Some Scores are More Equal than Others

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Athene Donald

Having committed to sit on an EPSRC panel for the first time in many years, I had my sights set on a post about the Shared Services Centre of the Research Councils. Clearly this is a popular topic for academics to target since I was pipped to the post; just a few days ago Telescoper vented his bile on them for their inefficiencies over his P60 forms at the end of the tax year. I have a different gripe to make. As long term readers will know, for some time I chaired what was uninspiringly known as Committee C of the BBSRC. I stepped down after a reorganisation last summer of the committee remit, taking it into fields about which I knew nothing – on the whole I believe a little relevant expertise is desirable in a chair, although not everyone may agree. Of late this has meant a diminution of posts on this blog about committee work and impact.

I thought that that BBSRC experience meant I had a fair idea of what to expect from the SSC, having seen BBSRC grants move from their own internal processes to use of this central facility. The transition had not been without hiccoughs, and the ‘paperwork’ we received for the first meeting after the switch was in a much less satisfactory state than that we had been sent for previous meetings, but we did manage to find our way around it. The ‘paperwork’ – both before and after the transition – was in fact on a carefully indexed USB stick, the weight of material we had to take to the meeting correspondingly light. The later problems came from the rather circuitous way things like referees’ reports were woven into the structure, making the whole thing harder, but not impossible, to navigate.

I cannot help comparing this with what was sent to me by the SSC for the EPSRC panel. In this case the paperwork came with no inverted commas around it; it was literally a mound of papers, loosely tied together with those awful green ties reminiscent of exam scripts. Furthermore, the information about procedures, scoring guidelines, details of where I was staying, the codes for referees etc were enclosed in a loose bundle which, by the time I’d dropped the pack on the floor a few times, were hopelessly muddled up. Why? Why do I have to strain my back lugging this stuff around? The thickness of the wodge of papers was such it has destroyed the spring on the carrier at the back of my bicycle (should I add the cost of a new one to my expenses claim?). Why are they determined to destroy my new year’s resolution of struggling towards a paperless life? I am baffled by the fact that the SSC – let me remind you it stands for Shared Services Centre – actually operates completely different systems for different research councils.

I cannot believe this leads to ‘efficiency savings’, as no doubt ministers were promised in some delivery plan. As has been pointed out, like many other initiatives designed to save money, in fact it has done anything but. When I pressed the Secretariat, it transpired I could have asked for stuff to be sent on a CD, but as I don’t have an internal CD drive on my laptop I’m not sure that would really have helped. I certainly wasn’t asked which I preferred in advance, which perhaps would have been the ideal solution. Perhaps the majority of EPSRC relevant people really do still want ‘paperwork’ in its genuinely paper incarnation, but I find that slightly surprising. I did manage to get the forms on which to write my comments to be sent electronically, so that I could type up my responses – but again that required a special request (quickly acceded to, I should add).

There are other things that have been revealed to me by sitting on an EPSRC panel again after a long gap. It shows once again how tribal we are, how different (sub)-disciplines hold variable views about ‘normal’ behaviour, and how much this may colour our funding landscape. The EPSRC wish to ‘shape capabilities’ but are also keen to stress (as stated in a letter from their CEO David Delpy and Chairman John Arnitt to Nature) that

‘Research excellence remains pre-eminent and the Council will continue to support applications that are deemed excellent by peer review.’

Hence, those disciplines which are more collegial – or perhaps less critical – will continue to thrive over those where internecine warfare between camps or simply a more judgemental attitude to filling in referee forms and scores holds sway.

This is a worry. Without wishing to pick out any particular area over another (apart from anything else the sample size is too small to do that safely, whatever my suspicions may be), I note that a number of years ago when I sat on the now defunct EPSRC Physics SAT (Strategic Advisory Team), sufficient unease was manifest about scoring differentials between communities that the EPSRC carried out its own internal audit. This confirmed concerns that referees from one particular sub-discipline were inclined to give the top score willy-nilly, whereas other fields were more severe in their scoring and inclined to use the full range available. That particular sub-field was rapped over the knuckles and, I presume, cleaned up its act at the time. I can’t help questioning whether similar differences in behaviour are not still prevalent. This, in times of cash shortages and sculpting of the portfolio, means that without some norm-referencing of scores coupled with a scrutiny about tone of comment, those areas where referees are tough – in word or number – will be at an even more severe disadvantage.

