What Price Work Experience?

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Athene Donald

What do students know about life beyond academia? I touched on this in my last post, and this week two reports have been published which are relevant to this theme and the overall ‘student experience’, loosely interpreted. Vitae published a report on ‘What do researchers want to do: the career intentions of doctoral researchers’  which has some results which may seem surprising to those who have followed earlier blogposts from OT bloggers including myself (for instance here). The second report was commissioned by the Government and headed up by Sir Tim Wilson. Entitled ‘A review of business–university collaborations’  it looks at the whole interface between business and universities, including examination of the implications for both undergraduates and postgraduates.  These reports both make telling comments and recommendations, implicitly and explicitly, about how students – during both undergraduate degrees and their PhD’s – are exposed to and consider life beyond academic walls.

A couple of posts written earlier this year on OT from Jenny Rohn (here and here) and Tom Hartley elsewhere  have suggested that there are insufficient openings for dedicated postdocs who want to find academic openings. Although that may still be perfectly true, the Vitae report suggests that actually more people stay in academia after their PhD’s than intended to do earlier on, with approximately twice as high a percentage staying on to do research in HE in the biological (27%)  and biomedical (23%) sciences than set out intending to do so during their PhD (13% and 12% respectively); the difference is much less marked in the physical sciences (19% versus 16%). Perhaps this merely says that the more you do biological research the more you learn to love it and that undergraduate degrees give you no indication of the joys of exploring something no one has ever considered before. However I must admit I was very surprised to find the following as Vitae’s recommendations:

Recommendation: In order to assure a flow of talent into research in higher education and beyond, government, funders and institutions should consider how to most effectively promote research careers to young people.

Recommendation: Institutions should explore how to promote doctoral research opportunities and research careers to high calibre students, in the light of potentially increasing competition from employers from non-higher education.

If the anxiety expressed by Science is Vital and many others about the bottleneck in careers for postdocs progressing to independence is real, as I’m sure it is, then these recommendations may not be wisely applied in the sciences. Otherwise we may just find the situation degenerating further.

A point of concern raised by Vitae is that remarkably few postgraduates had troubled to visit their careers’ service, approximately a third of those interviewed in their final year; a staggering 40% had never used the service at all at any point during their stay at university. Nevertheless, despite this omission, two thirds seem to have thought they would have benefitted from doing so (and those who had done so seemed broadly satisfied). More women than men seemed to think they would have liked more support on this front, but often the desire was to have had it before they ever entered university. With the cutting of careers’ advisors at school (a website seems to be regarded as just as good by the powers that be) this situation is not likely to improve.

One final point of note from the report is the relatively low numbers of students who had undertaken any work experience during their PhD’s; in the sciences the average was around 12%,. Indeed students in the physical sciences had almost the highest percentage overall – as high as 43% – who had never participated in any sort of work experience at either undergraduate or postgraduate level; only arts and humanities students had less exposure at 45%. This topic ties in directly with several of the recommendations from the Wilson report (there are 30 substantive recommendations in all) about work experience at different points in the academic pathway:

Recommendation 4, paragraph 4.5.2

Ideally, every full‐time undergraduate student should have the opportunity to experience a structured, university‐approved undergraduate internship during their period of study. Where such internships are paid, government should examine the feasibility of supporting companies that host students through a tax credit or grant mechanism. Where internships are unpaid, universities should use their ‘OFFA funds’ to support eligible students rather than condone a policy that could inhibit social mobility.

Recommendation 5, paragraph 4.5.2

The government‐supported graduate internship programme should be continued. However, recognising the constraints on the public purse, it is recommended that only companies entering into the graduate internship programme for the first time are supported by a one‐off subsidy. Repeated graduate internships are for the company and/or the university to fund. For the avoidance of doubt, the use of a university’s ‘OFFA funds’ should not be permitted to support unpaid graduate internships.

