Personal Tutors or Personal Responsibility

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Athene Donald

At every stage of one’s career one needs to know who to turn to for advice. This need doesn’t stop just because one is senior, but probably feels most overwhelming when first setting out. That crucial stage when newly independent, probably away from home for the first significant time, and facing new challenges in an unfamiliar setting i.e. when one first starts at university, is likely to be particularly unnerving. However, every time one starts a new position of any type one needs to learn a new set of practices and memorize a new set of faces; without a mentor or well-disposed colleague to help you negotiate the maze, things may feel decidedly tricky. Often one doesn’t even know what one doesn’t know or what questions one should be asking.

For that reason, a couple of years ago the Athena Forum put out a simple bookmark  aimed at postdocs, to help them take control of their lives by suggesting questions they should be asking themselves and others while they worked out whether academic science was the right path for them. These aren’t simple yes and no questions, nor are they necessarily going to be answered swiftly. But they are supposed to highlight areas where answers are needed. The bookmark was supplemented by a guide on the Athena Forum website. The further hope was that individual universities would ‘personalise’ these bookmarks by adding in the names/locations of relevant contacts (such as their Careers Service) or giving weblinks to where more information could be accessed, on the reverse side. My own university certainly did, and gave it out to all new postdocs with their contracts.

For freshers arriving at university a wealth of information may be tossed in their direction – either verbally, by pointing students to appropriate websites, or possibly even in voluminous tomes which are hard to penetrate – but that doesn’t mean the information is either what is wanted/needed or that it sinks in. A few weeks into term, or possibly even a year or more later, the anxious student is left floundering and uncertain of where to go to for advice. Unfortunately, in many universities, systems to detect the floundering fresher or the stranded sophomore are sometimes not failsafe.

It is one of the beauties of the Cambridge collegiate system that the combination of regular small group teaching (supervisions) with continuity of teachers throughout the term (at least in the first year or two), coupled with the existence of (pastoral) tutors to advise if money matters go astray or family matters come to a head in one distressing way or another, mean that students shouldn’t  slip through the cracks. Add in a Director of Studies who is the point of contact to help the student negotiate their way through course options and prerequisites and it all means that the student should be well supported. (The DoS is also the contact point for supervisors concerned about a student’s lack of progress or signs of distress. That several supervisors will independently pass on concerns to a single point of contact over a student perhaps with suspected anorexia or a sudden deterioration in quality of work from one who was previously stellar, means that problems should be picked up swiftly.)

I know from discussions with students from elsewhere that not all universities are able to provide this level of support. I hear tales of students finding wrong choices were made in one year which then bar them from following a course they are really keen on in a later year. Students who are struggling may also find it much easier to hide the fact if there is no continuity of teaching and no one checking up on them if they don’t turn up to lectures time after time because they’re unwilling to come out from under the bedclothes and face the world. These can be tough times.

By the postdoctoral stage, individuals should have resolved many of the issues that first beset them. But undoubtedly there are new questions to be addressed and times can still feel tough. Maybe all their experiments bomb and there is water coming through the ceiling in their flat. The latter is a problem that (probably) needs a plumber to resolve, but if the former arises how is one supposed to tell if one is not cut out for research or the experiments the supervisor has demanded to be done are daft? It may not be obvious, but it is certainly an important distinction. The Athena Forum bookmark and guide I allude to above make it clear that for the postdoc their career is their responsibility. They need to find their own answers to questions about what they are – and just as importantly are not – good at. They need to use answers to questions like that to help them work out what they want to do next, although they should certainly seek advice in reaching those answers. A personal tutor is not the solution; but personal responsibility combined with supportive mentors/PI’s and peers are. Getting that happy blend of personal insight and external advice is all important, but may be easier said than done.

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All Male Invited Speakers? It’s Complicated!

