Fear of the Illogical

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’m on my way to Newcastle to talk to their Women’s Network about confidence, and it’s made me think a lot more about the phrase ‘Feel the Fear and Do it Anyhow’ – the title of a book I must admit I’ve never read. It’s a catchy phrase that probably should be borne in mind by anyone being made, or encouraged to do, something that takes them out of their comfort zone. Fear is a strange thing, because it most certainly isn’t always rational. Why is it that I am quite happy giving talks but, as I’ve admitted before, hate asking questions after someone else’s talk? Why is it that the things that worry me aren’t necessarily by any means the things that might end up having the most disastrous consequences? It is worth trying to unpick one’s fears to see whether they are concrete and valid enough actually to be worth wasting one’s adrenalin on.

As a teenager with a penchant for ornithology, I used to go down to the south coast and wander round Poole Harbour’s shores through the stubby heather and gorse. Usually it was at this time of year when it was perishing cold and windy, but that was when the bird-watching was most satisfactory in the Harbour and out to sea. Occasionally we would stray down there during the Easter holidays, when the sun might shine and the ground was warmed up. Then I would get nervous. Why? Because it was well known that the heaths were inhabited by adders and the spring warmth might just be going to tempt them out to cross my path as I scanned the gorse looking for an elusive Dartford Warbler. I was constantly vigilant.

It was only many years later that I realised that what I was really frightened of was, not the snake minding its own business on a bare rock, but the hordes of snakes that – sub-consciously – I thought would make a beeline for me if they were within a mile or so. I realised that my fear really stemmed from the fact that I imagined I acted as some great attractor for snakes, a magnet pulling in their nasty little bodies from large distances just so they could spoil my day. Bizarrely, now all these years later I can’t remember if I ever really did see one there (I certainly did in the New Forest on several occasions), but I can remember that Eureka moment when I discovered just how illogical my fear had been.  Not liking snakes is one thing, imagining that they will actively bestir themselves to seek me out is quite another.

So, I suspect many of our fears (although by no means all) may have an illogical hint to them and we should try to tease this out, so that we can save our energy for the genuine problems we have to face. Giving a talk is scary, no doubt about it, and often talking in front of one’s own group feels even worse than talking in front of a bunch of strangers – but why? One’s friends and peers are probably aware of the fact that it may be their turn next; this may make them comparatively gentle, their criticism may be painful but constructive, whereas strangers have much less to lose by being challenging or nasty.

What about applying for promotion, something I have discussed before that women seem to be particularly nervous about doing? If you apply and fail, will other people start pointing their finger at you and laughing? Almost certainly not. Will they think the less of you for having the temerity to apply? It seems unlikely, particularly since most of them either already have applied (successfully or not) or are working out how soon they would themselves be a plausible candidate. So, what is it you fear except your own self-judgement – and why should this be harsher than other people’s assessment?

We can be our own worst enemies. Being reticent when it comes to volunteering for some major, visible role may sometimes be wise. It may be that success rather than failure is what frightens you because the task itself might be unpleasant, in which case the decision is easy. But, imagining yourself progressing along the career ladder by accepting an invitation to give a major talk, deciding to apply for that fellowship or promotion or agreeing to serve on a significant committee and then quaking in your boots and hiding your head in the sand is probably only self-defeating. Taking your fear out and inspecting it for logic is useful. And if, such progression still seems a bridge too far for your own levels of confidence, maybe you can identify some small step you can take that will be beneficial and allow you to test your powers in more modest ways.

So feel the fear and do it anyhow is not a bad mantra, even if sometimes to be taken with a pinch of salt.  If some particular step seems too large, can it be broken down into manageable smaller steps which seem less daunting? Applying for promotion without encouragement may feel intimidating, but why not ask a senior, trusted colleague or friend to cast their eye over your CV?  They may reassure you the time is ripe or they may say wait a-while, but either way you have some input to add to your own anxious thoughts. If they’re really helpful they may say your CV is potentially strong enough but could be rewritten to improve it – this, after all, is exactly why Cambridge now runs a CV-mentoring scheme so that women can formally request an experienced mentor to provide objective advice as to whether or not an individual is well-placed to apply for promotion. The same applies to those considering applying for a fellowship (although then an outsider reading through the scientific case would obviously also be advantageous). Many people may naturally receive support and encouragement from those around, but not everyone is so fortunate. Plucking up courage to ask for help may be the little step that is all it takes to make the difference. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: many (although indubitably not all, so picking wisely may be crucial) senior academics are only too happy to help, time permitting. Most will not like to offer such help cold if they have no formal responsibilities to do so, in case it looks patronising.

So, as I put the final touches to my presentation on ‘Building Self-Confidence’, I am reminded that fear can be pernicious and misplaced. Simply acting it out and holding back because it feels so large and scary, rather than finding a way round or through a problem, can cause its own stresses and pains. From time to time it is wise to inspect that fear-sized hole in your life and see if it can be plugged.

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Let’s Get Stereotypes out of Science Education

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Athene Donald

Women are from Venus, like making cupcakes, like bright colours – particularly pink – and need to be told at frequent intervals that ‘math is meant to be hard’. That seems to be the verdict you could cull from many pop-psychology articles, with that last helpful piece of advice about math(s) to be found in a recent article in this genre on the Guardian’s US News blog. It purported to be advising parents about how to help their daughters enjoy science. Unsurprisingly, an article that advised cooking and doing jigsaws (even ‘when the girls had lost interest in them‘) as a way of reducing the gender divide in science, did not find much support at large amongst the community with whom I intersect. I can only hope that parents more generally did not mistakenly cut the article out and pin it to the fridge door with a large pink magnet, to remind them how to bring up their daughters.

This article seemed to be about reinforcing stereotypes in the most unhelpful way (as forcefully pointed out by Dean Burnett in his ironic Guardian science blog on Boys and Science written as a response), rather than recognizing the reality of recent studies. Telling girls explicitly that maths is meant to be hard appears to be exactly the worst kind of advice to give, as it will simply reinforce stereotype threat; this is that anxiety provoked by being asked to do something where there is a negative stereotype associated with your identity. Tell girls they can’t do maths and they will underperform in maths tests; tell white boys that Afro-Caribbean’s can run faster than them, and their time over 100m will be less than if they hadn’t been told.  Claude Steele and his school of psychologists have mapped out the scale of stereotype threat manifested in many different situations, and one of those most studied has been girls and maths. Clearly Emma Gilbey Keller, the American author of the offending Guardian article, has not appreciated this concept; her main claim to fame seems to be having written the book ‘The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women who went from Career to Family and Back Again’.  Her disciplinary background was not immediately obvious from a quick web search.

The article has already prompted several rebuttals. A neuroscientist’s take on it can be found here, written by Suzi Gage; a more general rebuttal in the Guardian was written by Chris Chambers and Kate Clancy, which pointed out the dangers of using gender stereotypes when the evidence for significant gender differences in how men and women approach life and tasks is so nuanced. As it happens a new psychology study, debunking the  idea of clear gendered stereotypes, also came out this week (in essence telling us to scrub the ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ myth of gross character trait differences concept). Written by Harry Reis et al (abstract here and lay article here) it examines a whole range of different traits, ranging from height and weight (where unsurprisingly the differences are significant)to aggression and empathy, where the differences are much less striking than popularly believed.

Nevertheless, in the UK the evidence is that overall more boys than girls take science and maths subjects at A level and, on average, they do better; the magnitude of this ‘gender gap’ depends on subject. It is in fact reversed for biology – more girls take the subject (by a ratio of about 4:3) and they get a higher percentage of A and A*s than the boys, using 2012 data; the ratio is completely inverted in psychology (as was also discussed this week in the Guardian), a subject in which approximately 3 girls take the subject for every boy, and the percentage of girls who get the top grades is twice as high. So what in particular should we be worrying about, and what, if anything, should we be doing to rectify the situation?