Recommendation 16, paragraph 5.6

All full‐time postdoctoral research staff should have the opportunity to benefit from 8 to 12 weeks’ of work experience outside academe every three years during their contract. They should receive career guidance from the university’s professional staff each year of their employment as an integral part of their appraisal, and be encouraged to attend a short intensive enterprise skills programme alongside postdoctoral staff from other departments of the university. For the avoidance of doubt, these measures should be integrated within the contracts of postdoctoral research staff and, where possible, embedded within external funding arrangements.

So, work experience should be seen as integral and every student should have the opportunity to benefit although, as can be seen by the qualifying statements in these recommendations (which I have deliberately quoted in full), the source of funding is likely to be a tricky issue. However, the Wilson report was specifically asked to consider university interactions with business.  Just as was the case in the Willetts roundtable I attended last year discussing postdoctoral careers this, I feel, narrows the field of opportunities in ways that I think are unhelpful. The current scheme of internships at POST offers PhD students the chance to look at science policy and interact with politicians and civil servants. Two of my own students have participated; one is now working in science policy but the other found it interesting although not for them. Both students found the exposure to this very different world informative and valuable. How are we going to get more scientifically literate politicians, like my own Cambridge MP (Dr) Julian Huppert, trained in physics and chemistry, if we don’t let students get closer to Parliament upon occasion? What about science communication or journalism more generally? What about school teaching? Surely we should be doing more to offer opportunities away from the usual meaning of the word ‘business’ for students as well as expose them to the world of industry and commerce?

The Wilson Report covers far more than just this narrow emphasis on work experience, and highlights the importance of strong, sustainable links between our universities and industry for innovation and the economy. These points have been touched on by many recently in the blogosphere and I’m not going to consider this here. I simply wish to reiterate that there is much more we, collectively, in the universities and in government can do to equip students for the world beyond academia in the broadest sense. Our economy rests on far more than just innovation and we won’t have any of the entrepreneurs of tomorrow if we don’t have bright, articulate and accomplished individuals entering the world of teaching, journalism, politics, government and communication (and probably many other career paths too) to inspire and inform them. I do hope if and when BIS seeks to introduce the work experience that both Vitae and Sir Tim Wilson are pushing for, and finds the funds to make such a scheme happen, it will have an appropriately broad view of what ‘experience’ might include.


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What Next and How to Get There

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Athene Donald

Last week I visited Edinburgh University to participate in their inaugural ‘Innovative Learning Week’. Whilst many universities, though not my own, have study weeks or mid-term breaks, I haven’t come across the idea of teaching a different kind of teaching before. By all accounts it was a successful week, and those parts I saw were certainly innovative. It should be stated, though, that for me using a ‘clicker’ – as the audience did in the informative and entertaining talk on Dark Matter by Catherine Heymans – is in itself innovative. This is something I have not had the opportunity, or perhaps I mean courage, to try out on my class of 400+ 1st years in my own lectures.

Students were encouraged to try out many new things and participate in activities beyond and outside the curriculum. I only got to see what was going on in Physics, but there I encountered a student who had written an iPhone app from scratch in a day, another who had got philosophers along to discuss time travel and a group who were putting together a magazine covering the week’s events (for which I was duly interviewed and photographed).  Good material for a CV, I said, when starting to job hunt, to which I got a slightly jaundiced answer from one of the magazine team saying essentially that the person in question had so many activities under their belt, they’d ‘given up thinking about this when in the Fourth Year at school’. Well, if this person was telling the truth, I suspect they were unusual. Many students come through university with little to assist them in answering so-called ‘competency questions’ as they apply for jobs. These are the questions beloved by big firms trying to reduce the numbers of applicants fast (but not so fast they just count up the number of GCSEs at A*). PhD students – and postdocs – should be able to cope rather better than undergraduates when attempting to deal robustly with questions such as:

  • Describe a situation when you have persuaded a colleague to do something they didn’t want to do?
  • When have you lead a team and what did you learn from the experience?
  • Have you ever initiated new systems or processes, and were they successful?
  • Give an example of when you have taken the initiative, and what were the outcomes?

