With Fresh Ears, Eyes and Hands

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Athene Donald

In the run-up to Easter I happened to catch part of a broadcast of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. This is a work I was steeped in as a teenager, attending the annual Bach Choir’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London several years on the trot, as well as other performances around the country. To begin with I loved it but, for various familial reasons, it got intertwined with things that were less pleasant and by the time I was about 21 I had consciously turned my back on it. Ever since I have deliberately avoided listening to it and hence when, by accident, I caught an hour or so if it for the first time in more than 30 years I was taken off guard and heard it with fresh ears. Once more it was glorious. But I also heard things in it that I had been completely unconscious of in my youth.  In particular I heard the voice of the chorus in a new way. Instead of it just being the bit that I might have sung myself (although I only ever participated in a performance of the St John Passion in fact), I finally realised it was the conscience, the reflective participatory voice – for instance, staccato as it sang ‘loose him, free him, bind him not’ after Jesus was captured. Not that this indicates my religious predilections so much as it made me realise that maturity brings with it all kinds of new insights and emotions.

Simultaneously, though, maturity brings with it as often as not cynicism and a jaded palette, literally or figuratively. This applies as much to books one rereads after a gap of many years – I cannot finish Middlemarch now, a book I adored as a teenager, possibly because I now identify myself with a different character set, but ones who irritate me  – as to how one sets about life.  Which all goes to show how important it is to have a wide-ranging group of people making fundamental decisions, be it in a company’s boardroom or setting up the Steering Committee for an Athena Swan award. Diversity matters. Depending on the sort of decision-making in hand, representation across geography, gender, (sub-) discipline, seniority, sexual orientation, parental status, religious beliefs….any or all may be relevant.  This simple fact should constantly be borne in mind.

This equally applies in the research lab.  If you work in one area for long enough a certain mindset develops. You do things one way and since they have always worked you continue to do things in that same way.  A new postdoc turns up whose background is different, subtly or in much larger ways, and they bring with them fresh eyes and hands. Their previous supervisor tackled things differently, perhaps, and there may be a brief clash of cultures. They want to continue doing it their way, the resident group may resist. Any decent postdoc will persist, mix in some of this and some of that – in other words a bit of what they used to do with a bit of what everyone around them is now doing – and something new may well appear. Something unexpected, a twist no one saw coming. That is the fun of research, highlighting the way novelty and creativity often appear via serendipity and not via the carefully written-up linear stuff of grant applications. It highlights the importance of not being set in one’s ways too firmly but responsive to variation. It could almost be called the evolution of research. It is particularly important in the interdisciplinary world of research I inhabit. I may approach things with my physicist’s hat on, but a biologist or a chemist may come along and say ‘but you’ve completely ignored the fact that a cell in pure water is osmotically stressed’ or something equally obvious to them and quite obscure to a naïve physicist (I have at least learnt that one!).

Of course, just as maturity means you may get jaded, it also means you may have ‘seen it all before’ in a more constructive way. You may have a new postdoc who comes in wanting to try procedure X, which you know already will fail because you had a student try it for 3 years without success for reasons you eventually tracked down; you want to prevent the new postdoc wasting months similarly, but you want to do it in ways that don’t squash their initiative. So it’s a fine line to tread between encouraging lateral thinking and originality and merely reinventing wheels; and it’s a fine line for the supervisor between holding to dogmatic expectations and allowing unbridled but unwise enthusiasm to run amok. Nevertheless, personally I’m a great believer in letting those at the start of their careers have their heads. The acknowledgment in one of my student’s thesis which said that I had allowed him

‘the freedom to pursue the work down whatever alleys it led me, without which I am sure this thesis would have been much less interesting’

I took as a great compliment. Maybe not everyone would react the same way.

