Moving On to Pastures New

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Athene Donald

Every student, undergraduate or postgraduate, at the University of Cambridge has to be a member of one of the university’s 31 colleges.  To outsiders the college system may seem a little mysterious: how do they differ from Halls of Residence or ‘dorms’? But they do, they most certainly do. They are autonomous and governed by their own sets of Statutes and Ordinances, quite separate from those that control the actions of the University itself. Each has its own character and idiosyncrasies composed of a combination of the ideas of its founders, the traditions (and state of finances) built up over its life – whose duration can range from many centuries to mere decades – and its fellowship, past and present.  Much of the teaching within the Cambridge system is done in colleges through the supervision system, small group teaching with perhaps 3 students to each supervisor (numbers vary by college and subject) and each college will have many internal societies of its own, its own JCR and so on.

I now am set to embark on a new adventure with a new college, my third during my Cambridge life, having been pre-elected as the Master of Churchill College, a role I will take up in October 2014. This represents a tremendous honour and privilege as well as a daunting challenge. I have a year to contemplate this new role and to endeavour to learn as much as possible about my new community and the specific nature of the college which, as I will explain below, is unique within the Cambridge system.

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Photo: Courtesy of Churchill College

When I first applied to Cambridge as an undergraduate, my choice of college was hugely constrained: there were only three I could apply to because colleges back then were all single sex. So, I could choose between Girton, Newnham and what was then known as New Hall (now Murray Edwards). Of these one couldn’t apply to both Girton and Newnham and, for reasons lost in the mists of time, I had always had Girton in my sights. Somehow I thought I knew back then something about the difference between New Hall and Girton: after all by the time I applied the latter was already a century old whereas New Hall had less than two decades under its belt. I recall this influenced my choice of clothes for the dreaded interviews. Although I don’t remember the details I think this had something to do with the length of my skirt and a slightly more hippy look for New Hall. Whether this had any effect on the outcome I don’t know; I was admitted to both colleges, but chose to stay with my original choice of Girton. As an undergraduate there I didn’t regret this for a moment, supported through my (frequent) moments of doubt and confusion by a wonderful Director of Studies, Christine McKie, whom I wrote about before.

Girton was a pioneer, the first college created for women (although it is now mixed). My second college, where I was offered a (non-stipendiary) Fellowship when I returned to Cambridge after 4 years in the USA, was Robinson College. Equally a pioneer, it is the only (undergraduate) college to have been founded as a mixed college, back in 1979 when I was away from Cambridge. Right from the outset the original Warden – chemist Jack (now Lord) Lewis  – sought to make sure its fellowship had a good gender mix too and worked hard to recruit women in the sciences. At one point I suspect it had the majority of female lecturers in the STEM subjects across the University: that meant about 4 of us (it could hardly be like that now!). It too has been a very happy home for me. Its history is brief, its alumni (and wine cellar) still relatively young. It lacks generations of rich alumni and the wealthy patrons from kings and queens down that the oldest colleges possess, not to mention no vast estates across the country which have equally created a rich endowment for some. Nevertheless it sits in beautiful mature gardens – the terms of its planning consent meant many well-established trees had to be preserved – and is conveniently located for me at the Cavendish, being on the west side of town. A further advantage of its location is that it is well off the tourist trail, so students are not interrupted by loud voices of visitors outside or suffer the indignities of being peered at through the windows by them.

I shall leave Robinson with regret next year. But the new challenge of Churchill beckons, albeit a year off. Churchill is unique amongst all the colleges because, by its statute, both its students and Fellowship are required to be 70% scientists and technologists. As a college it was founded in 1960 as the national and Commonwealth memorial to Sir Winston Churchill. Another statute requires that each new Master is appointed by the Sovereign, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister and so there has been much formality associated with the publication of the recent press release which had to await a letter from Downing Street.

Churchill is a large college with nearly 500 undergraduates and slightly more than half that number of graduate students (known, unusually, as advanced students within the college). The Churchill Archives Centre  is housed on the site, an amazingly rich collection of papers of many of the famous scientists of the 20th century including a generous sprinkling of Nobel Prize winners (such as Sir John Cockcroft, the first Master, one of whose daughters incidentally taught me Religious Knowledge at school); plus of course numerous politicians including Sir Winston himself and Maggie Thatcher. I am looking forward to an opportunity to delve into these archives, both to inform myself and to find apposite quotes for the plethora of speeches I suspect I may be called upon to make during my tenure.

