Collini and Science

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Athene Donald

A couple of months ago Stefan Collini published his book ‘What are Universities for?’ to much interest. This book was reviewed in many places including here on OT by Erika Cule, although overall the reviews were pretty mixed. Peter Conrad for one, was less than enthusiastic in the Observer, concluding

What universities are emphatically not for is to subsidise the self-pity of those they employ.

I tend to get around to reading books long after they’ve faded from the best-seller lists, and it would be pointless to add belatedly another review to the myriad already out there written by a variety of distinguished scholars (I use this word advisedly, as I’ll expand on below). However I would like to chip in with my thoughts specifically on Collini’s attitude towards science and scientists, which I found rather dispiriting.

Collini is a colleague of mine, in so far as he is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the University of Cambridge. I have, however, never knowingly met him within the University so I have no first-hand knowledge of the man and I can only judge his attitude towards me and those of my ilk – viz, scientists – by the tone of his book. And, much though I can applaud many of the sentiments he expresses about the current assault on education as a public good, I do take grave exception to the constantly rather snide allusions and comments made about scientists in the book. For Collini it would seem that science, because it can be applicable, is also impure and in some senses almost unworthy of its place in a university. He makes a constant point of separating out ‘scholars’ from ‘scientists’ as if he is separating the sheep and the goats, or the wheat from the chaff.  In which case he clearly equates me with the chaff. I find this disappointing. We are all in this together – a point he himself makes – and universities would be the weaker if either the humanities or the sciences were somehow suddenly to be seen as dispensable.

I wrote some time ago about how I feel the long-standing tension between the humanities and science originally arose in part on class grounds.  I feel this sentiment lurks throughout the book, with the constant implication that humanities scholars sit on higher ground than us mere scientifically-motivated mortals. We only try to make sense of the ‘physical world’, as opposed to the aspirations of the humanities scholars who tackle the so-called ‘human world’ in Collini’s lexicon. I suspect this argument is made more convincing in Collini’s eyes because of all the current anxiety about so-called impact in the context of the REF.  This is a subject which absorbs a whole chapter of the book, which is a reproduction of what he wrote on the subject in 2009. Many scientists are just as disturbed by some of the ideas underlying impact as Collini and his colleagues and, again, it does no one any favours for him to get huffy because some portion of the work in the sciences undeniably satisfies the simplest interpretation of impact, which is that there is demonstrable contribution to our economy or healthcare. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that by the end of the 2010 Impact Pilot study, the English panel seemed much more relaxed about the agreed metrics that had been devised than the Physics panel, on which I sat and which continued to express nervousness.

Throughout the book Collini makes it clear that he feels the scientists have it easy in the current REF climate, because their research can be readily shown to have some quantifiable economic value. (although, as scientists know, this isn’t always the case). We then get rehearsed the standard arguments about how you can’t put value on Shakespeare et al and an implicit ‘so it isn’t fair’. Furthermore, that science is upon occasion useful for curing disease, or designing a better widget, is somehow conveyed to be slightly distasteful. Finally, that the sciences get more money for their research (and he makes no attempt to assess what a sensible unit cost of a science project compared with a humanities project might be) is put across as favouring them unduly. That all disciplines should in some sense get the same money, regardless of the actual cost, strikes me as bizarre.

The familiar arguments – which these points touch on – about ‘the two cultures’ of science and humanities long predates CP Snow’s Rede Lecture here in Cambridge, as I spelled out in my earlier post. But Collini has something curious to say about this apparent division, which exemplifies my fears about his attitude:

We should not, however, allow this observation about the differences in the public purchase of arguments about the sciences and the humanities to lead us to endorse or reinstate any version of the two cultures’ dichotomy. It is not simply that there is no coherent intellectual basis for this conventional distinction – not in method or subject-matter or purpose – but also, more importantly here, that scholars and scientists share more, and have a greater interest in common where the role of universities is concerned, than the hackneyed contrast tends to suggest. Indeed, as a rough rule of thumb one may say that the more distinguished the scientists are at their science, the more readily they acknowledge the shared character of intellectual enquiry and the more willing they are to make common cause with their colleagues in the humanities against various ways of talking (or measuring) that misrepresent this. ‘Two cultures’ talk has its main current home, as it had its origins, among those who find some kind of cultural insecurity about their identities as scientists or among those who administer science rather than doing it (the two groups are not mutually exclusive). ……In London, the British Academy and the Royal Society are next-door neighbours in the same handsome Regency terrace, with some sharing of their facilities – a neatly symbolic expression both of the traditional version of the divide and of their joint standing and interest.

Sitting, as it were, on the other side of the divide, there are a number of implicit assumptions and issues that trouble me in this paragraph. Here you see an explicit version of Collini’s careful distinction between scientists and scholars. I understand why Collini feels that what he and his colleagues do is not research and should more properly be described as scholarship; indeed in essence he devotes a whole chapter of his book to defending this position. But either we are collectively scholars and researchers, or else we are humanities and STEM people. His distinction seems perverse and conveys, to me at least, a sense of superiority on behalf of the humanities. But then, that’s probably just because I’m a poor undistinguished scientist suffering from cultural insecurity! That single sentence in the paragraph above, containing its veiled contempt for us, is in itself a wonderful way of putting us down, albeit I suspect he may not even be aware that that is implicitly what he is doing. I don’t think he can imagine being on the receiving end of that sentence in reverse.  But by saying we have ‘a great[er] interest in common’, and are ‘willing to make common cause’ he appears to express the fact that we scientists are meant to be the ones doing the moving to join those righteously placed in the humanities. In practice, I think the science community overall is much more likely to make space in their lives for poetry, art or music than many humanities scholars would for astronomy, geology or zoology – let alone the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the familiar example that CP Snow tossed about.

So, Collini is right to ask the question what are universities for, and right to point out in just how many ways the government is asking the impossible of us, and trying to turn us collectively into something that is almost certainly undesirable for the well-being of future generations whilst simultaneously gambling with the education of the present one. But that really is no excuse for operating the implicit divide and rule between disciplines that he seems to have contrived to do, whilst claiming to do the opposite. A wasted opportunity for speaking with a collective voice.

Posted in Book Review, Education | Tagged , , , | 28 Comments

Conferences and Courage

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Athene Donald

Exactly a year ago I wrote about the annual High Polymer Research Group Conference, held at the edge of the Peak District. Over the years I have watched it transform from an inward-looking cliquey organisation, where I initially sat right at the edge – a rare physicist amongst the chemists, an even rarer woman amongst the blokes – to a welcoming, inclusive and interdisciplinary meeting with an average age at least 20 years less than when I started out (unfortunately the same cannot be said of my own age!).  Now being one of the older attendees, I hope I do my bit (in accord with the wise words written recently about good behaviour at conferences by Rosie Redfield) to ensure each year’s newcomers don’t feel left out, and those scientists at an earlier stage of their careers can use late night chats in the bar to pick my brains if they feel so inclined and reckon they’re worth picking.  I’ve even been using this meeting to discuss Athena Swan awards.

Having previously served on the organisation committee, I know that the organisers are very mindful of the gender composition of both speakers and audience (it is an invitation only conference). This year around 25% of the speakers were women. Not bad, given the community from which the participants can be drawn. The percentage of women in the audience is probably a tiny bit higher, but not much, but is increasing year on year due to determination of the committee to seek out the less familiar female potential attendees. But this year, having read the plea Dorothy Bishop put out on her blog for women to speak up at conferences, I have been looking at the dynamics with different eyes. She felt that too often at conference talks and seminars, women were reluctant to open their mouths, unwilling to utter in case they made a fool of themselves, preferring to wait till everyone else had left to have a private word with the speaker. She says

There’s no point in encouraging men to listen to women’s voices if the women never speak up. If you are one of those silent women, I urge you to make an effort to overcome your bashfulness. You’ll find it less terrifying than you imagine, and it gets easier with practice. Don’t ask questions just for the sake of it, but when a speaker sparks off an interesting thought, a challenging question, or just a need for clarification, speak out. We need to change the culture here so that the next generation of women feel at ease in engaging in verbal academic debate.

Now in principle I agree with Dorothy, but I find in this case that I have a lot of sympathy with those bashful women who prefer not to quiz the speaker publicly. Not that I am usually regarded as silent – in committees or other kinds of meetings – but I do tend to be ‘bashful’ when it comes to the conference/seminar scene; it is one of the few situations where – still – I can feel the flight or fight reaction setting in. So, I have a lot of sympathy for other individuals – female or male – who feel the same way. It doesn’t always stop me chipping in, but I probably do it less than might be expected.

