The Dangers of Brilliance

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Athene Donald

As the detailed criteria of REF2029 are being worked through, the issue over the research culture part remains unclear. There are those who think research culture is an irrelevance in the pursuit of excellence, that it is a touchy-feely kind of thing, that woke stuff the last Government didn’t like, and who believe it is obvious what excellence is. This, I believe, is a profound mistake. We need all hands to the pump, as it were, in solving the many global challenges we face, from climate change to the dangers of AI, from (un)healthy ageing to food security. If we assume that the only way to succeed is to continue on the same trajectory we have been, at least throughout my lifetime, we are limiting ourselves. An academic world where success is determined by funding pulled in or space occupied, or even (although less true now than it once was ) the citation index of where you’ve published or the sheer weight of – figurative – paperwork you have produced, then we will never change or become a truly inclusive academic world. Yet the evidence shows diversity matters, and hence replacing like with like in the academic pyramid is short-sighted. Although the business world may slowly be waking up to the benefits to the bottom line of a diverse board or employee base, academia continues to have pockets of resistance. PNAS may publish a paper spelling out that

‘underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty.’

Yet this same paper depressingly goes on to say

‘However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted….are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities…equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups’

In Physics (as in maths, computing or engineering, but less so in chemistry or the life sciences) there is a great imbalance of the sexes all the way through the system and almost universally around the world. Increasingly, researchers are exploring the belief that you have to be brilliant to be a physicist; and also the belief that brilliance is something that boys (males) have more of than girls (females), a belief that seems to set in really young. Or, as the title of a relatively recent paper puts it “You need to be super smart to do well in math!”, based on studying children in (US) grades 1-4, roughly five to nine year olds. What messages are we giving our children so early on that leads to this belief?

Any physicist, male or female, is likely to have been greeted at some social occasion, when having disclosed their profession with ‘oh you must be so clever/I never could do maths at school’ or some variant of those phrases. It’s boring and embarrassing and I have always felt wide of the mark. I couldn’t do biology at school, my French pronunciation was atrocious and geography left me cold. I admired people who could speak fluent French and easily took on board concepts of frog development or the principal exports of Marseilles (a topic that seemed to take an inordinate amount of time in my geography lessons). It never crossed my mind that I was ‘smarter’ because my abilities lay elsewhere. Yet, apparently, on average, that’s how children and adults alike seem to think.

And this is unhealthy and unhelpful, and it feeds into a research culture many years later that is also unhealthy and unhelpful. It means we have an academy that is weighted in favour of those allegedly (more) brilliant male physicists and, as another recent paper put it, a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment in Physics departments.  They complain that

‘An emphasis on brilliance is harmful because assumptions about who has it are gendered and racialized: when we think of a brilliant person, we tend to think of men and white individuals, not women or people of colour’

And furthermore that this dog-eat-dog competitive culture arises because

‘brilliance is inherently comparative and hierarchical, so the more brilliant one person is perceived to be, the less others are.’

Interventions to alter our children’s attitudes towards the stereotyping of brilliance as a white male trait need to start early in our primary schools. These may be beyond the arena in which the typical academic is likely to get involved (I believe teacher training has a key role to play here, but children learn about cultural attitudes from far beyond the classroom.) Interventions to what and how we value being smart, at the expense of being supportive, generous, willing to do outreach and pastoral care as well as taking on a fair share of ‘departmental housework’ would all make for a better research environment and will be driven by attitudes around recruitment and promotion and, inevitably, REF2029. What incentives do we need to change the mindset we collectively currently inhabit and how can we avoid the perverse incentives that years of thinking about ‘excellence’ as a one-dimensional and easily recognizable criterion too often deliver?

Of course, it isn’t just Physics that has this ‘brilliance’ tag attached to it. In other areas, both Philosophy and Economics tend to get labelled this way too. These are also hugely male-dominated in unhealthy ways. In Philosophy a paper from last year stated that ‘people who identify as women internalize a gender stereotype and perceive themselves as less brilliant, but also share with others (i.e., men) the stereotypes of philosophy as for people who have brilliance and psychology as for people who do not have brilliance.’ The consequence, as they saw it, was that women were more likely to opt for Psychology as a discipline, where brilliance does not factor in in the same way and which ends up having a substantial female majority. As for Economics, my College colleague Diane Coyle has identified this major problem of gendering, both in her book Cogs and Monsters and in an article in the FT (so I hope many economists have read about the issue in one or other place). She highlights one version of the unfortunate ambience of what we value in the seminar room, stating

‘economics seminars are hostile occasions for point-scoring and aggressive challenge’

and in Economics journals where she says

‘Peer review rewards peers, and they are mainly men.’