I have written a while back about the ‘feminisation’ of science teaching as a possible strategy to increase the numbers of girls in science. I was sceptical then and I remain so now. I believe we should be trying to make our science teaching accessible to all, not pandering to an old-fashioned view of what is suitable. And we should be doing all we can, collectively, to eradicate those 1950’s stereotypes of girls being good with animals and boys liking to play with hi-tech equipment including guns which, I believe, fuel the divergent numbers of boys and girls choosing biology and physics A levels. Societal expectations will feed into choices as long as parents, peers and teachers give subtle (or not-so-subtle) cues about acceptability of different choices and expectations about what is and isn’t the norm for each gender.

What needs to be done in society at large may be relatively obvious but unlikely to be achievable fast; parents are best placed to tailor informal learning appropriate to their child’s interests but their best endeavours will be misplaced if they listen to the sort of ill-informed mantras typified by the Keller Guardian article. Where we can do more is in our schools, where teachers should be trained to teach and control a classroom in a gender neutral way. Do they do it? Unfortunately I suspect collectively they do not. The IOP’s 2006 study of Girls in the physics classroom highlighted some of the problems they saw. Their more recent study about the progression of girls from different types of schools into A level physics, highlighted the massive discrepancy in numbers between girls from single sex and coeducational maintained schools opting to stick with physics, the former leading to 3.5 times as many girls progressing to A level physics as the latter. This must be telling us something about a school’s ethos as much about the girls’ preferences (although it is hard to correct for social class effects in the cohorts at single sex versus mixed schools). So, we need more work to be done to find out what works in practice at the school level, to prevent girls being deterred from progressing in physics.

This week I attended a meeting of a group known, rather cumbersomely, as the Joint STEM BiS/DfE Ministerial Group, which regularly brings together representatives from the two ministries (civil servants and, on a good day, both relevant ministers; currently these are Elizabeth Truss and David Willetts) with those of us involved in different ways with STEM school education ie from the professional and learned societies, the funders and other relevant bodies. I am sure Chatham House rules apply to this meeting, so I need to be careful about what I say, but diversity formed a significant part of our discussions. I was delighted to see that both ministers clearly cared personally about this issue, both about gender and the other diversity strands including social mobility. The role of OFSTED inspections in improving awareness of gender issues in teaching was raised – as it had been in the latest IOP report – and it is to be hoped that the current position will be strengthened in this respect; DfE certainly appeared to be in listening mode. Furthermore, it is to be hoped that additional research on the effect of single sex teaching will be carried out to identify what makes the difference, something I have been  urging for a while. Not that I am advocating single sex schools, but they are obviously doing something ‘right’. Evidence is needed, not at the whole school level (about which there have been studies) but on the consequences of single sex classes for specific STEM subjects.

Finally, we shouldn’t forget some of the other statistics about the gender gap. We should also recognize that the relatively low numbers of boys progressing in biology, psychology and (at university) veterinary science and subjects allied to medicine, may also be a source of worry, as was pointed out by one of the representatives from the biomedical arena at the ministerial meeting. If girls don’t want to do physics and boys don’t want to be vets, fine. If, on the other hand, culturally and through our patterns of teaching, they are being deterred despite their unacknowledged personal wishes, it’s very much not fine. But uttering platitudes that ‘math is meant to be hard’ and that we should all encourage girls to learn science through reading recipes – no, that doesn’t cut it and such articles should be consigned to the waste paper basket, fast.

 

Posted in Education, Equality, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

Confidence and Confidentiality

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Athene Donald

I have a couple of tasks ahead of me which I am currently mulling over. The first is a talk I’m going to give to Newcastle University’s Women’s Network on Building Confidence, in which I’ve been asked to build on a couple of earlier blogposts (the one on Impostor Syndrome and the one on constantly feeling as if one is a novice); the second is a request from a new blogging site to write a piece about resilience, developing some ideas I originally wrote up in the Guardian. In this second case, I’ve been specifically asked to consider including something about ‘one of the times you felt like your life wasn’t going to plan – and how you pulled through.’