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Athene Donald

Some time ago I wrote about the complexities that may underlie all male short-lists for high-powered jobs. The scientific world is also full of justified angst about the disproportionate number of men who appear on conference platforms, particularly as invited speakers. A recent paper  has analysed the situation at one particular conference, the European Society for Evolutionary Biology Congress. It showed that what was really out of line was not the number of women invited to give presentations, but the number that accepted.  Around 50% of the women invited declined to come – much higher than a comparable response from the men. The authors of this paper (Schroeder, Dugdale et al) consider the possible reasons why this rate is so high. What is interesting about the paper is that it highlights that, as with all-male shortlists, what at first sight looks like ‘bad behaviour’ by the powers- that-be, variously conference organisers and head-hunters, is actually significantly affected by the women themselves for all kinds of legitimate and complicated reasons.  I’ve posted my further thoughts on this important but less than straightforward issue, along with why it matters in terms of role models, over at the Royal Society’s Inside Science blog. Read more there……

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Gender Issues in European Academic Science

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Athene Donald

This week has seen me travelling to Vienna and Bratislava for a meeting of the European Research Council’s Scientific Council. Travelling between the two cities along the Danube by fast boat provided a rare treat of a little relaxation fitted into the normally intense work of such a committee meeting. I am still learning the ropes, getting to grips with acronyms (of course) and structures; this was only my second formal meeting of the Council and the ways of Brussels can seem a little mysterious to newcomers. I also attended my first meeting of the Gender Working Group, a group chaired by fellow Council member Isabelle Vernos, who contributed to the recent Nature Special focussing on gender. In her article there she included some ERC statistics and put the case against quotas. There is absolutely no doubt that the ERC takes the issue of gender very seriously and it worries about the statistics surrounding the success rates for women in the various rounds of awards. The figures are not good, as their 2012 Annual Report makes clear. (see data below) Yet the reasons for this are many and complex – and to some extent still unknown. The good news is that the figures are being collated and analysed. The bad news is that there is no simple fix.

ERC starter grant gender

Comparative figures for total applicatons and successful applications from women across the 3 domains and for all calls of ERC Starting grants.

ERC Ad Grant gender

Comparative figures for total applicatons and successful applications from women across the 3 domains and for all calls of ERC Advanced grants.

If the figures above (taken from the 2012 annual report) are examined closely there are some intriguing factors. Speaking as a physicist, it is heartening to see that the PE domain (i.e. the Physical and Engineering Sciences) show success rates – particularly for Starting Grants, less so for Advanced Grants – which are pretty much the same for women and men, year on year (Social Sciences and Humanities also don’t too badly on this front). This is very much not the case for the LS (Life Sciences) domain. So are the eligible women in the life sciences weaker on average, are the panels more prejudiced or is there something in the way LS proposals are written that disadvantages women? The statistics alone are not enough to identify the problems, and there was much debate about this.

One of the figures that isn’t present in the annual report concerns the make-up of panels. The ERC is determined to get good representation of women on panels, but this should not simplistically be thought to be because having more women on panels will mean women will be treated more favourably. Indeed the statistics we were shown this week demonstrate clearly that there is no correlation between success rates for women and make-up of panel and I am glad to hear it myself: favourable judging by women of women would hardly be healthy and the broader evidence is that unconscious bias against women is as prevalent amongst women as men. But women should be at the table so that their voices are heard, judging both men and women. This, by now, should just be taken as read. Furthermore, although it is hard to find non-emotive words to describe this, if panels are seen as a power-base and if membership of panels is regarded (as it is) as a figure of merit, of course women should be participating in them. It is sad that this still needs to be discussed but, as with conference speakers, it remains the case that it is all too easy for women to be overlooked or forgotten. It is good that the ERC are very sensitive to the matter, so that oversight cannot accidentally occur.

So, to return to success rates. In the course of informal discussions the following points were made, which are purely supposition and may even be thought to include some unwelcome stereotyping. Nevertheless, they are probably thoughts worth exploring further if the causes – and solutions – of the lower success rates of women are to be appropriately dealt with.