The trouble is that unless this matter is regularly revisited to check for discrepancies, this has all the potential to become a self-reinforcing scenario. Remember that EPSRC rules (unlike BBSRC) mean that the panel can only evaluate grants based on the referees’ comments/scores. They are not allowed to put in their own views where they differ from what may be written on the referee forms. Again, this is different from BBSRC practice where the panel may choose to feed in their own specialist knowledge (although an EPSRC panel can choose essentially to reject a referee’s submission if there seems some clear reason why they should, for instance where there seems evidence that the referee hasn’t read the proposal carefully enough or might have a conflict of interest which hadn’t been initially spotted). What worries me is the tendency for referees to award the highest score, not always backed up by the tone of their comments. I wish the community would recognize how unhelpful this is.

The weird thing is, to revert to my previous experiences with BBSRC, I never saw this behaviour there. Comments across the board tended to be more critical, and more differentiated in tone. (My gripe with BBSRC refereeing would be different: that community seems to be in thrall to the need for a hypothesis or two to act as the focus for a proposal.  No hypothesis generally means no funding, although it is a hopelessly crude discriminator in my view.) I am not sure if the differences are endemic to physicists, or reflect the fear that EPSRC referees subconsciously feel that they should ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’. However, I think this is a potentially damaging situation that should be carefully monitored. Maybe when refereeing I too should join the club of simply awarding the top score, along with bland comments that provide the panel with little assistance.

The EPSRC obviously tries to overcome disciplinary differences by having a group of ‘rovers’ who visit all the panels taking place on a given day, with the aim of tensioning between disciplines so that rank-ordered lists can be appropriately interwoven. But I don’t believe that removes the problem of some areas having a tradition of making detailed critical comments, and others tending to say – even if at some length – something that amounts to the team is good, the science is interesting, this should be funded.

I’d be interested to know if readers who have served on panels of different sorts and in different parts of the Research Council family share similar anxieties.

Posted in Science Culture, Science Funding | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Men Feel the Fear Too (but what do they do with it?)

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Athene Donald

My last post struck a chord with many. I was rather overwhelmed by the response, both in direct comments on the post and through the more ephemeral form of twitter. Two aspects particularly struck me:

  • The reaction ‘I thought I was the only person who felt like this’ is not uncommon. That is why it is so valuable for the feeling to be discussed widely, so it can be treated as what it is: if not the ‘normal’ human condition, at least a very common one.
  • Men were more than willing to put their hands up and say ‘me too’, although I will qualify this statement below.

I was pointed in the direction of a selection of other excellent articles on impostor syndrome by various readers, including articles by two men, indeed two theoretical astrophysicists, though I’m not going to draw any conclusions from that disciplinary concentration: Peter Coles from Cardiff on his Telescoper blog  and Ed Bertschinger of MIT on the Women in Astronomy blog. The latter clearly devotes a considerable effort to diversity issues at MIT; the former pointed out that he had felt an impostor from a very early age, although it wasn’t entirely clear if his current position that luck plays the most enormous part in success demonstrates he has or has not shed his fears about being ‘found out’ (the importance of luck in success is a topic I have written about before).

I think those people who tend to feel massively handicapped by the feeling, are those for whom it is permanently to the fore and who find it a crippling burden preventing them from fulfilling their potential. These people probably cannot be helped by the discovery that other people feel the same way, they need more directed supportive routes to help them overcome their fears. Rita’s post , which she drew to my attention,  highlights the balance between the assumption of skill leading to deserved success and luck (in which case the success is undeserved); she definined the syndrome:

as a state of mind in which one does not attribute their own success to their own ability, but rather to luck, chance or clever trickery.

I don’t want to go on discussing the syndrome per se. Nor will I explore its intriguing partner in crime (which I hadn’t come across before it appeared in the comments) the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which lesser mortals overestimate their competence – a phenomenon that is most certainly not unknown in academia. The responses demonstrate clearly that for many people impostor syndrome kicks in early (possibly when a student) and is likely never to go completely away. But I want to return to my original question about whether men who feel the effect might be prepared to stand up and talk about it, like the women I mentioned in the previous post, and if not why not.

There is no doubt that many men were prepared to acknowledge that they suffered from impostor syndrome but (and this was even more apparent in the tweets I received), many of them had never before admitted to these feelings. I hope it doesn’t feel like attending an AA meeting and standing up for the first time to say ‘I’m an impostor’, but possibly the explicit acknowledgement that the anxiety exists inside one is cathartic; I’d like to think that those who responded didn’t feel the worse for doing so! The statistics quoted by Bertschinger from the work of Margot Gerritsen  demonstrated that 43% of males surveyed and 62% of females surveyed “often or always” think “I’m afraid to be found out”. So the majority of women studied felt like this, but slightly less than half the men (this work was predominantly studying engineers and earth scientists, with 80 male and 140 female respondents).  If these values are typical, it is clearly pretty common across the (scientific) population.  These responses were clearly not of identifiable individuals. Those of you who responded here and over twitter, on the other hand, were making a much more public statement but not in a way to enable me to produce any statistics.  Only two men and one woman suggested they did not feel this way, but the responses were probably self-selecting and, given that the post has had well over 2000 hits, only a tiny proportion of people who read the post expressed an opinion at all.

Where should men express their anxieties? I hadn’t really appreciated this before, despite it being rather obvious now it’s been pointed out, but although there are plenty of university support groups and development activities of one kind or another for women in science, there are not so many for ‘scientists’ (of both genders) let alone for men. My own university actually does run a personal development programme for men working within the university called Navigator, which I believe is part of a national programme; this ought to be a good place for these sort of discussions to take place, but I’ve no idea if it does. The sister Springboard course (i.e. the equivalent one for women) certainly does have slots for external speakers to come in and talk about their lives, the kind of talks about life in general that I referred to in the previous post when senior women had indeed broached the subject of impostor syndrome. So, in my own university, in principle, there would be a place for men to hear about and discuss the effect. And, since I received a tweet from Cambridge colleague David Spiegelhalter saying that, not only does he suffer from impostor syndrome but that he would be willing to stand up in front of an audience of men to say so, it looks like there is an obvious candidate to take this forward here if such a meeting were to be organised.

Now David, as the (in my eyes at least) hugely successful and influential Winton Professor of the Public Perception of Risk, should know precisely what the risk of reputational damage might be by making such a statement. And that there is a risk associated with it was highlighted in a tweet from the Tory Peer (and one-time physicist) Ralph Lucas, who said apropos of politics

Admission does not work well in male hierarchies. Reputational damage probable, certain death if politician.

So maybe academia is actually a more forgiving environment than some; I don’t fear – nor apparently does David – reputational damage by admitting to this particular weakness, but I can see a cabinet minister, indeed any MP, might.  It’s interesting that Lord Lucas refers to politics as a ‘male’ hierarchy, rather than simply a hierarchy. This is a point rather reinforced by another tweet from Ciarán Mc Mahon in Ireland

Those interested in increasing women in the Dáil should read Athene Donald on the #impostorsyndrome

Politics clearly has a way to go.

Another tweet (from graduate student Frank Leibfarth), raised the question about emotional honesty:

The real issue is that lack of emotional honesty in scientific research. It should not be taboo to talk about your feelings.

This probably should be read in conjunction with the comment from Chemistry professor Klaas Wynne, who said rather controversially

Having “feelings” is for girls.

I can’t agree with Klaas, because feelings cover a whole gamut of emotions. I suspect that he, and many men, wouldn’t consider anger a ‘feeling’, or contempt or annoyance or….many other things that would probably be considered acceptable by a typical alpha male (or indeed alpha female), those who thump the table or raise their voice to get their way. But these are of course ‘feelings’, just nice, safe stereotypically ‘male’ ones, unlike those inconvenient ones attributed to women, who may express weakness or fear or be sympathetic. I have written before here  and here  about the gendered way words are used and interpreted. I fear Klaas’s comment is just an extreme version. Good luck to him for not suffering from impostor syndrome, but he should be wary of assuming it is simply for the ‘weaker sex’ (horrible phrase).  I am much more on the side of Frank and his belief that feelings should have a place in the way we conduct scientific research.

