An Anthropological Experiment in Birmingham

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Athene Donald

I’m not sure that spending my last day as Master of Churchill College at the Conservative Party Conference would have been quite what I expected, but so it was. I was in Birmingham – just as I was in Liverpool last week for the Labour Party Conference – to support the Royal Society’s work around Science 2040. This is their project taking a forward look at what the science system ‘could and should’ look like by 2040. I’m delighted to be associated with it, both as a steering committee member and leading an ongoing piece of work about how career pathways need to develop. An interim report on the project will be published in the spring of next year, but already one strand has been published regarding what science does for the economy. With growth much in the Government’s eyes and words, spelling out the important, if often hard to quantify, contribution science makes to the economy is crucial.

This piece of work has been led by Richard Jones, my friend and erstwhile Cambridge colleague, now Vice President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement at the University of Manchester as well as Professor of Materials Science there. He gave an eloquent introduction to this strand at the reception in Birmingham, stressing how much Birmingham itself, over the last two centuries and more, has contributed to the science and innovation base of the country and how that had significant impact for the economy. Birmingham is of course associated with the Lunar Society of Erasmus Darwin (a polymath and one of my heroes), Josiah Wedgewood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and more.  It may have been a dining club, named after the fact that they met at full moon when it was safest to travel home late in the evening, but it was far more than that. Their friendship and inventions were a sparkling example of how science and innovation go hand in hand and can change the world. The contributions to the economy and our well-being in general are as important now as they were as in the Lunar Society’s time in the last years of the eighteenth centurey. (I’d recommend Jenny Uglow’s book about this group to you if they are unfamiliar to you.)

Attending party conferences is, as someone described it to me, an anthropological experiment. They are certainly unlike any academic conference I ever attended in many respects, if not in all. One similarity I noticed (and in this I was not alone) was that the percentage of women present was low, far lower than at the Labour Party conference. Furthermore, the dress code was very different, even if it was an unwritten rule. Men, overwhelmingly, were in blue suits with white shirts; tie choice was free, but ties themselves did not seem to be optional. In Liverpool the range of clothing for men was distinctly more varied, although I was surprised to see how many women were in dresses (the latter unlike academia, the former much more so). It was sheer chance, but just to confirm stereotypes I passed a couple of what I assume were recent graduates allowed out on the circuit, with one saying to the other ‘since you’re an old Etonian….’.

However, anthropology and more science apart, I mainly attended sessions on skills and apprentices, of which there were many (in Liverpool, the skills talks seemed doomed to be simultaneous, so I actually got to fewer of them there). Asking a question at one event about the apprenticeship levy, when no one had actually mentioned the role and vital importance of the providers as opposed to discussing the employer’s point of view, I was somewhat surprised to have Robert Halfon (one of the speakers) challenge me in response about why Cambridge University was not providing degree apprenticeships – which was not particularly relevant to my question about FE Colleges, but I supposed it meant he didn’t have to answer that. Even more surprising to me was when I walked into the room of a later session, on which he was also a panel member, and he shouted at me across the room, something along the lines of ‘Cambridge is here again; are you stalking me?’. To which my reply was ‘isn’t Cambridge allowed to be interested in apprentices?’. Perhaps my red jacket was equivalent to a red rag to a bull, but I felt he was out of order.

Halfon may have a bee in his bonnet about degree apprentices, but David Willetts (now of course a member of the House of Lords) was having none of it. In a third event on apprentices and skills, Lord Willetts made it absolutely plain he could see no logic in this particular hang-up, explicitly naming both Robert Halfon and Gillian Keegan in this context as having focussed far too much on this. He emphasised that in his view we should be ensuring the apprenticeship levy was spent on the under 25’s to get them into the workplace (Levels 3-5), and not providing Levels 6 and 7 for those already with jobs. All the evidence shows an increasing trend of firms sending those already with significant qualifications on to degree apprentices at the expense of school leavers. David Hughes, CEO of the Association of Colleges and on the same panel, wholeheartedly agreed with Willetts regarding this point.

In the Science 2040 strand of work I’m leading on careers’ pathways, these are some of the issues we’ll be exploring. I feel it is very important that the Royal Society explicitly recognizes that the elite scientific system of its Fellows often rests crucially on the shoulders of others whose qualifications are much more modest, and I was delighted that its five-year strategic plan explicitly recognizes this.

So, as of today and now I’m back in a very wet Cambridge, I am fully retired. It is a very strange sensation. I will miss the day-to-day business of a job and specifically of my colleagues at Churchill College (although I now become a Fellow Emerita). But it gives me the opportunity to explore new avenues – and perhaps write more.

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What Can I Do to Help?

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Athene Donald

Men who’ve heard me talk about my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), or more generally about the issues facing women in STEM, not infrequently ask me this question: what can I do to help? I can point them towards the helpful list I first published about nine years ago, and which I frequently use in my talks as the last slide, to leave on the screen during Q+A. But perhaps I should also point them towards the book I’m currently reading, Unrooted by Erin Zimmerman, with its subtitle of Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save An Old Science. The Canadian scientist is an evolutionary botanist, and a significant part of her book is dedicated to her love of that branch of biology, and her dismay that botany, in its classical form, is fading due to lack of funding and support, while molecular approaches take centre stage.

However, the part of the book I want to stress here is that summed up in the second word of the subtitle: motherhood and all the accompanying challenges for an early career researcher. Zimmerman thought, like many another young scientist, that she wanted and was destined for a career as an academic. However, her experiences of postdoc-ing while pregnant and after returning to work after the birth of her daughter (she was only entitled to four months maternity leave), demonstrated, for her, that the battle to combine the different roles became unmanageable in the face of an unsupportive boss.

That is the key point. He wasn’t overtly hostile, even particularly sexist, he simply failed to understand what she was going through, or how her experiences resulting from what he said and did and, just as importantly, by what he didn’t say or do, impacted her. Her experiences, I fear, are far from uncommon. Yes, there are misogynistic professors out there who are much more explicitly unpleasant, or even harassers and predators. But there are plenty more (and some of them women too), who simply have no imagination or sympathy for their team. All they are focussed on are the results, the papers, and being able to get the next grant. Sadly, our system of academic incentives currently makes such a focus unsurprising. The supervisors’ survival (particularly if they are still on tenure track or its equivalent) depends on these outcomes and not the wellbeing of the researcher.

Zimmerman describes this tension, this slow destruction of her ability to keep going in the face of apparent insensitivity and unawareness of what she’s going through, in miserable detail. It’s something many supervisors would be well advised to read if they want to be able to support their researchers.

“Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation…it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you love the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.”

I am sure those words will resonate with many women who have wanted to combine their love of science with love of their child(ren), but struggled.

Yet the reality is that academia should be quite flexible. Zimmerman’s complaint was in part that her boss simply made things difficult any time she wanted to deviate from what he saw as the ‘normal’ way of working. If she wanted to start early to fit in with when childcare was available, he seems to have rolled his eyes before giving grudging approval. Presenteeism should not be necessary in academic life, although some experiments (particularly with living organisms, which by and large her plants were not) may put certain demands on timings to make sure they stay alive. But otherwise, getting the job done – including reading at home in the evenings, if that’s what works – should be the only thing that matters, not when, or even where, it’s done.

I was clearly lucky in many ways when I combined motherhood and my science. It was a different age (four months maternity leave was generous then) and people – certainly in the Cavendish – hadn’t had to think about these issues before: as I was the first female lecturer there, I was obviously the first person to try to make this combination work. Maybe this made it easier as people collectively seemed to want it to go well. No one checked what hours I worked, as long as I turned up to lecture and run the practical classes at the appropriate times (and my working hours were extremely flexible, due to when childcare was available and how my husband and I shared the rest of the week). I didn’t have to go through the indignities of pumping milk in unsuitable surroundings, as Zimmerman did, since advice on how long to keep a baby on breastmilk alone was very different then, although I kept breastfeeding in part for many more months after I went back to work. I was shattered by these early months, lecturing at 9am when I thought my legs might give way I was so tired, but at no point was I faced with disapproval or even comment.

