Raising Expectations: Funders Get Tough(ish)

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Athene Donald

About 18 months ago, Dame Sally Davies, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, unilaterally raised the bar for Medical Schools wanting to apply to future rounds of funding through the Biomedical Research Centre scheme, demanding (in essence) that they obtain an Athena Swan Silver Award if they wanted their future applications to be successful. Since then, various – possibly many – people including myself,  have been talking to key individuals in the Research Councils and trying to put pressure on funders generally, asking them to stipulate that funding will only follow good practice on the Equality and Diversity front (see, for instance, the letter Angela McLean, Paul Harvey and I published in Nature in the autumn of 2011). At the time of Sally Davies’ announcement I wrote a blogpost openly calling for other funders to ‘get tough’. Now there is some movement in the right direction.

Last week RCUK  put out a statement laying out their own explicit expectations for Equality and Diversity. This is a statement covering the work of all 7 UK Research Councils and so it covers funding across all academic fields. For this reason, it is impossible to set a categorical requirement of something as specific as an Athena Swan award: to date these particular awards only cover STEM departments, although the scheme’s ‘owners’, the Equality Challenge Unit, are piloting an extension to cover Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.  This pilot project is ongoing so, as yet, an equivalent award to Athena Swan in non-STEM subjects does not exist and RCUK could not use this as a basis for ‘accreditation’ across all research councils even if they wanted to.

However, formal accreditation would have its drawbacks, a point made very clear at a consultation event organised by RCUK that I attended in the autumn.  For instance, supposing a really bright early career female researcher wants to apply to hold a fellowship in a department with a lousy E+D record simply because the science is first-rate, should they be prevented because the department doesn’t hold some explicit accreditation? If this were the case, the individual would be disadvantaged because of a department’s failing. Furthermore, the most obvious benchmarking, that of Athena Swan, is really concerned with gender and not the other diversity aspects. So, a department could be good around gender but never have considered the position for BME’s (black or minority ethnic if you don’t know the jargon) for instance, or transgender applicants. So, the RCUK statement simply names participation in Athena Swan (as well as involvement with other similar schemes such as Stonewall) as something that would provide solid evidence that an organisation is adopting good practice around diversity, but such participation is not (as with the Department of Health) an absolute requirement.

Is this sufficient? Time will tell whether this statement makes any difference or has any teeth in reality. The punchline is to be found in the final three bullet points of the statement, in which it says:

RCUK will

  • review the overall effectiveness of the approach at a Departmental / Institutional level through its Audit and Assurance Programme
  • discuss equality and diversity at Institutional visits
  • reserve the right to introduce more formal accreditation requirements for grant funding should significant improvement not be evidenced.

So, the question will remain open for some time to come as to what action RCUK might actually take if they are not satisfied that a department or institution is doing sufficient, and whether ultimately funding will be put at risk for such an organisation. The statement is a step in the right direction, but only if organisations really believe that sanctions are just around the corner and that it is in their own self-interest to get their act together and do something concrete to improve the working environment for everyone are women/minorities likely really to feel the benefit.

Of course, even without the threat of funding being cut off, it should be manifest that it really is in an organisation’s best interests to broaden the diversity of its workplace. Losing talent carelessly by excluding minorities, be they what they may, is stupid. Self-interest, as well as the moral high ground, undoubtedly ought to come into play when trying to find the best individuals to fill any role, not just looking for a clone of the person who filled that post before. I hope this message is filtering through the corridors of academic power. I can at least feel a little smug that personally I am part of an organisation that is well aware of the importance of sorting itself out on the E+D front, and is making good strides. For instance, it is heartening to see that the University of Cambridge has maintained its position as 11th in the 2013 Stonewall Workplace Equality Index just released, remaining the highest placed HEI in the index.

The RCUK statement has a further impact that perhaps as a scientist I am only just beginning to appreciate. Because the number of women in the sciences is so obviously dismal, particularly in subjects like my own of physics or in engineering, significant effort and attention has been applied to the problem for some years. Not so in the Arts and Humanities. The numbers of female undergraduates may be equal to or exceed the numbers of males, but the percentage of women in the higher reaches of academia are little better than in the sciences. Furthermore, the atmosphere in Philosophy, for instance, is obviously pretty toxic according to the Report prepared jointly by the British Philosophical Association and the Society of Women in Philosophy UK last year which I discussed in an earlier post. In the absence of an Athena Swan lookalike for such subjects, the RCUK statement may be particularly important in focussing the minds of non-STEM colleagues. I will be watching this space with great interest.