I have no problem talking about feeling like an impostor, the more so as that earlier post demonstrated just how common that sensation is amongst all strands of professionals. I am not at all comfortable with the idea of spelling out specifics of when my surroundings appeared to become hostile. How can I do that without telling tales that are better not told, naming individuals with whom by now I might be in perfect charity though at an earlier point we had been at daggers drawn, or explaining just why I think some doyen or doyenne of the scientific field had behaved totally inappropriately and had landed me in the soup or caused me to explode in wrath? No, those are not the sort of things that should be committed to paper for the public eye. So, that particular blogpost – if it ever gets written – will have to be more bland and abstract. Sorry, no doubt less fun for the reader, but it is the drawback of choosing to write under my own name. Discretion is definitely the better part of my blogging repertoire.

A while back there was a debate on a couple of US blogs I read, written by female STEM professors, about whether it was appropriate to write about one’s students. Both bloggers concerned write anonymously, so in principle this means their students are not identified or identifiable, but it is a fine line to draw about disclosure.  Academic Jungle described in some detail an ‘unpleasant altercation’ with a member of her group, but Proflikesubstance took exception, feeling that such public denunciation can hardly be guaranteed to be unidentifiable and so it is unacceptable. Her position was ‘I avoid topics where I criticize anyone who works for me’. I am with Proflikesubstance on this one (although for myself I’d include a rather wider circle of unmentionable classes of individuals and topics). Furthermore I don’t even have the invisibility cloak of anonymity to hide behind: if I said a student had messed up, or lost the plot or anything else, that student would be immediately identifiable. Even if I put it in the past tense and described something that happened a number of years ago, the individual would almost certainly still be identifiable. So I don’t go there; in my book it isn’t on to do that.

So, if you’ve been following this blog you will find plenty of references to Professor X and friends, but never a mention of a student (or only the merest reference in passing). Just occasionally I find that frustrating. Mainly, it is so obviously inappropriate that the anecdotes never surface as my fingers hover over the keyboard. I’ve had fun writing about the foibles of fellow committee members, chairs and professors I’ve known (even though different characters have been merged, stretched and pounded into new creations rather than actual individuals being described in depth). It would be entertaining but inappropriate to create a comparable cast of student characters to grace these pages. Despite how much the cartoon world of PhDcomics and the like points a finger of fun at how supervisors treat their students, I cannot see that I can do the same in reverse. So I won’t.

More recently, there is a new group of people about whom I feel unable to comment, those in a more political sphere. In my various roles both within and outside the University, I get to attend meetings with policy-makers of various hues; these too I must eschew in my blog posts. A wonderful bon mot falling from the lips of an MP, whose inhibitions may have been temporarily lulled by some alcoholic beverage, can’t be passed on; such a waste!

So, dear reader, while I’m willing to confess to some of my own weaknesses, I must continue to resist the temptation to spill the beans about identifiable individuals. Professor Charming, Drs Jobsworth and Ogle and their many colleagues will continue to grace these pages as distorted amalgams of the numerous people whose paths have crossed mine over my entire career, but do not attempt to attach the names of any individuals you may know to any of these epithets. Policy-makers and students, on the other hand, will barely make an appearance in any shape or form.  They may feel safe.

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What’s the point of talking to yourself?

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

Some time ago I had the curious experience of being an observer at a series of decision-making meetings covering different disciplines.  As a mere observer I didn’t have to do any preparation myself, none of this producing scores for the applications, or having to do the difficult task of comparing apples and pears. But I could be an observer in all senses, including anthropological, as I watched how the disciplines compared in their approach to a comparable problem and also how individuals tackled the task of analysing the applications. This time, unlike some committees I have been on, everyone had done their homework very thoroughly. However, not all the panel members were as successful in delivering what I think are the key skills at such meetings: being able to summarise the key plusses and minuses in the application in front of the panel and convey the important points to everyone in the room.

