Systematic Errors of Judgement

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Athene Donald

To tie in with International Women’s Day, last month Nature ran a series of articles about the issues still facing women in science and also a podcast with Uta Frith and myself debating some of the issues. The interviewer, Charlotte Stoddart asked me, amongst other things, why I felt unconscious bias was so important that I frequently wrote about it.  My answer was, and is, that it is important for the very reason that it is unconscious, unseen unless taken out of the closet and inspected and so liable to be invidious and pernicious. It is, if you like, a systematic error distorting the very way we judge and are judged – in general to women’s detriment.

Much is made of the practical difficulties of combining a career and a family for women; this is often proposed as the major reason for women leaving science, but I think this is too simplistic. Indeed, academia is probably an easier place – because of the relative freedom we enjoy to work at times that work for us and not just clocking in and out – than some other professions for flexibility around caring responsibilities, for both men and women.  Perpetuating the view that the combination is well-nigh impossible (without exploring, as Ottoline Leyser’s excellent book did, all the different ways women have found actually to manage to do it), is probably only discouraging and disempowering in itself.

But the evidence – gleaned from study after study in the social sciences and related literature, which many Deans of Science or Heads of Science Departments are probably not reading – seems to point to the range of subtle ways in which we, collectively, reach conclusions on others which, all unknowingly, are influenced by gender and stereotypes.  At the bottom of this post I list some of the papers I have come across in the past year or so, not all of which I have comprehensively studied and which I am unqualified to assess in terms of their (social sciences) methodology. I do this for the interested reader in the hopes that this may facilitate their distribution to decision-makers in their institution (some may be behind paywalls depending on institutional subscriptions, so I just link to the abstracts).  In this present post I would like to pick out just one which, like the much-discussed PNAS paper by Moss-Racussin et al, identify some disturbing aspects of the way we all – these failings affect women as well as men – reach conclusions about the work of others and then act them out (I’ll use another post to discuss a very recent paper by Wang et al on an analysis of choices boys and girls make about careers).

Unconscious bias can only be dealt with by making it conscious, by ensuring an instantaneous assessment is backed up by evidence and not just by one’s unthinking gut. Now that overt discrimination is relatively rare and explicit sexism of the sort that says ‘women can’t do this’ rarely annunciated, we need to move on to a situation where the playing field is genuinely level and not just free of gross peaks and troughs. It behoves us all, particularly those in decision-making roles but also those at the receiving end, to consider the myriad and disparate ways in which subtle cues can trigger different reactions according to the gender of the individual under consideration.  This isn’t simply a case of differing ways of reacting to actions, as in the conjugation ‘he is assertive, she is aggressive’ and equivalent pairings. It is also a case of reading between the lines of letters of reference (as I’ve talked about before here and here) or metrics (see this article) and citations (here).

Scientists may like to form judgements based on quantification, but what is emerging from the literature is that our collective reactions invariably seem to imply a systematic disadvantage to women by the use of such metrics, even though it looks like something as gender-neutral as citations may be being studied. The most recent study I came across, entitled The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest  looked at the responses of ‘243 young communication scholars’ when asked to rate some (carefully manipulated) conference abstracts. (The Matilda effect was a phrase coined by Margaret Rossiter 20 years ago to describe the systematic underrecognition of women in science.) The abstracts’ topics and authors were varied to see how the readers reacted and to test a series of hypotheses relying on ‘role congruity’. This theory says that a group (or in this case, an abstract) will be positively evaluated when its characteristics are recognized as aligning with that group’s typical social roles. So a paper written by women about a subject ‘appropriate’ to their gender, such as the effect of media on children (remember this was a project involving science communicators), will be more highly rated than one written by women on an ‘inappropriate’ topic such as political communication.

