Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: What Will it Take?

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee produced its report into Diversity and Inclusion in STEM. It states in no uncertain terms that ‘Action must be taken that truly moves the dial’, recognizing that the issue of diversity is a problem of long-standing, yet evidence and recommendations from previous studies and analyses have not transformed the landscape. It has to be hoped that this is the report that finally does shift things, so that STEM is a genuinely inclusive environment whatever one’s gender, skin colour or familial background.

I wrote previously about the evidence Katherine Birbalsingh gave to this committee, in which she claimed girls didn’t like hard maths and that this was the reason so many chose not to study Physics at A Level. Her remarks at the time were not well received (see e.g. this write up) and do not get significant coverage in the final committee report, which states guardedly in the summary that

‘The evidence our inquiry received offered no consensus as to the reasons for this difference—male dominated-environments, and pre-existing societal expectations being suggested causes.’

Nothing about girls not liking hard maths there.

The original call for evidence was broad, but the bulk of the report focusses on school years rather than what happens in universities and thereafter. My own (written) evidence covered both stages in an individual’s life, but only the former was raised at the in-person evidence session I presented at last May.  It is very clear that the Committee perceives significant limitations in the current school system when it comes to encouraging anyone and everyone to see themselves as a potential future scientist. As it puts it

‘In our view, it is important that all children are able to see themselves in what they learn from an early age. A diverse national curriculum—that contains female scientists, for example—is one low-cost way of ensuring this. Similarly, the careers advice and support pupils receive from the earliest years should promote diverse and inclusive role models.’

I would like to think this report will get attention and traction, but it isn’t clear to me that that is usually the fate of such Select Committee reports. However, it is high time the lack of diversity in STEM gets sorted, to resolve all the downstream impacts on innovation for our economy, good decision-making by scientifically-trained policy-makers, not to mention a healthy education system and fairness and opportunity for all.

Not just for the boys

I discuss many of the same issues (albeit with a specific focus on the issues women face rather than the challenges for other minorities) in my upcoming book Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more Women in Science, which is due out from OUP in May (August in the USA). I am certainly hoping this book is read, not just by those who are in the midst of traversing the tricky career ladder of science, but parents, teachers and policy-makers. As Birbalsingh demonstrated in her remarks to the committee, many a (head)teacher seems unaware of the assumptions they make, assumptions that the social science literature simply does not support. The IOP has spent many years trying to make clear just how much the ethos of the school impacts on choices children – boys and girls, around different disciplines – make. But still far too many schools persist in treating boys and girls differently, with the result we see few female engineers and few men entering English degrees.

I believe the problems start right from the time a child is born, with societal expectations imposed on them in the toys they play with (read Let Toys be Toys various studies and blogs to exemplify this), or the clothes they wear. The explicit message that ‘I’m too pretty to do math’, once emblazoned on a T shirt for sale, I think has been eradicated, but implicitly that message remains and is heard by many a girl. Of course not all schools or families pursue such gender stereotyping, but far too many do and, it would seem, including Birbalsingh’s own school (Michaela, in North London).

And, as numerous posts on this blog have pointed out over the past decade and more, the experiences of women as they move up the academic ladder pile on to these early years’ experiences to make many a woman question what they are doing in science, and whether they belong. The boring familiarity of attending a conference or meeting where the men are introduced with their proper academic titles and the women reduced to a plain Mary Smith may be trivial in one sense, but it is demeaning and highlights that women aren’t fully recognized in the groves of academe. It is equally likely to occur when experts are lined up in the media, when somehow the expertise of the woman is frequently downplayed while all the honorifics of the man are enumerated.

The Commons Select Committee report highlights many of these issues at school and in the scientific professions. Diversity requires we, collectively as a society, do better. I hope that the report receives the attention it deserves and stimulates action. As I anxiously wait to get my hands on a hard copy of my own book, and to see how it fares in the public eye, I have to hope my own contribution in this space will also help to ‘move the dial’. Society needs many more people to become aware of the systemic problems still facing women and other minorities in STEM fields. This is not only or necessarily to take blame upon themselves for being misogynist. The situation is more nuanced than that in general, because it is the whole culture we bring our children up in that is at fault, damaging both boys’ and girls’ life chances in working out what they really want to do, and what their talents are best suited for. Only when we resolve these challenges will society derive the maximum benefit from all its members in solving the numerous huge problems that the world faces.

