Who are You Calling a Geek?

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Athene Donald

In my last post, I threw out the fact that I didn’t feel the word ‘geek’ was necessarily going to encourage young girls to see science/engineering as a career for them, a point that was picked up both by my fellow OT blogger Sylvia McLain over at Girl Interrupting, and also by some (female) commenters on Twitter. My previous post was written around Easter-time for Fabiana, so well before publication of the Geek Manifesto put the term Geek into even more prominence. Like Sylvia, and as I discussed in an earlier post with a rather different emphasis, I remain nervous about how the word is being used and diffused, although not specifically because of its origin as a (circus) freak. It is, as Alice Roberts has said, divisive, splitting ‘us’ off from ‘them’, which is particularly dangerous when trying to convince the teenage girl that she wants to be both normal/conformist and a scientist. We should do nothing to make her think she has to make a choice between the two. I may be wrong, but I think the connotation for adolescent males is nothing like as prone to raise internal conflict as it is for females. I also think this is why all those who I’ve spotted currently expressing anxiety about the use of the word are women.

Mark Henderson used the term, in the title of his book, as a badge of pride to include both scientists and non-scientists who care about the scientific method and applying this method to evidence-based policy. In that approach he uses it as a call to arms for those of us already well within the fold, who, broadly speaking, are beyond the stage of trying to work out who we are and what motivates and interests us. That association seems to me legitimate and, although I would not go out of my way to label myself as a geek, if others want to it’s not going to cause me any problems.

However, for individuals – male or female – who are at that critical stage at school of trying to work out subject choices and career aspirations, if they raise their heads and consider what labels go with different options and how they feel about these labels, the word geek may set off alarm bells. If I turn to the Daily Mail as a typical bellwether of public mood, what stories hold the word geek in their headlines in the past few weeks? Here are a handful:

  • Geek chic: Bill Gates’ 1979 Porsche Turbo to be auctioned off at starting bid of $21,000 (May 23rd)

Little in that to appeal to adolescent girls

  • One small step for geeks: Nike trainers made with space-age materials used by NASA (May 18th): Geeks are not generally known for the quality of their sneakers…..

Nope, I don’t see that as a great attraction either. So how about:

  • The ‘geek’ who is learning how to party with his Facebook billions: Eduardo Saverin was portrayed as the nerd double-crossed by his scheming room-mate… but now HE’S the one living the Hollywood lifestyle (May 29th)

Leaving aside the recent downturn in the fortunes of Facebook,  Saverin is not an obvious role model or someone who is likely to appeal to girls (unless we are going to create a generation of Geek’s Wives to accompany WAGS).

Perhaps worst of all is the following story about the star of America’s Next Top Model  – which probably many teenage girls watch, although maybe in one of its other national manifestations  – Tyra Banks (March 23rd)

  • Making geek chic: Supermodel Tyra Banks is unrecognisable as bespectacled librarian in kids’ show Shake It Up

As a supermodel and chat show host, we’re used to seeing Tyra Banks looking stunning in glamorous outfits. But in a new acting cameo in hit Disney show Shake It Up, the 38-year-old is unrecognisable as geeky librarian Ms Burke. With her hair held together with pencils, oversized glasses, ill-advised eye shadow all over her lids and eyebrows, Tyra looks a far cry from her usual self.

I fear this sort of story is going to say that ‘geek’ is dowdy and a way of transforming an empowered (as well as rich and glam) woman into a loser. Again, not a message that will inspire the average adolescent girl this is an adjective she wants to get her hands on.

Moving on from the Daily Mail, I came across this random blog  which begins The “geek” image is based on a lack of fashion sense…..another negative message. This write-up finishes with a final sentence saying

The main idea with the geek chic look is to be an individual and wear what no one else does, just make sure you’re comfortable and happy with your style yourself.

Which for the self-confident young (or not so young) adult may be a positive message, but for the unconfident, not-sure-who-you-are-or-what-your-fashion-sense-is-just-want-to-conform adolescent, is about as terrifying a statement about fashion as one could find.

So, for those like Mark Henderson with his book, and those like Gia Milkovich, Brian Cox, Evan Harris and Simon Singh who featured in the Geek Calendar and who want to wear their geek badge triumphantly – go for it. I don’t mind implicitly belonging to their band (and have pledged my contribution towards a copy of the Geek Manifesto for every MP).  But please let’s be wary about extending that label as a convenient catch-all for scientists and science-lovers. The wider populace has not caught up with the positive spin the self-proclaimed geeks speak to, but still see geek as a term more of derision than delight. As the first web-based dictionary I found upon Googling, defined the word

1. a computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders.)

2.a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual.

3.a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken.

This is not going to appeal to many pubescent girls just shedding their Barbie obsessions, or battling confusion over their (lack of) career advice. I am much less sure how testosterone-fuelled teenage boys will react to the word, but I do feel we ourselves will be guility of turning off a further group of girls from pursuing science by our own actions, beyond that due to the marketing strategies of Disney, Lego  or T-shirt manufacturers and their like.  Please can we be more aware of the potential dangers of using the word geek for outwards-facing communication, as opposed to simply among consenting adults.

 

 

 

Posted in Education, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

A Shocking Waste of Talent

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Athene Donald

This piece first appeared in Fabiana, the magazine of the Fabian’s Women Network, on May 21st 2012, in an issue devoted to Finding the Way to Growth.  The whole issue can be found here.

Much has been made of the importance of innovation through science and technology as a means of putting the economy back on its feet, although the current Government’s record on translating this into a coherent policy is patchy. The UK is also frequently cited as an economy which fails to translate its excellent science base into new products and industries.  The UK University sector is strong in research and is increasingly willing to set up spin-outs to develop their novel ideas, but the financing of these is left dangerously to the free market, which is not (at least currently) equipped to take on the risks implicit in progressing early stage ideas. As David Willetts, the Universities’ Minister, said recently when comparing the UK with the US

“The land of free enterprise has an innovation and research system which depends on federal and state government just like everywhere else in the Western world.”

But the UK has for many years been resolutely non-interventionist in this area, weakening our nation’s ability to translate the basic science into the technology for successful products which can boost our ailing economy.

There is a second aspect to this, which is not usually coupled with our innovation track record. We have a remarkably wasteful pipeline of talent into the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) fields, particularly as far as the physical sciences and engineering are concerned. The numbers of women who enter these fields is low, the attrition rate along the pipeline deplorable. The low numbers of women entering these professions mean a shocking waste of talent, a waste for both for the individuals concerned and for society. The situation is not homogeneous, however, and different parts of the STEM landscape face different problems. In the biological sciences there are actually a majority of women studying the subject at university, yet the professoriat consists of only around 15% professors, whereas in my own field of physics, the percentage of women who choose to study the subject at university hovers stubbornly around the 25% level. Here the problem obviously lies in attracting girls at school to study the subject in the first place, whereas in the biological sciences it is keeping them there once they’ve started.

Culturally, our society gives out the message to young girls that physics and engineering are not for them. It does this essentially from birth, in the toys children receive (increasingly segregated by gender in toy shops, as well as colour-coded to make it easier for unwary parents to make these stereotypical selections) and in the role models the media casually displays. We may see female medics on our TV screens, but not many female engineers turn up in the soaps or even in documentaries. The loaded term ‘geek’, with its connotations of introverted and anti-social individuals lurking in a bedroom adorned with Star Trek posters, may also make these subjects unattractive to the adolescent girl. For those girls who do aspire to pursue a scientific/technological career, because the numbers are small they can find themselves feeling isolated and peer pressure or a teacher’s negativity can contribute to this discomfort, reinforcing cultural stereotypes with comments along the lines of ‘girls can’t do maths’,  thereby discouraging them from taking these subjects further.  Let’s not be coy, this sort of passive discouragement persists. Further up the career ladder, minority status inevitably persists, but now coupled with the pressures of the biological clock. An oft perpetuated myth is that scientific careers can’t be combined with having a family. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, this myth survives and acts as a further deterrent. Hence our female scientifically-equipped workforce leaks out, gives up and seeks ‘easier’ careers.

Why does this matter? It matters in just the same way as it matters in a boardroom. A diverse team is likely to look at problems from broader perspectives than a team made up of near-identical individuals. The collective societal decisions about which products turn out to transform a market or are just what the consumer needed (but didn’t know) will be influenced by the 50% of the population who are female consumers. The values that the consumer may appreciate may not always be equally appreciated by a design team unrepresentative of the population. Hence, in simple economic terms, we need diversity to drive innovation in ways that match the public’s desires and needs and so lead to the success stories of tomorrow. But it matters, too, that the talents and aspirations of half our young may be squashed and lost irrevocably.