Despite the majority of the college being on the science side, it appears clear that there is no sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ between the disciplines. Included as part of the Further Particulars for the job, there was an explicit statement of the college mission which included the phrase ‘to build bridges between the three estates of Science and Technology, the Arts and Humanities and the world of Commerce and Industry‘. To do this will be both exciting and non-trivial, but it is certainly a wonderful goal.

Finally, I should perhaps point out one of the other quirks of the Cambridge system, hidden in the text that I have written. As Master, my role is as a ‘Head of House’. Other colleges (‘houses’ ) use different terms to describe their heads. Girton has a Mistress, Newnham a Principal, Robinson (as I said previously) a Warden, Kings a Provost and Wolfson a President. Master is probably the commonest title and I see no reason to change it just because I’m a woman (and I am certainly not the first female to hold the title of Master within Collegiate Cambridge; I suspect Sandra Dawson as head of Sidney Sussex may have had that honour and there are currently several in post). It is a role with an ancient title rather than that the title itself saying anything overtly sexist. I’m not sure there has been a male Mistress at any college so far, but Girton has certainly had a male Vice Mistress (try not to snigger).

So, my centre of gravity will shift in the months ahead. How that will affect my blogging remains to be seen, but members of the college are well aware of this writing propensity of mine and seem content.

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Mammon and the Inferiority of Women

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’ve been reading another of those random books I’ve acquired in lieu of payment for a book review, something I wrote about previously. This time I want to turn my attention to a book called ‘The Spectacle of Intimacy: a Public Life for the Victorian Family´, by Karen Chase and Michael Levenson. More specifically I want to look at one particular chapter, describing the life of Sarah Stickney Ellis (1799-1872), a woman of whom I’d never previously heard, although she was clearly famous and influential in her time.  Her writings seem a bizarre mixture of ideas, encapsulating much of the confusion about domesticity and the place of women in the early Victorian period. As an apologist for the inferiority of woman she seems to have been right at the forefront in her day and yet, beneath this stated position she seems actually to have had a pretty poor opinion of men. She wrote a series of books with titles such as ‘The Women of England’ and ‘The Wives of England’ (she doesn’t seem to have noticed the rest of the UK) in which she put across her philosophy, as summed up in the following sentence:

It is quite possible you may have more talent [than your husband], with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired, but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.

This is not a sentiment which is likely to be much admired now, or one which women in academia would consciously adopt. However, it may be one that somehow feeds into the medley of reasons why women opt out in greater numbers than men from careers and then can’t find their way back (as described here). Women, still, are statistically likely to be the trailing spouse, the one whose career is put on hold when the children are born (as I’ve discussed previously here and here) but who may never quite get back onto the fast track. I may be the exception that proves the rule, but on average it tends to be the man’s career which is nurtured at the expense of the woman’s, although I doubt anyone – male or female – would explicitly state the position as starkly as Stickney Ellis did these days.

What is more surprising about this attitude is that before she married, relatively late in life, she had had a perfectly successful career as an independent woman writing under her own name of Sarah Stickney (unlike, say, the Brontё’s who hid under male pseudonyms) and priding herself as able to make herself financially able to support herself and her dependent family members (her sisters’ children for instance) and warned her husband-to-be, the Reverend William Ellis  (previously a missionary in the Pacific region), that

The kind of life I have led has tended very much to confirm a strength of will which, in my childhood, was, I believe, almost without equal. What will you do with such a companion?

In practice, what seems to have happened is that she adopted an apparently subservient position, albeit there is a degree of independence manifested by continuing to publish with her maiden name explicit even if rolled in with her husband’s. Yet, reading further about what she put down in her books, she appears to have seen men as poor deluded creatures, led astray by the call of Mammon. For the middle classes (for and about whom she was writing) she clearly felt that this false God was something of a recent phenomenon, but the fact that men got distracted by it was ‘the fault of the system’.