I have to admit when I see questions like this I can only be thankful I am not required to answer them myself (my mind always goes a blank), but for someone just setting out on ‘life’ they can be really challenging, particularly if your personal ethics require (as they should) that you remain fairly truthful, even if the odd embellishment may slip in.  By and large science degrees do not offer too many opportunities to gain these skills, and it is only the extracurricular stuff that can be incorporated. Fine if your vacation consists of arranging an expedition to monitor glacier flow in Greenland, probably less good if your holiday job is in the local Tesco’s.

PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, at least in most science subjects, probably have greater opportunities to gain experience relevant to answer some of the questions, particularly if a little re-interpretation is applied. If you haven’t initiated new systems or processes during your research, you probably are just cranking a handle for someone else and not actually doing original research at all. This might be something to worry about as thesis-writing time looms. Ditto taking the initiative; if you are assuming your supervisor has all the answers and you simply should do as they suggest even in your third year, you may not be cut out to go very far (unless you are part of an enormous team, and even then I’m dubious). As for demonstrating persuasion, that could be anything from getting someone to loan you a bit of kit for a week to making sure you got sent to that fancy conference in Hawaii.

However, do students/postdocs think like this and take heed of how to ‘sell’ themselves as the job market beckons? Not according to a recent article  I came across, written by Conor O’Carroll who is research director for the Irish Universities Association. He was specifically considering people who were looking to move out of academic science research, as the statistics show so many people will. (and let us remember that this should not be seen as ‘failure’ as I’ve written about before). He wrote

Having sat on many interview panels for non-research posts, it continues to surprise me how little preparation some applicants from the research sector put into the process….

A researcher should approach their CV as they would a grant proposal. In the case of research grants, there are clear terms and conditions and evaluation criteria. For a job, these come in the form of the job specifications and the desirable attributes of the applicant sought by the employer….

During verbal interviews some conduct themselves as if it were for another lab position. They are content to talk at length about their research, disregarding the fact that their potential employer may have little or no interest.

The message from this is clear, we need to do a better job ourselves of ensuring the students understand how to market themselves, and how to extract the most they can from the experiences they have had.  For undergraduates this may mean simply leaving it to the Careers’ Service, unless (like Edinburgh) a slot in something like Innovative Learning Week can be devoted to it. But as supervisors of those starting out on research careers, as PI’s we could and should do a great deal better (though I would doubt I myself do this reliably, despite my exhortations). This position was highlighted in the Willetts round table discussion this summer on postdoctoral careers and is implicit in the Research Concordat, which states (in the fourth of its seven principles)

The importance of researchers’ personal and career development, and lifelong learning, is clearly recognised and promoted at all stages of their career.

This includes PIs encouraging individuals to step back from their daily grind at the laboratory bench and computer (or back of envelope) to attend courses, something it would appear some PI’s are reluctant to do. Beyond this it should also mean an actual dialogue occurs about job prospects, interviews and time is spent looking at draft CV’s if requested. Although the Concordat goes on to say

Individual researchers share the responsibility for and need to pro-actively engage in their own personal and career development, and lifelong learning.

some need more than simply being told to take responsibility; a chat, encouragement to think hard in advance of submitting an application or preparing for an interview, might do much to render Conor O’ Carroll’s words above redundant.

During the day I was at the University of Edinburgh, a session (which I did not attend) had faculty talking for 10 minutes each, without powerpoint slides, about what they actually do each day. My talk too was focussed on aspects of  ‘life’ at least as much as my research (the title of my talk ‘Life-plans, Research and Sidetracks’ says it all). These sort of activities provide another route to prepare students – and many in my audience were undergraduates rather than postgraduates – for what may lie ahead, and what sort of questions they need to ponder as they make decisions about ‘what next? In my own university we try to do this (at least) once a year with the annual WiSETI Lecture, given this year by Professor Carol Robinson (on March 22nd). Maybe more places need to include activities like these  in the fare they offer students – at all levels – and postdocs. In the meantime, let me express my appreciation to Karon McBride, who was the prime mover for the Physics activities in Edinburgh, for what she set up. If all the departments in the university had such stimulating activities going on, Edinburgh will undoubtedly be keen to repeat Innovative Learning Week next year.