 

Posted in Equality, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Undue Influence?

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Athene Donald

If the newspapers are to be believed – and that’s a big if – then television has an awful lot to answer for when it comes to which university courses are over-subscribed. In quick succession last week, stories were run in the Independent claiming that the sudden increase in UCAS applications for midwifery courses was down to the BBC Series ‘Call the Midwife’, and in the Telegraph the story ran that the rise in physics applications was down to Brian Cox.  Of course this latter ‘story’ is not new (it’s been running since 2010 at least), but the specific point made this time around was that Manchester applications in particular had gone through the roof, so that the standard offer from the university was now 2  A*’s and an A – higher than the usual Oxbridge requirement. The stories were of course thin on actual hard evidence (as opposed to a few, possibly relevant numbers scattered around) and certainly should be treated with the customary caution, that correlation is not causation.

These stories are in the same vein as the one a number of years ago which said that Silent Witness, back then starring Amanda Burton, had sparked an increase in the number of applications for Forensic Science courses.  These days, following the much publicised closure of the Forensic Science Service, it seems improbable that the long-running programme continues to provoke such enthusiasm for a degree in the subject. Or maybe it’s simply that the novelty value has faded. But it is worth asking whether TV really does provoke waves of fashion in the student population or even, though I’ve not come across explicit stories to this effect, possibly aversion if a programme represents some field too negatively.  If it does have such influence, is this a force for good? However, it seems to me that there are additionally a whole slew of different factors that could be coming into play here, ones that the newspapers simply don’t touch upon.

Relevant factors could include one or more of the following:

  • Midwifery and physical sciences both may appeal to the student of today who faces the fee-payback of tomorrow.  In other words, when financial worries loom large, both physics and midwifery may look like good bets compared with, say, psychology or media studies, about which much has been written (certainly as regards their value and level of difficulty as A level subjects). If these latter subjects are seen as not going to provide a high probability of employment or satisfactory salaries, then maybe people are opting for courses that appear to offer better security.
  • For students who lack decent careers’ advice, as most will due to the winding down of the ability of schools to offer face-to-face provision, then information gleaned from the television may be seized upon as offering insight unobtainable during the normal school day. So perhaps TV should now be seen as filling a gap in information services for 16 year olds, thereby suggesting interesting alternatives for those who have discovered they probably do not have what it takes to sign for a top-flight football team or modelling agency (according to taste), the frequent aspiration of early teen years.
  • In the case of physics, the year-on-year increase in university applications almost certainly started before the ‘Brian Cox effect’ could have kicked in. His first major series, Wonders of the Solar System, was shown in 2010. Numbers of students applying to do physics courses have been going up since about 2007. Manchester may of course now be a particular attraction because that is his own university; but it is also the home of the most recent UK Nobel Prize winners in Physics Andrei Geim and Konstantin  Novoselov for the discovery of graphene. Graphene, and its home in Manchester, is probably in the science news almost as much as Cox, since large dollops of money keep being pointed in Manchester’s direction, so who is to say the attraction of Manchester  physics doesn’t have other roots beyond Brian Cox?

We have, of course, no evidence to help decode any correlation that currently appears to exist. Furthermore, it has been suggested that Cox’s appeal is only for the boys and that his programmes are subtly gendered in the way they are filmed and the framing of the stories.  Although that may be true, the number of girls proceeding to physics degrees, paltry though it is at only about 25% of total applications, has been rising too. Indeed, to counter that argument, using that well known source of fact the Daily Mail, we see that it proclaims that Cox is a sex symbol, which might well counter any negative effects of the actual style of programmes he is presenting. It is undoubtedly the case that the smiling face of Brian Cox, even better when alongside Dara Ó Briain, is seen to sell newspapers, so stories about what he may or may not have achieved are clearly worth publishing from the editor’s point of view. However, we really must take them with a pinch of salt.