 

Posted in Education, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: What Will it Take?

Renaissance Man?

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Athene Donald

This week the sad news of the death of physicist and erstwhile colleague Tom McLeish was announced, a soft matter theorist and committed interdisciplinarian – as well as a committed Christian. He is particularly associated with developing theories for the flow of polymer melts, theories he would illustrate with interesting demonstrations (often involving his arm and a sleeve to show how polymer chains of different shapes would move, if I recall correctly) and a fruity vocabulary. Not, I should say, improper language, but involving raspberries, for instance, to describe the associating polymeric structures that formed in certain melts, impacting on their flow; I am sure there were several other foody descriptions that now escape me.

What follows are personal recollections, and they may well be blurred by the passage of time. For instance, when did I I first meet him? Was he still a PhD student or had he progressed to being a postdoc? He spent time working on the flow of polymers at Courtaulds, looking at instabilities in spinning fibres. I wrote a couple of papers with him, the second some time after he had left Cambridge, looking at the motion of polymer chains in the glassy polymers I studied experimentally. I also remember introducing him to my collaborator of the time at the late lamented blue chip company, ICI. Tom subsequently built up a long term and highly successful collaboration of his own with the company, which led to much improved computer visualisation of flows in the complex geometries of a polymer processing factory, work he did as part of a large consortium which he led.

Tom moved from Cambridge first to Sheffield as a lecturer and, when still very early in his career (or as we said at the time, at a young age) moved to Leeds to take up the chair recently vacated by Ian Ward. Ian had been a key early mover in the mechanical properties of solid polymers (and wrote a book of that name; my own copy of this is well-thumbed) but was very much an experimentalist. Tom’s arrival in Leeds necessarily involved something of a reorientation of the work there in the Physics Department, including as part of the IRC (Interdisciplinary Research Centre) in polymers, set up in 1989 before Tom came and which was joint with Durham and Bradford. I think it must have been daunting for Tom to take on such a leadership role when only in his early 30’s, but I don’t think I ever heard him fret about it, although he did talk to me before he formally accepted the job.

Tom spent many successful years in Leeds before he moved to Durham to take up the role of PVC in Research there. Whilst there his enormous range of interests became much clearer. I know how much he enjoyed having an ‘excuse’ to visit departments far removed from his background and to interact with a huge range of colleagues, without ever ceasing to be a physicist. But he took enormous interest in the medieval Bishop Grosseteste (Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1253) and his theories of light and, when he moved to his final position at the University of York, once his stint as PVC was over, his title was explicitly not that of your average 21st century physicist, instead taking the (historic) title of Professor of Natural Philosophy, but holding it in the Physics of Life Research Group (like me, over the years his interests had moved from synthetic polymers to those of living origin).

Looking at the York website, though, it is clear how diverse his interests had become, including being a Member of Management group for the Centre for Medieval Studies and a Member of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. His Christian faith became ever more visible too, including in the 2014 book he wrote using the biblical Book of Job as its basis, Faith and Wisdom in Science. His last book, published in 2019, Poetry and Music in Science, has a wide sweep, as suggested by its subtitle: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art. He, like me, did not believe in a ‘two cultures’ approach to life. He served on the REF2021 Physics sub-panel, and was very exercised by how interdisciplinary research was being treated: he chased me to make sure that I was paying due attention to it in my role as Chair of the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel for the exercise.

I am sure that his faith was hugely important to him in the months leading up to his death, once pancreatic cancer had been diagnosed last summer. I last saw him at a conference in the spring, when he still seemed to be in fine form. He kept on tweeting during the months after his diagnosis (which he publicly disclosed over Twitter), and it was obvious how much solace he derived from music – he played the French Horn – with frequent comments on the BBC Radio 3 offering. Indeed, my last exchange with him was about something on Radio 3.