Their hypotheses were largely borne out; on average the papers written by ‘men’ were perceived as of higher quality than those written by ‘women’, and even more so if stereotypically male topics were being written about. The respondents were also more likely to want to collaborate with the males on stereotypically ‘male’ topics and with the women on those topics associated with women. These trends were the same irrespective of the respondents own gender. The differences in evaluations were not large, but as earlier studies have shown, small effects multiply up over time; this is true of salaries and it is true of less tangible attributes such as recognition or collaboration opportunities.

Somehow we – again I’d stress this seems to apply to both men and women – react differently when we see a name on a piece of paper (let alone when we meet the individual) and are less likely to cite a woman or want to collaborate with them. This reaction is apparently so in-built and rapid that it can happen without even noticing that one has taken in the gender of, say, a paper’s author. I have always believed I don’t look at the names at the top of papers – including those for job applications – and so am unbiased. This latest paper suggests that, whether or not I have taken in a name sufficiently to be able to recall it, I may still be being influenced, so I will have to work harder on this.

I have frequently heard calls for reviewing (eg for grant applications or jobs) to be done blind, i.e. with the name removed. I am not convinced, certainly within a country as small as the UK, that this would be meaningful. You cannot remove details of the field being worked in, the papers cited, or the list of publications attached, so how would an anonymous refereeing process actually work? Surely one should keep names in and remind everyone, constantly, to be on their guard for their own hidden biases? But doing the latter is hard, and cannot be dealt with simply superficially.

To illustrate this let me finish with two linked anecdotes (I know, this isn’t data). The first is from a woman who enquired about how unconscious bias was dealt with at a research council panel. She was told ‘any funny business is stamped on pretty quickly‘. Now, what did the official mean by this? That illegal discrimination was spotted and dealt with, or that anyone who has lurking unconscious bias is hauled over the coals? I think it’s easy to see which was intended. But by way of a specific example of the dangers of bias, of the sort that could turn up at a research council panel, let me cite statements from two recent references I saw (edited for the sake of anonymity) for a male and female applicant of roughly equal standing – the woman happened to be a year further on in her career but had taken time out to have a child – both with stellar credentials.

Woman A

‘ a consistent output of more than a dozen papers per year, despite a period of maternity leave and currently working less than full time; more than £2M of current research funding held as PI….however she is still at a relatively early stage of her career and this makes me uncomfortable about recommending her….’

Man B

‘I should comment on the fact that all but 3 of B’s recent publications do not include Y [his mentor, still in the same department] as a co-author. However for about half of these B appears to be the senior author, and presumably the intellectual driving force behind the work….my overall view is that…he is highly deserving…’

I expect you can see why these two references, in juxtaposition (and with A and B in competition) made me so angry. OK, they weren’t written by the same referee, but in one case the woman is damned with being too early on for serious consideration despite overwhelming evidence for her independence – through grants and papers – explicitly being presented. On the other hand, when it comes to the man – whose independence is being queried with the referee only using weak words like appears and presumably regarding what B has achieved – there seems no doubt in the referee’s mind that B is ‘ready’.

The panel I was on read these comments and dealt with them appropriately in my view, but not all panels may be so sensitive to seeing this manifestation of the Matilda Effect in practice in letters of reference. Is this a form of ‘funny business’ that needs to be stamped on? I think so, but there is no guarantee that it will be. This is why unconscious bias has to be teased out and discussed at every opportunity. Please distribute the (links to the) papers below as widely as possible, and add more to the reading list. It would be nice to think progress could be made.

Reading List (in reverse chronological order; this is bound to be very incomplete, as it relies on papers that have happened to cross my path rather than a systematic search, and only covers the last year or so; additions to this list would be welcome).