There is no union in the great field of action in which he is engaged; but envy, and hatred and opposition to the close of the day – every man’s hand against his brother, and each struggling to exalt himself, not merely by trampling upon his fallen foe, but by usurping the place of his weaker brother, who faints by his side, from not having brought an equal portion of strength into the conflict, and who is consequently borne down by numbers, hurried over and forgotten.

If that sounds like a description of life in the average university it is purely fortuitous; I suspect it is meant to refer to that dangerous and slightly dirty Victorian activity of ‘trade’, something with which the old-fashioned Aristocrat did not sully their hands.

She went further, spelling out the damage to the integrity of the typical male in a slightly superior female voice, despite her self-acknowledged inferiority as a woman:

We cannot believe of the fathers who watched over our childhood, of the husbands who shared our intellectual pursuits, of the brothers who went hand in hand with us in our love of poetry and nature, that they are all gone over to the side of mammon, that there does not lurk in some corner of their hearts a secret longing to return; yet every morning brings the same hurried and indifferent parting, every evening the same jaded, speechless, welcomeless return – until we almost fail to recognize the man, in the machine.’

So she is describing a situation where man has to work to earn his family’s bread, but does this in a brutal way whilst turning his back on the wife, the family, and the archetypal hearth over which the woman presides. The woman, in her inferiority, has to be content with organisation and ruling over her domestic sphere, but with precious little input from her partner. So we see set in train the middle class woman being given her place, where she must stay; indeed where, for the vast majority of women she did stay until after the 2nd World War. Remember it is only in the 1944 Education Act, for instance, that women were finally allowed to continue working as teachers after marriage. Many other professions similarly made women give up working upon marriage. In her domestic sphere all the Victorian middle-class woman might hope to do is influence her children (at least until the boys are sent away to some suitable public school such as Rugby or Marlborough) and train and oversee the servants, little more. Indeed the woman’s lot is summed up, by Stickney Ellis, as

[their] whole life, from the cradle to the grave, is one of feeling, rather than of action; whose highest duty is so often to suffer and be still; whose deepest enjoyments are all relative; who has nothing, and is nothing, of herself;

Somehow Stickney Ellis manages to convince herself that this is the right way to proceed. Her writings were clearly influential at the time and were contributory factors in the delay surrounding many advances for women, including laws regarding women’s property after marriage, child custody and divorce – topics discussed further in the book. I can only be grateful I am not a contemporary of hers, condemned to ‘suffer and be still’ and not pursue my intellectual pursuits just because I am married and must remain ‘inferior’.

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Is Helping Women such a Bad Thing to Do?

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Athene Donald

I am not infrequently asked to give talks at other universities about gender issues, including the work we are doing in Cambridge. (Strangely, I find myself doing quite as many of these sorts of talks as physics ones.) I would like to think that talking about our local work can help to inform and encourage others to find their own appropriate solutions to the specific issues their institution is facing; such talks are more likely to lead to successful outcomes if senior management is present; ideally even the VC, as was the case when I spoke at Leeds  over a year ago and at UEA more recently. During such talks it is only too easy to highlight problems, invoking the phrase ‘leaky pipeline’ that annoys some people (see here) but which is an accurate description in terms of pure numbers.

Sometimes people ask me if it’s good to focus on the downside, to point out that there are difficulties (which may include anything from bullying and invisibility to childcare). I appreciate there is a danger in being too negative but it seems to me that it is important to let people who are facing up to these issues to know it isn’t ‘just them’. If you are feeling isolated and in a minority it is too easy to assume that bullying is somehow your fault or that everyone else manages to self-promote and you are failing and seem destined to remain invisible below the parapet.  So I think on balance it is helpful to be upfront about the difficulties women may face in the academic workplace whilst simultaneously challenging the leadership to work to improve the local culture.