So, supervisors in general, think a little harder about what the young parents in your team may be going through and work out how to make it easier so that they can deliver what you want. Making their life a misery through inattention, disapproval or worse, will actually make the outcomes less successful for the whole team. A period of irregular working may still be significantly more productive than allowing someone’s drive to ‘wilt’, to use Zimmerman’s word.

“To keep making my way up the ladder with no additional thought given to my happiness or comfort in the workplace was getting frustrating. I felt like after more than a decade in research, I’d earned some basic consideration.”

So, if you want everyone in your team to be both successful in themselves and contribute to the success of your wider team, show a little consideration….I think that’s the next piece of advice I should proffer when I’m asked in the future ‘what can I do to help?’

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For the Last Time

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Athene Donald

For the Last Time

I have written in the past about the challenges of doing something for the first time. For early career researchers, this could be anything from giving a conference presentation to travelling to another lab to learn a new skill or joining (and speaking up at) a departmental committee. Anything unfamiliar can feel unnerving, although the more one tries things out the more one learns (even, as I found when I gave a TedX talk, that I never wanted to do it again). Indeed, the more one tries, the more one may begin to believe that you can cope with new challenges even if you make a complete pig’s breakfast that very first time. With luck, you know you can live down any associated embarrassment and come back stronger next time around.

However, as I discussed in an earlier post, retirement from my post as Master of Churchill College is almost upon me, and I am now facing the opposite challenge. It is a weird sensation that every committee in College I turn up to chair, I know it’s for the last time. Whatever decisions are made, it is for someone else to carry out. It is not a very comfortable position to be in. Of course, I could be completely destructive and try to leave a mess behind me, but that really isn’t my style. More to the point, I am left thinking, why did I not do more? Why did I not push through that change that always lurked at the back of my mind, or encourage a junior member to be more forceful in setting out their imaginative ideas? One can always look back and feel that perhaps one was too laid back, too hesitant, too nervous…..You get the picture. Seniority does not necessarily bring supreme confidence (although, of course, it may for some people).

There will be some committees which were less exciting than others, at least for me, (that doesn’t of course mean they weren’t important), that perhaps I won’t be so sorry to see the back of. I am fortunate in that retired Masters remain Fellows at Churchill, so that I will be able to see how things that have been set in train pan out in the months and years ahead. Indeed, it astonishes me that not all colleges do this; how cruel to serve for a significant number of years and then be unceremoniously excluded from the future life of the college. I will, perhaps, be particularly interested to see how the work around sustainability develops, where Churchill has made significant strides, although there’s plenty more to do.  We are very proud of the fact that, not only have we installed solar panels on many of our, fortunately flat, roofs, but that we invested in training our maintenance staff, so that they have been able to do the installations themselves.

However, what this amounts to is that overall, doing things for the last time is definitely bittersweet. It is right and proper to move on: the historic habit of Masters serving for life is definitely something that should never be restored. One gets stale, apart from anything else, unable to see new solutions to old problems which a newcomer may spot instantly with their fresh eyes. I’m looking forward – even if with significant trepidation – to whatever comes next. I hope it will raise new challenges to stimulate (and the signs are starting to be positive on this front), new things to do for the first time, not the last. I hope I will still find the issues, quirky or deeply serious, which provoke me to continue with writing this blog, but I look forward to new horizons, situations, even committees to keep my brain agile and my service to the community non-negligible. Time will tell.

 

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Getting Feedback

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Athene Donald

Academics do not necessarily get regular or even useful ‘performance reviews’, call them what you will. Businesses typically take this a lot more seriously, but a recent report highlights the many problems that can arise even with the best of intentions. Unsurprisingly, it turns out a lot of bias (around both gender and ethnicity) lurks within the feedback given to their teams, irrespective of whether by male and female managers.