If it isn’t the kiss of death to admit to the weakness of impostor syndrome,  if, on the contrary, it is seen as a constructive thing for a senior man or a woman to do to encourage the up and coming researchers by expressing their own anxieties, then a different matter comes to mind: do we need to do a better job of support systems for everyone, men and women. Many a time I have heard it said that ‘activities that help people in general, help women disproportionately’ and this idea underpins many of the actions to support women in science. But maybe we should on this occasion invert this, and say that activities that are shown to support women, may – and should – benefit many men too. Academia, or any profession (and I should point out that many responses I received clearly came from people outside academia – not just from politics either) should not just be suitable for those people who really are tough all the way through, possibly surging with testosterone, possibly suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome; there are many men as well as women who are not like that, and some more talking shops for people in general to express anxieties and look for support might prove useful. In other words, not only do men suffer from impostor syndrome in significant numbers, but maybe they need to push for more activities for them that don’t just involve banter and a pint or two after work down the pub.

 

 

 

 

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

What Am I Doing Here?

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Athene Donald

This past week reminded me of the seeming ubiquity of impostor syndrome, even in the visibly successful and apparently supremely confident. Or at least, this statement is true as it pertains to women. One outcome of what follows is I would love to know whether the same state of mind is a permanent undercurrent for males too.

Impostor syndrome, in case you do not recognize its name, is that feeling that you don’t belong, that you are only where you are through some clerical or other error and that one day, probably soon, you will be FOUND OUT. In other words, you are an impostor and the unmasking – with its consequent inevitable embarrassments and humiliation – is just around the corner.  I only discovered the name for this state of mind a few years ago, although the feelings were very familiar. As far as I recall it was Vivienne Parry who introduced me to the concept, in a talk she gave at a Woman’s Forum meeting in Cambridge. She was the guest speaker, talking to an audience of several hundred about how she had built a successful career in journalism and the media based on what she saw as her fairly modest qualifications. Having once come across the phenomenon, I quickly found others who suffered from the same anxieties.

The next one who publicly spoke about it at an event I attended was my erstwhile Vice Chancellor from Cambridge, anthropologist Alison Richard. She and I were engaged in a dialogue (in front of an audience of young female researchers) about our careers and the issues we felt we had had to face as we attempted to balance work and family life in order to make progress in the male dominated worlds we each moved in. Alison pointed out that when she had first got her letter confirming her place at Cambridge as an undergraduate at Newnham College all those years ago, she had assumed the letter had only been sent to her by accident,  clear manifestation of the syndrome. If you want to hear a different conversation along these lines, there is a podcast of an event the Royal Society held in early 2009 on the occasion of Linda Partridge giving the Royal Society’s Croonian Prize lecture (about her work on the biology of ageing), the first woman to do so. This involved Linda and myself – and indeed Vivienne Parry as chair/facilitator – discussing our lives and how we’d got to where we are: impostor syndrome featured quite early on in this exchange of ideas as you can hear for yourself on the podcast. As Linda said, for a long time she thought she was the only person to have such fears.  The reality seems to be that impostor syndrome is very common.  It is important that early career researchers know this, so that they do not let it take over their lives.

Last week, as I say I was reminded of these prior events and the frequent intrusion of the topic of impostor syndrome into talks about ‘life’, not having thought about it for a while. L’Oreal hosted a lunch for previous winners of their FWIS fellowships together with various senior female scientists in their capacity as ‘friends’,  to celebrate the FWIS fellowship scheme: the 2012 competition is to be launched on February 1st .  It was an appropriately joyful occasion (washed down with plenty of alcohol, not always a good thing at lunchtime), and this year’s winner of the L’Oreal/UNESCO FWIS Laureate for Europe, physiologist Frances Ashcroft from Oxford, gave a brief and excellent talk about her research on Type I diabetes in newborns, as well as thoughts about being a senior woman in science. Frances and I were, as it happens, Cambridge undergraduates together at Girton College back in the days when it was an all-women’s college. We lost touch with each other for many years until we found ourselves elected to the Royal Society on the same day in 1999 – a place I would suspect, neither of us expected to find ourselves when we had first known each other.

Her description of her work on diabetes was elegant and simple enough for me – and I would assume the other non-specialists in the room – to get a feel for what she had discovered, her passion for scientific enquiry and her determination to challenge the received wisdom when it didn’t add up was manifest. But, once again, here was a senior woman scientist prepared to stand up and say that, deep down, she constantly expected to be shown to be a fraud. In her case the situation was compounded by a supervisor early in her life saying to her that she would never make it as a scientist. Perhaps that was just the spur she needed: there is nothing like a bit of opposition to raise hackles, but also energy levels, as long as you don’t let it consume your soul.