Despite that, if TV is actually influencing the university choices of the young, shouldn’t we be trying harder to make sure that we, the scientific community, in turn influence what goes out on TV? It was not obvious ‘Call the Midwife’ was going to be such a hit. Is that down to the cute newborns who feature, or the woman of the moment Miranda Hart? Who knows, although even now focus groups are no doubt studying what the public most like about the programme to help the BBC find the next hit series. I don’t suppose it was foreseen that Brian Cox would be such a success either, but maybe the biologists need to find a successor to David Attenborough fast or they might fear their undergraduate numbers may be about to take a hit.

Can we work with the media to use them to provide good implicit careers’ advice to the teenagers who no longer get it at school? And do we need iconic faces – and/or ex-pop stars – in order to make that strategy work or is the content of the programme sufficient?

Posted in Careers, Education | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Culture, Class and Quakers

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last week Melvyn Bragg ran a special series of In Our Time discussing the meaning of culture in both the past and present.  Because of the timing of the programme I rarely listen to it, although it’s great for listening to as a podcast on trains, but on this occasion I took especial care because the second episode in this series of five was trailed to feature EB Tylor (1832-1917). His name is probably not widely known in the scientific (in the modern sense of the word) community. However he was my great great great uncle, if I’ve counted correctly, although his name rarely featured in my childhood. Indeed, I don’t think I’d ever taken his existence in until I was an adult. Nevertheless he was no slouch. He is, according to Britannica Online Encyclopedia, ‘regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology’.

So, it being the holidays and with more time than usual on my hands, the Melvyn Bragg programme prompted me to do a bit of Googling to see what I could learn about the man. There is quite a lot out there; if I went to my University Library I am sure I could dig up a lot more, but that’s not really the point. Looking into his life and background, and then listening to In Our Time, caused me to join a lot of dots – some of them probably incorrectly since I am a rank amateur genealogist, historian and anthropologist – but let me spell out some of the connections. I’ll split this long post up into two, starting with the personal (which any reader can obviously jump over) and then moving on to the ‘cultural’ aspects.

Part I: Personal

First of all I should state I would be ineligible to take part in BBC’s Who do you think you are? because I actually do know a fair bit about some branches of my family, going back quite a long way. This makes it the odder that I have imbibed so little about this particular part of the family. It so happens that as an FRS, I am expected to provide a brief autobiography for their library to help them when it comes to writing up my life for their series of Biographies when I die (sorry to be morbid). They try to prompt you with questions they’d like answers to, one of which is ‘are there any FRS’s in the family?’ to which I had answered ‘no’. My mother had tried to convince me that – in a different part of the family – my great, great grandfather Francis Boott had been an FRS, but the Royal Society records prove her wrong. He was simply the US-born Secretary to the Linnean Society back in 1832-9 and the first use of ether as an anaesthetic in Britain (for a dental procedure) was in his house at 24 Gower Street on 19 December 1846 (so says Wikipedia and I assume they know).

So how did no one seem to know that Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was an FRS? Why is one branch of my family’s genealogy so much better known than another? No doubt that is typical of families, reflecting who remembers what, and who cares about such things and transmits the information down the years (or, in other instances, takes care about thoroughly labelling the photographs).

Another question that the Royal Society wanted an answer to was ‘were there scientist in the family?’ Now you can see that if you were a Darwin/Huxley/Barlow tribe member, you could fill a page or two with details of previous eminent scientists to whom you are related, but I wasn’t entirely sure that EB Tylor counted as a scientist, although I did dutifully mention him (and great great grandpapa Boott). But researching the web for stuff about EB Tylor, I found mention of a certain Alfred Tylor (1824-1884), the older brother of EB, described as a geologist and brassfounder (a goodly combination). Digging around a bit further and it is clear that this guy is certainly another of my great great grandfathers  – his son is described as the ‘engineer and Egyptologist’  JJ Tylor and this man’s portrait most certainly adorned my childhood home, along with some of his own paintings of Egypt and some goodies he had brought back from Egyptian tombs (don’t worry; the British Museum knows about these, but what we have are only second rate spares apparently). So, I am directly descended from a geologist – and indeed an engineer. Again, why did no one ever mention these facts when I started heading off in a scientific direction?