What struck me time and time again was the care every panel member had taken in preparing lengthy notes on each application to which they had been asked to speak, but also the lack of thought they then put into the delivery of this material. Many, probably the majority, of the participants read their notes more or less verbatim. This in itself can be very boring, as few scientists of my acquaintance read notes (either for a situation such as this, or when in the different role of giving a lecture) with much energy. It tends to come across as rather boring, whether or not the content is in itself uninteresting. Worse, too often it is read in a soft monotone which does not carry across a room. Many panel meetings are held in large hotel conference suites, usually with lousy acoustics, often with a noisy fan for the air conditioning (in summer), or the constant racket of traffic on a motorway thundering past just outside. Senior academics really should be capable of pitching their voice so that colleagues 10 feet away can hear what is said; disappointingly often it doesn’t seem to cross their minds that this is an important part of their job when sitting on committees.  Microphones are rarely available and, as my experience in my own University’s Council Room has shown me, make for a disruptive hassle if used, even though the high-ceiling of such an elegant room can make such use desirable.

At these panel meetings as so often, some crude pre-scoring had been done and a rank ordered list produced.  This meant that it was obvious that a certain percentage were never going to make the cut, say 50%. Of course it is important to establish that no errors in transcription of marks into the mark-sheet have occurred and that no one has had second thoughts about their marks. Furthermore it is also necessary to check that no one has obviously been scoring at total odds to everyone else, for instance by giving all top marks or all bottom ones, rather than a reasonable spread across the board; or that one panel member has given a top mark which has been pulled down into the no-hoper range by a completely divergent score from a fellow panel member.

But if none of these caveats apply, then it ought to mean these apparent no-hopers can be dealt with quite briskly. Yet still, too many panel members read out their notes in full, regardless of the fact that a sentence or two in summary is really all that is required to enable feedback to be given, or at the very least for everyone to have confidence that the application really does sit towards the bottom of the score-sheet. I find it very frustrating to have to listen to interminable droning on about an application that is fundamentally flawed on some front or other. If the chair isn’t forceful this can happen only too easily, and cause committee meetings to drag on far longer than should be necessary. This drawing out matters because it can mean that applications discussed late in the day can get short shrift, as everyone starts consulting their watches and their iPhones about their return travel plans.

When I chair such a meeting, I often feel that for a very few applications sitting right at the top of the rank-ordered list, a brief discussion may again be all that is required. If an application is definitely going to be funded/sent out to referee or whatever, why waste time extolling its virtues. Again, a brief summary should be sufficient, yet rarely seems to be regarded as such.

I came away from these meetings impressed by everyone’s diligence, but depressed by the feeling that many of the members were in essence completely unaware the dynamics of what was going on, and had not troubled to think about how to make the meetings effective. Mumbling to yourself as you read out screeds of stuff which no one else wants to hear because it is obvious the application is going to bomb, seems to me to be a cardinal sin. Time and effort should be saved for the tricky middle-ranking cases, where the evidence needs to be carefully weighed up and all relevant information chewed over. And that really does require that everyone in the room hears every syllable of the analyses presented, not simply the odd phrase when the speaker temporarily gets their nose out of their notes sufficiently to address the room audibly. Only in that way can everyone leave the room confident total justice was done; that the outcome was not a lottery due to a particularly persuasive individual winning an argument over a mumbling one’s more reasoned arguments; or that cases presented early in the day fared better (or worse) than those that came later; and finally that any tribal tendencies visible between one part of a discipline and another are scrutinised fairly.

So panel members of today – and tomorrow – please bear the following in mind:

  • Speak up: Remember that all your homework is in vain if no one can hear what you say when you speak to a particular case.
  • Speak succinctly: People may tune out if you ramble on at unnecessary length when speaking to third-rate applications, and fail to spot the cases where you really feel there is true excellence because they’ve stopped paying attention to your verbose sentences.
  • Speak fairly: Do not let personal objections – to an experimental approach, a sub-discipline or to an individual – override the evidence presented in the case before you.
  • And equally, listen fairly and do not let a post-prandial dip in energy levels cause you to miss some of the discussion or your own prejudices (including against fellow panel members) distort the message you hear.