So, how do we as a society, change our attitudes towards brilliance so that children do not believe that males are more brilliant than females which, in turn, could lead to both a more pleasant work culture and a more equitable gender split across the board? If anyone has any good answers….do let the world know.

 

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Climate Change and Seneca Falls

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Athene Donald

Those of you familiar with American women’s call for the vote will recognize the name Seneca Falls. It is situated in picturesque upstate New York, near the top of Lake Cayuga, at the bottom of which sit Ithaca and Cornell University. Its main claim to fame is as the site of the first female convention ‘to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman’ in 1848, well before Cornell (itself an early beacon for female education) was founded. The Seneca Falls Convention was largely initiated by Quakers in this corner of the state, and took place a year after the New York State Assembly had passed a married woman’s property act (40 years before the UK got its act together to allow married women to hold property in their own name once they got married). Although its immediate impact may have been small, it stands as a landmark in the history of women’s suffrage.

One of the attendees and signatories to the Declaration of Sentiments that was the convention’s output, was a woman in her late 20’s who had moved to the town from New York City where she had grown up upon her marriage to an attorney; hre name was Eunice Foote. Although not one of the instigators of the two-day meeting, she was one of the editors of the proceedings. However, it is not the history of the vote or women’s rights I want to discuss here, but some science. Because, although her name is not one I was familiar with a few weeks ago, she does have a real claim to fame, albeit as an amateur scientist – the amateur-ness being inevitable for a woman of her day.

To change tack briefly, one of the perks of having (previously) been Master of a Cambridge College is that occasionally an alumnus/a would present me with a copy of their book. In this way I acquired a somewhat random collection of perhaps ten books which, not least because of their randomness, were (and are) a pleasure to read. One such book was given to me by Peter Stott, a climate scientist from the Met Office who has led various parts of the work of the IPCC. His book, Hot  Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change, is a somewhat terrifying read of his experiences attending and presenting his work on climate change over the last 25 years at different fora, in the face of hostility, disbelief and outright contradiction. Early on he sets the scientific scene for what the Greenhouse Effect is and why human actions have led to such dire consequences for us all. And here I read about Eunice Foote for the first time.

The early recognition of the power of carbon dioxide to trap heat is usually attributed to the work of John Tyndall, dating back to 1859 (when he showed how carbon dioxide interacted with infrared radiation) and 1861 when he discussed the potential consequence of this. However, in 1857 Foote had already published a paper (“Circumstances affecting the heat of the Sun’s rays ” in the American Journal of Science), notable for demonstrating the absorption of heat by CO2 and water vapor and hypothesizing that changing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate. She was not able, or was unaware of, the role of infrared radiation. But she explicitly said

‘An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature… must have necessarily resulted’.

The paper had been read to the American Association in 1856 by (a man of course) another scientist from New York State, Joseph Henry of self-inductance fame. She had very limited resources with which to do these experiments – I assume she was someone, like Hertha Ayrton later, who carried out her work in the kitchen – but she did get this paper into print. I’m not sure this is precisely a case of the Matilda Effect, since Tyndall’s work was more rigorous and a better platform on which to build an idea of climate change because it understood the role of infrared radiation and reflectance, but nevertheless Foote identified the challenge and recognized the implications. Whether Tyndall was aware of the work or not, he certainly didn’t cite it in his own papers.

At the time of her work (as of course continues to this day), people were discussing whether women were capable of doing science. It does seem that the US was well ahead of England at that time, because at least the schooling Foote had received (at Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School) had allowed her to study and gain a broad education in scientific theory and practice, before girls had been able to enter serious academic schools at all in England. Queen’s College in London was the first such, and it was only founded in 1848. The work of ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale’ opening up schools (such as Cheltenham Ladies College, North London Collegiate School and my own school, Camden School) where subjects such as science could be taught to young women, really only got going a decade later.

I find it interested that what is still a small rural part of New York State produced, not only the seminal women’s convention, but a seminal piece of science too. Foote’s name is one I must add to my own mental list of ‘women who did early science which then got overlooked’.