Frances Ashcroft, Linda Partridge, Vivienne Parry and Alison Richard all share the same fears and yet all have succeeded spectacularly in their chosen spheres.  Furthermore, we (and I’d include myself here) all feel – when asked to talk about our lives – this need to be honest about these fears. I know, because many younger women have said so to me after my own talks, that it is very powerful to hear us express these fears, that it empowers them because they realise that what they themselves feel can be lived with and need not lead to paralysis through the exercise of this fear. (This is a point well made in a recent post by Sarah Kendrew). They are not alone in feeling this way, although if no one points this out it is only too easy to feel as if you are.  Individuals may never be able to overcome it, but it is not terminal unless one allows it to be so and in general it should not be regarded as a ‘syndrome’ in the medical sense of the word. This is certainly a case of ‘feel the fear and do it anyhow’.

What intrigues me is this. I have named here several very senior women (including myself) who have all been willing to stand up and say ‘I suffer from impostor syndrome’ in public (predominantly, but not entirely, to audiences made up of women). I am just listing a few occasions when I have been present, therefore, by extrapolation, it probably happens pretty often.  What about men? The evidence (for some slightly scientific evidence see here) is that they suffer from it too, though possibly a smaller proportion of them do so, but how many would be willing to stand up in front of an audience and say so? I’m curious about this. Is it a feeling that men recognize? How willing are they to talk about it, or does it make them feel too uncomfortable? Perhaps far fewer men than women are aware of it?  Maybe successful and inspirational men are happy to talk about it in front of an audience of males, but of course I don’t attend such events so I couldn’t know.  Or is it the case that the men in the audience wouldn’t react to any such admission in the overwhelmingly positive way women appear to do, hence the topic is avoided? I do know I’ve never heard such a point of view expressed by them in public, but that may reflect the nature of events for women that I attend and which don’t have obvious parallels for men or mixed audiences in the sciences. My belief is that the phenomenon is ubiquitous, across ages, genders and disciplines. So, answers please!

Update February 5 2012 In the light of all the responses, the next post looks further at this problem, with more of an emphasis on men’s reaction.

Posted in Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 81 Comments

How Hard Do You Work?

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Athene Donald

Career progression and promotion require that you tick all the right boxes when panels scrutinise your CV.  If you are trying to optimise your chances of advancing up the greasy pole, this requires that you know what the boxes are and the relative weightings of the different categories of activities that may be under consideration.  However, as early career researchers go about their daily tasks, are these the first things on their mind? Almost certainly not.  Does anyone provide advice at the right moment? Again the answer is probably not.

These issues came up when I visited Leicester University last week to take part in their Athena Swan event Going for Silver. Leicester, like many other universities I’m sure, is very aware that the funding climate has changed since the announcement from Sally Davies last summer: the NIHR’s requirement is that clinical schools must achieve an Athena Swan Silver award if they are to be realistically considered for future BMR and BMU awards. At the time of the announcement I blogged about how I hoped other funders would follow suit. Although none have, as yet, it is a topic of ongoing dialogue within BBSRC, EPSRC and the Royal Society to my certain knowledge, and probably at other funders too. So, Leicester and other universities are wise to consider what steps they can take within their university to move on from simply holding a Bronze Athena Swan university award to having multiple departments with individual awards, at Silver or Bronze level. (You can find the slides I gave in my presentation at Leicester uploaded through the University of Leicester Athena Swan site here.)

Consideration of career progression, and the relative rates for men and women, ought to be one of the items of investigation for a department wishing to submit an application.  The ASSET2010 survey showed that systematically across the country, women still feel they are less aware than men about promotion criteria, less likely to be invited to apply for the next level up and less likely to be appraised, a time when they might learn about how promotion works or ask if the time is right to put in an application.  But it isn’t just a question of making sure that women (and men) know the formal rules that matters; they need also to understand what that means and be given advice, over time, about what opportunities they should accept and what it might be less wise to take on.

The ASSET2010 survey did not specifically ask about outreach activities but, anecdotally in general and certainly it is specifically true in my own department, women seem to do more. Is this wise? As one one attendee bluntly put it at the Leicester

How many school visits equate to one Nature paper?