This is one of the interesting tensions around gender equality. A range of paradoxes were exposed in a recent article by Marieke Van den Brink and Lineke Stobbe ‘The support paradox: Overcoming dilemmas in gender equality programs’, an analysis of a Dutch support programme for women in physics. They deliberately choose the word ‘paradox’ to highlight the fact that there are two sides to the case for interventionist policies and an individual can subscribe to both sides simultaneously without really being aware of it. So, should there be interventions to encourage women to apply – for funding, jobs, promotion or whatever? At one level this looks straightforward enough, but if it is perceived as giving an unfair advantage to the women, or representing ‘reverse discrimination’ then it can lead to something of a backlash. Worst of all is if the women concerned end up feeling they only got that job ‘because they were a woman‘, even though positive discrimination (which would apply if that were the case) and positive action (which the original intervention amounts to) are very different, with the former being illegal in the UK. I would strongly recommend reading this article because it articulates so clearly the two-sided nature of the argument around actions in this arena.

A curious narrative on a very dramatic interventionist policy was recently written up in the New York Times . This article described what could be regarded as a very large scale experiment at Harvard Business School in an attempt to even the playing field for men and women. It clearly was received with very mixed emotions by both sexes and yet,  by tackling a whole range of perceived issues, at the end of the day both men and women seemed to see some positives even if they didn’t like how they’d got there. It appears to have been a complete root and branch attack upon their teaching methods: as one example instructors were told to make sure men didn’t get all the air time in class, but simultaneously assessment based on performance during classes was downplayed.  I must say a description of a ‘class’ environment which could be described as follows:

‘that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows.’

sounds very unappealing  Women at Harvard seem to have been judged on looks as much as brains by their peers and treated accordingly.  That does not sound like a genuine meritocracy, although it may be an accurate reflection of how some major companies’ management operates – for which a Harvard MBA is such an important defining feature.

Since most people seem to think that the current state of play – for women in science, business or wherever – needs to change without liking some of the steps introduced to equalise opportunities for men and women, what is the best way forward? The Dutch research highlights the fact that interventionist policies towards women’s progression only look out of place and flying in the face of pure meritocracy, by shining the spotlight on actions that when it comes to men are, in general, normative and consequently invisible. The structures of society in general take ‘support’, broadly defined, for men so much in their stride they may simply not be apparent. No one suggests that men don’t proffer support/encouragement to other men in the normal way of things, but since it may not readily happen in a below-the-radar-but-systematic way for women in any particular organisation, intervention is required to ensure everybody benefits equally.

As one postdoc in the Dutch study expressed it

My conviction is that there are men who have structural advantages because they are men. That is indeed the “old boys’ network”, or that daddy does them a favor, (…) Well, they also don’t have sleepless nights worrying that “the woman was actually better, but they hired me.” (…) Some have advantages because they are men, so if I have advantages because I am a woman, I think, “fine.”

And as the article’s own conclusions states

It is therefore advisable to engage in critical reflection on the dominant discourse of meritocracy, the socially constructed nature of “quality”, and the silence about men’s support networks.

Put in that light, specific actions are no longer seen as flying in the face of meritocracy being the sole criterion; rather it is (as one would want) making sure that meritocracy and not luck as influenced by gender really is the only determinant.

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Don’t Say Too Much (or Too Little)

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Athene Donald

This week NESTA‘s Executive Director of Research Stian Westlake wrote a piece for the Guardian science policy blogs about those who offer scientific advice. If you want to find out why wonks should avoid being either a ‘berk’ or a ‘wanker’ I’d recommend you read his piece. However he made some telling points which go far beyond policy wonks and are perhaps worth rehearsing in a wider context. So, if you are about to write a thesis or a committee paper, if you are about to sit down to formulate, in writing, your strategy position on some key matter – or even if you are going to offer verbal advice to a family member or friend – you may want to ponder on the following useful pointers he highlighted (the three bullet points are taken directly from his text).

    • Neither glibness nor prolixity make for useful advice.

I would go further and say that in any situation, for any piece of prose that you are called upon to write, this bullet point is a good starting point. I have seen draft theses which fall into one or other of these camps. There are writers who think superficiality is adequate because their data is so convincing they can skate over the niceties of other people’s research that doesn’t fall into line with their own. There are writers who think that in order to demonstrate their competence they have to include references to every conceivably relevant article with a précis of its contents and believe that all techniques have to be described in exhaustive detail. Neither approach makes for pleasant reading, although in my view the latter is easier to correct than the former.