In the same vein, a discussion event will be held at Portcullis House on June 19th on this subject. Entitled ‘Time to release the UK’s potential energy’, the panel will include Chi Onwurah (Shadow Minister for Innovation), Dr Laura Nelson, Paul Jackson and myself.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

On the So-called ‘Death’ of British Science

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Athene Donald

This week saw the delivery of a funeral wreath and coffin to the Houses of Parliament. Why? Because a new grouping called Science for the Future decided to declare to MP’s the ‘death’ of British science. Actually what they were really complaining about was the way the EPSRC has been acting recently which, they claim, is mismanaging science funding to the extent that they would rather see their budget cut than continue as things are. Not everyone agrees with their actions. I’d like to explain why I, for one, am opposed to what they did in the way that they did it. Much of the background can be found on Pursestringtheory blog (with an extensive comment stream) so, for readers who haven’t been following the story, more detail can be found there, as well as commentary from Mark Henderson here  and a thoughtful retrospective here.

I am no apologist for the EPSRC. Indeed I am sure that they have upon repeated occasions found me to be a thorn in their side, so it is all the more surprising to me both to find myself reacting so angrily to Science for the Future’s actions, and to get encouraging tweets from senior managers at EPSRC on the basis of comments I have made.  I once spent an entire formal dinner haranguing Dave Delpy  – EPSRC’s CEO – for their policy towards the sort of interdisciplinary research I do. He was gracious about it, but I doubt I got him to change his mind one jot. Such dialogue – tending to argument – between me and many others in the EPSRC team about the problems I perceive, particularly for work at the physics-biology interface, has been ongoing and visible for many years.  Dialogue has been both semi-private – as at the dinner – and (relatively) public, for instance in meetings at the IOP’s Standing Committee for Physics Professors. As I say, I am no apologist for EPSRC.

But to return to Tuesday’s actions. The EPSRC, let us remember, does not cover all of UK science, it is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The biomedics, the astronomers and geneticists, the environmentalists and many others do not get their funding from the EPSRC in the main. So, for starters, Science for the Future is making an overstated claim when it says that the EPSRC is responsible for the death of ‘science’. Even if one agrees that the EPSRC is damaging those bits of science they fund, let’s not encourage excessive and exaggerated claims, thereby muddying the waters about funding for everyone. However, as far as I can judge, much of the group’s actions/words are in this same overly dramatic vein. Stalin seems to have got invoked at some point as a point of comparison, which is not only inaccurate but pretty offensive. Why is it necessary to use such hyperbole, a point other commenters have made (see Mark Henderson’s commentary in the Guardian, or Richard Jones’ comment on the PurseStringTheory blog)?

Around 100 people accompanied the funeral procession to Parliament, with apparently a diverse bunch of concerns ranging from disagreement with the recent Shaping Capability decisions (particularly as it affects synthetic chemistry), to the requirement that all applicants for grants consider their potential ‘impact’. This latter point is one that Philip Moriarty in particular takes grave exception to, and he has been waging war on it since its introduction (see here for previous discussion between him and me on this topic). In general I may feel that much of what EPSRC has done recently has been badly handled, and that more robust mechanisms for consultation with and challenge from their community could only be a good thing. I would like to be more convinced that their Council thoroughly think through and challenge all decisions before they are released onto the community. But I fervently believe that taking disagreements to the politicians in this histrionic way can only be harmful: for science, for scientists and hence for the future of the country – since, by implication, we all believe science is vital for our country’s economic and social well-being (as Science is Vital so abundantly and successfully made clear in the run up to the last CSR).  I do not believe (to use a legal phrase) this is a ‘proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim’, however laudable some of these aims may be. My objection does not equate to wanting to issue a gagging order about public debate; it is simply that using up an occasion of engaging politicians for a stunt rather than for a reasoned presentation of a broad swathe of issues backed by a significant fraction of the community seems, at the very least, to be unhelpful.

