If You Want a Job Done….

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Athene Donald

.…ask a busy person is the usual way to complete the phrase. But although this may be wise for the person wanting the job done, it’s tough on those paragons who repeatedly get asked to take on new duties. Hence the importance of a workload model to ensure that good citizens are not getting submerged beneath a mountain of committee work whilst others swan around with few chores to weigh them down. I am reminded of this because it’s that time of year when committees need to have their membership refreshed, so people cast their eyes around the department, faculty, school, institution or whatever organisational unit is appropriate to see who would be good on Committee X.

Of course as soon as you start considering the matter (and it really doesn’t matter whether you are thinking about the student liaison committee, or seeking out some humdinger of a senior professor for a high level international role, the same principles apply) you realise that many individuals have reputations which make their desirability as a member distinctly dubious. When I look at a list of epithets I have heard used recently about senior (I hesitate to say ‘respected’ given the epithets) colleagues in my own and other universities and across the disciplines, it makes for dismal reading: ‘behaving like an animal cornered’, ‘disengaged’, ‘needs to go on an anger management course’, ‘languid’ and ‘a selfish brat’ being just a few phrases I have heard being used in connection with members of the professoriat around the country.

The reality is that academics are simply human and have the same foibles as the rest of the population. But we are also trained to be competitive and unfortunately too many individuals learn strategies which may help them to compete on the research front, at the expense of the common good of other duties such as teaching.  So, the professor (not a physicist, before people start playing guessing games) described as languid, was further described as

doesn’t exactly put himself out for others in my view… not a team player. Some would even say lazy.

But the reality is he has a huge amount of output in print, usually as sole author, because that is what he chooses to concentrate on and on which his reputation rests.

The fact that not all professors are ideal role-models is nothing new, as a couple of random historical examples will show. Centuries ago, around the turn of the 17th century, the famed Paduan anatomist Fabricius was apparently ‘like a lazy horse who had to be spurred on’, according to William Harvey’s recent biography by Thomas Wright. When complaints were made he retaliated by cancelling the public dissections at short notice, these being a necessary part of the training for would-be physicians like Harvey.

Much more recently, and in my own University of Cambridge, John Henslow – a man responsible at least in part for enthusing and supporting the young Charles Darwin – apparently became a very delinquent Professor of Botany. Having started off enthusiastically when first appointed, his involvement with the University – to which he was still attached – got more and more remote once he’d taken on a new role as Rector of Higham in Suffolk.  Too far away for him to be able to ‘commute’, for some years he only spent 5 weeks a year in Cambridge. Thus technically he fulfilled his lecturing requirements, although only to a handful of students, but people were not impressed, as a letter from Charles Babington (a future Professor of Botany in Cambridge) makes clear in an 1846 letter:

Never was botany at so low an ebb as now in this place. A non-resident Professor, who only comes here for five weeks (as he calls it), going away on Saturday morning in each week, and returning Monday evening. I have been taking a party of our few naturalists for a short excursion on each of the last four Saturdays, but never got more than twelve to accompany me, all of them quite beginners.

(These facts I gleaned from an interesting biography of the man by Walters and Stow). At least in his case he had the justification that he seems to have been a very committed Rector, including being active locally about education for his congregation.

It is easy to identify that class of professors who are only interested in research at the expense of teaching but, to return to the committee work, there are others who see committees as a useful power base. These are also potentially dangerous. If someone wants to take on a particular responsibility – particularly if it’s chairing a committee – this may be for entirely benign, public-spirited and excellent reasons, or it may be because they see a way of getting their hands on resource control. Again, nothing new here, office politics of any sort would throw up something similar. I think the difference is that the joys of academia being such that many people would try very hard not to get stuck on many committees, there can be something of a power vacuum for the few with Machiavellian tendencies of this sort to slot into.

Perhaps someone believes if they chair the committee that doles out the annual quota of PhD studentships they can quietly ensure they and their cronies do rather well. Ditto on a space allocation committee – that way they’ll make sure their sub-field is thriving at the expense of others (and sometimes this may be literal expense as well as figurative). This, long-time readers of my blog will recognize this person as the ‘Chair with Favourites’ from an earlier post which depicted the characteristics of committee chairs. In that earlier post you will also find the Inefficient Chair, who tends to be the one the department lights on in desperation because no one else will take on some poisoned chalice or, even more probably, some deadly dull but necessary committee. I fear the Health and Safety Committee too often falls under that heading.