I feel almost cheated that for decades I have believed I was the only scientist in the family; the Tylor’s (EB apart) were always described to me as being of a legal disposition, including a judge and a barrister to my certain knowledge. Now of course I have no idea if Alfred Tylor’s contributions to glaciology are still regarded as useful. These included introducing the word ‘pluvial’ to describe the time when huge rivers filled English valleys (he apparently wrote to Darwin attempting to get him on side with this use, although it isn’t clear that he ever received a reply; on the other hand, the Darwin Correspondence project shows that Darwin certainly exchanged a number of letters with EB Tylor). Alfred Tylor was obviously only an ‘amateur’ geologist, in the sense that his day-job was running the family firm, the brassfoundry, but of course being an ‘amateur’ was practically the norm in those days when few scientists got paid.

So, at the end of my  brief exploration I can confirm that, if I go far enough back in my family tree, there was at least one ‘scientist’ and at least one FRS, and I never knew that before the Bragg programme kick-started my researching.

Part II: Anthropology, culture and class

The Tylor family were Quakers. This is relevant because it meant that they were barred from entering Oxford or Cambridge at the time, and consequently both brothers left school at 16 and any further education was done informally. EB Tylor seems to have fallen into anthropology purely by chance, having been sent to the US because he appeared to be consumptive. There he fell in with a fellow Quaker, Henry Christy, who was heading for Mexico and they set off together. Christy was more of an archaeologist but their travels inspired and informed EB’s interests. About 5 years later he published his first book Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans Ancient and Modern (1861), which as yet was still not particularly anthropological. That came later in his seminal book Primitive Culture (1871) and it was this book that gave him pride of place in the Melvyn Bragg programme.

What did Tylor mean by ‘culture’? – just about everything! But for other people at the time the generally accepted meaning was pretty narrow. I have written previously about the arguments between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley; these took place at around the time Primitive Culture was published. Arnold was in large part the subject of the first programme in the Melvyn Bragg series, in which his book Culture and Anarchy was discussed. For Arnold, culture referred almost exclusively to literature and philosophy. Huxley disagreed, because he felt science belonged in there, for instance stating in 1880:

From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical science into ordinary education was timidly whispered, until now, the advocates of scientific education have met with opposition of two kinds. On the one hand, they have been pooh-poohed by the men of business who pride themselves on being the representatives of practicality; while, on the other hand, they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars, in their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture and monopolists of liberal education.

But as this quote makes clear, much of this debate was centred on what a cultured gentleman should gather from his education. Tylor changed the context and meaning radically when he introduced the idea that customs and beliefs belonged to culture just as much as literature and philosophy. His whole thesis was that there was an appropriate, essentially evolutionary approach to societies. ‘Savages’ were just at the beginning of this process (and ‘barbarians’ in the middle) but he deemed them equally able to reach the heights of civilisation in principle.

This was not attractive to people like Arnold, who saw culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ conducive to ‘to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’ (from Culture and Anarchy) – sentiments that have strong theological overtones, as well as indicating the goal should be a state of human perfection rather than a more mechanical/scientific sense of simply knowing.  Tylor was much more in agreement with Huxley than with Arnold, and his introduction of a much broader meaning of culture changed the dynamics of the debate and, by implication, what an appropriate education should include.

Neither Huxley nor Tylor were ‘university men’ and that, I suspect, is highly relevant to this debate. Indeed, I was very struck by a statement I found in a somewhat undigested write-up of Tylor’s life on the Pitt Rivers Museum website, which quoted Edmund Leach as saying

despite the honors accorded to Tylor in his old age, anthropology remained a non-subject. Tylor was not a gentleman.

I assume he could not be regarded as a gentleman because he came from a manufacturing background (that brassfoundry) and hadn’t attended Oxford or Cambridge (although he became the first Oxford professor of Anthropology and also was awarded an Honorary Degree by the University). Leach was writing about the effect of class on social anthropology, so his qualification of ‘not being a gentleman’ is perhaps less pejorative than it sounds; I don’t think it meant he was a cad! Class, I think, is equally relevant to the ideas of culture and to the place of science (in its broadest sense and so including anthropology) within it. For a public school boy like Arnold, who was of course the son of Rugby’s famous and reforming headmaster Thomas Arnold, young gentleman studied the Classics and that was indeed, in his view ‘the best that had been thought and said’. Science was more the preserve of the Mechanics Institutes ie for the ‘rude mechanics’ of the lower classes whom he would no doubt have encouraged to better themselves, but whom it would have been natural for him to consider would ever remain outside the purlieus of the truly civilised and ‘cultured’ male society he moved in.

Returning to the Melvyn Bragg programmes, Paul Nurse took a rather similar line in the 3rd of the series, by implying the 20th century Snow-Leavis debate (very similar to the Arnold-Huxley disagreement, although conducted in much less polite terms; indeed, one could almost say ungentlemanly terms) belonged in an Oxbridge SCR rather than the real world. Nevertheless, it most certainly spilled out far beyond such a closeted ivory tower. For Nurse, also outside the Oxbridge firmament and identifying himself on the programme as coming from the artisan class, the arguments seemed artificial and didn’t make much real sense. Of course by the 20th century, culture (1, 2 or however many ‘cultures’ one wants to identify) had taken on other meanings again. Leavis may have chosen to make his rebuttal in large part a personal attack on Snow, but more broadly speaking there was undoubtedly a different split from simply classics/humanities versus science, but – for instance – also intellectual versus mass culture. (I use my terms here rather loosely as I am not a cultural historian, so I expect to be pulled up.)

It is perhaps inevitable that within the English system (Scotland would of course have been different), class is inherently so central to such a debate. Class also tied in with religious beliefs, and these of course also had strong implications for university education because non-conformists were banned from Oxford and Cambridge Universities until 1854 and 1856 respectively. So, when discussing the meaning of culture, it is unsurprising that a Quaker– Tylor – might have taken a different position from an Anglican – Arnold –  quite apart from the Quaker having visited and considered non-Christian societies and so gained a very different perspective on many fronts.

The Melvyn Bragg programmes were very stimulating. As will be obvious, I learned a lot on several different fronts and it makes me look at the Victorian and 20th century debates on culture with fresh eyes. The fact that I managed to glean so much so rapidly from the web about my own personal antecedents is just a very pleasant extra.

Posted in Education, Science Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Is Removal of the Gender Pay Gap a Utilitarian Dream?

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last month the University of Cambridge published its latest Equal Pay Review, something it is now doing biennially (rather than annually) since things don’t change that drastically year on year. As in previous years, if you look at the average or median salaries for men and women there are substantial differences, reflecting the tendency towards grade segregation. However what, to my mind, matters far more are the differences within the grades; here the gap is much smaller – although certainly not negligible. Nevertheless, even our local newspaper couldn’t make a particularly horrendous story out of the statistics.

We can and must do better, but actions in place are bringing the gender gap down year on year; we have clear action plans and this year introduced a couple of new recommendations which we hope will continue to improve the situation. These include a programme of support for returners (piloted this year in the Physical Sciences) and a specific charge upon Boards of Electors and Appointments Committees to ensure that any pool of candidates is appropriately diverse, through new guidelines/recommendations. Time will tell if this makes a substantial difference, but nothing is going to change things overnight, albeit the direction of travel is right.

However, amongst my Christmas reading I came across a couple of papers in the social sciences which highlight issues indicating it may be unable to achieve parity by institutional actions alone. The first of these papers involved Cambridge and Canadian researchers looking in more detail at gender segregation in 30 industrialised nations around the world (the full paper can be found here and a brief analysis on the University of Cambridge website here).

What this paper shows is that grade segregation in itself is by no means the whole story about the gender pay gap.  For instance, Scandinavian countries, which rank very highly on measures of gender equality, actually have very substantial job segregation and any such segregation implicitly indicates that occupational choice for both men and women is constrained to some degree.  The findings demonstrate that an egalitarian society is not necessarily incompatible with job segregation. A corollary of the findings in the paper is that the greater the degree of segregation – implying that women are in less direct competition with men – the greater the degree of seniority women on average reach and so the gender pay gap may actually be reduced by the segregation.  However I am not entirely convinced that this amounts to a healthy situation for anyone.  The authors also point out that where there is substantial segregation, the women typically occupy the more ‘attractive’ roles such as non-manual ones with a concomitant reduced risk of injury and death, again demonstrating that segregation in itself is not all negative.

The second paper is even more concerning to those who want strict parity, because it suggests the substantial role societal expectations play on both men and women, in colouring how women progress. This paper also has a ‘lay summary’, this time in the Economist. Carried out in the US, the study looked at the relative earning power within couples. Where the woman in a couple was likely to earn more than the man (based on demographics) she was more likely to leave the workforce completely or work at a lower level than might have been anticipated in order, it would seem, to fulfil the cultural norm that the man earns more than the woman.  The Economist states dryly ‘That’s bad news for the Economy.’

The findings also suggested that where couples did exhibit ‘role reversal’ (in other words the woman was earning more than the man), they were likely to state that their relationship was less happy than a ‘normal’ couple or that it actually ended in divorce. It didn’t seem to matter whether the woman earned just a little more than her husband or a lot, the outcome was the same. This obviously suggests that the purely utilitarian, rational arguments (in other words those which economists traditionally apply) fail because of our psychological responses and internal beliefs. As part of a role reversal couple myself, whose marriage has so far happily survived for 36 years, I can attest that role reversal is undoubtedly societally unpleasant for the male, but also we are ‘proof’ that it doesn’t inevitably lead to rapid divorce!

At the risk of using a sociological term inappropriately, this appears to me to be another form of ‘choicism’, where women will take a course of action – in this case restricting their salary and career aspirations – in order to comply with a cultural norm, whether they consciously know they are doing this or not. This may indeed contribute to the decisions of some of the women who become the ‘stay-at-home-mom’, justifying their decisions to themselves and the world that this is what they really want to do, a topic I wrote about at more length before.

I fear that these established norms are going to be very hard to eradicate, which in turn implies – if this study is applicable around the world – that the gender pay gap is not going to disappear in a hurry. It may be that institutions such as my own university can only go so far in successfully eradicating pay differentials by the introduction of new policies, if some women are actually self-selecting not to aim as high as their intrinsic skills might support and suggest. No doubt some readers will feel in essence let the women do what they want, why make an issue out of it, but if, deep down, this is not the choice that women would make if society were different  we should make an issue out of it. It is perhaps unsurprising that the US study shows that where a woman’s mother-in-law had herself worked, women were more likely to be the higher earning member of a couple. So maybe in another generation or two, when more and more mother-in-laws have themselves worked, these cultural norms will be modified. And perhaps only then will the gender pay gap really disappear. Not a comforting thought.

 

Posted in Equality | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Classifying Group Leaders

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

It’s the season for lists: best photos of the year, best quotes, best-dressed (even worst-dressed) celebs, momentous moments – you name it, there’s probably a list for it somewhere on the web. Since I’ve just covered the other seasonal topic of New Year’s resolutions over at the Guardian’s  Occam’s Corner, I shall add my own list to the multitude out there: a list of species of group leaders.

My last post discussed a charismatic, but also autocratic leader in the form of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. He could get away with being autocratic because he was inspirational – and also right about what he wanted his team to do far more often than he was wrong. But this cannot be said of many group leaders, some of whom should probably never have been left in charge of a dead parrot, let alone a group of nervous PhD students. At a recent consultation event for researchers carried out in Cambridge, the lack of interpersonal skills and interest in developing the careers of those in their care of some of attendees’ line managers was much talked about.

As with my previous identification guides to academic species (professors, committee chairs and members of university and grant-giving committees), what follows represent distorted amalgamations of individuals I have known, heard about or allowed my fevered imagination to construct. Consequently, any similarities to academics, alive or dead, are purely fortuitous. Nevertheless, I suspect you may recognize some strands of colleagues of your own in what follows. I will, for neutrality’s sake, assign a Chair to each of these individuals, but their failings are as likely to apply to the early career group leader as the grizzled greybeard (or grey-haired for those who lack beards) variety.

Professor Tickbox has read all the material from the HR department, knows what is expected of them in terms of careers’ advice/appraisal and goes through the required motions. Once a year each timid – or even more confident – student or postdoc will get their 5 minute interview at which the requisite forms are produced, whisked through and signed off without a chance for reflection or genuine dialogue. The braver individuals may attempt to spin this interview out by introducing a few questions starting off ‘Would it be possible…’ or perhaps ‘I understand it would be helpful if….’ but is unlikely to get further before a brusqe response stops the flow: ‘I think you’ll find I’ve dealt with all your questions; do take a copy of this form away with you’ and the poor unfortunate will be ushered sharply out of the room as the next victim enters. This is a professor who believes in form over substance.

Professor Oversolicitous If you have read Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, you will recognize this person is a kindred spirit to Miss Shaw. This is the kind of person who will say (as Miss Shaw does say in the book) ‘I can’t think why she shouldn’t have told me. My students always come to me with their troubles.’

Well, maybe yes, but often the group secretary is thought to be a better ear for student’s troubles than their supervisor, and sharing a regular pint of beer down the pub and letting hair down on both sides may well only lead to trouble later on. At times when some forcefulness is required, something along the line of ‘you promised me that draft by last week. You won’t be able to go to that conference in Hawaii if you don’t produce it within the next 24 hours’, the fact that boozy evenings have been shared may weaken a professor’s stance. Taking an interest in a student’s life beyond the lab is totally reasonable to build up a well-rounded picture of the individual and be able to provide support, but becoming a confidante may be less desirable and less likely to provide the right stimulus to hard work. Striking the right balance is probably one of the harder challenges for a newly-established group leader as they move onwards and upwards from merely being a group member to running their own group.

Professor Hand-holding has something of a similar bent. This is the person who breathes down a student’s neck every time they attempt a new experiment, sometimes fairly literally at the bench, although they have nothing useful in the way of experience, expertise or wisdom to offer. In fact, all such actions do is to make the hand shake at crucial moments so that the powder spills or the precious sample floats away in the water bath. Students have to profit by their own mistakes of course, but doing so when someone else is watching and (it is to be feared) internally criticising under the disguise of ‘helping’ is counter-productive. Professor Hand-holding merely conveys a complete lack of trust and their actions convey a claustrophobic miasma of failure. This course of action is of course quite different from requesting to see a repeat of some unexpected or critical result after success has crowned the first attempts at a new experiment. That can be considered merely appropriate caution and checking on experimental reproducibility on the part of the professor.

Professor Arrogant When it comes to seeking advice from Professor Arrogant (who may also masquerade as Professor AlphaMale, without meaning to imply that such a role can only be occupied by men), the inexperienced researcher may well suffer extreme anxiety, unless they can match like for like in such a conversation – unfortunately in itself a risky strategy. The trouble is these Professors have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, what it is to be uncertain about their own abilities or career paths. They cannot comprehend anything other than an academic career as being an acceptable destination and attempts to ask about alternatives, even trying to get experience of alternatives, lead to sneers and snide remarks about ‘waste’. These are the ones students should fear, as they will get nothing constructive from such a conversation, merely a feeling of inferiority.

Of course, the brilliant favoured son or daughter, for whom great things are envisaged, may get something helpful out of such a conversation. Perhaps they will be given advice as to whose lab to move on to next to further career aspirations, or a helping hand in obtaining a conference presentation at some important meeting. But the fact that one member of the group may be so favoured, only makes the lot of the remainder more bitter and miserable. It is best to try to establish the credentials of such a professor before ever signing up for the team, unless your own arrogance appears to match theirs.

Professor Blind is perhaps the commonest of all group leaders. Nothing wrong with them, but little that is right either. They potter on – or even steam ahead if they are successful – without ever really noticing the fate of their team. The group members are simply there to deliver results, ideally reliably and on a regular basis. They aren’t perceived as individuals with characters of their own, so much as pairs of hands with few needs beyond the requirement of obtaining a PhD ultimately (does it really matter so much when? Probably not to this professor.). Talking through future career directions with each person probably simply never crosses their mind, although they may well consider the timing of writing papers because that redounds to their own benefit. However, there is always the possibility, that if a brave soul accosts them to ask advice they can be pinned down sufficiently to give the matter due consideration. Their experience may not prove very helpful – what do they know of the world beyond academia? – but there is no malice aforethought in their actions. They are simply simple souls who have never attended any sort of people-management course, who think that the ability to read papers 24/7 and obtain funding is all that is required to make them a good group leader.

There are many worthy, sometimes even inspirational, leaders out there. The trouble is that individuals are not chosen for senior posts on the basis of their leadership skills to any large extent. The ability to raise money, yes. The ability to get the most out of young lives entrusted to their care is much less obviously assessed or valued at the appointment stage. Universities should worry more about this, if not at appointment certainly swiftly thereafter when the new group leader is (or should be) being mentored, instead of leaving things to chance. Meanwhile junior researchers suffer, too often ending up having to take pot luck when it comes to seeking advice and ducking the more outrageous actions (or inaction) that is their daily fare.

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