He was only 60, cruelly young to die. From the comments I have already seen (for instance over Twitter) it is clear how many people he helped, mentored and developed scientifically. His range of collaborators, within the UK and far beyond, was extensive. At the Royal Society, where he had succeeded me as Chair of their Education Committee, his passion for science, education and outreach was remarked upon to me this week as we all mourned his loss.

RIP Tom. You will be missed by so many.

 

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science, Research | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley

Posted on February 21, 2023 by Athene Donald

It is depressing to learn that the Treasury is essentially constraining any capital spending from the Department of Housing, Levelling Up and Communities. Whereas when Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State there might have been some optimism that he ‘got’ the need for investment in left-behind regions, the way the Department’s budget has so far been spent has suggested that there is not such a strong will overall across Government, and notably within the short-term financially-focussed Treasury. As Jack Shaw for the IPPR put it

‘Contrast the culture of innovation supported by EU funding with the Shared Prosperity Fund’s culture of bean-counting.’

The loss of these EU Structural Funds is a real blow for many areas, since these were allocated inversely according to the local level of economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding. The same relationship does not exist in allocations from the replacement Shared Prosperity Fund, as many commentators have noted. The more deprived areas are losing out to better-heeled regions in ways that are hard not to see as driven by political imperatives more than the need to level up. Furthermore, again to quote Jack Shaw,

‘the methodology underpinning the Shared Prosperity Fund bears limited relation with its stated policy objectives.’

An interesting recent report from the Centre of Cities, which contains a wealth of data to digest, highlights the inequalities across the regions, or more specifically across cities up and down the land. I live in Cambridge, a superficially wealthy city, though a previous report from the same organisation has identified it as the most unequal city of all. It has a great number of citizens with high levels of education, but it also has high levels of pollution together with exorbitant house prices which are second only to London. My city is not particularly typical. It seems to sit near the top or bottom of just about every figure of merit this report analyses. It sits at the very top of cities when it comes to rate of growth of the population over the decade to 2021, with an increase of 17.9%, closely followed in second place by Peterborough at 17.2%. The area is booming (which of course drives the prices of houses ever upwards), with the highest number of ‘new economy’ firms. However, our roads are choking us, public transport is still woeful into the city centre – although the council wishes to introduce a congestion charge along with improved transportation links – but cycling is available to anyone fit enough, including students, who happens to have the luxury of living close enough to their place of work to make that feasible (but beware that pollution).

Skills and education are taken seriously in Cambridge. At 3.4% of the population, it has one of the lowest rates in the country of workers with no formal qualifications. In my College we take apprentices seriously in teams like maintenance and catering, so even those who join us not having thrived at school can hope to gain useful qualifications, whether or not they choose to stay employed here. At the other end of the scale, Cambridge has one of the highest levels of the population with Level 4 or above qualifications at 63.5%, beaten only by Edinburgh and Oxford.

That high level of skills in the Cambridge population is of course immediately relevant to the city’s success. At the other end of the scale, Burnley has more than 5 times as high a percentage of people with no qualifications coupled with less than half as many as Cambridge with Level 4 or above education. Burnley, like many another northern de-industrialised city, has fallen into a low skills, low wage equilibrium. For families where the breadwinner lost their job in the mines or mills a generation or more ago, there may be a feeling of helplessness, a belief that a decent job is not there for them, with little concomitant motivation to stay on in education to gain qualifications that may take them nowhere, or to upskill later in life. The Centre for Cities report has a lot to say about these people who are demoralised to the point of not attempting to enter the workforce or to seek a new job when they lose theirs. These are people they call ‘involuntarily inactive’.

One of the problems with the Levelling Up White Paper is how little it had to say about skills. There has been a little more information published recently about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), although how helpful that will be in practice for those involuntarily inactive in regions where skilled, even semi-skilled jobs are in short supply, remains to be seen. Who will want to take on a substantial loan in mid-life with no certainty of a well-paid job at the end, a situation made even more unpalatable if there are several family dependents? Helpful though the LLE may be for some, it is far from a universal panacea to resolving the distressed face of places like Burnley.