 
Not Lack of Ability but More Choice: Individual and Gender Differences in Choice of Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by M-T Wang, JS Eccles and S Kenny published online March 18, 2013, doi: 10.1177/0956797612458937 in Psychological Science http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/18/0956797612458937.abstract
The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest by S Knobloch-Westerwick, C Glynn and M Huge published online February 6 2013 in Science Communication  http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/24/1075547012472684.abstract
Is publication rate an equal opportunity metric? EZ Cameron, ME Gray and AM White Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28 (2013) 7-8 http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347%2812%2900275-3
Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favour male students CA Moss-Racusin, JF Dovidio, VL Brescoll, MJ Graham and J Handelsman PNAS 109 (2012) 16474–16479 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478626/
‘I wouldn’t say it’s sexism, except that … It’s all these little subtle things’: Healthcare scientists’ accounts of gender in healthcare science laboratories V Bevan and M Learmonth Social Studies of Science 43 (2013) 136-158 http://sss.sagepub.com/content/43/1/136.abstract
Penalties and Premiums: The Impact of Gender, Marriage, and Parenthood, on Faculty Salaries in SEM and non-SEM Fields  K Kelly and L Grant Social Studies of Science 42 (2012) 869-896 http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/6/869
The academic jungle: ecosystem modelling reveals why women are driven out of research KR O’Brien and KP Hapgood Oikos I21 (2012) 999–1004 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2012.20601.x/abstract

 

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

Lecturer Spotting

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

The Easter break, relatively short though it may be, offers me an opportunity to introduce another raft of characters from the Athenian University to join my previous lists of Dramatis Personae/ character assassinations. Here I describe variations on the theme of University lecturers, although of course that title is not meant to say anything about an individual’s seniority, merely that their job is to lecture. These now join my other characters, so far encompassing Group Leaders; Professors; University committee members and committee chairs, as well as members of external grant-giving committees.

Dr Energetic

Dr Energetic paces up and down the lecture theatre, their arms waving wildly as they try to put an important point across. Not for the sleepy student who wants to be permitted to doze quietly at the back of the lecture theatre, Dr Energetic will make a quick kip after a hard night’s drinking hard to come by. The advantage of a lecturer such as this is that even boring or turgid subjects may come alive enough to render them intelligible. The disadvantage is that strident tones and histrionic actions may merely irritate not inform.

Dr Inaudible

Dr Inaudible’s offering is very different. They may be the most intelligent person you will ever meet, with a solid grasp of every fact they are trying to convey and a neat turn of phrase to illustrate difficult concepts, but if they are not audible beyond the first two rows in the lecture theatre (and disdain being wired up with a microphone), all this is in vain. Alternatively they may be inaudible because they totally lack confidence in the material they have been assigned to teach and want to be unheard and unremarked. Dr Inaudible needs a stiff talking to by those in charge of teaching, plus subsequent follow-up to check that instructions to use a mike have been taken to heart – as well as a check that their lectures are indeed comprehensible as well as audible.

Dr Dusty

I am of an age to have once been lectured to by a gentleman in a gown. I was exposed to only one such example, I hasten to add, by someone then already close to retirement. The dust – chalk dust- was obvious. For others the dust may be less visible or more metaphorical, but, many lecturers look as if they have been curled up in a corner for many years and are only let out on license for their annual lecturing duties. What they do the rest of the year may be a mystery (in Cambridge of course they can hang out in their college rooms, and may be assiduous in teaching generations of students there). Closely related is Dr Dry-as-Dust, old in character if not in chronological years, probably pernickety and dull, these characters do tend to take their lecturing duties seriously, indeed teaching may be their lifeblood (if not in a style attractive to many) and may be all they wish to do, not least because they aren’t interested in research and possess the leadership and administrative skills of a baby mouse.

Dr Absent-minded

Dr Absent-minded has a reputation for forgetting to turn up to lectures. One such I encountered myself encouraged me to come and find him if he didn’t show up, although that was something I found too embarrassing to contemplate. They may also turn up with the wrong lecture notes (a sin I myself once committed, although the class was amazingly tolerant) or forget to keep an eye on the clock and run over the stated time, despite the audible collective rumblings of the audience’s stomachs. They may be an irritating class of lecturers, but they can also be excellent value. Their failings are in their personal organisation not their teaching ability.