  • Maybe women do better (comparatively) in the PE domain because, those who have survived to the level of seniority that they are eligible to apply have had to fight so hard against the flow that they have no chinks in their armour when it comes to making applications. If this were true it would be expected to be the case that women assessed by physics, maths and engineering panels might be expected to be more successful than chemists, where the pool (at undergraduate level) is more even. The numbers are sufficiently small, and fluctuate sufficiently greatly, it is hard to test this hypothesis, but it is the case that PE5 (which covers much of chemistry) does seem to perform less well on this front than other PE panels over the years.
  • Maybe there are differences in the style of writing between different domains and disciplines, so that there is a greater tendency to flowery prose/hyperbole/self-promotion in the LS domains and that the style that finds favour is more likely to be written by men than women. In this argument it is not the actual quality of the science that differs, but the style of presentation. The ERC has already changed the details that need to be given in the CV (e.g. by reducing the number of papers that can be cited as recent publications) to ameliorate any gender differences in the style of presentation of this part of the submission. A project is currently underway to try to examine differences in career paths (rather than actual presented CVs) between successful and unsuccessful applicants, both men and women, to see what can be learned about these aspects of the applications.
  • Perhaps women are receiving less mentoring and institutional support to enable them to submit the best applications they can, based on the actual science they want to carry out. It is clear that the amount of coaching and other advice that applicants get can vary hugely by institution and department. This is a concern usually expressed when looking at the low levels of successful applicants from the EU12 group of countries.
  • Maybe unconscious bias is present in the way panel decisions are reached by both male and female members of the panels. The extent of this may be affected both by group dynamics within any actual panel and the actions of the chair. This is perhaps the easiest problem to focus on. In principle simple interventions, including a quick briefing on unconscious bias at the start of every panel meeting might be thought to resolve this issue. This is an idea that is being considered further by the working group.

One of the reasons I felt particularly pleased when I was invited to join the Scientific Council was that it would expose me to disciplines very different from my own, including those in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and because it covers all of Europe and so would open my eyes to how things are done across the very different countries. As we discussed gender issues in full session, it became apparent that my experience to date has very much focussed on the English-speaking countries. On this blog I have written often about UK experiences, and a little about what I know within the US. Fellow Scientific Council member Matthias Kleiner pointed out to me that in Germany, during his tenure as President of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), he introduced quite stringent expectations about German institutions funded by his agency. This, in 2008, was some years ahead of Dame Sally Davies’s statement  about UK Clinical Schools, or the more recent statement, made earlier this year by RCUK. On the back of his actions, German institutions are already being assessed (as, I think, of this year) as one of 4 grades, thereby naming and shaming those who are doing little. There will be funding consequences.

Maybe other countries across Europe have funding agencies that have similar expectations around gender with real funding implications; if readers know of others do let me know. Naively, largely based on comments from German academic women of some years ago, I had thought the German academic culture was unfavourable for the progression of women. Clearly, there is a significant transformation underway. Let us hope that actions like these will help to improve the success rates for women in future rounds of ERC awards. It is hard to believe that the current levels, particularly in the LS domain, truly reflect the quality of the applications. In future years maybe comparable diagrams to those above will look very different.

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The Two Opposing Sides of the Desk

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Athene Donald

At different times in one’s life one is more likely to be an interviewer or an interviewee, but these things are never immutable. As it happens I have been the subject of several interviews recently, something which has made me think a bit differently about how to tackle these things and reminds me what it feels like to be the one put on the spot.

I was never instructed in how to be an interviewer or, to be more accurate, half way through my career I attended a course which was more to do with the formalities and the law than how to come up with questions which are likely to be informative. From the course I learned that it was unwise to annotate one’s notes with comments like ‘hideous bloke with big nose‘ as an aide memoire in case one had to produce them. The diversity issues were ones on which I hope I was already up to speed; I knew not to ask how a woman was going to sort out childcare or enquire about intentions vis-à-vis pregnancy, even all those years ago. (It isn’t so long ago that I heard a colleague ask the former question and had to leap down his throat.)

So, not having the advantage of instruction I learned the hard way not to ask closed questions, the kind that only require a yes or a no by way of answer. So, asking a potential secretary if (s)he can use Excel is not useful; asking them to give an example of when and why they’ve had to use a spreadsheet and how it helped them rather more so. It was with secretarial interviews I learned just how limited my skills were; somehow the interviews I’d conducted up till that point with students and postdocs hadn’t highlighted my shortcomings so drastically, probably because it came more naturally to ask open-ended questions about research. But, that day when another novice and I tried to choose a secretary and constantly asked these uninformative closed questions stands out in my mind as a bad day (though, despite that, we made an excellent choice).

At the other extreme of questions are those I think of as ‘competency’ questions, beloved of many employers trying to sift out the sheep from the goats in the graduate milk round. Those are the kinds of questions which require the applicant to annunciate, possibly at some length, when they have persuaded a colleague to do something they didn’t want to do; or to give an example of when they have shown an entrepreneurial side. Mercifully, personally, I’ve never had to apply for a job which required me to answer these questions in paragraphs of waffle (or insightful prose, depending on your point of view).

However, recently I’ve been on the receiving end of rather similar questions in a series of different interviews – and I’ve struggled with them!  First there were those associated with the First Women Awards, for which I was shortlisted. Both at the actual interview associated with the awards and in an accompanying interview for my local newspaper, I was flummoxed by questions such as ‘what do you take most pride in?’ and ‘what is your next goal of something to be the first to do?‘ It’s not that they are in any sense unfair questions but they aren’t ones to which I have a convenient soundbite answer. I felt tempted to say, I don’t do things I don’t take pride in but I know they want some simplistic answer such as ‘it was when I cured XXX‘ or ‘that Eureka moment when suddenly I understood all the mysteries of the universe‘.   And my work doesn’t lend itself to answers like that.

To be the first female professor in the Physical Sciences at Cambridge was indeed pleasing at the time, but should I take pride in it when it was always going to be simply a matter of time for some woman to attain that accolade and it just happened to be me?  It’s not something that makes my chest swell with pride every time I think of it, it was just one staging post on a long journey for women in the university. Furthermore, since I hadn’t been aiming at that goal very consciously it isn’t very surprising that I haven’t got another ‘first’ goal in mind; I don’t operate like that. Perhaps, if I’m going to find myself in a similar situation again, next time I’ll try to have my soundbites prepared – when I’ll inevitably find it is a different set of flummoxing questions that are thrown at me.

The other recent interview I participated in is all too public under the gentle interviewing style of Jim Al Khalili  for Radio 4’s The Life Scientific. Here the challenges were of a different type. I find Jim (with whom I sit on a couple of committees through the Royal Society, so he is no stranger) a very easy person to talk to. Nevertheless, some of the questions were decidedly leading, including comments implying both that I excelled at music at school and personally transformed the whole field of biological physics. Both these concepts strike me as decidedly stretching the point, so I tried to pull him back a bit from these excesses.

Of course, the story is so much better if I was a musical prodigy as well as a physicist, but the truth is I was a useful jobbing viola player surrounded by those who went on to be professional musicians. I would also say I have done my bit to get biological physics on the map, but it was an idea for which the discipline was ripe and many individuals were getting involved around the country and raising the subject’s profile. So, to go in for the ‘good story’ at the expense of precision bothers me. This is of course a standard complaint about scientists by the media in general. We are too concerned with accuracy to present a simple and exciting straightforward story about our science that is easy to pitch to editors or to present.

As with any activity, no doubt the moral of the story is to be well-prepared, whichever side of the desk one finds oneself. As the interviewer that really should be simple and, having mastered the art of asking open questions I ought to be able to carry out informative interviews. On the receiving end, there is always the danger that the questions asked are somehow at odds with who one is and how one thinks things through, so that reasonable questions can still become minefields despite preparation and even, I suspect, despite the best intentions of the interviewer. Practice, practice, practice is all very well as advice, but may still be insufficient.

 

 

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Fitting Interpersonal Skills into Academia

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Athene Donald

There is much talk in higher education about the importance of transferable skills. For a PhD student this means that you receive training in things beyond your own particular field of research. Typically this would include being required to consider your writing and presentation skills; additionally, maybe you would be exposed to ideas of project management or examining your entrepreneurial side and learning how to write a business plan. Seldom, at this level, does it mean considering people skills, handling negotiations or how to be persuasive in difficult situations. Role play may also rarely feature. Yet this latter group of subjects are also important skills, whatever field of employment you ultimately are destined to join.

A few weeks ago I was asked to give a presentation to Schlumberger’s Faculty of the Future on the topic of ‘Building a Career and a Team’ – their title not mine! Before I say more about the thought processes that went into writing that talk, let me say a little about this programme for early career women. Schlumberger, like L’Oreal with their For Women in Science International Fellowships, are investing heavily in young women in academia: young women from all parts of the globe, particularly the developing world. These fellowships are not intended for the richer nations where there are already many opportunities, but for those countries whose educational structures are not as well developed and where there is untapped and unfulfilled talent. So each year Schlumberger Foundation funds about 60 individuals to take up either PhD or postdoctoral appointments in countries in Western Europe and the USA. The workshop I was invited to speak at was for those working in Europe, who came to spend several days at a residential course in Cambridge. This was a chance for them to share experiences with others in similar situations even if widely diverse fields of research, to listen to speakers from different backgrounds and to get a little recreational time to explore Cambridge.