Along with upskilling must be the creation of relevant jobs in local industry.  All the evidence is that anchor industries play a crucial role in the economy of a city, not least because non-graduates are much less likely to move away from their home towns than those with higher qualifications. Lincoln has thrived through the combination of a new(ish) university and employers like Siemens, a vision vigorously pursued by their former VC Mary Stuart.

But sometimes there are employers seeking a skilled workforce who cannot find them. To return to my own local area, but moving a bit further from Cambridge, at a recent meeting organised by the Royal Society in Norwich, we heard from a company based in Suffolk about their employment needs. Here was a firm, with a full order book, but it couldn’t attract the skilled and semi-skilled people it needed, with local youth not seeing being a machine operative, for instance, as of interest to them. The area is not rich in alternative industries, but still they could not attract those leaving school, and local courses were not particularly geared to their needs. Further education colleges in the area, as elsewhere, are now even more hampered in development due to the government’s recent reclassification of them as public sector. This change means they are now subject to strict government lending restrictions and effectively barred from taking out commercial loans, making capital expenditure almost impossible, preventing them from expanding or changing emphasis in their courses. This particular Suffolk CEO who spoke, felt that developments at Sizewell C, not that far away, would suck up many of those who might otherwise have thought about joining their company – and additional skilled labour for the construction of the site would need to come from much further afield.

Only if we start to see joined up thinking across Government – from the Department of Education, through DHLUC to the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – will there be any hope of seeing improvements in our urban areas, ensuring a match between the skills provision and local need as well as decent funding to go along with this, thereby creating jobs and hope where currently there is little of either.

Posted in Education, Equality, skills | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley

Celebrating a Pioneering Engineer

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Athene Donald

Constance Tipper (née Elam) was born on this day in 1894. Although some years ago I gave a talk at TWI, just outside Cambridge, to the Tipper Group – a group which endeavours to promote diversity and inclusion to wider audiences – and was introduced then to her name, I am only just learning what a remarkable woman she was. One who undoubtedly has suffered from the Matilda effect, with her name and achievements effaced by other, more famous male engineers. I am indebted to Michael Thouless, a former Fellow of Churchill College and the son of another former Fellow and Nobel Prize winner, the late David Thouless, for bringing her achievements to my attention over dinner a short while ago.

Tipper was a metallurgist who studied Natural Sciences in Cambridge at Newnham College during the early years of the twentieth century. Thereafter she worked briefly at the National Physical Laboratory and then at the Royal School of Mines (part of Imperial College London) for more than a decade, but during which she also worked at times in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, my old department. She worked closely with various men whose names are well known, including GI Taylor, with whom she won the Royal Society’s Bakerian Medal in 1923. The lecture – which I assume was actually given by Taylor – was published that year.

Tipper Bakerian

I will return to the rather sad anecdote about the evening of the lecture in a minute, but first I should admit to a mea culpa. I won the Bakerian Award in 2006 and have been saying ever since I was only the second woman to win the award after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1972. This is clearly entirely wrong, given that Elam/ Tipper won it in 1923 as part of that pairing with Taylor; I will admit I had never thought to check the listings that far back. Had I done so I would realise that even if Tipper was the first, after her there was a second woman who won the award as part of a pair: William Hardy & Ida Bircumshaw won it for a paper entitled Boundary Lubrication – Plane Surfaces and the Limitations of Amontons Law in 1925 (pairings seemed quite common during these years). Aside from the fact that Bircumshaw was also known as Ida Doubleday (presumably her maiden name), and she published a few papers on lubrication in the early 1920s, I can find out nothing about this second woman. But there it stands, there were two women winners of the Bakerian Medal before Dorothy Hodgkin, so I was in fact the fourth female winner, albeit the first two were not sole winners and did not deliver a lecture themselves.

After my own lecture, back in 2006, the Royal Society kindly laid on a dinner. That was true for Constance Elam except…she was invited when no one realised that CF Elam was not a man. Unfortunately, the Royal Society dining club of the day was not open to women joining the dinners. She appears to have been very gracious about this, apparently writing

‘I am sorry to have given you so much trouble. But it is my misfortune rather than my fault that I do not happen to be a man. I felt very much honoured on receiving your invitation, although I realised that it had been sent under a misunderstanding.’

I hope no one would be so conveniently understanding today, but I can confirm that women certainly are able to dine. All Elam/Tipper got back then in lieu of the dinner was a ‘nice box of chocolates’ apparently.

After Constance Elam married and became Constance Tipper, she worked in Cambridge but, as for so many spouses then and now, for many years she was more of a hanger-on in the University than a formal employee, even during the time she held a Leverhulme Fellowship. Even Newnham College only seems to have given her a short spell as a Fellow. But she worked away (the Engineering department do seem to have provided space and facilities) looking at the interplay between metal structure and failure. Come the 2nd World War, a number of lecturers departed to serve and she took on some of their teaching duties.

The war provided her with a fascinating case study arising from the disastrous failure of so-called Liberty Ships. These were ships built hurriedly during the war, with a change in design for the hull from riveting metal plates to welding them. Several of these ships failed catastrophically, some when not even in rough seas, as this photograph of a docked SS Schenectady shows.

Liberty ship(This photo comes from one of my early favourite books on materials science, The New Science of Strong Materials by JE Gordon, which I read when still at school. This image stuck in my mind all these years.). She was invited to be a technical metallurgical expert for the British Admiralty Ship Welding Committee. An easy target to blame for the ships’ failures was to assume the welders were at fault. These were frequently women, so-called Wendy-the- welders in contrast to Rosie-the-Riveters, given the men were mainly serving in the forces. So, blame the women for doing a bad job! But, as Tipper – as she was by then – demonstrated, the fault lay not in the women but in the steel which, in the cold waters where the failures were occurring, had undergone a ductile-brittle transition. In welded ships, with their much larger continuous sheets of metal, small cracks were easily able to spread, whereas in the riveted design with a smaller size of each plate, the cracks got stopped much sooner, before they led to critical, uncontrolled advance and fracture across the whole ship.

This Tipper was able to elucidate, with detailed underpinning metallurgical understanding. You can find much more about this in a 2015 article ‘Revisiting (Some of) the Lasting Impacts of the Liberty Ships via a Metallurgical Analysis of Rivets from the SS “John W. Brown”’ published in the Journal of Materials, which provides a detailed technical explanation of why the problem arose. In the same journal issue there is another article, containing much more information about Tipper’s life, from which much of this post is derived. Although my own PhD was concerned with brittle failure in metals, and I learned about many of the underpinning ideas, her name was not one I was familiar with, as opposed to those such as Taylor and Orowan (men) whose names continue to be associated with the issue of brittle-ductile transitions in metals.

Ultimately the Engineering Department in Cambridge did appoint Tipper to a Readership (the old name for what is now known as an Associate Professor and, back then, a high rank to rise to when most people remained as lecturer as the ‘career grade’), the first and, for a long time, the only woman on their books as a member of the academic staff. For 11 years, until her retirement in 1960, she was able to enjoy appropriate professional recognition.

It seems appropriate that we celebrate her life today on her birthday – and in close proximity to February 11th, the International Day of Girls and Women in Science.

Posted in Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Celebrating a Pioneering Engineer

Inequity and Research Culture

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Athene Donald

Research culture remains a topic that is of concern to many, because it can be so very far from ideal. You don’t have to be from a minority background – of whatever kind – to find yourself in an environment that doesn’t bring out the best in you. Can anything be done because, if it can, it is likely to help all those who are ‘othered’ by their personal characteristics even more? A recent report from the University of Oxford identifies many areas where processes about the whole research system could be improved for people who fit into the category of ‘marginalised researchers’, which covers women and racialised minorities, people with disabilities and those identifying as LGBTQ+. As the report says

‘A growing body of evidence underscores that academia is not a meritocracy. In academia, as in the rest of society, systemic barriers remain to limit the success of researchers in many marginalised groups.’