I’m sure most people will be familiar with those smart and confident people who preface their questions with ‘I’m afraid I’m being very stupid but…’ and then jump right into the heart of the matter with some percipient and pertinent question. Most seminar speakers should quail when the question begins that way, although just occasionally the person is indeed being very stupid. However, the people who I recall doing this with style and dangerous disingenuousness are two previous heads of my own department. One of them used to compound their apparent innocence by seemingly being asleep through much of the seminar.

Then there is another class of frequent questioners who are determined that their voice should be heard, come what may. You can count on them to jump in, whether their question is deep or merely about trivial methodological detail along the lines of ‘can you explain what size vial you used’ sort of thing. They are the show-offs, the people trying to prove they’re smart by being vocal. If no one else has any questions this can save the organiser the embarrassment of a totally silent audience, but otherwise this person is little more than an exhibitionist nuisance. Of course there are the genuinely thoughtful who also have lots of questions to ask. Keenly interested in everything, they really do want to know more, and more and more and so keep asking questions. In general they are likely to spark off lively debate. But how many women would I feel I could name who fitted into any of these categories. Very few. So Dorothy clearly has a point.

Why do I myself prefer to keep quiet? Sometimes it is because I assume that I am being thick, or that maybe I dropped off at the vital moment when the bit I fail to get was being beautifully explained or that everyone else had learned it at GCSE and I had somehow failed to pick it up.  I think these are the sort of ‘excuses’ with which Dorothy would have no truck. Maybe these are the excuses of the coward, who is simply trying to hide, but they can feel very real.  At other times I feel, although my question is reasonable perhaps it is just about detail that the rest of the audience won’t care to know, and so can safely be left aside (unless no one else is asking questions at all, in which case it is useful to have up one’s sleeve to save that awkward empty space when the organiser looks round the audience in increasing desperation to see if anyone had paid any attention at all). But when I feel on top of the subject but puzzled, or when I want to tie the work in with something else or someone else’s data then, yes, I’ll pipe up. I can even recall once, at this very same conference I’m currently attending but some years ago, the person sitting next to me saying ‘don’t be too harsh with your question’ when the speaker really didn’t know their stuff and was rather obviously making a hash of a topic close to my own heart. I hope I managed to phrase my question then sufficiently tactfully that the debate was opened up without too much of my incredulity about the work being brutally set out.

So ladies, indeed people, speak up when the situation warrants it and shut up when it doesn’t. And if asking public questions really isn’t your forte, as long as you speak up elsewhere, don’t berate yourself too harshly. If, on the other hand, you have never found your voice in any situation, then you have a problem that you need to address – and fast.

Aside During the conference I put out a tweet remarking that the evening session one day had been particularly good and ‘all the better for having 2 women speakers and a female chair’, for which I was taken to task. I stand by what I said. This was not to denigrate any of the male speakers, or to imply individually the women were better. But having a session – presumably by chance – at which all the participants were women should just serve to remind people that it is both possible to find excellent women to showcase and that when you do the conference continues to thrive. For the younger women in the audience such visible role models too can only be beneficial. Clearly issues around any sort of ‘positive discromination’ are complex, and I have written about this before here and here. But a visual (and audible) reminder to the community, that too easily can think male is the norm, has its advantages. If there was a conference where females were in the significant majority, I would stick up for a session showcasing men in just the same way!

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

How Many Arms do you Have?

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Athene Donald

I was amused  by the throwaway comment Bettany Hughes made in her recent TV programme Divine Women  about the Hindu Goddess Kali’s many arms being ideal for multitasking. Academics of all ages would benefit from growing a few more limbs, since so often it seems our jobs require us to tackle several different strands of activity simultaneously.  The well-known portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin by Maggi Hambling (hanging, I believe in the National Portrait Gallery) seems to reflect a similar message, with 4 hands apparently reflecting her ability to do many things at once (just think how useful that would be for doubling the number of emails one could deal with). However, it was hinted to me by one of her family once that actually the multiple hands reflected the artist’s frustration that the sitter would not sit still! I shall soon find out just how challenging such long periods of pseudo-inertia really are, having agreed to have my own portrait painted by Tess Barnes who is currently involved in a major project painting female scientists.  She has already painted many ‘high profile’ women, as her collection Women of Substance shows.