 

 

 

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Lesser? Spotted? Well, that’s just the Professors

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Athene Donald

This piece first appeared in Times Higher Education on February 23rd 2012 in their Off Piste series.

As a child and teenager, I spent many happy hours in cold, wet and uncomfortable conditions peering through my binoculars at small dots on the horizon, brownjobs hidden in foliage or tantalising glimpses of waterfowl skulking around in reedbeds.

Birds are a challenge to observe, and perhaps that is why they provide so much satisfaction for so many people. They are also ubiquitous, so it is a rare part of the world where there is nothing to be seen if a little trouble is taken. I was introduced to ornithology when only about eight years old: I was taken regularly to my local park, which just happened to be that amazing tract of land near central London that is Hampstead Heath. Back then it was a wonderful mixture of woodland, fields, ponds and more formal parkland; it probably still is, although I haven’t visited it for many years. Such a mixture means that it has a wealth of spaces to explore and a diversity of habitats available, so that many different species will find something appropriate for their tastes. Its location also means that it provides a welcome respite where migrating flocks can touch down, having perhaps traversed the less-hospitable urban landscape of inner London, or even outer suburbia.

So, despite living in a major city, I had plenty of opportunities to hone my observational skills on a wide range of species, not all of which would be likely to turn up in a suburban garden. My primary school project topic books were invariably filled with pictures of birds that my teachers had probably never even heard of (although it has to be said that the quality of my primary school teachers was patchy: I had one who tried to convince me that a bat was a bird). I remember colouring in the bright colours of bullfinches (at least the males) and wheatears in these books, feeling pleased that I had some speciality I could focus on that differentiated me from the crowd who were uninitiated in the joys of “twitching”. My contemporaries in the classroom didn’t see the attraction, and didn’t realise the excitement that can be raised in a young heart at the idea that there may be something novel just about to fly into one’s field of view.

To say that this activity taught me something about the scientific method that has stuck with me throughout my professional life would undoubtedly be stretching the truth. Nevertheless I learned a lot of useful observational skills: the importance of taking good records, both at the scene when an unfamiliar species made an appearance, and back home jotting down when and where the commoner birds were seen. Year on year, a record of my personal observations was built up. Hearing the first cuckoo of spring (as one could back then on the Heath) would undoubtedly have merited an entry in the notebook. So would the passage of all migrant species, including the wheatear I alluded to above, a regular spring and autumn migrant en route to rockier and wilder terrain than Hampstead Heath could afford. Nature study was the only kind of science I was offered at my primary school, but none of it contributed at all to what I learned; it all came from the more serious birdwatchers (my mother included) of my acquaintance. There was – and no doubt still is – quite a coterie of local ornithologists who kept track of the many species that lived on the Heath, or passed through or over it.

As I grew older I joined, along with my mother, the London Natural History Society, one of the many such organisations established by enthusiastic Victorian amateurs, all male, back in the 19th century. This society opened up new horizons, arranging coach trips that took us to the further edges of the Southeast. Much more experienced ornithologists would casually share their knowledge, and sometimes a peek down their telescopes, at chilly coastal sites such as the mudflats on the Isle of Sheppey or at Bradwell, or the Ouse Washes closer to my current home. Thick mud, icy blasts and grey days, with their consequent bad light, are firmly engraved in my memory as fixtures on such trips. But so too are the excitements of such rarities as a diver strayed south for the winter; the beauty of flocks of thousands of waders wheeling and weaving in synchrony, shimmering low over the waters of an estuary; and the majesty of short-eared owls or marsh harriers hawking over the wetlands abutting the shores. Trudging along the coastal path in long crocodiles of booted and anoraked enthusiasts, the potential for the unexpected was always lurking, but not always fulfilled. There were days when the sight of the coach at the end of a long day (with the welcome thought of a Thermos of hot soup and a chance to get feeling back into one’s toes) was the most thrilling event of the outing, but those days were rare.