Pertinent question though that may be, it is like comparing apples and pears. One would like to think in practice people do what they do at least part out of love for the subject rather than merely to tick boxes for promotion criteria (or a Pathways to Impact statement), but nevertheless it is worth asking oneself from time to time whether what one is doing is wise. But beyond that, departments ideally should have some transparent form of workload model which indicates the totality of tasks (as opposed simply to research) performed, with some indication of the volume of the work involved. In reality, by no means all departments do. This means that one individual who carries out many school visits a year, or is responsible for admissions or pastoral care, may get just the same teaching load as someone who does nothing else beyond their research. It may also mean that where departments/universities are seeking to ensure that women are represented on key committees, the same few women may get very overworked.

This potential overloading was an issue raised at Leicester, and it is a tricky question. To my mind one solution is to increase the cohort who are looked at for a particular committee by broadening the categories of people who might be considered, and also to make sure that if women are in short supply, they are invited to serve on the really key committees, and those where a different voice might be crucial, not simply some of the more workaday ones. However, if there is a transparent workload model, which is easily accessible, then individuals can make up their own minds more easily if they are taking on an absurd amount of ‘stuff’, and then try to work out which bits of this are things they really enjoy and care about and/or are things that might further (or hold back) their career.  If also they can get to the bottom of promotion criteria (including any weighting between research, teaching and ‘general contribution’ excellence) they may also be able to make well-considered decisions, ideally in consultation with the head of department, mentor or appraiser.

This may still beg the question of how some of these tasks are weighted in any such model. How many hours are attributed to the work of any given committee may be somewhat subjective (how long do you assign to reading the paperwork, for instance?). Do you factor in committees outside the department let alone outside the university, such as associated with a professional body or funding agency? If dealing with outreach work, is a visit to a local school given the same ‘credit’ as one many miles away that takes a day out of one’s life in total to deliver the same talk? But, if the rules of how the workloads are calculated are known, even if the methodology is crude, there is some kind of framework to get a handle of when doing personal calculations.

I don’t have any answers to these questions about which particular bits should be assigned how much time, but I do think the questions ought to be aired occasionally. Some people have spectacular research careers, assisted by sufficiently dire teaching skills that they are relieved of much of a standard load. This might raise the suspicion that their apparent incompetence is judiciously cultivated. Other individuals slave hard over every task they are assigned, doing a sterling job so that they simply get asked to do more. They are known as the reliable ones amongst a department of flakier people whose ability to deliver on time is seriously in doubt (recall Professor Workhorse and Professor Last Minute?). Hence, without some record being kept of who does what, the reliable ones slowly disappear under an increasing workload, whereas the endless procrastinators can get away lightly. Who is likely to do better at finding time to perfect that paper for Science? And hence whose career is likely to flourish?

Academics may not like line management, they may not wish to have their every move scrutinised by some Big Brother in the ‘Centre’, but goodwill should not be abused and reluctance to say’ no’ ought not to be presumed upon. The suspicion may be, taking a stereotypical view of the ‘average’ female lecturer, that without something approximating a fair workload model, women may be being disadvantaged in ways that lie beneath the surface. If there is no quantification done, if there are no appraisals when the person concerned can vent their frustration with their ever mounting workload, the playing field may be less level than intended.

So how hard do you work?

 

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

The Dangers of Disciplinary Diversity

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Athene Donald

One of the curious facts about our scientific disciplines is that they do tend to have their own flavour and culture, with things that are taken as the norm in one discipline seeming very alien to another. There are a whole class of issues which fall under this heading, but stressing these differences too much could turn out to be politically damaging, as I’ll discuss later.

These cultural variations mean, for those of us working in interdisciplinary areas, it isn’t simply the language of another discipline that one has to learn, it is also their way of doing science. It is too easy to fail to realise that these differences exist because one is so steeped in one’s own methodologies that one doesn’t stop to think there might be another way of doing things.  I’ve previously written about the different styles of paper titles that seem the norm in physics and biology, but there are other significant differences in the way papers tend to get written up. As a microscopist, one of the things I find quite hard to get used to is the presentation of figures in biological papers, when a single ‘figure’ actually often consists of a montage of 9 or more, rendering each of them extremely small. With my decreasing visual acuity, I find this intensely irritating because I often can hardly see the feature of interest, particularly if – as seems so common – said feature is not arrowed or otherwise identified. Of course, the situation is much worse for me as a physicist, since I may not exactly understand what point is being made in all its biological glory.  In other words, I am a ‘lay biologist’ to adapt the phrase Martin Rees used recently:

We’re all  depressingly ‘lay’ outside our specialisms — my own knowledge, of recent biological advances, such as it is, comes largely from  ‘popular’ books and journalism.