Dorothy Hodgkin by Maggi Hambling

But to return to the topic of academic multitasking, we are required to do such diverse things, and somehow acquire proficiency in some of these with essentially zero training.  As a student you are given a project and, unless you are very unlucky, some guidance as to where to start, the techniques to use and perhaps even a friendly postdoc to run to if the equipment breaks. You can take control in many cases, choose whether to head off in this or that direction and you should fairly rapidly develop the innate skills to know when an unexpected result is merely artefactual, as opposed to genuinely novel and exciting and so potentially opening up new vistas. So far, so good.  Your job is to do research and, eventually, to produce a thesis as a labour of love, ideally accompanied by a handful of papers and a few conference presentations, be they oral or poster. Thus your acquired skills should include: technical lab–work in your chosen field, scientific writing and presentation-giving.  Possibly you’ve also been able to teach in a practical class or to a small group of undergraduates. Your supervisor is, one hopes, there to look over your shoulder to encourage and exhort and – again with luck – stop you falling into bad ways or dead ends.

Stick around longer in the academic world and as a postdoc you may acquire a new string to your bow:  supervising research students, albeit probably informally. Perhaps your organisation runs courses to help with such supervision, but I don’t think they are very common. Most people learn as they go along, basing their technique (almost certainly) on their own experiences which may, or may not be relevant. However this is a nice soft way to start since you are unlikely to have sole responsibility and it would be uncommon for this to act as more than a welcome diversion from your own research. Multitasking is still not really necessary (unless you’re trying to multitask a variety of simultaneous experiments, but that’s not really what I have in mind).

No, it’s when you get to be an independent researcher or junior faculty that things become critical. By the time you are a lecturer/assistant professor, you will need to be doing several very different activities in parallel: writing grant proposals, for which paper-writing is not necessarily an adequate preparation as the rules of engagement are somewhat different (many institutions do seem to provide courses on this, though often not going beyond how to fill the forms in); teaching, probably in the form of standing up in front of lecture theatres full of less than enthusiastic students – but you can only do this once you’ve spent many a long day (or possibly night) writing the material up into some form suitable for delivery; and taking on and supervising  research students  – which requires first dreaming up projects and then attracting students and funding too. Interspersed with that you probably simultaneously also have to pick up good interview skills – to make sure you choose your PhD students wisely, for instance – avoiding leading or closed questions. You may also be stuck on a committee or two and wish to become an effective voice there too.

It can all be quite scary and possibly the only saving grace is that you are trying to learn so much at once that you don’t have time to reflect on just how difficult and draining each of the tasks individually is, let alone in total.  But chickens can come home to roost when you get the questionnaires back at the end of that lecture course, or the grant funders are so churlish as not to award you that grant, upon which you expended so much TLC during its gestation. Such setbacks are inevitable, coping with them is likely to be a severe test. And all the time there is that nasty feeling that your more senior colleagues are observing –and judging –  your performance. Testing times, when energy levels may sink but there is no let-up in the need to juggle multiple balls in the air.

I can only feel glad (although perhaps apologetic too) that I set out when I did on this precarious path, because I am quite convinced that the stresses, the multiple demands on new lecturers/fellows are significantly worse than they were in the past. Academia has become more of an industry and less of a profession, driven by government dreams of accountability at least in part. But if you are feeling down it Is worth remembering that there are colleagues around who can help and provide support, reminding you that initial lack of success is unsurprising – be it in teaching, grants or whatever –  and that all of us fail, still, at least some of the time.  All one can hope is that one doesn’t fail all the time. My first individual grant failed; my last one did too with a churlish email sent at some insane time of the night from our Research Councils ‘shared services centre’ only last week.  Clearly in between I have had occasional success, and for any individual receiving the sharp end of rejection it is well to remember Robert the Bruce.

So multitasking is an inevitable if unenviable component of the modern academic profession. The only thing to do is embrace it, practice being more effective at it, stiffen one’s backbone as the negative scenarios pan out, and celebrate the intermittent successes  – both your own and those of your colleagues.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

10 Things You Should Know about Election to the Royal Society

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Athene Donald

There has been much consternation today in the Twittersphere –  and no doubt elsewhere too  – about the fact that there were only two women this year in the list of 44 new Fellows elected to the Royal Society. It goes without saying that this is deeply disappointing. I know that this is a view held by many, including (possibly particularly) those involved in the decision-making this year, which I was not.  However, the low number of women does not mean to say the Royal Society is chauvinistic, backward-looking, biased or unaware of the challenges it faces in ensuring its fellowship more accurately represents the scientific population. It has for some time past been working very hard to try to improve the situation.  So, since I am one of the few Fellows who blogs (and tweets) I will take the risk of being drummed out of the Society by speaking out, to try and set the record straight and counter some of the more prevalent (and sometimes daft) myths that fly around about the election process.