So, that workload model  I referred to at the start of this post is a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure the smooth-running of a department.  Heads of department do not always have the sanctions they need to make sure everyone makes a reasonable contribution to the greater good. My suspicion is that readers from industry will read these sentences in horror because, by and large, companies do not tolerate this degree of ‘individualism’, for which frequently you should read ‘selfishness’. But because universities, by their very nature, celebrate and reward individualism, competitiveness and single-mindedness, it is hard to see our academic world changing radically any time soon.

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Get a Wife!

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Athene Donald

This useful phrase seems to be the advice proffered by one physicist – male of course – to questions about how to succeed in an academic career.  It says a lot about what may go wrong for women also trying to climb the greasy academic pole, almost regardless of what their institutions may be trying to do to support them. At least some of the time – and I certainly don’t want to let universities completely off the hook – the challenges for women may reside closer to home.  I came across this response in a deeply disturbing article this week, even if at a certain level it didn’t surprise me. It was a study of married male scientists, at a relatively early stage of their careers, but for once it was the views of the men that were sought. What they said was, in some instances, pretty shocking, although not apparently to all the readers judging by some of the comments added at the end.

The article reported a study by Elaine Howard Ecklund and colleagues, as part of the ‘Influences on Science Careers’ project (which has previously published  an interesting article on the effect of having fewer children than ideally desired on scientists’ careers). That earlier study is fully written up, but I have only a brief description of the ongoing study to analyse and, inevitably, this published brief account may or may not accurately reflect the full work. The report is based on work released at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.  The project leaders had interviewed 74 male physicists and biologists, who were either grad students or early career faculty, as to their attitudes towards couples and family caring responsibilities.  About 15% had no children (at least as yet) to worry about. Some men obviously saw their partners as equals – about one third fitted into this category – and knew that they were compromising their own careers in order to share responsibilities such as putting the children to bed, finding themselves often sleep-deprived and certainly not able to work in the flexible way (ie long hours) that had been possible pre-children.

However, a slight majority had rather less egalitarian attitudes. Some (just under a quarter, largely and disappointingly graduate students) had working wives, but believed that it was the women’s responsibility to take care of home matters. They seemed to believe that this was what the women wanted, that it was their ‘choice’.  According to the study

[I]t appears that men overemphasize their wife’s decision as a ‘choice,’ when in reality their wife’s choice to care for the children is constrained by her husband’s schema of children as primarily ‘her issue,’

Some of the commenters didn’t like this attitude, complaining the authors had preconceived ideas that they set out to confirm and implicitly saying, their wives had opted out of their own free will so why couldn’t the authors believe this happened in general. They obviously haven’t read the literature on ‘choicism’, which supports the view that many women want to believe they’ve given up promising careers freely, either completely or by cutting back their efforts and settling for less than their potential might predict, because they don’t want to admit discrimination or being worn down by partners into putting their careers on the backburner. I wrote briefly about this previously in the context of the book Opting Out – Why women really quit careers and head home by Pamela Stone, but there is a substantive literature out there. A useful summary of the issues surrounding ‘choicism’ can be found here.  This is a problem way beyond academic science.

The final group of men interviewed, about 30% and mainly tenured faculty, fitted a traditional breadwinner role. The women didn’t work outside the home and the men clearly recognized this made their own lives much easier. The one who took the biscuit though, was the one whose response to

Do you think that having children then is difficult to manage with being a scientist?

was

No, absolutely not. That’s why you have a wife.

I am sorry to have to admit he was a physicist; I blush for some of my colleagues.

One moral of all this is that old chestnut, choose the right partner. If you are a woman wanting a career, make sure your partner understands and will support you in this role, even at the crunch time of child-rearing. But even that, I suspect, isn’t always enough once push comes to shove. An earlier report from the Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, looking at dual career academic couples, had some rather disturbing statistics.  Looking at responses to the question ‘whose career is primary?’ where the couple were both academics, showed that 59% of women and only 45% of men answered ‘both careers are equal’. (The following two figures are taken from this report and illustrate these points.)
Figure 17 dual

For 50% of men (compared with only 20% of women) their own career was primary. Interestingly, as women got more senior they became even less likely to say that their career was primary (moving from 33% at assistant professor to 27% at full professor level), whereas the opposite was true for men, where the figures moved from 57% to 63%.
Figure 18 dual
These figures don’t make for comfortable reading; if women and men continue to believe that the man’s career is primary and that, the proportion of women who believe that their careers are as important as their partners is higher than the number of men (presumably the other half of the same couples) who believe this, there is no way that problems for the progression of women to the top ranks in academia will not persist.

The optimist in me would like to believe that the young men of today could not write to me as one correspondent did, after my recent Comment is Free article in the Guardian. This retired schoolteacher wrote (rather sweetly, on a typewriter):

May I simply suggest that the ladies concentrate on useful technology courses, rather than pure science. Men might allow ladies to develop careers in technology, if they sacrificed competition in science.

I won’t attempt to spell out what I find so appalling in those two sentences; suffice it to say the word ‘allow’ seems fairly offensive. But if, as this recent study seems to show, the male graduate students of today are content to assume (or even presume) that their wives are meekly content to watch their career aspirations slip away without checking how accurate an assumption that is, I fear the road to equality will be a long time coming.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 48 Comments

On Being Inefficient

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Athene Donald

Academia is a great place for being judged on outputs, and I’m not just referring to the kind of output relevant to the REF. But, be it papers written, worked examples provided, grants submitted or students tutored, we are expected to deliver something tangible. Students tackling their PhD projects, however, basically have just one output they want, namely a completed thesis. This may seem like one huge, monolithic, crushing entity; the closer the submission date approaches the more terrifying and unattainable this object may seem. I have read a variety of posts recently from PhD students struggling with the task, feeling overwhelmed and somewhat got down. Of these let me just point you in the direction of one from squirreledthoughts who bemoans the fact that (s)he doesn’t feel (s)he’s productive and that time is slipping by – although (s)he’s only in their 1st year. So let me reassure him/her and those in the same boat, that efficiency can be something of an illusion.

Squirrelthoughts specifically referred to my earlier post in which I discussed the need for academics to be able to multi-task and do many things in parallel. As I said there, that is a huge ask particularly as you try to tackle some of these activities for the first time upon setting out as an independent researcher. But the plus side of this is that it means that if you are struggling with Task A, there are always Tasks B, C, D and so on ad infinitum which you can try to get on with instead. If you really hit a brick wall with writing that grant proposal, then you can feel virtuous by responding to the emails from confused students on your lecture course or refereeing someone else’s paper. You can hide in the library and try to gather ideas for next summer’s exam questions or you can virtuously read the committee paperwork for one of the committees onto which you’ve been co-opted. Any one of those may be as hard to get stuck into as the original task, but the chances are that one of them at least will feel manageable and doable if not palatable .

So that is the upside of having multi-tasking to do. Instead of sitting there thinking, why isn’t my thesis getting written, I am clearly procrastinating by dealing with emails, something I’ve seen PhD students fret about in print and in person, I try to take the opposite view. If I’m managing to get through my email mountain I try to think that’s good, the inbox is down from 250 to 249. I may be being incredibly inefficient about one thing but as long as I’m not using my computer merely to play Sudoku or follow all the aftermath of London 2012, I can feel that something on that interminable to-do list is indeed being done. The variety of things I have to do then can become a positive advantage.

Or at least that is true until the day you realise that actually you have been procrastinating that dreaded Task A after all and it’s now Too Late. The senior examiner has lost all patience with you because you’re two weeks late with your worked solutions or the grant deadline is 48 hours away and administration won’t process it if they don’t receive the form within the next 10 minutes. That’s when inefficiency really catches up with you, and no amount of feeling virtuous that email numbers 248 and 247 have also been dealt with is going to get you out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself.

Please, all you PhD students out there, do not feel that you are ‘bad’ because writing feels difficult and that sometimes you absolutely have to take a break and fritter a little time away. But think about what that frittering is. I always thought that inserting references (a tedious but necessary chore, which requires little brain power but much stamina) or polishing off diagrams and figures were great ways of leavening the load of actual writing. But clearing your inbox isn’t such a bad idea either. Breaking down the task into bite-sized and varied chunks may help to reduce the magnitude of the weight bearing down on your shoulders, and enable you to see progress day by day. And whatever else you do, do not kid yourself that senior academics have all the answers, that we are magicians who can produce material effortlessly, and who have never been tempted to do something time-wasting rather than keep single-mindedly to the task in hand.

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Sitting in my Corner

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Athene Donald

Today I find myself in the illustrious company of the well-known bloggers over at the Guardian Science Blogs. As Richard Grant and  Stephen Curry already spelled out a week ago, we happy band of OT bloggers have a new outpost over at

 

Occams corner

 

My own first post today sets the scene of the kind of research I do in biological physics and why I find it exciting. Written for the general public, Jenny chastised me when she read the draft for using over-technical words (in this case the offending word was ‘stoichiometrically’, as well as using the Research Council acronyms without spelling them out), so I’m going to have to try harder to explain what I get up to in appropriate language over there. Just like the rest of my colleagues here, the posts on the Guardian will only be a fraction of my output – but it is a wonderful way to reach a wider audience, and I’d like to thank Jenny, Richard (G) and Stephen for getting us to this point (did anyone mention ‘impact’ recently?).  I will not attempt in the future to dissect any comment stream I get, as I did with CIF; I have no excuse of shortage of time to get my nuances as I wish this time around, so if I’m hammered I only have myself to blame.

However, my own first post on OC was, briefly, something very different, indeed something that was written in haste yesterday by me acting in a capacity rather different from my OT/OC self. Responding to a general request from the Guardian to its bloggers for a fast-turnaround piece on A level results, I agreed to do something based on my experiences as the Chair of the Education Committee at the Royal Society. This piece (now located here on the Guardian) uses bits of evidence from various recent Royal Society reports. Consequently, it wasn’t a tough job to produce quickly, since the facts were more or less at my fingertips (and the wonderful team at the Royal Society checked that I hadn’t mixed anything up). The analysis shows that despite the upbeat figures for STEM A levels, there are still underlying concerns. As usual the headline

A level figures for science subjects: could do much better

was not of my making, nor was the image of 3 female students* clutching their results my choice. As I say, briefly that appeared under the Occam’s Corner banner, but swiftly got moved to a more appropriate location on the Guardian website, thereby making room for what was intended to be my debut post.

I’m not a founder member of Occam’s Typewriter, but joined the group after the concept was well advanced, although my first post appeared on the site only a couple of days after OT was launched. Like Stephen, I too owe my ‘membership’ to Jenny, whom I’d been ‘virtually’ introduced to through other media contacts when we were both writing something for The Times science magazine Eureka. When I subsequently approached her for some advice about blogging (being at that point a mere novice blogger of only a few months standing; now I’m just a few days short of my second anniversary), the invitation to join OT was the result.  I feel very privileged to be writing here – and now over there on the Guardian too. I hope you’ll continue to keep me company  – on both sites.

* Interesting – now changed to 6 lads on the website. Did someone complain?

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

I Am Not A Bimbo

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Athene Donald

 Not so long ago I read a distressed ‘rant’  about being catcalled in London, from a woman who seemed persistently to be subjected to it – and worse. Alice voiced her anger and her misery in detail and provoked a storm of comments – supportive, although also occasionally mystified – on her blog and through twitter. Many if not most women will have suffered name-calling and unwanted physical contact from strangers on the streets of the sort she identified. It can be hard to avoid when random individuals feel they have a right to comment on one’s appearance, dress or figure. (I will admit as a teenager in London myself, the typical comment I got was the more innocuous ‘don’t worry dear, it may never happen’ rather than something referring to my anatomy; it was rather depressing to think I walked around with a permanent frown or grimace on my face.) The verbal taunts are bad enough, but the groping and quasi-assualts are infinitely worse.

What Alice found interesting was that, having vented her spleen through the medium of the blog, the nastiness appears to have ceased. As she said in a follow-up post, she can’t prove what caused it, but 5 weeks of freedom from attack must demonstrate something and the most likely explanation she could come up with is that by offloading her distress and annoyance she subsequently walked taller, as if she had confronted the enemy face-to-face instead of in print. My guess is that she unwittingly found a means of freeing up her ‘inner assertiveness’ and by becoming stronger internally she no longer appeared an easy target. It was interesting to note in her original blog that she used the word ‘bully’ several times and of course standing up to a bully rather than allowing oneself to be the victim is always to be recommended – if one can. (For a wonderful book on acquiring assertiveness, I’d recommend Anne Dickson’s A Voice for Now, a book I discussed earlier in my interview in The Browser).

In a place of work one should be free from verbal and other sorts of assault. Should be, but of course it doesn’t always pan out that way. I’ve written about this in the past, although I have no easy answers. At my age, I don’t expect people to comment on my appearance or dress in a sexually inappropriate way, but just occasionally I find myself still subjected to behaviour that at the least could be called patronising, but more accurately demeaning. It always catches me out. It doesn’t happen often I’m pleased to say, presumably a combination of learning how to ooze apparent assertiveness (whatever my innermost thoughts might be) and the ‘status of seniority’ I have acquired en route to my current position deters most but the most hardened offender. However, as I wrote previously, I can still fall victim to the wandering arm and sexually offensive comments occasionally. And, as I discovered not so long ago, I can still be subjected to verbal put-downs in the most unlooked for places, reducing me to feeling that the culprit in this case had me down as a mere bimbo, and leaving a most unpleasant taste in the mouth.

Earlier this summer I was invited to a dinner at a location well away from my home town where several of us were guests from afar. The other guests in this category were all male and some had brought their partners, although I had not. It was (unusually for this summer) a lovely evening, drinks were served outside and everything was very informal. A crowd of us were there, but no proper introductions were done, simply first names – nothing to identify who was who, who was the housekeeper and who were the hosts, who were the visitors and who were the local crowd there to make up numbers. Given that no guest list was presented this was all rather confusing. I say all this in an attempt to create a scenario for which what followed might be considered excusable.

There was a seating plan and I duly took my place and did my duty talking to those on either side of me. So far so good. But halfway through the meal things started to slide. One of my neighbours started talking over me as if he’d had enough of dialogue and had reached the point (perhaps determined by the level of alcoholic lubrication) where he just wanted to hold forth to show what a splendid chap he was in his field – one far from mine, but one that certainly was of interest and I’d have been happy to discuss it with him. I was given no chance and felt somewhat irritated but no worse. Subsequently conversation got more general and the gentleman across the table – who was another of the visitors, as I discovered, but goodness knows who he thought I was – started to wax lyrical on a subject about which it became clear he was not at all well informed. Shall I just say, he was not a scientist but decided to air his personal views about genetics and evolution. If it had been his hobby maybe he’d have known what he was talking about, but it was clearly just his hobby horse.

Now, as is obvious, those are not subjects I’m a professional expert in, but nevertheless I certainly knew more about it than he did and tried gently to point out some of his more blatant errors so that we could have a more sensible conversation . That man had the hide of a rhinoceros; he just swept on as if I was some speck of dirt on his horizon. Clearly, he was used to holding court and could not conceive he was being contradicted. Rather than make a fuss, which would – I’m sure – have been a dreadful social faux pas and just embarrassed everyone, I’m afraid I chose instead to engage the wine waiter in a lengthy conversation so that I could gracefully opt out. Possibly the coward’s way of handling the situation, but on this occasion I was sufficiently angry that any response could have got out of hand and  it would simply have been bad manners on my own part to the hosts.

Now, the question is, would he have done that to a man? Did he just assume I was an ignorant bimbo, come along as partner or arm candy for one of the other senior males (which of course makes the dangerous and unreasonable assumption that such people are themselves beneath contempt)? Or am I being too sensitive and he was the kind of boor who enjoyed pontificating whatever the nature of the audience he had to hand? I know who he is, and I’m sure he’s given lots of opportunities to hold forth in public with his audience hanging on his every word. This would be fair enough when talking about his own field of expertise – again he could probably have been very interesting if he’d stuck to that – but not when expressing idiotic opinions based on ill-informed ideas. He is, by every measure, a Grand Old Man, but I sincerely hope I never have to rub shoulders with him again.

In this case I clearly could have gone on to fight my corner and try to get him to pay heed to where he’d got things muddled up, but to be honest I couldn’t be bothered. It didn’t matter enough. Zinemin said in a recent post about unattractive displays in the bar at conferences that some individuals try to

prove their manliness to each other by trying to drink more, make the better jokes [but the right, manly kind of jokes], being louder and being ‘cooler’.

A conference is a much more trying situation than a simple dinner party, particularly for those aspiring to effective networking and serious conversation. Indeed, I found Zinemin’s post very depressing, because I thought the kind of conference bar atmosphere she described had rather faded away (as I’ve described before). But just occasionally it is worth remembering that those boorish tendencies can still escape and, for many, can be damaging as well as unattractive. I’m passed the point of it ‘mattering’; I am not past the point of caring at being subjected to such ill-mannered behaviour and wondering what I’d done to deserve it. And, if people can be loutish in this way, do I trust them not to be loutish in other ways that are even more offensive? But whether one should just confront every instance of it to try to stop the perpetrator doing the same thing again or worse, or simply turn the other cheek – that is always the conundrum.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments