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

Staffing Matters

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Athene Donald

How good are Universities as places of employment? The THE ran a couple of stories last week, headed ‘higher education staffing’, looking at the age distribution of academic staff, and the gender pay gap. I don’t think either of these stories are particularly new for this year, but they are a constant, depressing reminder, that as a sector we don’t appear always to value individuals as we should. The stories arose from the publication of HEFCE’s Annual Report on Staff employed at Hefce-funded HEI’s.

The report shows that the proportion of academics over the age of 60 has increased from 5 to 9% in the years since 1995, and the older staff are especially concentrated in humanities, languages and social, political and economic studies – so less of a problem for scientists apparently (maybe we burn out earlier). As things stand, this drift in age (there are now only 8% of academic staff under 30 compared with 14% in 1995) is only likely to get worse with the removal of a default retiring age. Most universities have simply accepted this position; in the future academics can choose when to retire past 65 and, if US universities are a guide, a significant number will choose to work on well into their 70s (according to a 2006 report, for instance, at Harvard there were more tenured faculty over 70 than under 40). This is not going to improve the situation for those up and coming youngsters, the postdocs  and research fellows seeking to step up into permanent faculty positions, whose fate has featured previously on these pages (here and here, for instance)  as well as those of OT blogger Jenny Rohn (here and here).

My own university saw these problems looming. We looked at the turnover for different grades of staff: academic, academic-related and support staff. What was very clear was that we had less turnover of academics than many HEIs, with around 50% of all new academic openings arising from retirement. These statistics meant, if we just accepted the removal of the default retirement age (which anyhow is 67 for academics at Cambridge), we would have even more limited opportunity for recruiting new blood and, as a secondary point, this would also make it even harder to improve the gender distribution amongst our academics. So, we argued the case – through a vote – to maintain an Employment Justified Retirement Age for academics, although not for other grades of staff where turnover was not an issue. (I say ‘we’ because, through my role on University Council and as the Gender Equality Champion, I was quite active in producing the arguments in favour of this action, as can be seen in the flysheets we produced.) It wasn’t obvious the majority of academics would vote in favour of limiting their own tenure, but they did by a very sizeable majority (greater than 4:1 of those voting). So, we are one of the few universities that have actively sought to do something about the ‘greying’ of the academic workforce (Oxford has also introduced an Employer Justified Default Retirement Age) and, although my own retirement seems to be approaching remarkably fast, I am proud that we have taken that stand for intergenerational justice. It would be nice to think other universities would wake up and do something similar to counter the ageing population the HEFCE report identifies.

The second story the THE ran looked at the gender pay gap, which showed that at the very least the pay gap for permanent academic staff has not diminished over the past 7 years; the raw numbers show that it has increased from £5,690 to £6,680 but I don’t have enough numbers at my finger tips to know what that means after adjustment for inflation.  Here the sciences do do very badly, with a differential of more than £8,000 in physical sciences and maths. The size of this gap probably in large part reflects the fact that there are so few women professors in these subjects so we shouldn’t be very surprised. However, the lead on the story was the anxiety expressed by Geraldine Healy from QMUL (which is having its own problems about gender issues, with criticism of ‘clear gender discrimination’ arising from a metrics exercise to see who should be made redundant in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, according to Rachel Ashworth from the School) about the lack of transparency surrounding pay in academia. She called for academics to be able to see what their colleagues earn.

Now, it is not the case in my University that individuals can see exactly how much Professor W or Dr J is being paid, but we do at least publish an Equal Pay Review , something that doesn’t seem to be common in universities, particularly those in the Russell Group. So we can see the mean value in each grade, and the differences by gender. Because we have the data – and publish it – we can start to act on obvious shortcomings if they show up. I chair the committee (the so-called Gender Equality Group or GEG) set up by Council to oversee the findings and to make recommendations. In fact, what we have seen so far is that there is a massive pay differential if you simply look at the average pay across the university which is, if you like, the headline figure, but this for the unremarkable reason that there is grade segregation: women are more likely to be found in the lowest grades (cleaners etc) and men in the professoriat. This is hardly ideal, but we know what the problem is and, as the first part of this post illustrates, we are mindful of it and are doing what we can to increase the number of women in the academic grades (doing far more, I should add, than simply sticking with a default retirement age). We still fall far short of where we’d like to be, but it’s a start. What we would be much more concerned about would be if there were significant differences within grades. In fact, aside from at the most senior professorial levels,  where we, just as almost every other UK university, have problems because of the lack of senior female professors, the pay gap is rather small. Not zero, but small and tending to diminish over the years.

So, whereas the THE bad news stories represent a bad state of play across the sector, I feel Cambridge is doing better, and actively pushing to do better yet, than many other institutions. Add in the fact that we are the highest ranking HEI on the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index http://www.stonewall.org.uk/at_work/stonewall_top_100_employers/default.asp  and that we won this year’s Employee Inclusion Award http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/2012/07/23/cambridge-wins-employer-inclusion-award/  from the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion and it can be seen we do believe ‘Staffing Matters’ and that we are striving to improve. There’s a long way to go, but there is a will here that makes it a pleasure to be part of the effort. Not before I retire (at 67 of course) will we see the gender pay gap vanish, I fear, but we will be monitoring it; nor do I expect to see the professoriat suddenly become 50% women, but again, we’re on the case and monitoring it. I do at least feel discrimination of the kind alleged at QMUL is unlikely to feature, although unconscious bias undoubtedly persists here as elsewhere.

Posted in Equality | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments