these conversations which different people will respond to in different ways. I don’t think this is helpful.

I personally find it much easier to deal with direct questions than wonder if I am suffering from over-confidence by thinking the phone-caller might be asking obliquely about my own interests. I don’t know why head hunters follow the etiquette they so often seem to do, but I believe it is in many instances counter-productive for both men and women, but possibly particularly if they want to catch the serious interest of a woman. This fact I passed on in my recent discussions with company A.  I should add, as I have got more senior, there has tended to be less and less beating about the bush about what is being suggested, but it is at the earliest stages when people are least likely to be confident that it is most important that there is total clarity about the terms of the interaction, not at later stages when they seem to be more prone to say ‘your name has been brought to our attention’.

A second point is that no one more senior than me has ever passed on any tips for how to deal with head hunters. Nor, I must confess, have I ever done this for anyone else. Perhaps it is like the British attitude towards money, simply not something that is ‘done’, though I have to wonder why. Possibly the whole community is confused and doesn’t have any tips to pass on. But as I approached my advisory meeting with company A I realised that perhaps, had I ever wanted to leave Cambridge, I would have been well advised to approach one of the specialist companies and let them know this was the case. Maybe, in one of these not infrequent conversations that I have with the companies, they could have indicated how to go about this by suggesting that even though I might not be interested in the particular post they had rung me about I should let them know if I was ever thinking about a move.  I don’t recall that such a suggestion has ever been made to me and likewise I have never enquired (but then, I didn’t want to leave Cambridge). What I am really saying is, the mystique of the communication between head hunter and target ‘huntee’ is almost certainly not helpful in encouraging a diverse field of candidates. Although it is of course possible that the rest of the world understands the rules of engagement and it is only me being stupid, I don’t believe this. I suspect many individuals – male and female – may equally not be getting the most out of these interactions.

I did learn something very valuable during my conversations with company A, something that would not be apparent in the Cambridge system but where the firm had obviously already worked out how they could be helpful to some individuals, probably women in particular, during recruitment. Many universities (although not my own) use head hunters to help them recruit professors. After interviews and once the offer of the position has been made, the companies come back into the loop to facilitate the negotiation of a package. Such negotiation is likely to include salary. If the person underestimates themselves/doesn’t like to brag or self-promote etc, then they may not ask for as good a deal as someone of a less modest persuasion. You can see where this is heading: the head hunters are in a position to do their bit to reduce the well-documented gender pay gap at professorial level. This strikes me as something very positive. It would also help to circumvent the problem identified in various studies (see e.g. here) that even if women do ask for a pay rise or equivalent they are penalised for doing so by those with whom they are negotiating. If an intermediary is used who is familiar with negotiating strategy, then there is more likely to be a happy outcome.

So I would summarise by saying

  1. As I said before, one should not conclude that absence of women on shortlists mean no women have been approached.
  2. That head hunters might have more success with certain types of character if they were explicit in what was being asked when cold calling, not leave it as a subtext.
  3. That head hunters could also make it clear that they could be approached by those looking to move and explain how this would best be done.
  4. That facilitating negotiations for those of modest temperament might contribute to a reduction in professorial (or equivalent) gender pay gap.

Now I will sit back and wait to be told by others that my understanding of the head hunter – huntee relationship is all wrong and that others’ comprehension of the interaction is very different. Fire away.

 

 

Posted in Careers, Equality | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Turning the Mirror on Oneself

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Athene Donald

What do you see when you look in the mirror? This is the question underlying the What I See Project, conceived by Edwina Dunn. Her concern is that we live in a society where, for many women, when we look in the mirror we are expected to look at – and even more and worse, be judged by – the superficial details, not what resides within. For young women around the world, this is a restrictive view of who we are and what we might be.  Her aim is to aid the empowerment of women by getting them to reflect on who they are beneath the surface and not be sucked into believing beauty is only skin deep.  This is an issue that resonates with me as I am all too aware young girls readily believe the media messages that their aspirations should amount to little more than be eye-candy to catch a boy, sexualised from an early age rather than focussed on what they are actually able to achieve in more concrete ways using their brains and not simply their bodies.

