From Invisibility to Power

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Athene Donald

What can be done to render women in science less invisible? A few women may stand out from the crowd, both historically and at the present time, but the list of women scientists most people – by which I mean other scientists as well as the general public – are able to name tends to be remarkably short. I’ve written a couple of pieces elsewhere which touch on this theme recently addressing very different aspects of this problem, although their more-or-less simultaneous timing was unplanned and uncoordinated. The question of this invisibility is nothing new; what matters is what can be done to change the situation.

The first piece, which appeared in Nature, related to the well-documented Royal Society Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Many people have written about this event in the broadsheets as well as elsewhere (see for example here and here). The occasion was a good opportunity to take some small steps to redress the balance of biographies on Wikipedia, and to give a few more women (15 I believe) the opportunity to get to grips with being a Wikipedia editor in the hopes that they will continue to contribute or expand articles about unsung scientific heroines on Wikipedia in the future. In the case of this online encyclopaedia, the challenge seems to arise from a combination of the vast majority of ‘editors’ apparently being male and the low visibility of the relatively small numbers of women who were able to make a contribution to SET subjects in one way or another historically. The headline to my piece ‘Throw off the Cloak of Invisibility’ – chosen by the Nature sub-editors – shines a light on the problem. Women are too often overlooked and such positive action as the Edit-a-thon is just one way of trying to improve the situation.

One consequence of this article appearing, is that I have been emailed directly by various people with issues relating to the piece. One writer – Jevin West –  in particular drew my attraction to a project analysing the ‘gender gap’ in publishing, which has a write-up here.  Analysis has been carried out for all the publications held in JStor, looking at the over- (or under-) representation of women in different fields, and their place in the author list. Such work could be seen as providing a basis to identify some of the names for women who might deserve Wikipedia entries but who have previously been overlooked.

However, my own view is that we need to do much more than worry about women from the past on Wikipedia, because by and large these are unlikely to inspire the current generation of young women contemplating careers in science. We need to identify living women role models and celebrate their successes; we must continue to press conference organisers not to tolerate all (or predominantly) male slates of speakers, unless there is some very compelling and unusual reason; and we need to get more women scientists into high profile presenting roles on TV and ensure that the Science Media Centre has as many women as possible signed up to provide expert opinions to the media.

Secondly, SpotOn  London – which used to be known as Science Online – is coming up in about 10 days time in London. One of the panels I will be involved with is also concerned with women’s visibility, in this case specifically with how to use Social Media to help increase it. Organised by that brave couple Seirian Sumner  and Nathalie Pettorelli  – who also organise the Soapbox Science event on the Embankment I wrote about before  – this session explicitly looks at ‘Improving Visibility of Female Scientists Online‘. Along with Judith Willetts  and Martin Robbins, I will be participating in a panel discussion on this topic, but additionally a wider group of us are writing blogs on the subject through the SpotOn website. My own piece looked at how I use Twitter to disseminate information about #womeninscience activities. I point you in that direction to see how I went from being opposed to the very idea of Twitter to a convert in a very short space of time, and why I find it a useful adjunct to this blog. Others have written on the SpotOn site about how it is good to toss one’s impostor syndrome aside and start blogging, and how social media can reach out around the world when travel is limited. By the time of the actual London meeting it is hoped there will be a broad-ranging set of posts illustrating different aspects of how online media can be a female scientist’s best friend. A set of resources are being pulled together to go with this Womeninscience session. (The other panel I’m involved with looks at how to fit public engagement into your scientific career, and fellow OT blogger Jenny Rohn will also be on the panel, as well as Anne Osterrieder  and Brian Wecht)

So, these two pieces relate to a couple of occasions where the low visibility of women in science is being recognized and discussed. But it is always important to ensure that one looks for constructive ways to move forward, and moaning over what has gone wrong in the past is certainly not particularly constructive. So let me end this post, not with considering the past low profile of women, but looking again at how to celebrate and empower women scientists. For this let me turn to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, which has just put out a call for names to be considered for their so-called Powerlist, with a plan to rank the ‘100 most powerful women in the UK’. We should ensure this list contains a good number of scientists, engineers, computer scientists and so on (in other words STEM professionals) to remind people – young women in particular, or possibly their parents – that science is a suitable, rewarding and important career for women. This is an occasion where the community can do their bit to make sure the women scientists are not invisible, overwhelmed by TV personalities who cook or celebs from the Soaps. There are better – or at least a wider selection of – role models for our daughters to consider than those, but only if we remember to nominate them. So…..go to it!

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

Risk, Education and Politicians

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Athene Donald

As usual I’m a trifle behindhand in my reading, so only now am I catching up with the Darwin Lectures  on Risk, a series of lectures given in 2010 and now available as a book or on your Kindle). This is a fascinating compendium of chapters looking at risk from many different angles, ranging from my Cambridge colleague Mary Beard on the ancients’ view of the dangers of life, to a much more modern take, as manifested by Oxford’s Lucia Zedner discussing Terrorism and Counterterrorism.  The introduction says that during the actual lectures there was even a short film about ‘the risk to one’s personal life of being too passionate and engaged in one’s work’, a risk to which I suspect I am definitely prone.

David Speigelhalter, another Cambridge colleague and whose formal job title is the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, contributed another chapter, presented in his usual clear-headed style. He discusses that useful measure of risk, the micromort, a concept introduced by Ronald Howard, a professor at Stanford, several decades ago.  A micromort represents a one-in-a-million chance of death, and provides a useful way to compare different dangerous activities. It is, as Spiegelhalter describes it,  ‘the average ration of lethal risk that people spend each day, and which we do not unduly worry about’. Anything from giving birth to riding a bicycle for a mile can be quantified, at least approximately, in terms of this unit. (In case you’re wondering the answers are 0.05 micromorts for the latter; for the former it’s 80 micromorts in the UK, but more than twice that in the USA, something I think that says more about their healthcare provision for the less well-off than the dangers in a middle class hospital.)

Elsewhere Spiegelhalter has recently taken to pieces the statement that there is ‘a 20% increased risk of developing pancreatic cancer per 50 g of processed meat eaten per day’ as being really not a very helpful way of presenting the data. By looking at the  risks of eating a breakfast including bacon as an example compared with a healthier alternative, he shows this statement corresponds to an increase in deaths from pancreatic cancer of only from 5 to 6 for every group of 400 people eating one of the two alternative breakfasts all their lives. He has not, to my knowledge, evaluated the risk of being sent to jail if you are an Italian geophysicist who is deemed to have given expert advice to the Government, but he does have quite a lot to say about the horrible absurdities of the situation for the L’Aquila scientists. In terms of taking pains to make sense of risk for those less expert than him (which is just about everyone), he cannot be faulted; he is always worth reading.

The trouble is, most of us – scientists included – have a hard time of working out just what a particular figure really means for us as an individual. You are told you have a 60% chance of success in clearing up a medical problem if a certain procedure is carried out but also a 2% chance of death, what do you do? A doctor told me some figures along these lines a few years back, although I’m glad to say further investigations demonstrated that this was not at all the right procedure for my condition. I felt the figures were not at all helpful for me to work out what to do, although the risk of death felt uncomfortably high, and the success rate miserably low. Data for the population is hard to relate to oneself, where you may not be ‘typical’, just as the figure I quoted above for giving birth in ‘a’ US hospital, will mask huge variations depending on which hospital.

If you are not a scientist or mathematician, reasonably confident with probabilities, statistics and the rest, you will struggle even more. The British Academy has just released a quite extensive position statement regarding Quantitative Skills in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The BA is worried, not only because they see the lack of such skills threatening the UK’s status as a world leader in research and higher education in these fields, but because ‘quantitative methods underpin…effective evidence-based policy’ –  and we don’t see enough of that do we!  They are not talking about the majority of the UK population in this statement, but about a fairly privileged sub-set who still struggle to handle and interpret the data appropriately. I have discussed some of these issues previously, following a meeting at the British Academy, where I was trying to set the scene about the limitations of the UK’s maths education: as I pointed out then and as this recent statement reiterates, our post-16 maths education is unimpressive. Out of a survey of 24 countries carried out by the Nuffield Foundation, we (strictly speaking England) are the only one  with a participation rate of less than 20% in maths for the 16-18 age-group, and many students taking social science subjects at A level will barely be tested in quantitative methods during their assessments, although there is a significant variation across awarding organisations.

When it comes to what the Statement calls ‘skills for a modern participating citizenry’, they quote from the Royal Statistical Society’s ‘getstats’:

At every turn we make decisions to which risk, probability and sampling are relevant. Choosing what to buy or planning a journey, deciding on medical treatment and listening to the advice of the doctor; calculating earnings and benefits and how to save and invest: these are statistically rich decisions. We need numerical data to understand the performance of schools and hospitals, but also to understand why league tables can be distorting and unfair.

Our overall weakness in maths and statistics is now being recognized in Government, and maybe there is hope on the horizon. ACME (the Advisory Council for Mathematics Education) is being asked to advise on what could and should be done for post-16 mathematics in England by the Department for Education. But it cannot be forgotten that the DfE has its own agenda, as the way the story about a project in Cambridge to create enrichment activities for student and teachers at Maths A level appears to have been ‘spun’ to the media makes only too plain. If you compare the factual story about this project on the University of Cambridge website with the way it was written up in the press (led by the Daily Telegraph, with its wholly inaccurate title ‘Cambridge University professors ‘to set maths A levels’) the discrepancy between the reality and what the Ministry appeared to want to happen is clear.

On the day this particular story broke earlier this week, with the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, visiting Cambridge to launch the initiative, I was attending a so-called Joint STEM Ministerial Meeting in London.( I refer to it as ‘so-called’ because, despite the fact that both the Universities’ Minister David Willetts, and the Schools Minister Liz Truss were intended to be present, neither of them were – albeit the former turned up later in the meeting after both KS4 and A level reform and been heatedly discussed.)  I felt obliged to point out quite forcefully to the other Education representatives in the room, that the media had got the story completely wrong, to make it clear that my University is not trying to leap into the breach of ‘setting’ A levels unilaterally.

Nevertheless, it is good news that the DfE is looking at the post-16 maths provision. We have to hope that future generations are better equipped to make sense of many aspects of their lives, risk included. That will at least represent progress.  In the Darwin Lectures, Spiegelhalter says ‘Public figures need to act with humility when communicating about [these} uncertainties’. If they started doing this, that would also represent progress.

Posted in Communicating Science, Education, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

What You Don’t See at Conferences

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Athene Donald

Academics get to go to conferences in exotic places, there is no doubt about that. But that is not the same thing as getting to see the exotic places in which the conferences are held. In my experience, too often one gets to see little more than the inside of a conference centre which, particularly in the US, may be a soulless complex of Hilton, Mariott and the like hotels and a collection of vast identikit rooms with over-patterned carpets to hide the coffee stains. Plus, of course, the airport lounges which are equally soulless and empty of fresh air. I’m afraid I think conference travel is an overstated benefit of being an academic. It frequently seems little more than an opportunity to acquire jetlag, airmiles and a clutch of cards from people you bumped into at the poster session.

Perhaps that is just the jaundiced view of an academic with an insane diary, who lacks the time to add in a day or two at either end to get away from the conference centre in order to explore the heart of the city one is visiting or the surrounding beauty spots and historical sites. Many years ago, when I was a young postdoc at Cornell, I had an excellent trip to the Grand Canyon with fellow postdocs after attending an APS meeting in Phoenix. That was a spectacular trip which made up for the fact I had been forbidden to walk anywhere on my own in the city by my professor, due to fears about the down and out’s who frequented the area around the conference centre.  However, more typical (in as far as I travel abroad at all now, which isn’t much) was the trip to Atlanta from Cambridge, where I spent a grand total of about 36 hours in the US, and all I got to do was attend a reception in a revolving restaurant at the top of some tall building as soon as I arrived (not enjoyable in a sleep-deprived state); walk to and fro between hotel and conference location – a mere 300m in the fantastically hot and humid August air; and see the ever-monotonous inside of said conference centre.  The trip was just long enough for my body to contemplate readjusting its internal clock, without succeeding, before going back to UK time. This was an experience I have taken pains not to repeat.

I write this post in some frustration after a brief trip to a brilliant location at the top of a fair-sized hill abutting the Mediterranean, in a medieval town full of monasteries (now defunct). No conference centre in the American sense of the word, but a converted church. Meetings in a below ground crypt are not ideal, but the views from the coffee room at the top of the church were spectacular despite the haze. And that was all I saw. I arrived after dark, I left in the early morning, and I spent 2 days in deconsecrated church buildings – and restaurants. Early career researchers, don’t kid yourself your professors enjoy themselves on such trips by seeing all the sights of the world you’ve always wanted to see yourself. Chances are, if you get to visit some far-flung place for a conference, you will enjoy your trip much more than your seniors because you live your life at a more leisurely pace. Make the most of it!

But there is a more serious side to this travelling malarkey that I was reminded of when sent some promotion papers to read and comment on recently for someone from another university. This person had stated that they had received various invitations to give talks at international locations, to indicate that they were successful and in demand. They also stated they had declined some of these invitations because they had small children. Why I cheered as I read this was that the applicant was male. I am quite sure the more comfortable men are in stating that they are opting out of travelling for family reasons, the easier it will be for women not to feel embarrassed by making an equivalent admission. It is too common for women to be assumed to be the primary carer (as I’ve discussed before), to end up having to decline trips abroad – or even within the UK – and then fearing that they will be marked down by promotions/ appointments panels for saying so. Or, even worse, be marked down because they don’t feel able to put that in writing so that it looks simply as if they haven’t been getting such invitations at all. If both sexes – and the committees –  feel that the honour of the invitation is what is the mark of esteem, not the turning up and delivering (which, after all, no one will score or report back on to such committees) then it will be one more step to making success in academia not inconsistent with family life.

As I heard stated recently at another meeting I attended, this one at the Royal Society and which was not meant to be discussing gender issues but had strayed in that direction, ‘burning up the kerosene’ should not be a necessary attribute to get on in academia, nor taken as a straightforward proxy for academic excellence. By default, by lack of imagination when people make assessments, it too often is.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 17 Comments

Hypothesising about Interdisciplinarity

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Athene Donald

How often have I heard it said that ‘the policies are good but the implementation is shaky’?  I could make that comment about many of the issues around women in science, where the best-intentioned policies are defeated by negativity, implicit stereotyping and just plain old habits dying hard and not being challenged in some remote parts of an organisation, whatever the top brass may believe. However, in this post I will leave the diversity theme alone and return to the topic of a relatively recent post, that of interdisciplinary work, where I believe the same statement about the mismatch between policies and implementation may sometimes apply.

Previously I wrote about the challenges facing those researchers whose area of activity cannot neatly be pigeonholed into mainstream areas or whose work spans more than one Research Council’s activities. The post was prompted by a meeting both myself and Doug Kell, Chief Executive of the BBSRC, had attended – Physics Meets Biology. Both of us had come away from the meeting enthused and encouraged by the exciting research being carried out in many places within the UK. However, I retain a long held worry that such interdisciplinary research fares badly under the current grant-awarding system where I suspect there is an overwhelming tendency of ‘regression towards the mean’. In other words, I believe truly innovative and adventurous research that doesn’t tick standard boxes can fall by the wayside.

My experiences with both the BBSRC and the EPSRC over many years have fuelled this anxiety. The situation can only be made worse by the current funding climate, where money is exceedingly tight; it is perhaps unsurprising if, in these circumstances, panels tend to play safe and the more adventurous/less mainstream/ less easily pigeon-holed applications are systematically if unconsciously disadvantaged. (Yes, alert readers of my blog will spot that here is a very different version of unconscious bias than the one I usually write about!)

Doug attempted to refute what I said on his own blog. He highlighted what the BBSRC policies are around interdisciplinary work, and also on his blog discussed the (un)importance of hypotheses, an issue I highlighted in my earlier post as causing particular problems for scientists like me when applying to BBSRC. Although, like him, I do not think the blogosphere is a very good medium for this debate, I would like to think that our exchanges could prompt much deeper thought within the Research Councils and the wider community. So, I will take the liberty of analysing his refutation. It should be recognized that this is not meant to be read as an issue specific to BBSRC (whom I am sure are no worse, if not any better than any other Research Council), let alone directed at Doug Kell personally.

The basis of my concern is that, whereas Doug may be absolutely correct in what he claims is his Council’s policy, there can be – and I believe indeed is – a gulf between excellent policies and the actual implementation. We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I would contend that, whatever the good intentions and stated objectives of BBSRC (and probably EPSRC too, although they haven’t entered this debate, at least as yet here), their implementation is not monitored to see where these good intentions have actually led.  This is a common problem for large organisations with complex structures and many layers where decision-making may occur. I have no reason to believe the BBSRC is any different from any other organisation in this regard, but if – as BBSRC and EPSRC explicitly state – they are both truly committed to funding interdisciplinary work, they should check whether their well-intentioned policies really are delivering what they want or whether somewhere along the route systemic problems arise.

First of all there is the question of which Research Council to send a proposal to when it straddles the seams. Doug says that if researchers are worried where their proposal might sit they should discuss it with staff. I cannot tell you how fed up I am with this answer, because I have heard it repeatedly and it completely misses the point.  The remit query (set up on the Council’s website), and conversations with helpful staff in Swindon, assume that a grant can be written so it fits readily within one Research Council’s ambit or another. I am not interested in how the funding is carved up and I am well aware two or more Research Councils may co-fund a grant in some proportion or another. I am interested in whether the application that describes the best science an applicant can write up will be judged fairly by committees. I have been in the position where my grant has been rejected by (in this case) EPSRC because there was too much biology in it, but there was no way it could find favour with BBSRC (who were prepared to accept it) because the biology was necessarily of the Noddy kind which would allow the physics to be teased out on a model system before there could be any possibility of tackling the real biology.

We are always told by those kind Swindon folk, to write the best science we can. Then we are told it isn’t acceptable to one Council and it is very obvious it will be bound to fail at the other. When this happened to me, and I was told I had to withdraw my EPSRC application and submit it to BBSRC, I was well placed to judge just how well the grant would fare at BBSRC, because I was chairing the relevant committee at the time! The ‘best’ science may well have a lot of rather simple biology in order to progress an approach before it can be used on serious biology; in order to achieve this the physics needed may equally appear to a hardcore physicist to be Noddy. The synergy is what makes it interesting and worth doing. Being forced to find a home in one Research Council or another will merely destroy that synergy.  I assume these same arguments apply at all the junctions between Research Councils. It would be good to see comments from people who recognize the problem at any of these joins; I saw a smattering on Twitter after my last post on this topic.

Let me now turn to the vexed question of hypotheses. Of course Doug will know how the referee form reads and he tells me the current wording is ‘If the work is proposing or testing hypotheses….’, but I wonder when he last sat through a grant-awarding panel or read a batch of referee reports.

How about this as a response from one referee to my non-hypothesis led proposal to BBSRC from a couple of years back.

But as hypothesis‐based research, this proposal is rather weak and unfocussed. In fact, the word “hypothesis” never appears in the Case for Support. Moreover, the implicit hypotheses are not compelling. The proposal has the flavour of a “fishing expedition”, in which the investigators intend to play around to see what their technologies can deliver.

This referee then proceeded to try and invent some hypotheses (s)he then shot down. What a way to proceed! Even if a committee and its chair try to ignore such stupid refereeing, the damage is done. When stacked up against other proposals which have only positive referees’ reports of course it will be subtly marked down. It doesn’t matter that the proposal was not intended to be hypothesis-driven, nor that the BBSRC senior management doesn’t want grants to be judged this way, what I refer to as the tribal nature of the community defeats the good intentions that the policies may intend. So what is the answer? I am afraid that just being told that of course it isn’t necessary to include hypotheses simply doesn’t solve anything.

That is why I would urge the Research Councils to look again, not at what they say they do, but how their policies actually work in practice. To be told that the Chief Executive had no trouble getting funding for interdisciplinary when he was an active researcher also isn’t reassuring; once upon a time I didn’t have issues either, but those days are past. I think the difficulties for interdisciplinary work are now acute and only those areas (eg EPSRC’s Technologies for Healthcare) where a major, genuinely interdisciplinary programme is formally constructed with money explicitly allocated to it, is success likely. For those of us who work in more marginal or ill-defined areas which cross boundaries, but not as part of a pre-determined priority, life is an endless frustrating struggle, with success having little to do with excellence.

So I say again, maybe it is time for those of us who do not fit squarely into any box to stand up and be (even more) vociferous. Not to use special pleading for our field to be particularly protected, but to call for practices to be as fair to us who work at the margins of any given discipline and who cross boundaries, as for those who sit squarely in the middle of some well-established subject. I would urge the research councils to look at, not their policies, but what actually happens in practice so that they can give me the evidence that interdisciplinary work is genuinely not being disadvantaged by current structures. It is of course possible my experiences are not aligned with other people’s, but nothing that has been said to me by colleagues makes me think that is so. Again, comments on this blog – one way or the other – might help to beef up the evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, but a multiplicity of examples could help.

Posted in Biological Physics, Interdisciplinary Science | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments