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.

Posted in Careers | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Incompetence at the Top?

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last week an article entitled ‘Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?‘, published in the Harvard Business Review, was brought to my attention (thanks Kate Bellingham!). Written by a (male) Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL), Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, it included many choice phrases. Examples that took my fancy were

  • we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence
  • manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential
  • arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent

with the characteristics of (over)confidence, charisma and arrogance being perceived as stereotypically male. Chamorro-Premuzic linked his arguments to some published articles if you want to check out some of his conclusions; I’m not going to attempt to analyse his piece in a scholarly way. But it struck a chord with me and clearly with the many individuals (male and female) who retweeted the link, such as the male PVC who replied ‘ The problem is they don’t become leaders but other men appoint them to management jobs (especially in HE!).’ So, when I wrote previously about Leadership Stategies to deal with Jerks, maybe I should have recognized that some of the leaders are the jerks themselves, narcissistic and full of their own self-importance.

Clearly, to identify some of these characteristics as ‘male’ is far too simplistic. Perhaps, to move away from a crude divide by sex, a more important message from the piece is the concept that what gets people to the top are not really very helpful attributes once you’ve reached the dizzy heights of leadership: traits such as the ability to talk fast and bluster or a tendency to concentrate on self-serving tasks rather than good citizenry. Nevertheless, anyone in academia (or, I guess, business) will recognize that these qualities do often get you rather a long way, as is manifest by considering some of the high flyers – the jerks – I wrote about before.

Nevertheless, even if that male:female split is crude, it is clear that many of us do think in those sorts of terms. And what does that mean about women reaching the top? The THE ran some articles about female VC’s in their most recent issue, highlighting their paucity and the issues they have faced.  Again some comments raised by male leaders in this context struck a chord, or perhaps I should say a sensitive nerve.

  • Women are more caring and [are] therefore better suited to and naturally drawn to teaching duties
  • It [was] not male bias that prevented more women from leading universities but women’s refusal to ‘play the games’ needed to reach the top
  • They [the males] wanted to spare women the ‘rough and tumble ‘ of leadership –  referred to in the article as ‘a typical example of ‘heroic, paternalistic masculinity’

Those comments, read alongside the Harvard Business Review article, make strikingly similar points from a rather different perspective. The males are admitting that the way they got to the top is by ‘playing games’ rather than developing leadership potential and the patronising tone of voice of the last comment is rather terrifying. Furthermore, as Julia King (VC of Aston currently) confirmed, if you do join in the rough and tumble you end up being termed ‘frightening’ in tones far from approving, an attitude that Shirley Pearce (former VC of Loughborough) I know has equally experienced with annoyance. For many women the choice seems to be either be demure and restrained and get nowhere, or be tough and speak out and end up being hammered as scarey, fierce – or accused, as I was, of leaving scars.

So what attributes are assigned stereotypically to women in a complimentary way that could also lead to progression to the top? Last term I attended a fascinating talk by Michelle Ryan of Exeter University, who has come up with the phrase the Glass Cliff: in business too often it seems women CEO’s are the ones heading up failing companies. It is easy for the headlines then to scream that having women leaders mean companies fail (implying they are falling off the metaphorical cliff), but Ryan examined which came first – the women at the top or the company failing. It turns out that it is the very skills that women are perceived as having, again stereotypically, such as being compassionate for their staff or good communicators, are ones which are attractive to those in a position to appoint a new CEO when a company is already in trouble.

To test these conclusions, Ryan conducted various experiments in which study participants were given descriptions of mythical companies in various states of financial health along with the CVs of fictitious candidates for the top position, men and women with roughly equal experience. When companies were failing participants were far more likely to ‘appoint’ the woman than when the company was doing just fine. Drilling down into why this was it turned out to be precisely because stereotypical female skills were seen as valuable when morale within a company was low and it was tearing itself apart. If, on the other hand, all was hunky dory then the (stereotypical) confident/arrogant male leader was seen as right for the job. Again, you can find some of this research about the Glass Cliff described in an earlier Harvard Business Review article.

So, the moral of this story is twofold. First and foremost, we should all try to jettison crude stereotypes. There are plenty of articulate, compassionate men out there and plenty of confident, outspoken women. It is even possible to be both compassionate and outspoken; these aren’t either/or characteristics. It is not unreasonable to feel that different attributes may be appropriate for different leadership situations (just as a business may be in trouble, so may a university department – or indeed a whole university) but they shouldn’t de facto naively be associated with one sex or the other. Furthermore as we reject these obvious and unhelpful gender stereotypes we mustn’t unconsciously hang on to thinking that a compassionate man is somehow wimpish or that a forceful woman is frightening.

However we, or at least those seeking out and choosing new leaders, should think harder about the skills needed for those at the top of any type of organisation. Confidence may be necessary but arrogance almost certainly is a handicap. Playing games is only likely to be constructive if everyone else is being Machiavellian. Even if they are it may still be a mistake to try to double guess how many bluff and counterbluff moves are going on. In general thoughtful analysis, a clear articulation of the issues coupled with awareness of how decisions may impact on the workforce and simply playing it straight really may be a better strategy for genuine leadership. I hope selection committees will think a little deeper about what really matters and not stick with imagining tired old stereotypes actually fit the job description.

 

Posted in Education, Equality | Tagged , , | 8 Comments