If you’ve been appraised by your supervisor, or anyone else from your department, a few key phrases may stick in the mind. These may have been the most helpful or the least helpful/hardest to swallow. One of the most useful pieces of advice I was ever given, mid-career, was not to accept too many refereeing tasks but, for instance, simply to accept roughly the same number of papers to referee as I was myself submitting in any given year. It was a practical and actionable piece of advice, whether it was right or wrong, and it helped me put in context that to others I might have looked like I was being too much of a slave to duty if I was refereeing two or three times the number of my own submissions. By contrast, a colleague came out of an appraisal fuming. Having laid out what he felt were the problems he was facing in the fine balancing act of being a young academic, his appraiser had said ‘I can see you have problems’. Empathetic maybe; useful most certainly not, it only made my colleague feel worse and that, somehow, he shouldn’t have been having those particular problems.

In many businesses, receiving feedback is a much more regular occurrence, but it is clear that significant numbers of managers don’t make a good job of it, even if they are ostensibly ‘ticking the boxes’ required by their HR department. Two features stand out for me from this recent report from Textio: firstly, that comments are so often unhelpful and stereotypical, and secondly that men are more likely to internalise the positive and women, by a massive margin, the negative. It is hard to imagine these observations do not apply in academia too. An additional set of their conclusions relates to the highest performing workers, who appear to be given the least useful advice and who, the evidence shows, are therefore more likely to quit (and of course, good workers are more likely to be able to get another job easily).

In the past I’ve written about being accused of being emotional – not, as it happens, during an appraisal but over the phone. It turns out that this is a word (and no one will probably be surprised to hear this) directed commonly at women: the report states that whereas 78% of women in their survey had had that tossed in their direction, only 11% of men. (I wonder if people don’t regard getting angry or losing their temper as a show of emotion, but I digress.) Women were also more likely to be badged as unlikeable than men, although not by such a large margin. Ethnicity matters too. White workers were the most likely to be described as likeable (at 41%), whereas only 10% of East Asian and 11% of South Asian employees were described this way. Black and Hispanic/Latino employees were least likely to be deemed to be intelligent, and so it goes on. Bias was widespread.

What do you remember from an appraisal? It turns out women were seven times more likely to internalise negative comments than men, whereas men were up to four times as likely to remember the positives. This ties in with stereotype threat, a concept introduced by Claude Steele and described in detail in his book Whistling Vivaldi.  It is the concept that, if you belong to a minority (in whatever sense) you are held back by the fear of conforming to the stereotype of that minority. That might be about women in tech or black students doing maths exams, which was the situation Steele first studied. But the criticism that you are emotional, for instance, is exactly what women fear and so it sticks in the mind more than many other comments. This is as true at conferences as in appraisals, as many a woman will attest after a bout of hostile questioning implying – or even explicitly stating – that the speaker is stupid or ignorant, regardless of the capabilities of the questioner (who may too often simply be grandstanding for their own benefit).

As for the comments about high performers, which seem to have a particular definition hard to replicate in a laboratory setting, too often they receive unhelpful feedback perhaps in the form of a cliché, the examples given in the report being as ‘she left it all on the field’ and ‘he thinks outside the box’. What are you supposed to do with such phrases? They don’t tell you what you could do better or what specific goals you should or should not be seeking. The most useful feedback is that which gives you something to work towards and a timescale on which to do it. Generalised clichés don’t offer that opportunity and can be frustrating (again something many an academic will recognize, I’m sure). The report suggests employees are twice as likely to think about seeking a new job if the feedback they receive is unhelpful.

This is a US study of businesses, so the parallels are bound not to be exact for UK academics whom I take to be the majority of my readers, but there should certainly be food for thought here for anyone involved in leading or managing other people in any setting. We should not be wasting the talent of those coming up through the ranks in pointless exercises. Good feedback can, however, be immensely helpful at critical junctures in a career.

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Does Working from Home make you more Productive?

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Athene Donald

Does working from home (and hybrid working) improve productivity or the opposite? Two recent reports have come to slightly different conclusions, and I suspect this is not surprising because the answer almost certainly is ‘it depends’. Clearly if you are a waiter or a bus driver, a night-club bouncer or a hairdresser, the question really doesn’t arise. You have to be at the appropriate place of work to carry out those roles and no amount of negotiation with management will change that. The jobs that lend themselves to hybrid/fully wfh are the ones available to those with higher levels of education, but certainly not all. If you are a researcher carefully tending a cell line, bacteria or some GM mice, you may well need frequent attendance, perhaps even at anti-social hours. If you are the researcher looking at the fluorescent images taken from these same organisms, you are quite likely to be able to do that from home. So, that different research gives different answers may not be surprising, since like should only be compared with like.