When I was invited to talk to them on my assigned topic, my first reaction of course was ‘what do I know about these things?’ Yes, impostor syndrome struck again, as it so often does. However, as I have made plain on these pages before, there is little point in giving in to that nasty little internal voice that can be so destructive, so I sat down to consider what should be included under the title of ‘Building a career and a team’. What pearls of wisdom could I summon from my singularly unplanned career to illustrate how one should actually plan? Of course, therein lies the first bullet point:

  • Many/most individuals at whatever level in their profession will have arrived there by a combination of chance, serendipity and luck, just as much as by forethought, brilliance and grim determination.

Scratch the surface of someone at the top of the pecking order and you are likely to find someone vaguely surprised by what has happened to them.

Following on from that is the corollary

  • Often the most important decisions are made without noticing.

By that I mean that incidents that with hindsight turn out to have been crucial and key turning points, may have been made by accident or without due attention. On what basis did you choose your PhD supervisor? A well-known professor of my acquaintance confided to me once that his decision had been made based on the fact that one particular potential supervisor smiled at him as he walked into the room. On such little things can one’s whole life turn (as, in a sense, it did in his case).

That isn’t to say that you can’t take some control for your progression. Thinking hard about what skills you need to master to accomplish the next stage, where to go for advice and trying to build up a support group of friends, peers and those just a bit ahead in the game are all things that are up to you to manage. Mentoring is all very well, but mentoring schemes may not work if you happen to be assigned someone with whom you have little in common and you rub each other up the wrong way, so finding less formal routes to get advice is always a wise thing to do. So point number 3 would be

  • Know who to go to for advice and build up a network of supportive friends and colleagues (not necessarily in your immediate group environment). If you can find colleagues at different levels of seniority, so much the better.

Then there is the team-building aspect, which is where the people skills I refer to above enter. I never had any training in this, but I expect there are courses out there. Some of it is common sense, but it does require an awareness of both yourself and your own natural approach. Consultants would no doubt devise psychometric tests to analyse one’s intrinsic style, but I think one can make some progress without such external labelling. The kinds of questions that I personally, in my amateur way, think matter when it comes to considering how to tackle a burgeoning group, include

–      Do you want to keep things formal or informal?

–      Do you get more out of people by being forceful or relaxed?

–      How are you going to handle the need to criticise someone?

–      Are you comfortable heaping praise on others, and do you think you know when to do this judiciously?

–      How friendly is it wise to be with the team? Do you socialise with them or does that damage your authority?

–      Do you keep brief records of conversations and progress or simply rely on memory and good will?

–      How can you keep the team working well together?

–      How will you handle interpersonal conflict?

Everyone will have their own set of answers to these and many more questions which defines their approach. But the one that I think is central to getting the most out of people is the one about praise. There are those who think the only way to get people to work hard is to criticize their attempts endlessly; there are parents who think that is the right way to bring up their children too. I am not of that school of thought. I think students need encouragement, just as much as young children, and that constantly saying in essence ‘pull up your socks, you’re not slogging your guts out hard enough‘ is simply demoralising. Of course sometimes one has to say something along those lines, but if at other times you are at least a little enthusiastic then I believe the criticism will have more impact when it comes. There is a third way of doing things on this front. Never to say anything good or bad, just grunt when results are presented and set the next round of agreed targets. I have never been comfortable with that kind of stiff upper lip neutrality, but it is far from uncommon.

Of course, there are students and students. Some may themselves react better or worse to these different styles. For some, constant gushing praise may just be embarrassing rather than uplifting; for some of the bone-idle variety, incessant criticism may be a requisite if any results are ever to be produced at all. Students, like supervisors, are people. They need to know where they stand: whether the data they have is likely to turn into a thesis chapter, whether their null results can be incorporated and are they on target to finish on time, for instance. Students should not be left uncertain as to their progress, but too often they are as PhDcomics frequently pillories graphically. Building teams is as much about utilising interpersonal skills to get the most out of people as sheer intellectual brilliance. Unfortunately, too often these facts are forgotten in academia.

 

 

 

 

 

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