I have become involved with this project as an Ambassador, and you can find my own brief video for the project here, along with those of the other 17 women from the UK who have taken on this ambassadorial role. Amongst them are some powerful women (3 baronesses for instance) including fellow scientist Frances Ashcroft from Oxford.  Last week she and I joined the panel (along with Caroline Criado-Perez, Jody Day, Eileen Cooper  and Kelley Temple) for a Q and A session in the Science Museum for the launch of the project (see more here). The questions, slow to come at first from a mainly female audience who took a while to warm up/gain courage to quiz us, were ultimately quite deep and challenging. Let me simply home in on the one specifically STEM-related question. What, we were asked, is the right way to respond to the comment ‘You don’t look like a mathematician‘. I’d be interested in people’s views on this, which manifests itself in various forms (‘you look too young to be a doctor‘ is a common variant). The best I could come up with on the spot was to suggest challenging those who ask this question to say what they think a mathematician should look like, in the hopes it will make them realise the existence of their prejudices or appreciate the danger of stereotyping. I am sure, however, there are better ways of handling the question.

Continuing the theme of worrying about what one looks like, the next night I found myself bizarrely discussing, with a retired (male) head of a Cambridge college, whether men or women have a harder time with regard to getting their attire right in unfamiliar situations. The occasion was the dinner following the installation of the new master of Selwyn College Roger Mosey, freshly arrived from the BBC to take on this role, where I was acting as the Vice Chancellor’s deputy. I found it interesting that this man across the table from me felt that there were more pitfalls for a man (turning up in T-shirt and jeans, perhaps, when something more formal was required) than for women who have in general a greater and more continuous spectrum of alternatives. I have always thought that that very fact made our problems worse, but he clearly felt the opposite. It seemed a fairly peculiar dinner table conversation, but highlights the importance of our appearance and our dress to define who we are and identify what ostensible power we have and what position in the social and professional hierarchy we occupy, so linking straight back to the What I See project.

However that was not the most surreal part of my conversation that evening. Dutifully following the instructions of the seating plan I had found myself sitting between two recently retired (again male) college fellows from disciplines far from mine whom, as far as I was concerned, I had never met before. During the first course the one on my right remarked we had met previously on a mid-career training course run by the university. I am sure he must be right. He could cite one of the exercises we had carried out: write your own obituary to highlight to yourself how you see yourself – another connection with that mirror of Edwina Dunn’s project. He remembered I had been anxious about whether I would get promoted to professor, which indicates this is more than 15 years ago and yet he could still remember me. I found that unnerving but there was yet more to pile on.

Switching to talk to the gentleman on my left during the next course, we covered his field of research and then moved on to discuss the portraits in the hall – all of past Masters of course. At which point he announced he remembered physicist Alan Cook, one of these previous Selwyn masters, bringing me in to dinner. It took me some time to remember what the occasion can have been but I think it must have been an examiners’ dinner when Alan was the senior examiner and so hosted the dinner in his college. I can vaguely remember the occasion. So this ‘complete stranger’ too was claiming to remember me, in this case probably from even longer ago, maybe 20 years. Again, I feel pretty certain my dinner table companion must have been correct.

The moral of this story for women is that we do actually have some advantages in the academic world. Since there are so (still) so lamentably few of us, we are memorable. I don’t believe I was unforgettable because I stood on the table and danced at the dinner in a drunken haze, because that’s not my way and I didn’t. Nor, I hope, did I let off steam at the training course about my colleagues in ways that made me stick in the first man’s memory, although that could conceivably be true if I thought I was discussing my life amongst total strangers, albeit ones in the small fishpond that is Cambridge. So it must have been just because I was the only woman both on that training course and on that board of examiners that I stood out in people’s memories, although I still find it unnerving that 15-20 years on their memories are so vivid as to identify me readily in a totally different context.

However, women should realise as long as their numbers remain low in academia, they won’t simply blend in to the furniture. Uncomfortable though that often is, there are times (although this dinner was hardly one of them) where being unforgettable may mean you get that invitation, be it to talk at a conference, serve on some important committee or apply for an exciting job opportunity. It is often uncomfortable to stand out, particularly if we feel unsure as to who we are (or whether we feel we look attractive in the mirror to ourselves or anyone else) but sometimes, just sometimes, there may be advantages.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Moving On (Part II)

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Athene Donald

As readers will know, improving the situation for women in science is dear to my heart. One of the roles in which I’ve been able to make some sort of a contribution has been through chairing the Athena Forum. This group was set up in 2008 as a successor to the Athena Project, which kickstarted the whole Athena Swan process. The Athena Forum in its current incarnation no longer has direct links with the Athena Swan process, which is now overseen by the Equality Challenge Unit, but it still maintains the same ethos and motivation. Its mission is stated as

to provide a strategic oversight of developments that seek to, or have proven to, advance the career progression and representation of women in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) in UK higher education.

Last week saw me step down as chair of the Athena Forum, which I have chaired since 2009. More than time for a new broom and I have passed the baton (or perhaps that should also be broom) on to Ottoline Leyser, whose wonderful booklet Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it All she produced when she won the Rosalind Franklin award in 2007. I am quite sure that she will do a wonderful job as Chair and continue to move the agenda forward.