So that is one, in some senses trivial challenge to the interdisciplinary worker. There are cultural differences in the way laboratories may be run too. The typical group size for a physics researcher tends to be much smaller than, say, in synthetic chemistry. The biology professor tends – as far as I can judge – to operate in a much more hierarchical way than a physics professor.

At the moment differences in the scientific community are apparent in other more significant ways. The EPSRC has been under attack on many fronts, in large part because of its ‘shaping capability’ plans. The synthetic chemists in particular have been on the offensive, complaining in a letter to the Prime Minister last summer about their speciality apparently being singled out as one where funding will be reduced, albeit from a very high level. Chemistry as a discipline has always tended to splinter into tribes: physical, synthetic, organic and theoretical chemists often sit in their own sub-departments without necessarily much communication (or love lost) between them. I have the distinct impression they are very protective of their sub-disciplines and their own way of doing things. I have heard it said in the past from within EPSRC that the chemists always tend to be the ones who complain and on this occasion with regard to the EPSRC, they have done so loudly and publicly. I am not here to comment on the wisdom or validity of their position, I merely point out that chemists seem more prone to object to funding decisions than, say, physicists or engineers.  One could argue, within the UK’s funding regime, that physicists being split between STFC and EPSRC are not in the same position as the chemists, and there is no doubt physicists have complained long and hard about STFC policies in the not so distant past, though they have been less obviously vocal in their dissatisfaction with the current EPSRC actions.

There are times, however, when fragmentation, doing things one’s own way, is probably profoundly unhelpful. Jocelyn Bell Burnell put this clearly in her 2010 Presidential address   at the IOP Awards’ Dinner, days before the Comprehensive Spending Review was announced, following a particular case of one part of the scientific community attacking another:

 Thirdly – and perhaps the most important of all – stick together.  There will be pressure to belittle other people’s work to fund your own.  Resist it.  We will make a much stronger public case for science and engineering by speaking with one voice and highlighting the overall benefits.

In the run up to the CSR we also saw the strong and unified voice of the Science is Vital  campaign, led by OT fellow blogger Jenny Rohn  stressing the overall importance of science for the economic good of the country, without needing to resort to splitting the community into camps. Collectively we are indubitably stronger than if we allow cracks to open up between our disciplines allowing the Government or the funders to operate a ‘divide and rule’ policy.

Currently, 15 months on from the CSR, there are signs that David Willetts  is trying to work out if an ‘industrial policy’ is needed and if so in what form, as shown by his recent speech. Both Richard Jones (here)  and William Cullerne Bown (here)  have done excellent jobs of analysing the content and subtexts in the speech, so I won’t attempt to offer any analysis of my own here, but there are some interesting underlying issues about how scientists present themselves when dealing with politicians that we shouldn’t ignore. If we are to look ahead, peer into our crystal balls, we need not simply be slaves to the idea that blue-skies research is all we need and wonderful discoveries will fall out coincidentally; nor should we assume that ‘knowing’ where we are trying to get to will solve the problem either, if we narrow our choices and put all our eggs in a single basket. But we have no choice but to work with – rather than against – the politicians if we are to make any sensible progress in forwarding the science agenda. We need to build on the position we are being offered by Willetts, namely that science-can-drive-innovation-can-drive-growth. But if we stay in our tribal dominions and fight over the boundaries between them, we are weakening our position and our opportunities. I have heard Willetts use the Haldane Principle in debate  as a way of apparently ducking decision-making (in this case about numbers of and careers for postdoctoral researchers), by saying such matters must be left to the scientists themselves without government interference. If we fragment as a scientific community, he can continue to use the Haldane principle to our detriment by refusing to listen to our arguments, claiming that if he listens to one section he might be disadvantaging another. We must be very wary of allowing this to happen.

 

 

 

 

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