All so much easier said than done!

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Interviews and Expectations

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Athene Donald

Today I was very saddened to read a graphical account by a blogger writing under the name of Zinemin, of an interview for an academic post she really wanted that had gone horribly wrong. Her experience sounded appalling, and quite unlike any academic interview I have ever participated in (as interviewer or interviewee). Was she spectacularly unlucky, or was there something deeply unattractive about the institution that was considering her application (she does not specify where, or even in which country) and she was lucky not to be successful at the end of the day? Was her gender relevant to her experience? Could she have been better prepared? I’d like to try to deconstruct what happened to her a little, in the hopes that it might provide both an antidote and some fodder for reflection for others considering applying for posts. Of course, I can only really describe the UK situation (my interview experience in the US was so long ago, it can hardly be deemed relevant, although at least one commenter on the Zinemin post made the assumption her experience had been in the US).

Panel Membership

Zinemin describes a situation where she was interviewed by around 25 scientists, all but one of whom were male. I have never come across a panel that size; a number of 6-8 would, at least in the UK, be far more typical. Such an excessively large panel would strike me as unwieldy, and in danger of leading to heated debate amongst themselves rather than a fruitful interview of the applicant. (Of course, if Zinemin could have instigated such internal wrangling, maybe she’d have fared better!) It also strikes me as designed to intimidate. If an organisation wants to choose a candidate who isn’t fazed by such a crowd, good luck to them. However, it is hard to see that such skill is likely to be straightforwardly correlated with either academic brilliance or an exceptional teaching style, both of which would seem to be more important criteria for an academic position. A department that wants to daunt their candidates by sheer physical mass seems to me to be a good one to avoid.

My own experience suggests that panels are likely, on the contrary, to worry about how to reduce intimidation levels: by the lay-out of the room, making sure there is fresh water available and introducing all panel members at the outset so that the applicant knows who are the experts and who the generalists, whether there are students present (I’ve come across this in some institutions) and who is there to take the minutes. The intention is, in my experience, to permit the candidate to do themselves justice, not lose confidence in the face of a horde of unwelcoming faces and so underperform. Of course, people can get nervous and their minds may go blank under pressure, but usually only temporarily and such momentary lapses should not be taken as a fundamental flaw.

In many fields it would be anticipated that there would be unlikely to be more than one or two women present simply based on the proportion of available female faculty, but it would be nice to think that that in itself that shouldn’t necessarily mean hostility (overt or otherwise) towards a female candidate. However, there is absolutely no doubt that unconscious bias may lurk even beneath an apparently welcoming exterior.  That, as the recent PNAS study revealed (something I discussed further here), may be as true of women as men. I believe it is incumbent on every senior academic not only to familiarise themselves with the fact of unconscious bias, but to do their best to spread the word to less enlightened colleagues who may be completely unaware how easy it is to underscore individuals on the basis of extraneous facts, including gender and skin-colour.  Reality unfortunately tells me that we have still a long way to go in even the best-arranged organisations for unconscious bias to have been eradicated.

Aside This situation also seems to tie in with comments made by BB and LL on my last post, where a lack of respect for the individual (female in both cases) seems evident (in these cases not where a job interview is concerned, but grants and fellowships). Is all this straight-forwardly gender related? It is impossible to tell simply from these anecdotes, but it would appear a woman’s credibility as an independent researcher, as someone not tied to a present or past collaborator’s or PI’s apron strings, is being questioned in ways that perhaps would not have occurred if a male had been concerned. It is tricky because that first step to independence is a crucial one, and one that not all experienced postdocs genuinely are well-placed to make (perhaps I will write a separate post about this transition one day). Nevertheless if men and women really are being systematically judged differently on this front still, we undoubtedly have an ongoing serious problem on our hands. I hope that the more this is talked about, the less it will accidentally happen. So, keep talking about it!