As many will know, last week also saw the announcement of the latest batch of Athena Swan awards and it is encouraging to note that more and more universities are signing up and departments winning awards.  However, this is not an ‘if you enter you win‘ competition and, hidden beneath the successes there are departments (possibly even universities) that are failing in their applications. This has to be a good thing, in one sense since it means that securing an award really does indicate that an institution is embracing change.

Despite the progress that has been made, despite all the Athena Swan applicants that have been successful, there is no doubt there is still a need for such an organisation to maintain pressure on funders and universities alike. The very fact that some departments and universities have, in various rounds, lost their awards shows that progress is not yet deeply ingrained everywhere and organisations that think they can get by simply by ticking boxes and then never thinking about the matter again need to think again. However it is nevertheless the case that improvelents are being made. It may be frustratingly slow, there may be all kinds of endemic problems in our society way beyond the higher education sector that are likely to continue to prove intractable (gender segregation of toys, low aspirations from teachers and parents alike when it comes to girls doing science and lack of role models being some obvious ones for school children, putting them off from ever starting on the STEM career path) but, reading a legacy report of the original Athena Project for my last Forum meeting does highlight that there is visible progress. The report will go up on the web in due course, but it needs more polishing yet.

After the Athena Forum committee meeting there was a workshop hosted by them at the Royal Society to which a number of funders came to discuss the ongoing issues and the extent to which they can influence change. In some instances there may be easy wins. One might think of the RCUK statement in this light, in so far as it is now a very obvious stick with which organisations can in principle be beaten. I daresay in practice it was a non-trivial task to find a form of words all research councils could agree to as with any political communiqué.  In other situations it may be much harder for funders to effect change in institutions when it is individuals that they actually fund. They also need to make sure that their own practices are as excellent as they can be for their own internal employees and the committees (from Research Council councils down) that they run. Data is currently being collected as a follow-up to the previous Report on Good Practice by UK Research Funders to see how far things have moved in general on this front.

Sarah Dickinson from Athena Swan gave a presentation at this workshop, passing on some tips from her experience of submissions and some analysis of success rates. The organisation is currently running a pilot both for Research Council Institutes and, more recently, for non-STEM departments. All this means that the impacts delivered by Athena Swan should be starting to impact soon on other disciplines where, as my recent foray into Philosophy departments has revealed, all is very much not well.

However let me conclude with a few random questions that were raised in my mind at the workshop and from reading recent media stories. I’d be interested to hear people’s views because these are very much not black and white issues.

1 Sarah Dickinson said that a Head of Department sending emails late at night sends the wrong message because it implies everyone else should also be working late at night. While I understand why this could be interpreted this way, it also seems to me that one of the joys of academia is that one has a lot of flexibility about when one chooses to work. If it suits someone to leave work mid-afternoon to go and pick up the kids and then spend the evening with them, but go back to work once they’re in bed, that strikes me as perfectly reasonable. I remember once expressing concern about a grant administrator who was sending me late night emails and they pointed out that that was the way they chose to work for this very reason. Clearly no head of department should expect or require anyone to work at what would normally be described as antisocial hours, but if they choose to do so then that should be fine (and of course it may be the head of department whose work pattern is as I’ve described above).  What do people think about Sarah’s statement?

2 For women about to go on maternity leave what assumptions should one make? I had always thought the correct assumption was that they would do nothing unless one was told otherwise – it should be entirely their choice – but managed to cause grave offence by taking this line recently. I have certainly known women who have absolutely held to the line that their research group can just get by on their own for the full period of their leave without any contact from the PI. I can’t imagine that I would have felt comfortable doing that for a year. Indeed I didn’t: I continued to see my students and read their work during my 3-4 months of leave, but the choice has to be the individual woman’s. Nevertheless it took me completely by surprise so to upset someone by starting from a position of assuming nothing. How do others approach this?

3 From the press I came across a story about ‘mumpreneurs‘, women who set up businesses from home whilst looking after their family. Clearly what they are doing is impressive, but does a new word really have to be invented for this, which is so clearly gendered? Entrepreneurs is a perfectly good ungendered word, unlike so many words in our language, so why create a new one? I can understand that individuals might want to stress their entrepreneurial activities were home-based rather than run out of an office, but how about ‘entrepreneur-from-home’ which remains entirely gender-neutral? After all, perhaps it’s the dad who stays at home (particularly with the new paternity laws) so why specify which parent is involved? Is it relevant to the business plan?

So, answers please to this rather random set of questions!

 

Posted in Equality, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 23 Comments