Politicians are not, by and large, scientifically expert (with the notable of my own MP and erstwhile academic colleague in Cambridge Julian Huppert). By and large they don’t think about science very much, and they are hardly likely to appreciate the nuances underlying this week’s demonstrations. Nuances such as the fact the ‘science’ they claim to represent only covers a section of all science, and that their organisation – with its turnout only 5% of the size of the Science is Vital demonstration in 2010 – is not demonstrably representative of the community they claim to stand for. As far as I can tell the group’s primary aim is to bring down Dave Delpy and the senior management at EPSRC, but perhaps there is something more subtle they are aspiring to.  Has Science for the Future attempted to establish how many people agree with these aims? I’d like to see the evidence if so.  I, for one, would have felt far more in tune with the organisation if they had simply been content to draw up and make a presentation of a petition to our politicians in place of the horse-drawn carriage, which would have had the added benefit of enabling everyone to know how many scientists wanted to sign up with Science for the Future and its goals. As Mark Henderson’s recently published book Geek Manifesto so strongly states, and as Adam Smith in his commentary in the Guardian says in agreement, scientists should stand up and make their voices count and not be afraid of policy and politicians. But, as anyone who has got engaged with  trying to effect a change in policy (in government or elsewhere) knows, there are good and bad ways of setting out to achieve this.

Philip Moriarty has challenged me what I think can be done, if not advancing on Parliament. Specifically he has said

Is your response that, regardless of what flaws we see in the research councils, we should keep our heads well below the parapet and not ‘rock the boat’?

As far as I can tell what he means by this is that anything short of publicly drawing attention to his complaints by something like the stunt of a coffin at Parliament equates to doing nothing. I think the world is full of far more gradations than this seems to imply. He seems to think it makes the actions of me and those of my ilk who think other routes more constructive, ‘supine’ and ‘unethical’, to use his terms. It is not sufficient for those of us more pragmatic beings to talk to EPSRC officials both ‘behind closed doors’ and publicly at the many events the EPSRC have held, where their managers have tried to put across the justifications for their actions in the face of widespread anxiety and even anger from the community. Furthermore, leaders of the Royal Society and relevant professional bodies have written in no uncertain terms to the EPSRC expressing unease about some of the things that have been done – again actions very much in the public domain.  These events have hardly amounted to individuals lurking beneath parapets or making sure the boat does not judder more than a little. I simply cannot understand why Philip Moriarty thinks that because people like myself believe tackling politicians at this stage, with as little across-the-board support as this week’s event mustered, is the same thing as being (again to quote remarks specifically addressed to me by him)

seemingly happy that the character of basic scientific research in UK universities can be eroded, as long as the cash keeps flowing

with the added corollary that he believes what the ESPRC are doing is equivalent to eroding the scientific method. It would seem that those of us who are unhappy with dramatic media-visible exploits are to be deemed as implicitly spineless and content to see public money ‘squandered’ simply because we disagree with the specific actions we saw this week.

My primary objection to the course of action this group chose to take is that by so doing they have weakened the position of all scientists in taking their legitimate and broad concerns about science funding to politicians. They have acted so as to spread confusion amongst the MPs who lack specialist knowledge about what the fundamental issues are, regarding who is unhappy and about what. There is a vast difference between specific concerns about some (not even all) actions of one research council, and holistic concerns about the whole way science is funded in this ‘time of austerity’.  Nobody is suggesting Science for the Future should be muzzled, let alone that speaking out in public is inherently a bad thing, but tackling Parliament should be saved for the largest issues when there is a consensus of opinion to back up claims. Science is Vital demonstrated this last time, when their message was heard loud and clear by David Willetts and colleagues, and that – coupled with many other positive and constructive actions such as the timely publication of Royal Society’s Scientific Century report – led to a less than catastrophic CSR for science.