Dr Ultramodern

When the world was using blackboards, Dr Ultramodern had progressed to the overhead projector. As their colleagues caught on with this they were already contemplating the joys of Powerpoint (or should that be ‘joys’?). Dr Ultramodern is never satisfied with the current teaching tools and no doubt will now be dropping in Audioboos to enliven the lecture theatre, relevant or not, and eyeing Google Glasses with interest (will the teaching budget run to them?). That is the trouble: in an ever-changing technical landscape, this particularly lecturer is more interested in showing off the latest technology than mastering the actual content and delivering it with clarity, a failing that can become tedious for the audience.

Dr Famed-as-Charismatic

Word of mouth commentary amongst generations of students is ubiquitous, and a lecturer who starts off as wonderful – enthusiastic, accurate, charming and comprehensible – can notch up a stellar reputation. This can be unfortunate if they start to rest on their laurels, no longer sweating over their lectures to make them first class, but relying on their reputation and a wing and a prayer to get them through, year on year. This is of course particularly disastrous if the teaching admin are so mean as to give them a new course to prepare. What, they have to start from scratch, mug up some new jokes and prepare new slides? Their reputation may take a rapid nosedive after such an unfortunate turn of affairs.

Dr Careless

Dr Careless may have an excellent grasp of their subject, and be hard-working at getting a good course structure with illustrative examples and clear explanations. But where they go wrong is in all those irritating little details – in physics, minus signs incorrectly placed are a particular bugbear; I hated this sort of sloppiness as a student myself, but again I’m ashamed to say it is a sin of which I have not infrequently been guilty. In handouts or in slides these little errors regularly lurk, to the students’ frustration. They do not want (although it may be good discipline for them) to have to check through every equation to ensure that all subscripts are present and correct and factors of 2  or p – as well as those minus signs – have not gone AWOL.

Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here

This person believes they are too important to have to lecture, and they are going to make this manifest. They look down their noses at the scruffy audience they have to address, to convey the fact that they are Important Personages who are conferring a favour merely by turning up. Their style of lecturing is peremptory, unenthusiastic but probably efficient enough. But they are never going to convey a love of the subject to the lecture hall because their love is for themselves first and foremost, and they would vastly prefer to be furthering their ambitions by jet-setting around the world than by being chained to the lecture theatre dais.

Dr I’m-not-here

This one is the ultimate manifestation of Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here because they aren’t, in fact, ‘here’. The students turn up only to find that their lecturer has indeed got on that plane and vanished, without troubling to find a stand-in (let alone notifying the powers-that-be that they were heading off so that they could find a replacement themselves).  Their diary is too full of opportunities they deem more important to permit them to fulfil their lecturing responsibilities; their lack of a sense of duty is such that it never crosses their mind that their own self-importance should be subservient to their obligations to the student body. This one is a hard nut for a Head of Department to rein in, but vital that they should.

Posted in Education, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Trying to Get Away from It All

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’ve been away briefly this week, to an extremely cold and windy Suffolk coast.  Not the kind of break one comes back from tanned – other than with wind-burn – or with skiing fractures, but remembering there is a world beyond academia seems important to me, to help me put the world in a bit of perspective.  Nevertheless, it has to be said the weather was disgusting even by British seaside standards. Struggling against the wind, trying to make sure my deplorable woolly hat didn’t disappear into the far distance (the wind was off the sea, a fierce easterly, so at least the hat wasn’t going to get tossed into the sea), I was disappointed to find my mind still didn’t turn off from physics.

The sea was in a fury of white foam, layer upon layer of froth as the waves beat at the steep shingle bank we stood upon. The foam was also constantly blowing up and onto the beach and onto our clothes. Why was the foam so long-lived? Irritating to find myself trying to answer that question; I was NOT there to think about colloids! I do not believe the sea is now so jammed full of detergents (as sometimes one sees when a river gets frothy due to local pollution) that the foam is permanently stabilised by Fairy Liquid and its cousins. Whether the fury of the waves was sufficient, or whether there are saccharides or other molecules excreted by marine organisms contributing to a lowering of the surface tension, I don’t know. And to be honest, when on holiday, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

Waves is the subject I’ve been teaching to 400 eager (and not so eager) 1st years in Cambridge for the past few years; I’ve also taught it previously (in more advanced form) to second years, and I have therefore had professional occasion to consider the nature of water waves, and seek out examples of how they behave.  Shallow water waves and deep water waves have different dispersion relationships and hence behaviour, but I’m quite sure neither representation would have been adequate to describe the turbulent water that seethed at my feet.  When I first started lecturing this material some years ago now, I came across the idea (and traditional images) of a tsunami, without having any idea of what such a thing was. I thought it was some obscure Japanese folklore. Of course, since 2004 (and again in 2011), no one could possibly have any illusions about the importance of this phenomenon, even though it still doesn’t feature explicitly in my course.

There wasn’t a proper sandy beach, no shells or crabs, I saw only the remains of cuttlefish (calcium-rich aragonite, if you’re interested, and a useful and controllable buoyancy aid for the marine creature as long as it doesn’t go too deep, where apparently the gas-filled chambers of the bone implode under the pressure). The shore mainly consisted of shingle and marram grass, but there was sand a-plenty, much of it being blown into my mouth or smothering the esplanade: Lewis Carroll’s seven maids came to mind, although there was only a bulldozer which might have been attempting the same task. And where there was an accidental layer of sand covering, it had interesting ripples. Again my physicist’s mind went into annoying overdrive: what determined the periodicity of the ripples? No doubt, as with any similar instability, there is an optimum/fastest growing wavelength set by a balance of two factors, probably involving the distance the sandgrains have to migrate to build up the peaks and something to do with windspeed and how the peaks affect the local forces on the grains due to the wind. I reiterate, I was on holiday and I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS….I want to switch that part of my brain off. NB this means I’m not looking for a detailed analysis of the problem in any response.

Of course, battling the power of the wind could hardly fail to remind me of the possibility of wind as an alternative energy source, and towering over Kessingland where we were staying were two large wind turbines rotating at speed. The figure I had just read in the book (Project Sunshine) co-authored by my friend and long-term collaborator Tony Ryan flashed into my mind. This book, an impressive, sweeping overview of our energy problems past, present and of course future, claims the outermost tips of the blades whizz round at 200mph. Do they? I refused to try to check that mental calculation out; I wanted to head for the pub. There weren’t any offshore installations that I could see, despite what felt like a good opportunity to extract some energy from the ferocious wind, but I have been to this part of the coast when all is still and, as both Tony’s book and the earlier Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, by my Cavendish colleague David Mackay, now CSA at the Department of Energy and Climate Change make plain, storing energy from wind turbines and other sustainable energy sources is a major, unsolved challenge.

I had come to this part of the Suffolk coast with two aims. The first I had failed at badly; I hadn’t switched off from the day-job as well as I’d hoped, as the anecdotes above will make plain. My other aim had been to come to make my peace with this particular part of the sea. Some years ago I’d visited Southwold at a time of turbulence and upset in aspects of both my professional and personal life. Whereas, throughout my life, I have found watching agitated and tumbling water to be a powerful source of peace, grounding and wonder, on that occasion I had found it simply moved me to tears with no accrued benefit. It was almost as upsetting then to find that wave-watching no longer restored my spirits as to suffer from the underlying distress itself.

To return to the same part of the coast and feel, once more, the joy derived from the unceasing and unpredictable motion of inky, churned-up water, was the true benefit of the break. It was good too to remember just how far I have been able to recover from what had seemed to be an encounter with an unassailable brick wall. If that recovery hadn’t occurred I could never have started this blog; so this seems like a good moment to remind the reader of a truth I have discussed before, that no one, however outwardly successful, is unlikely not to have been kicked in the teeth on more than one occasion. Equally they will have found some mechanism to use that to their advantage, to find a way round the immovable object blocking the way or at least to bury the bad memories so that they no longer impede daily life.