The Presentation

It is of course bound to be the case that a significant proportion of the audience will not be experts. Pitching the talk appropriately is crucial, but it is unforgivable in a panel member to shake their head as if visibly disagreeing with the content. Zinemin struck very unlucky that her panel was so unmannerly. I have occasionally been bored stiff by presentations from job applicants, I am sorry to have to admit; people who are so insular that they cannot step back far enough from their research to present a coherent story within an appropriate context. Nevertheless, even when bored stiff I hope I have managed to keep a vaguely intelligent and interested look on my face. It really shouldn’t be difficult to do this for a 15 minute presentation (although distinctly harder if drawn out over a full hour; with luck, in that case the lights will be down in a lecture theatre, so that faces can’t be read).

I can’t recall ever sitting on a panel where I have felt boredom and hostility were obviously collectively oozing out to engulf the candidate, even when it has been obvious that someone is not in fact going to be a strong contender for a position. I suppose, if a candidate were really confident they could challenge any panel member shaking their head: ‘Professor X, do you disagree with my conclusions and could you explain why?’ – but that might be both a risky strategy and require a great deal of nerve to carry out. However, possibly that was what this particularly unwelcoming group of people wanted. Beyond a certain point maybe there is nothing left to lose, except one’s own self-respect.  And that at least might do better for a little more forcefulness in the face of antipathy.

The Q+A session

This ought to be a moment for clarifying points of confusion and for broadening the discussion, not a moment for the panel to convey contempt or a patronising attitude. One can prepare to a certain extent for more general questions such as ‘why is your method superior to Smith’s?’, or ‘why do you think this is a fertile line of enquiry for the future?’.  I do think it is reasonable for a panel to ask general and big questions, even if a bit removed from the specifics of the seminar. I am not sure this necessarily implies – as Zinemin’s post suggested – a lack of respect for her. A department wants to know a colleague has an open mind, is well-rounded in an appreciation of the field, and can think on their feet. However, it equally should be OK for any candidate to take a few moments to think about any such broader question.

If this is the way an interview goes, take control; think about politicians who often repeat a question to gain time and perhaps to check that something that sounds a bit whacky really is the question being posed. It is reasonable not to rush in with a hurried answer and also to check that there isn’t some misunderstanding underlying the question. With a multi-disciplinary panel such a failure in comprehension may be all too probable. Of course, if the whole tenor of the interview has been unfriendly, it is inevitable by this point that a rattled candidate will see further negatives in the questions being asked. Again, it may be wise to challenge the questioner in a low-key sort of way, perhaps by suggesting the question isn’t relevant, or that the methodology is well accepted. But it ought to be possible to explain where the work is going, why what one is doing has some added benefit that others may have overlooked and if necessary politely explain why the questioner has got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

Unfortunately, if an interview has been sticky from its very first minute, taking control and challenging an awkward cuss who looks like they are attempting to patronise you will be a hard thing to do. A clear example of stereotype threat, breathing deeply and counting to 10 may be completely inadequate to rescue the situation. Nevertheless, there may be attractions in using the inevitable opportunity offered by ‘and have you any questions for us?’ moment to let rip, since by this point perhaps there is nothing left to lose (and such action could also provide ammunition for anyone representing HR in the room wanting to take the panel to task subsequently). An answer along the lines of ‘Yes. Why did you invite me along in order to belittle my work and visibly express your contempt for my field of research as well as me personally? Nothing would induce me to come and work with a bunch of bastards like you have proved yourself to be’ could just restore a little dignity, although making a fast and graceful exit after that could prove tricky. Mercifully, I have never been on a panel where I feel a candidate could remotely justify taking such a line. Clearly Zinemin was less fortunate.

Posted in Equality, Science Culture | Tagged , | 11 Comments