Firstly, what is my pedigree for pronouncing on this? I was elected to the Royal Society in 1999. That year, as it happens, there were 5 women elected: Frances Ashcroft; Lorna Casselton, who went on to become the Foreign Secretary; Janet Thornton, the late Rosa Beddington (who tragically died when she was only 45, a few years later) and myself. I have always found myself welcomed in the Society and most certainly not felt as if I was the victim or target of some patronising group of unreconstructed males. Since my election I have served on many of their committees, including Council from 2004-6. Currently I am Chair of the Education Committee and a member of the Equality and Diversity Advisory Network. I am sure, in their endeavour to make sure all their committees do include female representation, I have been given far more opportunities than many of my male colleagues. Hence, overall I have been involved in many different parts of the Society’s work, and found it rewarding and fascinating. This includes close involvement with the election process itself. First I served on Sectional Committee 2 (I’ll explain this below) for 3 years, then on Council for 2 years, and then on Sectional Committee 2 for another 3 years, chairing it for the last two of these (finishing in 2009). So, I believe I am well placed to provide some hard facts about the process, without breaking any sort of confidences.

In case you think I am a stooge, simply writing this to try to dampen down the collective anxiety ‘out there’, I would point you to an earlier post of mine, where I covered the broad issue of diversity work at the Royal Society long before this current furore started. This covered some of the same ground, although it was not primarily focussed on the Fellowship elections. As I said then, it is easy to pillory the Royal Society on its gender composition, and also completely misconceived to do so. I find it sad that people are so willing to point a figure at our national academy of sciences, without really pausing to think about the realities. The realities which start way before the point at which women could be considered for election; indeed even at birth, as my last post said. I get angry with the casual assumptions people make without careful thought, particularly as my own (sometimes painful) experience tells me there are many other organisations which are substantially less bothered about diversity issues, but which pass unremarked.

So here are 10 facts for you to chew over, 10 things you probably didn’t know and maybe should.

1 You can only be elected if you’re nominated.

Sounds obvious, but it does require someone to act and not just assume that ‘someone else’ will do it. Nor does it require an existing Fellow to start the process. To my certain knowledge, ever since Lord May was President  – so for at least a decade – and possibly before, the Society has actively sought nominations by writing to Heads of Departments and Vice Chancellors encouraging them to put names forward.  Officers have also gone to talk to the Professional Societies to do likewise. If there is no one appropriate locally to proceed with the nomination, then the Officers of the Society  can find a Fellow close enough to the candidate’s field to make a reasoned judgement as to whether the case is strong and, if it is, to get the paperwork together. Each nomination must be supported simply by a Proposer and a Seconder, both FRS’s. Back in the days when I was elected there had to be at least 6 Fellows supporting each application. That was reduced to two (again about a decade ago and again I suspect prompted by Bob May’s concerns) because it was so obviously harder to be nominated if you were a minority or in an emerging field or came from a university without many existing Fellows.   This action, by  lowering the barrier of connectivity as it were, in itself should have facilitated a more diverse field of nominations coming in. It should also be recognized that any Commonwealth citizen can be nominated, or anyone working (for more than 3 years) in the UK, if they are not a UK national.

2 In the first instance you are considered over a 7 year period

Fairly few candidates are elected in their 1st year, although I have seen it happen. The average age of election (and I can’t remember what it currently is) is older than one might like and this is a source of concern. However some individuals do get elected in their early 40s – and some in their 70s.

3 There are 10 sectional committees

I referred to Sectional Committee 2 (SC2) above, which is the one I served on. It covers physics and now includes astronomy; I chaired it as it switched to include both fields. The remits of the committees change from time to time, to reflect the changing realities of the disciplines; they are not so fossilised as still to look the same as they did years ago.  The move of astronomy from SC5 to SC2 was to allow SC5, which includes environmental sciences, to expand as this field grew in size and importance. The 10 committees are divided into two groups: the A side (SC1-5, the physical sciences)  and the B side (the biological sciences covering SC6-10).

4 Membership of the Sectional Committee’s constantly turns over

Each member serves for 3 years. Thus, if you were feeling suspicious that someone could block a particular woman for instance, they wouldn’t be able to do so for long and certainly not throughout the 7 year period an individual is under initial consideration.   Anyone who has either proposed or seconded a particular candidate, or who is from the same institution, is barred from speaking up for that candidate.

5 Much thought is given to the geographical, sub-field and gender distributions in the composition of the Sectional Committees.

Nor is it the case that the committees are stuffed with Fellows from the Golden Triangle. Far from it. I suspect that these universities are actually under-represented on the committees, given their proportion in the Fellowship, although I’ve never done the sums to check. There will also be representatives from overseas on each committee. Additionally, great care is taken to ensure that all sub–fields are as well–represented as possible. This may cause challenges as new areas emerge. In recent years a particular concern has been the situation for candidates from industry, and great effort has been expended in making sure people working there are both nominated and then given appropriate consideration. For instance, mere bulk of standard papers would be an even less reasonable metric for them than for those in universities. In general, though, metrics are not used: no slavish following of h factors, citations or impact factors in my experience.

6 ‘Pedigree’ does not matter

I have heard it said that if you haven’t passed through Oxbridge your path is much harder. I don‘t believe this for one moment.  Or maybe you fear that you had the ‘wrong’ PhD supervisor, or your postdoctoral experience was not in a Russell Group university etc. I think all these wild fears are wide of the mark. What matters is what you have done and whether you have become a clear leader and set a field alight, not where you did it.

7 Approximately 8 reference letters are sought, nationally and internationally for each candidate

Reference letters are hugely important. The committees go to immense trouble to identify appropriate international scientists (ideally Fellows of their own National Academies, although sometimes that isn’t possible because of the field) whom to approach. Feuds are of course not unknown in science, and sometimes this comes through in letters of reference. Committee members are shrewd enough to know when such vitriol is unjustified and can and will discount them in that case. However, I suppose it is possible a sterling candidate who has upset the entire rest of the world will fail to get elected because they are uniformly panned.  Anyone who thinks lobbying of potential referees is likely to be a good thing should think again; it is likely to backfire.

8 Council members sit through all meetings to see that things are both conducted ‘properly’ but also to tension between fields and committees.

As a Council member it is expected that you sit through all the relevant committees i.e. the A or B side as appropriate. That means, were a committee to forget itself and start playing games, or being chauvinistic or ageist or whatever, Council will spot it. They can intervene or even overrule committee ranking. That rarely happens of course. It does also mean, though, that if one SC has an even stronger field than usual in a given year, it can be factored in when the final list is produced. That does and should happen.

9 I have seen ‘all other things’ being equal brought to bear in various ways, but things are rarely equal.

One comment was made on Twitter that, even without lowering the bar for women (which I believe would be intolerable and totally inappropriate) perhaps if ‘all other things’ were equal a female candidate could be bumped up.  This, I believe, is something that might happen and not just around gender but around sub-field discipline too.  However, it is rare that things are that equal that this action can be brought into play.

10 Ultimately the full Council makes the decision on the final list

This, as I indicated above, means there can be tensioning between committees carried out, and the whole slate of Fellows-elect  considered in the round.

The selection process undoubtedly has its vagaries, but I believe overall is pretty fair. Committees are not peopled only by blindfolded elderly men who couldn’t care less about what the outside world believes of the Society. The Royal Society is however not going to start electing individuals just to improve its ‘appearance’ in the eyes of the outside world. If only there were more women nominated there would at least be the opportunity to elect them, but it is going to take many years before the pool of candidates   – even in the biological sciences, let alone in the physical – is anything like an even split between the genders. I look forward to the time when the number of women elected each year approaches parity and ceases to be a topic of interest to anyone. However, I fear that time will not come for a while yet, despite the Society’s best endeavours.

If you’ve waded through to the end of this rather long post, I hope you feel a little less suspicious about the process. Personally, I feel very strongly that the Royal Society is working as hard as it can to create an even playing field, even if scientists collectively can seem a very conservative bunch.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Why We Need to Start Young

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Athene Donald

Recently the Royal Society of Edinburgh released its report looking at the position of women in STEM in Scotland and what ought to be done by their Government; it also looked more broadly at the situation across the UK.  The report, Tapping all Our Talents, covers all too familiar territory. It rehearses the well-documented loss of women along the career pipeline, mourns the low numbers of women starting off in some disciplines and considers the cultural barriers that women face.  Much of the data presented is not new, but what is new is the Scottish focus, and the feeling that perhaps the Scottish Parliament might be more responsive to doing something beyond hand-wringing. A clear set of recommendations have been put forward, including building on Sally Davies’ call for departments to have an Athena Swan Silver award if they are to receive future funding. In the Scottish case it was proposed that

All Scottish Universities should, within 2 years, have in place a strategy to bring all their STEM departments to the minimum standard of an Athena Swan Silver award (or equivalent); within 3-5 years the majority of departments should have achieved this level.

This will be quite a tall order. Currently, although the University  of Edinburgh has two departments with Silver awards, I cannot see any others in Scotland at all; Edinburgh also has an associated bronze department, in the form of the Roslin Institute. But, besides Edinburgh, only Strathclyde has a University Bronze award and without this minimum level of commitment, departments cannot even start applying for individual awards. It would be nice to think all the Vice Chancellors in Scotland will be avidly reading this report and summoning appropriate people together to say ‘Get on with it’, but I suspect that would be being overly optimistic. Furthermore, a further recommendation was

The governors of each Learned Body should publicise a statement welcoming and encouraging the full participation of women in that Body and its academic discipline.

Given that this report has been published by one such learned body, it would have been nice if they could have set the ball rolling by including their own exemplar statement.  Instead, the President’s foreword merely says

We are keen this report will lead to a coherent strategy, particularly in Scotland, to address this most important issue. We stand ready to assist Governments and other key agents to develop and monitor this strategy.

I fear that is a statement without too many teeth, because it passes the buck elsewhere. Unsurprising, but frustrating.

I read this report whilst I was also reading Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (finally I’ve got around to it; I feel I should have read it a year or more ago) . It is depressing reading for anyone who cares about gender (in)equality because what it highlights is that by the time we are considering the fate of girls going to university we have to a large extent already lost the battle, certainly in disciplines such as mine of physics, with their seemingly strong masculine cultural bias. Fine debunks much of the neuroscience that is used to support the claim that boys’ and girls’ brains are necessarily hard-wired differently.  I assume she is right on this, but I’m not going to go down that path here since I haven’t sifted the evidence myself.  What I found much more depressing is the careful presentation of facts which demonstrate just how much our societal norms notionally split babies by gender from the moment of birth (and possibly even before birth if the parents are informed about the sex of the baby in advance). However much parents may think they are bringing up their children in a non-gendered way, it seems to be inescapable. The evidence demonstrates just how much children pick up cues, which may be non-verbal ones at the earliest ages, including those which implicitly stress differences between the genders.

As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets – and they receive the clear messages that  collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly associated with that distinction. Inevitably they are likely to ‘hear’ the message that boys are noisy, into everything and generally vigorous and enquiring, whereas girls are ‘expected’ to be good, docile, nurturing and passive. Parents may do all they can to counteract these expectations, but others around (including other children as they mingle more at playgroup and school) are likely to be less scrupulous. Parents may themselves be unaware of their own implicit associations between gender and stereotype.  If you don’t believe you personally suffer from this, try taking one of the Implicit Association tests I have mentioned before on this blog (for instance here and here).  Even most practicing female scientists, myself included, still find an unconscious tendency to associate words associated with science more with men than women. Every time I do the test and find I still  do this, I get dispirited. I feel it is no surprise if random members of the population do this if I do, despite my deep-seated belief that women and science really do mix.

So, we have a society which creates cultural hurdles for girls who want not to cherish their dolls but take them to pieces to see how they work, or for girls who scorn to play with pink Lego representing a veterinary surgery but want to build rockets instead.  If we are to see more girls opting to study physics at A level (or equivalent), we need to present younger girls with more visions of choices that involve the stereotypically male occupations and childhood diversions which are not simply passive or nurturing. Equally, we will only get a more balanced intake by gender into Vet Schools if the Lego Vet’s office is not pink, and encourage boys to cuddle pets rather than tease them.  One of the points Fine stresses is that different cultures around the world see very different proportions of boys and girls taking up subjects like engineering. This observation reinforces the idea that engineering is not simply a subject girls are necessarily disqualified from by the way their brains were constructed in the womb, but has a substantial cultural aspect.

The RSE report is all well and good. Improving cultures in our science departments so that women students and staff are not further discouraged should be a high priority and I am all in favour of it. But something much more radical needs to be done in the early years if we are finally to reach a point where we don’t lose many smart girls from the pipeline before they ever discover the joys of science.

 

 

 

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