This same stretch of coast, a bit further up near Great Yarmouth, was home to that Dickensian family of Peggotty who lived in a boat on the shore – I was reminded of this as we walked past over-wintering boats dragged high up on the shingle. As it happens, I’m just reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens. It is not irrelevant to the previous paragraph that he suffered in his youth, notably from his period in a blacking factory, and yet, as she puts it

‘What is most remarkable is the strength of the image he had of himself ,his belief in his own capacities and potential, justified by everything that came after, but quite uncertain then.’

Additionally, the vulnerability he felt in the factory found its way into many of the children he characterised in his novels and provided fertile experience for him. However, few of us are likely to have quite that degree of self-belief and robustness Tomalin attributes to Dickens, particularly as at the time under consideration he was around 13 years of age. Nevertheless, it is healthy to remember that today’s catastrophe can (although it most certainly won’t necessarily do so) blend seamlessly into much more happy circumstances, with the accompanying wisdom of experience and accrued toughness. A small nugget to try to hold onto if your world appears to be crashing down around your ears.

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Learning the Foreign Language of Twitter

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Athene Donald

Any time I go to Europe, as this week, I come back ashamed of my lack of linguistic skills. This time I struggled through a brief conversation in French with a Brussels taxi driver trying to talk about the impact of the snow on Eurostar, my sentences larded with ghastly grammar, incorrect syntax and the odd English word. Goodness knows what he made of it. I then went to the European Commission where everyone from the security guards at the door to the secretariat I encountered at the top of the building seemed to speak faultless English. In the case of the former, it didn’t alter the fact that they wouldn’t let me into the building as no one had given me my correct badge, but they could at least explain fluently why I couldn’t get in until someone came to vouch for me.

I realise the ‘language’ I have been trying to learn most recently has, however, been Twitter. It is of course not just the words but the syntax, conventions and abbreviations. Some of these have come from texting I suspect, and personally I have never mastered the art of emoticon symbolisation. But my tweets can cope without a smiley (or any other kind of face), so I’m not troubled by this. But there are stylistic conventions I have quite consciously set out to learn and others where I remain  uncertain.

Dorothy Bishop has written a helpful introduction to Twitter and if you aren’t familiar with the medium at all you could go there for wise words which I won’t attempt to recapitulate. I have also written an explanation of why I think tweeting is helpful for academics and other professionals to enable them to access articles, commentaries and so on they might otherwise miss, in a very efficient way (albeit that article was written with a specific emphasis on women in science, the arguments hold equally true in other spheres).  I don’t want to cover that ground at all here. What interests me is how one ‘learns’ how to use the medium. It does seem to me the parallels with learning a language are very close.

I spent some time reading other people’s tweets before I got myself an account and started tweeting, so I had to learn how to recognize twitterhandles (@), shortened links and hashtags (#). The latter still seem slightly mysterious to me because you seem able to make up your own whenever you want. I think. Sometimes you suddenly see a whole string of tweets with some particular hashtag which takes off. #overlyhonestmethods seemed to be a particularly successful and entertaining hashtag(see here where the stream seems still to be going strong many weeks after its creation and a write-up here), with brief descriptions of what isn’t put in scientific methods.  People can be very creative given the right nudge. Twitterhandles are easy because they are essentially just like one’s email address, but knowing how to shorten links so that a web address fits into the 140 character limit is something that required 5 minutes homework on my part, noting how many of these started bit.ly and simply Googling that. (These days Twitter does the abbreviation all by itself, if you want to leave it to it).