But it isn’t just theses to which this applies: position papers presented to high level committees with 165 numbered paragraphs are distinctly soporific and encourage the reader not to concentrate. The worry is that that is the intention and that in paragraph 161, something really sneaky and important has been introduced with the expectation that the committee will have lost the will to live long before this point in any discussion is reached. Prolixity, one feels, is a Sir Humphrey tactic that unfortunately may equally well turn up in an academic situation.

    • Good advice is not just a matter of providing information, or summarising research. It also involves making a judgment about the balance of facts, helping frame the issue, and communicating in a way that the person you’re counselling will understand and act on.

Scientists aren’t always familiar with the idea of framing, or at least that is my personal experience. I certainly only came to appreciate its importance relatively late in life largely as a result of reading Mike Hulme’s excellent ‘Why we disagree about climate change‘. Framing is certainly more likely to matter in a policy situation than when writing a physics thesis. Nevertheless, even for the latter it is the case you need to think about the balance and relevance of those facts you are presenting and not get hung up in one corner, as it were.  For instance, when presenting results that sit at the interface between fields it is important to highlight the relevant parts of each field, not slavishly write down everything you can or – just as bad – cherry pick the bits that fit. Maybe you can construct a model based on sub-field A, but if sub-field B says the assumptions you need to use in order to solve the model are invalid you are not going to make genuine progress, although you can generate data, graphs and all the rest within the model.  They are just meaningless graphs. You cannot only focus on one part at the expense of the other, and that is where I think there is a loose connection with framing (or rather, absence thereof).  I am aware this does not precisely fit the social scientist’s definition of framing!  Nevertheless, not infrequently the inexperienced fail to make an appropriate judgement about the balance of facts and end up generating useless thesis fodder.

    • Clarity, brevity and a sense of narrative are all important parts of good advice

Yes indeed! Would that we could all follow these wise words all the time. I know that upon occasion a friendly voice has pointed out to me that all my punchiness has deserted me in my prose, that the narrative has got lost in a series of nested brackets and that a single sentence has run on to occupy a whole paragraph. We can all be guilty of sloppiness from time to time as deadlines approach (and again, to focus on thesis writing, one is almost invariably up against a deadline). As various people, ranging from Blaise Pascal to Winston Churchill via Mark Twain, have been alleged to say ‘I would have made this shorter had I had the time‘. Brevity and clarity do not come the first time a sentence, a paragraph or a chapter are set down. It takes an eagle eye to remove unnecessary circumlocutions and hesitancies. My own drafts tend to contain a lot of weasel words like maybe, perhaps and probably which are nearly always best excised; probably that ‘nearly’ fits the bill too! That’s why hitting deadlines destroys the beauty of the prose, as it becomes impossible to sleep on the waffly words so that in the morning a fresh brain can be surgical about the excisions.

So, read Stian Westlake and realise that most of what he says applies equally well to your own attempts to tell a story, describe an experiment or set out a position paper. It isn’t only policy wonks who should think about the best way to put across advice and evidence.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Thinking about your CV

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

There are many different ways of writing one’s CV, and hitting the right spot is not always straightforward. Speaking personally, the postdoc applicant who writes that they are ‘a highly motivated and aspirational individual, with a strong sense of self-worth and drive who is looking for swift advancement in academia‘ merely makes me think that they have been given advice appropriate to another sector (possibly even another planet). I would much prefer to work with someone who doesn’t need to describe themselves by motivational words but prefers to dwell on what they’ve actually accomplished on their research path so far and the demonstrable skills they have acquired en route. For me this means practical skills like electron microscopy or Monte Carlo simulations rather than excelling in Powerpoint or more general presentation skills learned at a one day transferable skills’ workshop. Important though transferable skills are, I don’t think they should be headlines on a CV.  But that, as I say, is speaking personally. Maybe not everyone wants to get first and foremost a sense of accomplishment, curiosity and love of the subject from a CV, I don’t know (though I could hazard a guess).