Although it is primarily those winter trips I recall, perhaps as much because of their icy character as the sheer beauty of wildfowl and waders in their thousands, there were also the warmer summer trips: to Minsmere on the Suffolk coast for a sight of those iconic black and white birds, the avocets, with their unlikely beaks; to hear (for the only time in my life) the trilling notes of a nightingale – in broad daylight – at Walberswick; or an opportunity to observe the splendour of migrant ospreys at Stodmarsh in Kent. So many visual delights, so many unexpected pleasures.

Finally, having reached the grand age of not quite 13, I went away on a junior birdwatching weekend to the North Norfolk coast. I suppose this was the first time I even got a hint of why I wasn’t quite your normal sort of birdwatcher, or indeed your normal sort of girl. I don’t know what efforts my mother had to make to ensure the leader was willing to take me on board, but it certainly included persuading my older sister (whose enthusiasm for ornithology was considerably less than mine) to come along too. Because of course all the other youngsters on the trip (perhaps eight of them) were male, mostly several years older than me. The age difference became most apparent as they all headed off to the pub in the evening, legally or not I don’t know, but certainly sufficiently mature to pass muster.

In retrospect I am very glad I had a friendly female with me, but I’m also really glad they let me come along at all as it was great fun and there were birds-a-plenty to fill the days. A quick glance at my childish diary of that weekend shows me how many species I saw then for the first time in my life, but little else is recorded. Nothing about the exhaustion of trying to keep up with the older, stronger males on long hikes on shingle, or even the sheer strangeness and terror of trying to find my way around the female dorm in a youth hostel after lights out (the minivan had broken down en route and we were very late arriving the first night). I’d never slept in either a bunk or a sheet sleeping bag up to that point, and both seemed very mysterious. Before that weekend it simply hadn’t struck me that birdwatchers collectively were very heavily male; my mother must also have stood out as being in a small minority of adult women on the coach trips, but I have no recollection of that. No doubt this all stood me in good stead for my subsequent career as a female physicist in a very male world; maybe it toughened me up, but I didn’t see that coming at 12.

So, ornithology taught me to fit in, or at least to be tolerated, in a male environment, but there’s something else I feel it contributed to my later career in academia. As I observed earlier, I don’t really feel it offered me the sort of scientific training I needed to succeed as a physicist in terms of weighing up the evidence or taking good notes, although it did make me appreciate some pale version of those things. (It should be noted that at least two of these young males who accompanied me on those weekends went on to read zoology at university, one of whom to my certain knowledge went on to have an extremely successful career as a marine zoologist in Antarctica, so some people built more directly on their birdwatching experiences.) But I feel it conferred on me a very different set of skills.

If a bird flies overhead against the sun, you may not be able to detect any colours to aid in identification but you can still glean much beyond its mere size. Does it fly in a straight line or undulate in its flight? Does its silhouette have any pronounced characteristics? A forked tail perhaps, feathered wing tips or a long beak or neck? A mere glimpse of its outline may be enough to give a pretty sure identification for many species, and one learns to pick up such cues at speed, aided by knowledge of the surrounding terrain and perhaps the sound of its call as it passes. This is equally true of birds overhead, in the trees or in the reedbeds.

But as Desmond Morris discussed in his classic book Peoplewatching, it is not just birds that are worthy of study in a detailed way. We can’t escape from people; our interactions with them are crucial to the pursuit of our daily lives and, not infrequently, our success in large ways or small is affected by how well we “read” the signals they give out. Most of us do not consciously sit down and consider what a raised eyebrow or a tapping finger are implicitly conveying, but undoubtedly we all receive these subliminal messages and some people are better than others at picking up these visual hints. I would like to think my early exposure to the study of birds, learning how to distinguish similar species by spotting small differences at high speed, has contributed to how I glean information from the body language of my colleagues. I have gone from being a birdwatcher to a peoplewatcher.