But it is the customs and shorthand that take rather longer to get to grips with. The abbreviations such as RT (retweet), MT (modified tweet) and HT (heard through) seem simple enough, but the tricky question of when is a RT really a MT seems on a par with how long is a piece of string. If I modify someone’s tweet to fit it into 140 characters should I label it with an RT or MT – and does it matter? It seems to me that people behave differently but I’m not sure that, whatever one does, it can amount to a serious breach of etiquette. I try to indicate where I heard something from using HT, but sometimes that gets squeezed out by the character limit (particularly if a twitterhandle is long). I regret sometimes being sloppy in this way but I won’t lose sleep over it. The trouble is, I have reached my conclusions on these points simply by trying to read between the lines, as it were, of what other people tweet. Maybe my tweetguistic skills are as good as my French and I’m actually quite out of line – but I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

There are other kinds of courtesy that I’m unsure about. Suppose someone’s #ff’d me (which turns out to stand for Follow Friday and its message is ‘I like this person so why don’t you follow them too’ and is tweeted by some people on – you guessed – a Friday, usually at least) do you thank them for the thought or take it in your stride and ignore it? I tend to thank them, although when someone did this about me for a significant number of Fridays in a row I stopped. Once was enough (by them and hence by me) in my book.

If someone retweets me (sorry, RTs me), I feel pleased that I’ve said something significant enough for someone else to want to pass it on, but I’m hardly going to send them a vote of thanks. But if they’ve retweeted my tweet linking to a recent post of mine – or even more if they’ve actually said some nice words about a particular blog I’ve written – then I try to say thank you because it means a lot to me. Sometimes, though, this becomes impossible simply because I can’t keep an eye on the twitter feed closely enough to spot the RTs – and once or twice just because the numbers of RTs were so numerous it was simply unfeasible to thank everyone, chuffed though I was (which was the case with the impostor syndrome  post of mine). I am conscious of the fact that several tweets in quick succession thanking a number of people for their RTs make for very boring reading for other readers, so apologies to you!

There is one aspect of Twitter which a lot of people seem to have failed to decode, demonstrating a real linguistic failure to pick up a basic rule of operation. This concerns in essence a confusion between replies and retweets. If you want to reply to someone the tweet will begin @joannabloggs,  followed by the message you want to send them. However if you want to reinforce a message that @joannabloggs has already tweeted, you may want to stress that this is something she has said. In speech you might well say ‘Joanna Bloggs makes a good point…’, on Twitter if you begin with @joannabloggs then only she will receive the message (plus those who follow you both). I frequently see this syntax going astray; the correct thing to do is to begin with some other character rather than the @ sign. People use a  . or sometimes “ (as in . @joannabloggs or “ @joannabloggs ), although I think any character would do. Again that is only ‘ I think’; I may be wrong. I find myself feeling slightly disappointed when I spot people who obviously wanted to pass on that they’d liked something I’d written but who only manage to say so to me!

This is clearly exactly the sort of thing when concentrating on your ‘language’ and looking at what other people are doing, should enable you to pick up the correct syntax just as with learning a foreign language as a child. The difference is that there is no parent to correct your mistakes and I don’t think total immersion in Twitter – as in being sent on an Erasmus year abroad or, the old-fashioned female way, of becoming an au pair – would be a desirable way to spend one’s time. So syntactical errors continue and we each develop our own modus twittendi , to coin a (bad foreign) phrase.

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Fixing the Numbers (well maybe)

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Athene Donald

This week I read that the Labour party was attempting to redress the lack of women candidates by using all-women shortlists, as women aren’t faring well in open competition to get selected as Parliamentary candidates. In Europe, meanwhile, we see the European Commission (EC) pushing for 40% of women on its advisory committees for Horizon 2020 (presumably once that problematical budget is agreed), so far only as a target not a formal quota. Is this sort of ‘social engineering’ the only way we are finally going to make significant progress in a reasonable time period? And if so, will there be unintended consequences? I am afraid I believe that the answer to the second question is yes, even if it isn’t obvious what the answer is to the first question; this isn’t necessarily very good news for men or women.