What worries me about the way the event and subsequent debate has emerged is that we are in danger of squabbling over the detail, however important, not concentrating on the big picture (and I do not intend on this blog to get drawn into the specifics of whether this or that area should be funded, or whether the whole idea of impact is equivalent to the devil incarnate ). I would urge Science for the Future to consider how representative they are of the whole of the EPSRC community, before they purport to act on our collective behalf by producing grandstanding exaggerated statements in order to gain publicity in the media. That so many of the signatories to the recent letter to the Telegraph, however illustrious they may be, live beyond the UK’s shores hardly demonstrates representation, nor confers confidence that all of them – just like the MPs – are really able to appreciate the nuances of the issues.  I would like the organisation to think whether using up a rare chance to engage politicians on a relatively narrow – albeit important – issue is the best way of promoting the science they love so much. And to justify to people like me, who were not satisfied by their action, why they feel existing action groups with a well-established and trusted political  pedigree such as CaSE (I’ll admit to a potential conflict of interest here, since I am a member of their Advisory Council), or a demonstrable effectiveness plus widespread grassroots support, such as Science is Vital,  are insufficient to further the aims of putting the case for science funding and its appropriate management.

In the meantime they should think much harder about the damage that may be consequent on their actions by introducing unnecessary and confusing divisions in order to further a course of action that smacks of witch hunting against Dave Delpy personally, and which has seen unattractive invective directed at other individuals who have expressed unease and opposition to their actions. They need to recognize that disagreement in others does not imply that we are all lying on our backs doing nothing, happy to ignore misguided actions by looking the other way. It merely means not everyone will applaud stunts which are counterproductive or think that confrontation is helpful just because more civilised routes have failed. Maybe they should even understand that shouting long and hard about particular policies, long after fellow scientists have listened and turned away, whilst simultaneously accepting EPSRC funding in large swathes, isn’t a very coherent stance nor one likely to have productive outcomes. They remind me of British travellers overseas who think shouting louder in English will make locals understand them better – and they are about as likely to succeed.

 

Posted in Science Funding | Tagged , , , | 107 Comments

Celebrating Success (Even if Progress is Slow)

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Athene Donald

Last week (the lack of) women in science actually made it onto BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, when Lesley Yellowlees – President-elect of the Royal Society of Chemistry – spoke out about the lack of women in her own and other scientific disciplines. She got much coverage in the media in general that day, in advance of her keynote speech at Science Scotland (currently she is Vice Principal and Head of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh). Her headline message (or at least what was picked out as the headline; one can only assume she did actually say it) was

It’s clear that the UK is half-a-century behind when it comes to advancing the cause of women scientists.

This was the line that stuck in people’s minds, and was picked up by Angela Saini in her Guardian blog. I had dinner with Lesley earlier this spring when I was in Edinburgh, and I appreciate her concern and that this is a matter close to her heart, but I think this statement, catchy though it may be, is neither really accurate nor helpful. Undoubtedly if you make, as she seems to have done, a direct comparison of the numbers of women elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year (24 out of 84) and compare it with the equivalent elections to the UK’s Royal Society (2 out of 44, as I discussed in a recent post), things look spectacularly bad. If those numbers held up year on year it might be an admissible failing on the UK’s part, but I haven’t seen the evidence to suggest that over time the discrepancy is as bad as that. It may be, I just don’t know. Even so, numbers are not the only part that matters. Firstly, the US has – at least at times – operated a policy of affirmative action which enables people to point a finger at female hires hinting that they were appointed only because they were women. As the relatively recent 2010 MIT report stated, there is a

perception that standards for hiring and promotion of women faculty are lower than for male faculty demonstrated,

This leaves women feeling anxious and insecure in unhelpful ways even if the numbers look superficially encouraging. Secondly, as I discussed recently,  there is the USA’s unhelpful attitude towards maternity leave and how this complicates work-life balance and academic progression. Finally, there is the question of how good the quality of the academic working environmentactually is, something that matters hugely too; the book I reviewed recently suggests things aren’t really very good on that front either in US Laboratories. I have found it telling that when I have written blogposts about the Athena Swan awards, commenters from the US have sighed ‘why don’t we have such a scheme here’. So, poor as the UK’s statistics may be, I simply don’t believe we are half a century behind the US. After all, I was a postdoc in the US around 1980 and at that point I was the first female postdoc in my engineering department at Cornell, and the University used affirmative action to create their first faculty position held by a woman anywhere in the Engineering School. No, we’re way ahead of that here and that was only just over 30 years ago; Lesley’s ‘half a century’ is undoubtedly an exaggeration.

Meanwhile, the Athena Swan awards go from strength to strength over here. More and more universities and departments are achieving their benchmarks, and the recent tranche of winners expanded those numbers further. Last week I went to Leeds to speak at their WISET event celebrating both two departmental awards and also a photographic exhibition of portraits of some of their most successful women, from PhD students to professors. It was a joyful evening to congratulate themselves on how far they have got, whilst still remembering how much further there is to go. For my talk, I was asked, amongst other things, to talk about what ‘Utopia’ would look like, once all departments had achieved Athena awards and there was no longer an issue for women in science. Hard though it is to imagine such a world, where there is no gender pay gap, promotion rates for men and women are identical and there are so many excellent female role models the term has disappeared as outdated and unnecessary, I think the key thing would be when everyone appreciated that all individuals are different, not that men and women are different.

One key factor that was very evident at this enjoyable and successful evening (aside from the fact that the Leeds University catering is excellent), was the explicit buy-in from the university’s leadership. Michael Arthur, their VC, was there to make the welcoming speech but stayed not only through the formal part of the evening, but through all the informal part afterwards when people mingled, admired the photographs – and  of course the food. He said to me how valuable it was for him to get opportunities like this to meet some of the junior staff. I know lecturer Sarah Staniland – a nanotechnologist making headlines with her science on magnetic bacteria and who had been a key player in driving the event as a member of the WISET Steering Committee and the originator of my own invitation – had a long chat with him. I think there was even an opportunity for her to pin him down to committing money towards the future of their work; indeed the VC’s parting shot to me was that the evening had cost him £300,000, presumably (if this follows through and was not just an offhand nicety on which to end the evening) to cover resourcing of post(s) to facilitate future departmental awards in the years ahead. Also there, speaking up and pushing things forward, was Dawn Freshwater Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Staff and Organisational Effectiveness, whose responsibility the diversity agenda is. Relatively recently appointed to this post, she has plenty of time ahead in her term of office to drive through major cultural changes – and is clearly determined to do so. This buy in from senior leadership is vital for universities for progress to be made, a subject I have discussed before.

So, good luck to Leeds! But there a few caveats I want to make about those putting applications in for Athena Swan awards based on conversations I have had with various people in various universities.

1 Do not just expect a junior woman to take the lead, because she is a woman. I came across a case recently where a newly appointed lecturer, in post for less than a year, was being asked to spearhead the departmental bid. This is undoubtedly a case of a woman being asked to take on this task with no thought of her as an individual. A new lecturer – male or female – should have establishing their research and teaching as their top priorities. Putting an Athena Swan submission together is time-consuming and requires knowing your way around departmental and university resources and politics. So, to my mind, an ideal person to do this is a senior male – if it is a male doing it, it strengthens the case by signifying the department sees this as a departmental problem, not simply the women’s problem.

2 Even if a department has received an award – of whatever colour – they should continue to consider whether they are doing things as well as they could. Not so long ago I heard of a department with a Silver award, where they still insisted on holding departmental seminars at 5pm, a time inconvenient for many parents (of either gender). A young mother was being taken to task for never attending in ways that made her both uncomfortable and angry.

3 When universities have a few departments with awards, they can – and should – undoubtedly share what they believe is their own best practice. But every department has to work out what their own issues are and a single template cannot fit all; shortcuts of cutting and pasting someone else’s submission cannot be a solution.

So, congratulations to Leeds and other recent Athena Swan award winners. We should celebrate their success, whilst recognizing we have a long way to go even if we are not a full half century behind the UK.

 

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

To Confront or Not to Confront

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Athene Donald

Just over a year ago I pressed the ‘publish’ button on a post with some trepidation. I felt I was exposing some inner anxieties that maybe were better not exposed. Your collective response to the post in question ‘I can hear you’re getting emotional’ amazed me. I realised the power of speaking out about situations that made me feel very uncomfortable (wandering hands and sexist verbal put-downs); collectively we could share experiences and bring out into the open things that too often stay under wraps. I am not sure I really learned any tips I felt I personally could utilise for how to deal with inappropriate behaviour – verbal or physical – but it opened my  eyes to a variety of things, including just how ubiquitous such behaviour is, and how it is subtly culturally nuanced which makes it all the harder to discuss and handle.