The study in Nature published in June looked at behaviours in a specific Chinese technology firm. It concluded – as its title says – that hybrid working improved retention without damaging performance. In other words, workers felt happier when they were allowed to stay away from the company site on agreed days, and there was an accompanying reduction of a third in workers who quit. That would definitely look like a winning formula. However, the wider-ranging US study covering many different kinds of employer, came to more nuanced conclusions. Firstly, whether working from home made workers more or less productive depended on who you asked: the workers thought their productivity had gone up, but the managers disagreed and thought it had fallen. The Stanford researchers meta-analysis showed that the managers were right, and productivity did fall by 10-20%.

However, it does depend on what you think you are measuring. If you are a worker who no longer has to commute every day, you may well believe your productivity has gone up because the total time you spend to complete your work has decreased for apparently the same output. But, because the manager doesn’t factor in that travel time, all they may note is the output has dipped because the worker spends more time surfing the web, making additional cups of coffee or playing with the dog. In this context, the outcomes of a pilot experiment in my local (South Cambridgeshire) council is interesting, because they found that nearly all measures (22/24 measures) showed improvement when the working week was cut to four days – this was not about working from home, just about working at all.  This didn’t stop the last government trying to forbid the four-day week as ‘not value for money’, even if there was no evidence of this, just an assumption that five days work had to be better than four. Once again, recruitment and retention were found to improve.

How does improved retention factor into productivity? The loss of a worker has significant implications for a firm, the more skilled the worker is the greater the cost, some of which is real financial cost, some is more indirect due to knock-on effects on other workers. The CIPD lists four types of effect, and firms should consider these when contemplating whether a slight loss in daily productivity of a worker on a hybrid pattern of working is more than offset by the less obvious costs associated with losing the worker. These four are related to the administration of resignations, costs associated with recruitment and selection, sorting out and paying for cover during the vacancy and induction and training for the new employee when recruited. This last factor also means there may be an extended period of training when the new employee simply isn’t able to contribute fully to the required work. Loss in productivity due to the high churn of employees through job dissatisfaction, may therefore be helpfully offset by facilitating a hybrid form of working to increase the happiness and well-being of employees. The Nature study of the Chinese technology company explicitly calculates savings due to the reduction in employee loss, based on the figure of US$20,000 cost per employee lost.

However, if considering fully remote working, working from home for five days a week, there are some other factors that need to be considered. Induction is obviously one. How does a new employee learn about their role and who the key individuals they need to interact with are? This was a lesson many people had to face up to during the pandemic and it won’t have been easy. How do you mentor someone you’ve never met if you’re their manager? How do you build new relationships or find a common interest with someone if you’re not bumping into them in the tearoom? As scientists, those chance and perhaps interdisciplinary interactions can be incredibly fruitful (not to mention the challenges of dealing with committee dynamics over Zoom, as I wrote about previously at the height of the pandemic). Fully working from home may be particularly attractive for those with caring responsibilities or disabilities, so there is a real danger that these people will end up more marginalised and disadvantaged when it comes to progression due to the lack of face-to-face contact. A very recently published study from the University of Durham also highlighted that gender stereotypes in the home are alive and well, and women working from home are far more likely to struggle to separate work from their family needs than men, with all the obvious downsides.

All this goes to show that there is no single answer to is working from home good or bad for productivity? It depends on so many factors from the individual to the sector, from the type of work to the pattern of working from home. Employers need to factor in the cost of losing employees against any possible loss of productivity. Researchers in the academic sector probably have more choice than most. Presenteeism is enforced by only a sub-section of professors – although undoubtedly there are some who judge the worth of a student by how long they are prepared to spend at the bench – and for the professors themselves there is likely to be a lot of flexibility. It is hard to think that hybrid working isn’t here to stay, but we should make sure we optimise how that plays out and recognize the costs and benefits for different sections of the workforce.

 

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