As I do with many such reports, I started off by reading the recommendations. I found these, at first sight, rather disappointing. Not that there was anything wrong with them, but they seemed to be treading along familiar paths and it didn’t strike me they were likely to lead to much change. Equally, this had been my initial reaction, and this still holds, to the 2021 BEIS People and Culture Strategy document, about which I wrote

‘full of laudable sentiments though the strategy is, it appears to lack any clear indication of the path from where we are now to where BEIS aspirations would take us.’

Eighteen months on from the publication of that BEIS strategy, I’m not convinced there has been much progress.

However, when I read the full Oxford report, I felt rather differently about what it had to say. Not because I feel the recommendations are particularly novel or ones which will immediately change the landscape, but because the way they are put into context is very powerful. It identifies exactly how the current system introduces inequity for different parts of the researcher population, ranging from the less confident (who may find an interview intimidating and lead them to underperform) to those with a disability, who may have problems accessing or completing forms.

There are certain of their recommendations which really should be easily put into practice, for instance by funders. In particular, I would highlight the timing of closing dates for grant applications, so they do not fall immediately after the main holidays. It should be obvious that a closing date of early January is likely to impact more severely on those with caring responsibilities than those without, who may in fact just have had several weeks without the normal teaching or committee loads so making grant-writing easier not harder. Funding calls which are only open for a few weeks are also likely to be detrimental to carers, but these are far from uncommon.

The issue of confidence I allude to above is a more tricky one. Firstly, because having the confidence to give a convincing conference presentation is a relevant skill for success, and may feel as pressured as an interview. Consequently, I believe such skill is not entirely divorced from the ability to conduct a successful project. Nevertheless, I am sure all readers will have encountered the brash or arrogant candidate. If they come across as patronising to their audience it may cause uncertainty about how well they would do in running a group or giving an undergraduate lecture. I well recall one man, smartly turned out in a pinstripe suit that would not have been out of place in a bank (yes, I know, I should not be prejudiced against someone because of the clothes they wear), who – as part of an interview process for a lectureship position – gave a seminar that was positively intimidating in the way the audience was addressed. It was full of chutzpah. I was less convinced it was full of content, but others on the interview panel seemed not to spot this. I argued that an undergraduate faced with such a style of lecturing would not have received it well. That seemed to me a significant part of the reason for requiring a candidate to give a seminar. Again others (almost certainly all male, although it is so long ago I cannot swear to that) did not seem to be as put off as I was.

That level of ‘confidence’ I believe is dangerous. Someone can come across as persuasive and on top of things, when actually it’s simply a smokescreen of performance. Any successful leader should understand their audience and never give off an air of intimidation. At least that’s my view. Shyer people may stutter a little, in a presentation or an interview, but not giving glib answers to questions may indicate deep thinking and knowledge and not ineptitude. It is my belief we are, collectively, too easily swayed by style of delivery rather than actual content. It is totally appropriate that such an issue should be highlighted, as the report does.

Other types of bias may be well-known, but nevertheless still prevalent. The statistics about ethnic minorities is particularly dispiriting. The report cites Wellcome data which shows that the success rate for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic applicants is 6 percentage points lower than that for white applicants (8% compared with 14%), with precisely zero awards made to UK-based applicants reporting their ethnicity as Black or Black British in 2019/20. The fact that there are hardly any black professors in the sciences across the UK is obviously directly related to this. What the report makes clear is how many different parts of the system disadvantage such people, from lack of mentors and sponsors, to internal sift systems as well as grant-giving panels which fail to overcome their biases. A black woman who speaks up may be classed with the standard trope of ‘angry black woman’ when behaving in exactly the same way as a white man, who is simply seen as confident and assertive.

The report spells out the dismal situation many researchers face, identifying the different key stages where problems occur. I found it salutary reading to look far beyond those areas of disadvantage I am familiar with from my work regarding women. Not that I think we have by any means overcome those hurdles more familiar to me, but it is important to recognize that different groups face disadvantage from many different parts of the system and that all of these need to be identified and addressed.

Posted in Equality, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Inequity and Research Culture