As a child my ability to write a decent essay was limited by my clearly deficient imagination. If I was asked to do a descriptive piece I was fine; and if I had to write an essay on the growth of trade unions (my excellent history teacher came from a family steeped in unionism: her name was Mrs Miliband, which probably says it all) I had no trouble with factual prose. But asked to be more inventive and my inspiration dried up. As a physicist, I have not worried too much since my school days about my inability to fabricate a good story. It isn’t a facility worth much to me. However, of late I have found a new way to express myself through a blog, and now I can give rein to descriptions of personality traits as I finally bring to the fore my species recognition – refined through my years as a birdwatcher – in describing my fellow academics. I don’t mean to strike terror into their hearts by fictionalising some of their more idiosyncratic failings, but it is nevertheless a pleasure to be able to remember how to write descriptive prose and liberate this long suppressed part of myself. I can understand why, when the secretary to a research council committee I was chairing drew attention to my blog, with its caricatures of committee member types, people started looking worried and fussing around with Google on their laptops surreptitiously, but I try not to be too obviously personal in my descriptions. I don’t intend the sketches to be identifiably any particular individual so much as generic types.

So, whereas if I were to describe that magisterial short-eared owl prowling over the Norfolk marshes, I would want to be precise and comprehensive in my description, that does not apply to my people-watching sketches; they are merely sketches, vague outlines, no more. I hope.

 

Posted in Academia, Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Quotas, Good and Bad

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Athene Donald

I have always felt that the idea of quotas –  for increasing the number of women on FTSE100 Boards, for instance – is a bad idea because it implies women need help in order to get themselves into positions of seniority. Likewise, when I heard a number of years ago that the NAS had in mind to have a fast-track for women to become Fellows (I don’t know if they ever did actually introduce this), I had no wish to see the Royal Society follow suit.  Suffering from impostor syndrome or not, I simply don’t think women want to believe, or even suspect, that they only were admitted ‘because they were a woman’ because then they would automatically become second class citizens in their own minds, if not those of others. A similar fear was manifest in the comments made in the MIT second report on the status of women, where there was a

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

a pernicious and dangerous undertone to a working environment, as I discussed previously.

However this week I met Nicole Dewandre, a senior EU official with particular responsibilities within the Digital Agenda for Europe, but also an ex-physicist with a strong interest (and previous responsibilities) around women in science issues. She put a different argument as to why quotas should not be regarded with such suspicion, and one that seems very straightforward and yet…and  yet I’m still not convinced and I’ve been trying to work out why.   Her argument, speaking from within the EU, was that for many committees quotas by geography are the norm, so she was puzzled why people are so nervous about quotas by gender. I understand if you are discussing fishing allocations around the shores of Europe, it might not be helpful if only landlocked countries were involved in the discussion; and I can see it makes sense if debating farming subsidies that countries with different traditions of agriculture should all contribute to the discussion; in these contexts quotas by geography make perfect sense, so why do I still feel nervous saying there should likewise be quotas by gender as well as ‘country of origin’?

I think there are a couple of clear reasons why geography and gender are so very different as parameters in this way. Firstly I think there is a deep-rooted cultural issue. In western culture, we have had centuries when overwhelmingly the man was the bread-winner and women were not expected to earn either at all or at least not comparable wages. Women, by and large, are still playing catch-up; relative status remains a question mark in some instances.  If equality cannot be presumed in all spheres – as indeed it cannot specifically in the case of women in science, as Larry Summers’ remarks of a few years back still makes plain – then there is an inherent tension.  Politically, one country in the EU may be richer, more powerful politically or have a longer history as a coherent entity, but I don’t think anyone would dare to say that the standard deviation about the mean of any character trait was larger in one country than another. That, however, is exactly the argument Summers made about the gender differences in maths in his remarks  of 2005 which provoked so much debate and ire.  It is of course precisely because equality cannot be assumed to be accepted or acted upon that the matter of gender composition on committees has such force. That is why quotas may be necessary. It is equally why they can be so dangerous in situations such as appointments themselves – for instance to posts and fellowships. Who wants to be told you only got that post because you’re a woman? It is definitely less offensive to be told you were only asked to serve on a committee to make up numbers – it might even be useful to get your feet under the table, stir things up and then retreat to the undergrowth again.

Country of origin and gender may both be regarded as accidents of birth (or habitation), but there are other differences, and my second point refers to the question of numbers. Let’s suppose there were only two countries, not the 27 of the 2012 EU and these were the UK and France, for instance, would the norms feel the same? I think not.  If we were populating a committee to decide anything of importance I suspect the expectation would be a 50:50 split, and if it was a committee to decide something to do with cricket (or boules) it is hard to see that it would be anything other than a preponderance of one nationality or the other. The ‘natural’ expectations could probably be matched quite easily. But if you are trying to set up a research council committee, or a committee to study teaching and learning goals or appoint a new lecturer within a university, it isn’t nearly so obvious what the expectation should be when it comes to gender. The natural tendency would be to fill it up in crude proportion to the pool from which you’re drawing wouldn’t it? And if the pool is engineering professors and there are (as is only too likely to be the case) a tiny number of women in that pool then, by that logic, it would be OK not to have any women on the committee. For an appointment committee it might well (though certainly not necessarily) then transpire, in the absence of women, that there was no obvious champion to say ‘let’s make sure we spread our net wide and encourage women and other minorities to apply.’ Such action is, by the way, perfectly legal; this is simply positive action but experience tells me people get very confused between positive action and positive discrimination (the latter is, of course, not legal; for useful definitions of these two terms see the ECU website).  My university does try to make sure there is at least one woman on every such committee; not all universities do the same (a point I find worrying, particularly if they don’t even consider the matter).

Does this amount to a quota? I suppose it does, but this one doesn’t bother me in the same way as appointing someone to a post simply because they’re a woman. An appointments committee for a lectureship really doesn’t have to be made up only of professors. Hence there will be a large number of people who could be asked to sit on the committee. It isn’t a case of trying to say one person is ‘better’ than another so much as this is a reasonably balanced group of individuals who all have something to offer.  It makes sense in that situation to make the committee as diverse as possible. I think this is the argument used to try to introduce quotas onto Boards of FTSE100 companies. However, in either case it can only work if the appointees genuinely do have the relevant experience – and also the confidence to challenge the rest of the committee.  If they don’t, they will be useless.

If this sounds as if I’m confused about quotas then I’ve conveyed my position accurately. I think there are clear situations when quotas amount to positive discrimination/ affirmative action. I saw the consequences of the latter when I lived in the USA in the early 1980s and I think the unintended consequences still colour the landscape there, as the MIT report made clear. But I think there are other situations when introducing minority members to encourage a diverse approach can only be a good thing. When you are choosing from a large pool of potentially good candidates, who each bring something different, gender can just be one of many attributes that are taken into consideration. On the other hand, when you are selecting a single individual who is meant to be unequivocally ‘the best’, to appoint someone only because they are a woman who is vaguely qualified is dangerous and unhelpful to the individual and the organisation (and is illegal in the extreme way I’ve expressed it here). An appointment to a Chair or a fellowship is likely to fall into this category. I guess FTSE Board membership falls somewhere between these two extremes.

So quotas? Well, it depends.

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

On Geeks and Humanity

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Athene Donald

There has been a fair amount of self-disclosure on OT blogs in the last couple of weeks. Most recently fellow blogger Cromercrox described his painful battle with depression; over the past couple of weeks on my own blog many people have held their hands  up to agree that they suffer from impostor syndrome . Both these aspects of humanity are nothing to do with us being scientists; they are sad facts of the human condition. It would be nice to think that the world at large ‘out there’ does indeed recognize that scientists are human, but by and large I fear that is not the case. Somehow we are a race apart, variously labelled as dorks, dweebs, nerds and geeks. Some scientists may wear the geek word with pride, but it is a word derived (as Wikipedia usefully informs me) from the German word for freak (geck) and it is usually used by those outside the community, such as tabloid journalists, in a pejorative way.

Recently Alice Roberts, newly appointed Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Birmingham, took exception to the term in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. Her specific objection to it arose because she thought it was divisive, separating out the aspiring scientist from the rest of the world.

I hate the word geek,” she said. “It is being divisive. It is creating labels that are really unhelpful when what we should be aiming for is much more of a renaissance person idea.

You can be someone who thinks of themselves as an artist but be interested in science, engaged with it and understand it. I think it is possibly unhelpful from the outside that you can’t be a scientist unless you are a geek in the first place.

Her particular beef, and one I share, is the narrowness of our school curriculum in the UK; it means you have to decide at far too early an age whether to specialise in science or not.  But it seems to me the danger of the word geek lies in the fact that it makes us ‘different’ from the rest of the world in ways that a historian or a social scientist is not. No one (as far as I can tell) greets a historian with the words ‘you must be awfully clever to do that’ or ‘I never could do history at school’ – or at least not with the monotonous frequency that a scientist, and particularly a physicist like myself, seems to meet with these comments. I am not sure there is an equivalent pejorative noun for workers in these other disciplines, albeit there may be for individual practitioners in each. I would like to feel that tabloid readers and Joe Public in general was prepared to grant that scientists were human like them, suffering from, amongst other things, depression and impostor syndrome. Or, in Shylock’s words (albeit in a very different context):

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

I am bored with being tarred with the implicit brush of insanity. Gerald Warner, writing also in the pages of the Telegraph about 2 years ago, threw much abuse in our direction – with particular vitriol directed at those scientists who advise the Government. He claims, one hopes without foundation, that

the status of the white-coated prima donnas and narcissists has never been lower in the public esteem….. After a period of priest-like authority, the pointy-heads in lab coats have reassumed the role of mad cranks they enjoyed from the days of Frankenstein to boys’ comics in the 1950s……The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the nineteenth century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening any more.

I know there has been much personal animosity directed at academics individually. One could cite as an example the opprobrium with which David Starkey is often greeted, but I’m not sure his status as a historian is his primary sin, nor is his profession and his colleagues in it reviled en masse. No, there is something that the likes of Gerald Warner find particularly disturbing about scientists.  I suspect it is the fact that, either due to a failing of education or motivation, they have no hope of understanding what we say, nor any desire to do so, hence all they can do by way of disagreement is to imply we are loonies who can’t be trusted and so sweep everything we say under the carpet.

George Monbiot, responding in the Guardian to Gerald Warner’s attack on scientists in the context of climate change said

There is one question that no one who denies manmade climate change wants to answer: what would it take to persuade you? In most cases the answer seems to be nothing. No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us.

This makes it all the more important that school children are not turned off and turned away from science at an early age, as Alice Roberts highlights – whether they are aspiring historians, lawyers or journalists like Gerald Warner or, onthe other hand, the scientists of tomorrow. They need to understand what evidence is, and how to think about it critically. The art of ‘critical thinking’ seems sometimes to be linked in people’s minds with the humanities, but at its most basic it appears to me to be remarkably similar to the scientific method. Unfortunately, school science as currently taught seems much more hung up on the rules of what makes a ‘fair test’ than with thinking about what the evidence is actually showing. Knowing whether you are introducing systematic errors into an experiment is of course crucial for a practicing scientist, and a schoolchild should be appropriately aware of the dangers. But it is unfortunate if rote learning about whether a test is ‘fair’ or not, and the expenditure of much time and effort in discussing this, removes the possibility of understanding whether the data is meaningful in other ways – such as whether it confirms or refutes a hypothesis, or whether the statistics are robust enough to conclude anything at all.

Scientists like Alice Roberts, with her very public face shining out from our TVs, along with those other media personalities who have done much to bring science just that little bit further into the public’s eye and sitting room – Brian Cox, Robert Winston and Jim Al Khalili for instance – have a vital role to play in reminding people that we are human after all. That Brian Cox was in D:Ream and is prepared to go on chat shows has done a great deal to reassure people that here at last is one human scientist (though these are actually things that most people would never have the opportunity to do, they seem like ‘normal’ activities to many). They need to realise that many more of us do indeed bleed, have depression and feel anxious much of the time, even if they very occasionally also sport a white lab coat.

 

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