 

 

 

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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wisdom

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Athene Donald

I came to Mary Wollstonecraft late, as it were, not even having come across her name until relatively recently. Perhaps that is a shameful admission, but I think she has become much more visible of late, not least due to a variety of interesting books. For me, my first introduction was via Clare Tomalin’s biography (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft), via Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (covering the lives both of Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley), through the relevant parts of Richard Holmes’ Sidetracks and just now concluding with Bee Rowlatt’s In Search of Mary.

This last is less a biography of Wollstonecraft, more an exploration of how her intentions and views back then might translate into the 21st century. Some of what was radical at the time (for instance, calling on a man without a chaperone) hasn’t stood the test of time as revolutionary, but other aspects of her life and her clarion call for equality are still highly relevant and as important as ever. How does one make a better society? Well, we’d all like the answer to that one and the answer is as elusive as ever. One central part of the answer Rowlatt comes up with, having talked to what felt at times during reading like a random selection of people ranging from witches to librarians, with many stops in between, is to ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’.

I’m sure readers of my blog all want to do their bit about making the world a better place, but it can feel an impossible challenge. Furthermore, it can also feel – to my mind at least – as if the bit one does do doesn’t compare with what your neighbour is doing (assuming you have a nice neighbour). By this I mean it’s all too easy to feel that you’re not doing enough because someone you know is doing more/bigger/better things/ in wider spheres, and you just feel inadequate. It’s important to remember, and I will do my best to do so when feeling low and as if I’m no longer (as a retired professor) making enough of a contribution, that all one can do is ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’. In other words, however many challenges or problems you know surround you, you can only do so much but doing that – whatever it may be – is still worth doing.

People ask me regularly what my post-retirement plans are. As yet, I don’t know the full answer, although pieces of the jigsaw may be coming together. Those who follow me on social media will know that I’ve recently been appointed as Chair of the Department for Education’s Science Advisory Council. The Council hasn’t met yet, so I can’t give away any secrets about what we’re going to be doing, but I’m sure bringing a more explicit science grouping within the ambit of DfE can only be a good thing. I thoroughly enjoyed my earlier stint as chair of the equivalent council for DCMS, where the challenge of bringing a diverse group of experts together to make progress on pressing problems I found intensely interesting and also satisfying. Now I’m no longer Master of a college, I can admit that I find such committees more appealing than those, however vital, more concerned with formal governance, of which I have chaired many over the past decade.

In the spirit of the earlier paragraphs, though, I will say that I was very touched by the colleague who responded to my tweet about taking on this role by saying ‘You never stop serving, never stop inspiring!’. I didn’t take up the role either to serve or inspire in any conscious way. I just felt this was a job that was worth doing and that I thought I had the experience to be good at. Sometimes one does things from a sense of duty, and sometimes for personal satisfaction. It is excellent when those two coincide.

I am surprised to find my diary getting quite full with different small tasks, conversations or visits. Not really roles as such, but actions that feel as if they might make a difference to someone or something and also keep my brain in gear. It is nice to feel I have time to read interesting reports that appear, it feels, on a daily basis, about education, skills or innovation (all of which come together in the recently published Industrial Strategy Green Paper, even if I feel that coming together and coherence isn’t always obvious in that document, which highlights skills early on, and then says little about them thereafter). But there is also still a lot of work to do settling into our newly refurbished house and I need to leave time for such domesticity. For the last ten years we’ve been spoiled by living in the equivalent of a ‘tied cottage’, with the College taking responsibility for the usual tedious issues of leaks or hot water systems failing. Now it’s down to us.

There is much to consider in this rebalancing of my life, but I need to hold on to that zest for living that Wollstonecraft showed during her sadly short life, and remember that each of us can only do so much to make the world a better place.

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Can One Simplify the REF?

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Athene Donald

The REF is much in the news, with some feathers ruffled by UK Day One’s proposal to simplify the whole process, as detailed in their report Replacing the Research Excellence Framework. I am sure there are academics and administrators up and down the land who would welcome simplification, but not at any cost, metaphorical or otherwise. Ben Johnson, former Government advisor, has written enthusiastically about UK Day One’s plans but, as James Wilsdon has spelled out, simply relying on the totality of funds earned to drive the distribution of Government funding has all kinds of issues underlying it.

Indeed, Wilsdon was the lead author of the important report The Metric Tide (2015), which considered how the REF could be scrapped, something Prime Minister Gordon Brown had wanted back in 2006, and a simple ‘basket of metrics’ used in its place. This would have simplified things, although I suspect metrics beyond the single figure of already awarded grant income was always envisaged back then, but the response of the sector at the time was deeply negative. Metrics, one or many, remove any opportunity of nuance due to circumstances at any level from the individual to the institutional. The Metric Tide spelled this out in great detail. (It won’t surprise anyone that one of the objections I personally would raise is the obvious statistic about how diversity would be negatively impacted, as was made clear by Wilsdon and co-authors.)

When I chaired the REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel, early in the cycle for the 2021 exercise, we were asked to consider whether any of a number of metrics could possibly be helpful in assessing work that crossed boundaries. We went through the list provided one by one and unanimously concluded that no, none of them was likely to be a fit measure. And so none was used.

It is tempting to think that using someone else’s decision about what is ‘excellent’, as would be the case if funding were the sole criterion, would be a sensible choice. However, in practice it simply amounts to outsourcing a decision to other, non-calibrated bodies. Even if one stuck with UKRI funding and assumed that all successful UKRI grants were equally excellent, I fear the evidence would not support that quantification. Let me explain why, directly from my own experience.

Back in the ‘olden days’, before UKRI or even BBSRSC was a thing, I sat on a panel of one of BBSRC’s predecessors, the AFRC (the Agriculture and Food Research Council). At that time grant-holders had to write a final report saying what they had achieved with the money they had been given, and we had to assess them. ‘We’ in this case being the same people (since these were standing committees, which met at regular intervals) as had judged the grant good for funding in the first place. It was dismal to see how many grants we must have raved about three or more years previously were then graded poorly once we read the final reports. Now, of course some failures are to be expected if exciting but risky stuff is to be supported, but too often the outcomes just seemed boring, incremental or non-existent. It made for sobering reflections, as we tried to work out why we got things so wrong.

Some of this may have been hype in the original proposal, promising the moon and we were too naïve to see through this. Some of it would undoubtedly have been due to circumstances beyond their control. I can well remember a (BBSRC) grant of mine which got precisely nowhere, largely because the amount of time the central instrument was functioning properly was so limited. We – by which I of course mean the poor postdoc – did our best, and they didn’t waste their time as they tried to work out where the problems lay when the manufacturers weren’t particularly helpful. But, as far as I recall, we only managed to write one paper and that not of a very high quality. These things happen. But too often, reading the final reports it just felt as if the grant-holders had either lost interest or been buried in other tasks so as to be unable to drive the specific research programme with adequate attention. (I may say I don’t believe our assessments made any difference to anything, although obviously in principle bad final reports could have been used to blackball a particular researcher for some time.)

That is clearly a single data point, but highlights with the best will in the world panels making judgements will sometimes get it wrong. The process is inevitably flawed and to allow further money to flow based on it would just exacerbate inequalities. It really is surely better to judge outputs, and judge them with a human eye. However, beyond that rather major problem, it is worth thinking about unintended consequences if this metric replaced the REF. If grant income is what matters, then more people will be writing more grants, and will feel themselves under pressure to write more grants. More panel members will need to be found. More personnel at the funders to administer the proposals and more administrators in the universities to do the costings… and so it goes on. The costs labelled ‘REF may disappear, the bureaucracy that we all recognize now may disappear, but it will turn up elsewhere to service this different ‘simplified’ approach. That really isn’t a solution.

But there is another fundamental problem that even the ongoing REF is still wrestling with. What price excellence for the people working on grants? Just as professors will feel themselves under more pressure to write more grants, once they have been awarded one that pressure will likely get transferred to the researchers on the grant to produce results at speed to make it easier to obtain further funding. There will be more emphasis on more papers, more hours at the bench, more competition to get that Nature paper out swiftly, and less room for work-life balance, compassion and support as people try to find their way through the academic maze. The research culture element is still being argued over, but as a community we should not allow excellence to be interpreted only with regard to outputs and not take people into account. I fear a funding metric would be intensely detrimental to our lab culture, just when people are beginning to take it seriously. We do not need another generation looking just like the present generation, learning how to compete, bully or fail to bring out the best in their teams. It really is a depressing thought.

There may well be a better way of analysing research excellence, but relying on a crude single number is not likely to be it.

 

 

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The Path Not Taken

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Athene Donald

One of the last tasks I did as Master of Churchill College, was to partake in an afternoon’s event as part of their alumni weekend, badged as ‘Arts meet Science’. The first, and more substantial part, consisted of various pieces of music, mainly new – or at least newly configured. It had a strong emphasis on women, not least due to the involvement of the Marsyas Trio, who have an ongoing association with the College and who contributed to several of the works. The trio are not only women themselves, but are champions of music by women that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, as their repertoire makes clear. In this particular concert they showcased a piece by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, her Overture in C, which had been arranged for them by a previous Director of Music at the College, Mark Gotham. Hensel was so much more than Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, however much she was stuck in his shadow throughout their short lives, and restricted in what she could do by societal and familial pressures. (If you want to know more about her, I would recommend Anna Beer’s Sounds and Sweet Airs, telling the story of several largely forgotten but impressive women composers.) Mark Gotham, it should be said, exactly exemplifies the ‘arts meets science’ label, as he is now a member of the Cambridge Computer Science Department, having previously been a Professor of Music Theory in Germany.

It would have been possible to make the connection between this musical section and my own talk, in which I briefly discussed my recent book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), by stressing the issues facing women, past and present. Instead, the current Director of Music, Ewan Campbell decided to emphasise the fact that once upon a time I had played the viola. A long time ago! Music was incredibly important to me as a teenager (you can hear more of my experiences by listening to a rather old Desert Island Discs).

It was a respite from a heavy A Level load and a place where friendships formed based on what we were doing together in choir and orchestra. But it was not something I wanted to pursue as a career, despite the urgings of my teacher. I knew I was ‘in demand’ as a viola player, because they are typically in short supply; I knew as a consequence, I got to play with some wonderful musicians who did proceed to professional careers. To play the Schubert String Quintet with four individuals, all of whom made music their lives was a fantastic experience. I was not in their league. When my viola teacher wanted to persuade me to study at one of the London colleges I could immediately see it would amount to a life simply of being a peripatetic teacher, like her, and it did not appeal. Cambridge and Physics beckoned and I never regretted that.

However, the reality is that many teenagers are totally perplexed by what they ‘should’ do. Should, in the sense of a parent or teacher pushing them in a direction they may or may not be comfortable with. Or ‘should’ in the sense that they know little about career choices but someone once mentioned to them that career X is a safe, or interesting, or financially-rewarding career, and therefore they think that must be the right choice, regardless of their interests. England is unusual in forcing teenagers to make choices at an early age, when they know little about themselves, little about the world beyond school and are also very susceptible to peer pressure, which may be ill-informed if not actually ill-intentioned. So, we have a system where too many people make choices that aren’t right for them and/or are not wise.

I believe this early decision making strongly influences girls to steer clear of subjects like Physics, which means our workforce is less diverse than it should be. However, it is dismaying that often schools are unable to provide adequate career advice, due to a lack of resources. Too often A Level choices are not made wisely for a particular career path. A common problem is the belief that taking a single science A Level so as to keep one’s options broad will prove adequate to study some science at university. Usually this isn’t so. Nevertheless, as the Royal Society has been recommending for years, a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum is really important for the 21st century, so that teenagers don’t get forced down narrow paths that then equip them poorly for the world of work later on. To make this work would require many substantial changes in the educational system.

For those for whom university may not be the right choice, navigating the complex system that provides other qualifications, including apprenticeships, can prove to be an impossibly confusing challenge. The funding and qualification landscape is currently tricky to understand and traverse. It is to be hoped that the creation of Skills England will resolve some of these issues regarding tertiary education, and that the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review will consider how best to prepare students for their lives. There is a long way to go.

I feel fortunate, not that I had good careers’ advice – I didn’t get any at all, back in the day – but that I wasn’t confused as to what choices to make. I always knew what I wanted to do (although I would have liked to do German A Level too, but the timetable made that impossible). Many children are less clear in their aspirations, or steered in unhelpful directions that don’t bring out the best in them. For every child there are many possibilities, but at each stage doors tend to close, narrowing options. We may not have a Labour Government that talks in terms of ‘Education, education, education’, as Tony Blair did in the run up to the 1997 election. But we do have a government that is giving skills a higher priority that has been the case in the recent past and, with its mission of breaking down barriers to opportunity, it intends to start with the earliest years of a child’s life.

Each of us are constantly faced with forks in the road, even if we’ve gone a long way down one track before even noticing the decision that was silently made at that fork. I don’t regret not becoming a peripatetic viola teacher but far too many adults will look back at decisions taken by or for them that forced them in a direction that, with hindsight, was a mistake. It is to be hoped that with renewed focus on early years, schools and adult (re)upskilling there will be fewer adults who take a mistaken fork and end up somewhere they wish they’d never got to.

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