 

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Breaking into the Lab

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Athene Donald

What follows is a book review which first appeared in Times Higher Education on April 12th 2012

Breaking Into the Lab: Engineering Progress for Women in Science
By Sue V. Rosser
New York University Press
264pp, £23.99
ISBN 9780814776452
Published 25 April 2012

Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, stirred up a storm in 2005 by suggesting that women are under-represented in science due to “issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination”. The author of this book, Susan Rosser, was present at that infamous meeting and in her introduction writes that “most of us, individuals who had worked and conducted substantial research on women in science… were appalled and shocked by his remarks”. Breaking Into the Lab covers Rosser’s own experiences, from her early days as a researcher in zoology, through years of research in women’s studies, culminating in her present position as provost and vice-president for academic affairs at San Francisco State University. It is complemented by excerpts from interviews with various women currently working in science and engineering research at a range of institutions.

Rosser has no doubt that women are disadvantaged at every stage along the career path in small but subtle ways – what she terms “micro-inequities” – and that this process plays a central role in the way women drop out and burn up. In this book she discusses how these micro-inequities manifest themselves at different career stages, building on the experiences and reflections of her interviewees. She also touches upon what might be done to improve the climate.

This book is written by an American about the US landscape. For UK readers it may have more limited resonance, with frequent mentions of “stopping the tenure clock”, in particular, not exactly chiming with the way things aredone here. Furthermore, the legal position in the UK is different in some quite significant ways (for instance, regarding maternity leave) that ought to make the academy here a rather happier environment. Nevertheless, the UK has many similar problems, with the numbers of women in science subjects decreasing steadily at every stage of the academic career ladder, and with many and similar microinequities present here just as much as in the US. So, leaving aside the inevitable American take on things, will this book bring insight and help for UK academia? The answer is, I fear not.

The early chapters chart Rosser’s own career and experiences, interspersed with snippets from the many interviews she carried out to illustrate or stress her points. However, quite often the quotes seem to fit uneasily with her text, thereby feeling forced. Furthermore, for those wanting hard facts and statistics, this anecdotal style may seem unhelpful and irritating. The book could not be described as polemical, but it is certainly personal. Its style does not lend itself to use as a handbook for those wanting a guide to improve their own institution’s performance, although for any senior managers who haven’t yet considered the gender dimension in their science faculty, it may prove enlightening about the challenges many women face. Towards the end of the book the style changes radically, almost as if it had been written by another person. A chapter on why women are under-represented on patents is followed by one misleadingly entitled “The impact that women have made on science and technology”, which details the various types of feminist theory and how they interpret the challenges for women in these fields; this sits uncomfortably with the rest of the book.

The aspirations of this book, to inform and assist readers in improving the climate for female academic scientists, are laudable, but I cannot see that it will become a “must-read” manual. Long on anecdote and short on practical advice, it may have something for everyone, but equally it has everything for no one.

 

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Mentors, Friends and Saying No

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Athene Donald

Who needs mentors? It is clear that when setting out on a career, having supportive mentors can be immensely helpful: people who you can turn to for advice when decision crunch-time comes, or who provide pointers about things you should be doing or looking into.  At early career stages mentors are quite clearly separate from your friends, who are the ones you moan with in the pub or exchange anecdotes with about the evil ways of your supervisors. Friends are typically contemporaries, mentors somewhat ahead of you up the career ladder (anywhere from just a year or two to the head of department); what matters is that they have had more time to gain experience, absorb the culture and learn the ropes – and that they are willing to pass on what they know, simultaneously with taking enough trouble to know you sufficiently well that the advice they give is constructive for you as an individual and not just correct but irrelevant.

As one climbs up the greasy pole, I suspect for most of us that need for objective advice never actually goes away. It may be about very different situations and questions than when a student or postdoc, but I think practically everyone would like access to a cross between an agony aunt and a careers’ advisor. Do not believe that being a professor makes one immune to indecision or a suspicion of being manipulated or unreasonably challenged that would be good to air.  However, by this point the number of potential mentors is likely to be pretty small. Who does a head of department turn to, for instance?  The answer is, of course, mentors are likely to be those colleagues you have learned to trust ie your friends within the academic circle. The trust bit is clearly crucial. If you are in the midst of a quandary, exposing yourself to ridicule from a colleague who perceives you as a rival would be unwise. Perhaps you have no desire to do something that on paper looks excellent, because it might conflict with caring responsibilities, mean uprooting your family to another part of the globe or cause you more stress than you feel your high blood pressure can cope with. You may have excellent reasons for not wanting to do something in terms of your work-life balance but still want to talk it through – just to check the reasons really are excellent – with someone who isn’t an involved family member. Choose the wrong colleague and you can end up labelled emotional (certainly an adjective tossed in my direction from time to time), or provide ammunition to be thrown in your face at a later date to prevent you doing something that is your cup of tea.

These thoughts are provoked by a handful of recent events. Firstly, when writing the blogpost on impostor syndrome I went back to listen to the podcast of the discussion with Linda Partridge and Vivienne Parry, to check exactly who said what on the subject. During that debate, Vivienne asked us if we still had mentors. My answer was that I had friends who served that purpose; Linda likewise still had a clear need for people to turn to for advice. Secondly, I met up with a senior academic colleague for lunch, the vacation providing a brief moment of relative calm, although we still had to fix it on a Saturday due to our insane diary over-commitments. This person, who I’ll refer to as Prof A for simplicity, was bemoaning the lack of support and assistance she was able to access when it came to making decisions about which requests to accept, although she felt there were ‘experts’ around who could have provided welcome insight.  And thirdly, I finally reached the point of declining to serve on a university committee.

So let’s start with what is so often the difficult task of saying ‘no’. I wear various hats within the University, one of which is serving on University Council, and from that role many committee memberships naturally flow, because our governance (don’t ask me if it’s a Statute or Ordinance which requires it, but I suspect the latter) requires that many of the central committees have a certain number of Council members appointed to it. So, I have a heavy tranche of committee work to get through, much of which is interesting, much of which is important but some of which probably doesn’t fit either category. However, when I was asked to serve on yet another committee out of the blue, I wondered why. A little research revealed that I was being asked neither because I was a Council member, nor because they needed a scientist, not even a female scientist (they already had at least one). So, despite the fact the workload was going to be slight, I felt it was time to put my foot down as a point of principle. There are a lot of professors in the university, and some of them I suspect remain happily removed from the reality of committee work, which I would call community service. Ask them for once, I thought. (In fact they didn’t, they asked another overloaded, hardworking but male physical scientist.)

On that occasion I had no trouble saying no, but – to go back to Professor A – it isn’t always so clear. Maybe you should make choices based on whether task 1 or task 2 is ‘better’. But what does better mean, and for whom?  Better for you, your department, your university, for some professional body or for society at large? What is better for one of these will certainly not necessarily be better for all. When Martin Rees was asked to serve contemporaneously as President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College I have no idea how he weighed up the pros and cons of doing one, or the other, or both. In fact I rather think he was already the Astronomer Royal. Did it bother him that he might be over-committed? Who did he discuss it with? Now most of us would not be in quite such an extreme position, being offered such an embarras de richesses, but nevertheless at any stage there may be choices to be made. Is it better to get buried under a mountain of ERC paperwork or a UK research council pile? Should one dare to appear on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, however much media training one has had, or simply accept that something less challenging such as Start the Week is the limit to aspire to? Is university committee X better than Institute of Physics committee Y? We all need to talk these matters through with someone; ideally someone who has a relevant track-record, or at least familiarity with that bit of the system.

Which is where mentors/friends come in. In my experience, talking through what is good and bad about options, and working out what ‘better’ means in different circumstances, is a helpful exercise, even if it only reinforces the prejudices one started with. Now Professor A and I are both, clearly, female. I have no idea if there is a gender slant in this desire for advice (or at least a chat), but I suspect it is much more a personal issue than a gendered one as to how much of this one wants. But the reality is that being senior means both that the choices seem much larger not to mention diverse, and that the choice of suspects to discuss the matter with is more limited. Maybe other universities cope with this better than Cambridge and have an in-built support system. Maybe this is part of the competitive rather than supportive environment that is an oft repeated Cambridge characteristic, simultaneously both a strength and a weakness. However, I rather doubt that this is so. What do others feel?

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The Man of Science and the Man of Letters

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Athene Donald

I have just spent a few days in Lichfield, which you might not think of as a key cultural centre, but it happens to be closely associated with two giants, in the form of Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Johnson, both doctors, though of very different kinds. Looking round the museums representing their respective houses – for Darwin, the one where he lived and practiced medicine for 23 years from 1758-81; for Johnson the one where he was born and brought up approximately half a century earlier – it is interesting to put their lives into some sort of juxtaposition.

Regular readers of this blog will know that Erasmus Darwin is one of my heroes about whom I have written before.  Charles Darwin’s grandfather, he seems to have had inklings about evolution, which he expressed through the unlikely medium of rhyming couplets in his poem Zoonomia and also (albeit briefly, because it offended the clerics from the Cathedral onto which his house backed) through his Latin motto ‘e conchis omnia’.Literally this means ‘everything from shells’ and it was emblazoned on his coach. During the time he lived in Lichfield time he encountered Samuel Johnson a few times; between them there was clearly mutual dislike if not loathing.  The evidence for this comes from the families of one of those very same cathedral clerics, Canon Seward, whose daughter Anna wrote an early biography of Darwin. More of this below.

Samuel Johnson was born the son of a rather disorganised bookseller in Lichfield.  He is famous for his dictionary and for his wit, which he seems to have made essentially his profession in the way that Georgian society permitted. His background being probably best described as ‘trade’ (as opposed to ‘gentleman’), he did manage to get to Oxford for 13 months of education, before having to leave – without a degree –  due to shortage of funds. For this reason the eventual award of an Oxford honorary degree (hence his title of doctor) was probably all the sweeter. But, from what I can gauge, he probably always had a chip on his shoulder about his pedigree and was anxious to get all the recognition he could. I have read his ‘A journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’, and very pompous and self-satisfied I found it, however ‘witty’ and informative it may be about the people he met en route. Full of self-aggrandisement, it is a testament to how anxious Johnson must always have felt about his standing in a society which believed in Society. He could not take things for granted and needed to feel in the thick of things. He used to visit Lichfield from time to time, and appears to have had high regard for the city and its citizens, referring to them as

‘the most sober, decent people in England, the genteelest in proportion to their wealth and spoke the purest English’.

Johnson’s craving for cosmopolitan fame and success is in utter contrast to Darwin, who more than once turned down the opportunity to become the Royal Physician in London. Darwin, one feels, was more comfortable in his own skin than Johnson (who has been posthumously diagnosed as suffering from Tourette’s apparently, which can’t have helped), more confident in his own merits, and more inclined to follow his interests where they would rather than because it would earn him plenty of money. Hence, an original inventor of many things (a speaking machine, an early pantograph, the basic idea underpinning modern axles and a horizontal windmill to name but a few) he never took out a single patent. His profession was medicine and he clearly feared that by revealing himself to be either an inventor or a poet he could damage that professional standing on which his income – which he most certainly did need for a very large family of children, both legitimate and illegitimate – depended. Yet he equally certainly was both, and for a while (once he had ‘outed’ himself as a poet) was regarded as the foremost poet of his age. He would appear to epitomise a Renaissance, or more accurately an Enlightenment Man. He was a Whig, who admired the spirit of the French Revolution and whose close circle within the Lunar Society included many of the leading scientists (Priestley and Watt) and innovators/manufacturers (Boulton and Wedgwood) of the day.

The Seward family had interactions with both Darwin and Johnson. Canon Seward, a prebendary at the cathedral, was very influential in setting Darwin’s medical practice on a firm footing when he first arrived in the city, although subsequently Darwin fell out with him on various counts. Seward’s daughter Anna was a close friend, who sought advice from Darwin on her poetry; indeed Darwin encouraged her rather against the wishes of her father (who clearly felt this was not a seemly activity for a young woman), but Darwin had strong and advanced views on female education summed up in his 1797 book A plan for the conduct of female education in boarding schools. However, ultimately he may have left Anna feeling let down, by not asking her to be his second wife.  The Seward’s clearly knew Johnson and used to entertain him during his Lichfield visits, although Johnson was hardly complimentary about the Canon:

‘Sir, he has ambition to be a fine talker; so goes to Buxton, and such places, where he may find company to listen to him…’.

Canon Seward had literary pretensions himself, having produced a new edition of Beaumont’s plays. When Johnson produced an edition of Shakespeare, Darwin pilloried them both in verse:

From Lichfield famed two giant critics come,
Tremble, ye Poets! Hear them! ‘Fe, fo fum!’
By Seward’s arm the mangled Beaumont bled,
And Johnson grinds poor Shakespeare’s bones for bread.

That being so, perhaps it is no surprise they did not get on when they subsequently met a couple of years later. Johnson was the older by some 22 years, and must have regarded himself at this point in his life as the son of Lichfield made good (although his friend and erstwhile pupil David Garrick could also have claimed to fit that particular niche).  He did not like returning to the town to find a local star, a polymath who had a growing national reputation and who could not be talked down. Anna Seward wrote in her biography:

‘Mutual and strong dislike subsisted between them’

and

‘Johnson liked only worshippers’….

Darwin and the Seward’s were not of those who

‘sunk, in servile silence, under the force of his dogmas’.

Clearly there was a strong clash of personalities between two larger-than-life characters, neither of whom wished to give ground to the other, and who probably differed in their approaches to just about everything. Although I found my visit to Johnson’s house the more interesting, maybe because I knew less about him in advance but also because the Erasmus Darwin house is largely aimed at children, my sympathies lie much more with the enlightened free-spirit of Darwin, keen on female education and with a general curiosity about everything, than the high Tory Johnson wishing to be liked and plauded wherever he went.

 

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Quantitative Skills for All

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Athene Donald

What do social scientists need to know about science and maths? What should schools and universities be doing to make sure they have the necessary skills? This was at the heart of a recent meeting at the British Academy, where I found myself sharing a platform with colleagues from the CBI and ESRC, who are not my usual bedfellows as it were. The BA is leading a BIS-funded programme on Languages and Quantitative Skills (two separate strands), aiming to ‘strengthen skills and build capacity in these vital areas’ for the humanities and social sciences. This particular meeting was focussed on the quantitative skills’ aspect, with a morning devoted to the situation as we find it now in the UK, and the afternoon to what lessons might be learned from the international scene with talks from Korea, the USA and Canada.  My role was to present the – rather dismal – scene within schools, taking data from the Royal Society’s four ‘State of the Nation’ reports, the last one  of which I ‘launched’ last year, and then to participate in a long and thoughtful Q+A session, with fellow panellists John MacInnes (ESRC Strategic Advisor for the Teaching of Quantitative Skills) and Neil Carberry, Employment Director from the CBI, talking respectively about the situation in higher education and employment.

I think we all shared the view that our children and students are simply not gaining the skills they need. Only 59% of schoolchildren manage to get maths GCSE at A*-C, which means 41% don’t even obtain a C grade although these probably don’t go on to do degrees in social sciences. Furthermore, the vast majority of pupils don’t do any mathematics post-16, hence they are not well equipped to deal with the realities of large datasets, grasping the technical meaning of significance or distinguishing between correlation and causation and other such important realities that face social scientists day by day.  The Wolf Report, published last year advocated that everyone should be doing some form of maths post-16, a view reinforced by the ACME reports on Mathematical Needs. This message seems to have been heard by Michael Gove: in a speech I hosted last summer at the Royal Society he said

I think we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18.

We will have to wait to see if anything actually transpires, but this (one hopes) is a changing scene.

Of course, in Scotland a far higher proportion of students carry on with maths past Standard grades, progressing on to Highers. In the BA talk I showed data demonstrating both these numbers and the way students combine maths with science subjects in their Highers choices. I was then challenged (by Roderick Floud, Provost of Gresham College) as to why, if the Royal Society felt the Scottish system had so much going for it we didn’t advocate moving towards a Baccalaureate system. I pointed out we had – but after a 24 hours flurry of media attention (during which I had the opportunity to speak on both Today and Radio Scotland early in the morning of the report launch; there was also some reporting in the print media) no further interest was shown. Clearly a more sustained ‘campaign’ would be required to make any significant inroads into either public or government opinion.

Government was represented at this meeting by David Willetts, albeit briefly. He lolloped into the meeting with his customary long strides, delivered a brief speech,answered a handful of questions and then lolloped out again. His speech was notable for its personal touch. Firstly he remarked on his own experiences as an Oxford PPE student, faced with a research paper including a regression analysis with which he had no familiarity. It wasn’t entirely clear how he coped with this – or indeed if he now feels comfortable with regression and other statistical methodology – but at least it meant his comments about the importance of quantitative skills in the social sciences were heartfelt. His second anecdote was at least as bothering. He said that as a junior (junior what was not made clear) in the Treasury he had once been presented with a report with all its prose complete. He was asked to insert the figures into the text, presumably implicitly being asked to find the figures that fitted with the policy being advanced. His comment that times were different now and that the Coalition believed in evidence-based policy was met with polite silence whilst he was in the room. The subdued snigger was only forthcoming after he had left.

I am myself supposed to be more quantitatively skilled than a mere PPE graduate. However, it has to be said that my own schooling provided me with no knowledge of statistics – by implication during the BA day regarded as the most important ‘branch’ of mathematics – and by the time I had left school I don’t suppose I had ever encountered a regression analysis either. It just didn’t feature in the A levels I took, which covered Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. Maybe there was a Statistics course at the time, but my school did not offer it and anyhow I probably wouldn’t have appreciated its relevance for an aspiring physicist. So I had my own first moment of being asked to cope with statistical analysis at around age 18, and indeed  in the context of the social sciences. During the year after A levels, which would now be termed a gap year – although that was a phrase unknown at the time – I went to work as a ‘statistical assistant’ at the National Children’s Bureau in London. This was my formal job title, despite the fact that I knew no statistics. The place was full of sociologists, and some medics, who were studying the so-called 1958 cohort of children. This longitudinal study encompasses all the children born in one week in March 1958 and who have been followed up 9 times since, most recently in 2008.

It is an amazing dataset, rich for study, with a massive associated output of papers (as far as I can see from the web the staggering total of 1716 papers have been published in connection with the study). This was, for instance, the cohort whose study first revealed the connection between low birthweight babies and smoking during pregnancy. My own role (working under Dr Eva Alberman, who was something of a pioneer herself) consisted of studying all the low birthweight babies, and tracking down records of those who had got ‘lost’, most usually because of neonatal death, as well as looking at the association between birthweight and subsequent IQ test data at age 7. At this point my memory tells me I had to do a student’s-t test, which of course I had never heard of before the request was made. Luckily I had those around me who could kindly fill me in, and show me how to deal with the punch cards – yes punch cards were the cutting edge of data analysis back then in the early 1970’s – to get an answer. So, given my own background, who am I to sneer at a PPE graduate who also had a moment of panic when faced with a statistical approach he hadn’t met before?

The moral of the story is of course what the BA Quantitative Skills programme is all about. Not everyone in the population will need to deal with something quite as specific as regression or test null hypotheses, but nearly everyone will have to face up to what it means when the newspapers scream ‘red meat increases the chance of death by 20%’ – a nonsensical Daily Mail headline alluded to at the meeting. People need to know what is going on when experts, and the deniers, try to explain what factors are contributing to climate change, sometimes (in the latter case at least, although one hopes not the former) using decidedly dodgy statistical analysis to back up their claims. So, let us hope that better numeracy for all, further exposure to maths post-16 for every student – appropriate according to their future envisaged degree/career trajectories – and a general enhancement in our quantitative skills ensues. It is shameful that England can boast fewer than 20% of post-16 students studying any form of mathematics, compared with nations such as Korea and Japan where as many as 95% do.

 

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