I wrote before about my mixed views about quotas and the like; that post was actually provoked by a conversation with an EC official. Now I find myself writing this in Brussels, as a new member of the European Resarch Council’s (ERC) Scientific Council. Gender matters greatly to the ERC, which has been gathering statistics on relative success rates of men and women to its various schemes since its inception in 2007. But, as my fellow Council member Isabelle Vernos said in her Comment piece in Nature recently (£),

‘quotas might even make matters worse by overworking already-stretched female scientists.’ 

I agree wholeheartedly and one has to look carefully at what using more women on their committees might actually be expected to achieve, beyond sounding impressive.

The recent and much-cited PNAS paper by Moss-Racusin et al demonstrates that populating a committee with more women is not necessarily going to lead to more favourable outcomes for women applicants. The evidence from the ERC’s own statistics support that: there appears to be no correlation between the number of women on a committee (or whether the chair is male or female) and the success rate by women. That finding is healthy and as it should be. Women academics are thin on the ground, representing less than 20% of the professoriat globally across Europe, although that figure obviously varies significantly both between nations and disciplines. These women are likely to be already overworked (or at least worked disproportionately) locally on committees, distracted from pursuing their research in ways that might facilitate winning ERC funding themselves. So asking them to devote yet more time to sit on grant-giving committees, isn’t necessarily the best way to achieve better gender balance in success rates, however important, rewarding and stimulating such a task may be and however much there may be concomitant indirect benefits in experience gained and networking opportunities. Superficially seeking out women to sit on such committees looks attractive; in practice it may be a completely misguided and wasted effort.

That last paragraph encapsulates a depressing truth: statistically women are somewhat less successful in obtaining ERC grants than men, as Isabelle Vernos’ article pointed out. The ERC is not unusual in that respect: I wonder if there is any grant competition across Europe where that isn’t true. If it can’t be solved by a simple manipulation of committee make-up, what can be done (I refuse to accept the naïve argument that women are less good at science!)? I suspect the answer may lie in tackling deep-seated cultural issues. Just as men have traditionally been able to rely on (male) support systems to help them navigate their way through job opportunities, career progression and promotions, so I suspect this sort of networking may also have provided them with access to mentors and peers who can comment on early drafts of grant applications and share insight and tips from their own experiences. Do women automatically get this sort of support without asking? And if not how many of them feel comfortable asking for such advice? Possibly if this mentoring were provided as a norm throughout their careers, women would imbibe the tricks of the trade that help to transform a decent proposal into a stellar one.

One strategy my own department has recently introduced is to offer mock interviews for applicants for ERC Starter Grants who reach that stage. Automatically this is being offered to men and women, with senior staff making up the mock panel. It’s too early to say if this will make a difference but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. However, that is already fairly late in the process, when many individuals will already have failed to make the cut – I am suggesting that perhaps women are being disadvantaged by a lack of mentoring as they actually write the proposal in the first place. There are figures to show that some states in the EU are also under-represented, and the concern about them is that lack of expertise in these countries means applicants aren’t getting the insight and advice they need from their seniors to enable them to enter the process as effectively as, say, those from my own country which has been extremely successful in obtaining funding from the ERC (even if many of the successful applicants are not UK nationals). I can’t help feeling that the same may apply to women.

If this is true, then we should not be blindly moving to some quota of women on committees in a vain attempt to redress the imbalance. We should, in our own institutions be mentoring women as they set out and at every stage along the way. If women are reluctant to ask for help as they put an application together, we should make sure the help comes their way whether they actively seek it or not (or conversely creating an atmosphere in which asking for help comes more naturally to them).  Maybe some of the women who do make the grade of winning an ERC grant will willingly join a future panel for the experience and sense of returning something to the system. But if we insist that the few women who do succeed must disproportionately give up their time to fulfil an EC ambition of 40% female membership we will be doing them (and the ERC) a disservice in preventing them from benefitting from the money invested in them.  In my earlier blog when I wrote about quotas I had mixed feelings. In this particular instance I feel quite clear in my own mind that the plans are likely to backfire on the very people that they are meant to help.

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