Nevertheless, first impressions may matter more than one would like to believe. If the opening sentence of the CV puts me off I may feel jaundiced as I read the rest, but my personal prejudices may not be yours. Spelling mistakes and these vague aspirational statements I refer to above are both included in mine. Spelling mistakes matter because they imply a degree of sloppiness. For all I recognize that some people may be dyslexic and obviously do not want instantly to disclose this, nevertheless there are perfectly good spell checkers available if you put in the time to use them (or your friends for something as important as this).  Cover letters that tell me how much the applicant wants to come to work with me in Oxford don’t go down too well with me either, since I’m Cambridge-based, but are surprisingly common. I try not to object to being addressed as Dear Sir because I know my name is odd, even for an Anglophone, so perhaps the applicant was confused rather than just irritatingly blind to the possibility a professor could be female.  After all, I am not infrequently referred to by the ill-informed as Donald Athene and Donald would indeed suggest a man.

Recently I have had occasion to read a bunch of CVs from people across a whole range of degrees of seniority for several different purposes that just happen to have coincided. It made me realise how much something that seems very important at a junior level may seem inappropriate and out of place at a subsequent stage. In an undergraduate application, being a Grade 8-with-distinction violinist is a sign of talent and determination, but in a postdoc’s CV anything more than a passing reference to hobbies such as playing in an orchestra would seem irrelevant. Winning a poster prize at a major conference last year is very much a positive for a graduate student but incongruous for a new lecturer, for whom listing an invited talk or two would seem more appropriate.

Perhaps you are not presenting an itemised list but are asked to provide a textual discussion of your research, something more common at the later stages. Just as with letters of reference, I believe these can end up gendered in the words used, but now you have only yourself to blame. I have read such resumes from outstanding people (and specifically women) who stress the collaborative nature of their work and their enjoyment of helping to bring something to fruition. All that may be true, but it will be read by committees who are looking for words like leadership and innovation to convince themselves that the person is indeed excellent. If you write a nice gentle story you may end up shooting yourself in the foot.  It is a question of style as much as substance and comes back to issues relating to the ‘self-promotion stakes‘, as also discussed elsewhere recently. Recently, a woman responded to my comments on her draft CV by saying she’d try to bring out her ‘inner man’.  It may be unfortunate – and again, as in my last post reflecting mere crude gender stereotyping – but as shorthand for ‘get rid of emphasising the team-player aspect and bring out the actual leadership skills I have‘ the phrase conveys the right message.

If you write an arrogant, over the top CV that will be just as bad. Believe me, I’ve seen it done. Claim to have done more than you genuinely have and someone on the panel who is also an expert in the field will say so, pointing out it was done by Professor X in some totally different lab and you just made a minor contribution to one paper that came 2 years after the major discovery. Truth and integrity are closely linked and (almost) no one wants to risk someone without good ethical principles in their department. I’ve seen that style of CV go wrong when achievements have been misleadingly presented.

There are, however, grey areas regarding how much to write on a CV/summary of achievements document. I would say public engagement/outreach/blogging is one quite large unknown in this category.  I’d like to think it would always be seen as a plus, but for many academic jobs it must play second fiddle to the research itself. The Royal Society awards prizes for this sort of work – for instance I heard Brian Cox deliver his Michael Faraday Prize Lecture earlier this year at the Royal Society as he was being celebrated for his amazing contribution to public engagement. That there are a couple of prizes (the Kohn Award is the other one) in the Royal Society’s lexicon of awards specifically for public engagement work is testament to the importance they attach to it. Nevertheless for Professor Y applying for election to the Royal Society, how much emphasis should be placed on non-research activities of this sort? Again I would like to think quite a lot, a way of distinguishing between two otherwise equally brilliant individuals, but maybe not everyone thinks so, despite the Royal Society’s Foreign Secretary Martyn Poliakoff having an enviable reputation as a U-tube star in his Periodic Table series.

How you write your CV, as well as what you’ve actually got to say, does matter. It pays to consider who your intended audience is and what is likely to matter most to them. If simultaneously applying for jobs inside and outside academia, don’t use the same CV for both. More examples of how not to write a CV (with an American flavour) can be found at Female Science Professor’s blog, where she ran her annual writing competition on the subject last year receiving an interesting selection of fake CVs. There are obvious no-no’s and there are more subtle areas of uncertainty. There is also no uniquely right way of doing things, but finding the right middle ground between overweening pride and excessive humility is something worth striving for.

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