Many anecdotes came forward in the comments, which smack of the currecent rent furore in the press – those about AA Gill’s comments about Mary Beard’s appearance and about the misogyny pointed in Louise Mensch’s direction, where gender becomes a convenient focus for vitriol – but rather than reproduce those comments from the previous post here, I suggest you go back and look at them yourself if interested. What I want to look at in the present post, building on that earlier one,  is what the best way to deal with inappropriate behaviour is. For me, tempting though it may be to turn on the individual concerned, confront them explicitly with why their behaviour strikes me as offensive, I have never been convinced it is a fruitful strategy even if I were quick-witted enough with a suitably pithy put-down. Furthermore, particularly when the individual is going to continue to cross one’s path regularly, it may be a case of unwisely burning bridges. An alternative strategy that was clearly used by some of the commenters, was trying to turn the offence off light-heartedly with a joke. In other words, the hypothesis was that humour rather than confrontation is an easier/better way to handle someone who is behaving inappropriately.

I was reminded of this discussion when reading the book Coping with Minority Status (edited by Fabrizio Butera and John M Levine) recently.  The relevant chapter, Managing the Message by Swim, Gervais, Pearson and Stanger, specifically looked at the consequences of different methods of dealing with verbal discrimination – sometimes in the context of sexist remarks, but other situations (such as racist ones) too. Now this is a book written by serious psychologists; their analyses are not based on anecdote but on controlled studies, where subjects try out different courses of action under specified circumstances. I leave it to others to judge how well this mimics the sorts of situations I alluded to in my earlier post, or whether the conclusions based on ‘lab-work’ can easily be carried across to the lab. But, with those caveats in mind, here is what they conclude if an individual tries to confront a perpetrator.

Three strategies for handling the situation were explored, closely mimicking the different strategies commenters proposed: ignoring the remark completely, making a joke about it, or directly confronting it. The analysis considered how the perpetrator reacted as a result of these strategies, specifically looking at how ‘competent’ and ‘likeable’ the confronter was perceived to be as a result of their actions. The news is not all good.  Although the confrontation may have had an impact on the perpetrator, reducing the likelihood they will repeat similar remarks, it was also likely to change their perception of the person doing the confronting. In other words, as women in this position have often intuitively felt, there is a cost associated with ‘making a fuss’. Those who tried to turn the remarks off with a joke, were felt to be less competent, whereas those who directly confronted the situation were seen as less likeable and viewed with hostility.

All confronters were seen as more complaining and less likeable than if individuals did nothing. Telling a joke decreased the likelihood of these negative impressions, but those who told jokes were seen as less competent than those who made more direct confrontations. Although the joke could possibly have other effects that would help prejudice reduction, such as conveying that the perpetrator has strayed past a prescriptive norm, the light-hearted nature of the joke may make this violation seem trivial. In contrast, those who made more direct responses were seen as more competent than those who told jokes. Yet direct confronters were seen as more complaining and less likeable than those who made a joke.

So there’s the informed position, which rather confirms many people’s fears that you can’t win if put in this position by a colleague. When faced with some personal attack, or at least infringement, you have a split second decision to make, which roughly can be represented as: do I want to be seen as likeable or competent or is it simply not worth making a fuss? In practice, such a cost-benefit analysis will be the last thing on one’s mind, and how one reacts will depend on everything else going on around one. But, if the behaviour is persistent, then possibly it is more useful to take time to consider what strategy is most beneficial. It is also interesting to note in the book that it is clear each of us has a very different threshold as to what provokes us, based on prior social interactions and support systems (in other words one’s self-identity), another point that the earlier post discussion made very clear.

There we have it. The limited anecdotal information provoked in the comments by my description of my failure to cope with inappropriate behaviour directed at me, has a formal mirror and place in the psychology literature. I am not sure it helps me work out strategies, but it is always good to go beyond anecdote. Nevertheless, I am pleased to say that in the year that has passed since my original post, I haven’t had to deal with any extreme situations where the tips you collectively passed on could be put to the test. Indeed, I notice that men (always men I think) sometimes seem as if they’re about to pat me on the arm and then visibly back off. Perhaps I now ooze noli me tangere so strongly they wouldn’t dare, even in situations where it wouldn’t have caused me any offence. However, my own personal experiences do not give me optimism the world has radically changed, so much as I may have done. A year older, a year tougher and perhaps those wanting to harass are finding easier victims – the young and less secure – to target. I would love to believe that wasn’t true, but….

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