On Versatility

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Athene Donald

I should start off by thanking CherishtheScientist  for kindly nominating me for a Versatile Blogger award (see the emblem).

The Veraatile Blooger Award

I hadn’t heard of these before, but I’m honoured – so many thanks. I find myself still thinking I’m the new kid on the block, so it feels very flattering to be accepted as a ‘professional’ blogger by such a nomination. However, I realise it is 18 months now since I entered the fray, so it is probably my lurking Impostor Syndrome self that means I still feel surprised when anyone takes my blogging seriously.

Anyhow, having been informed of the honour, I turned to the website to find out what this meant. The rules are given below:

1)      Nominate 15 fellow bloggers

2)      Inform the Bloggers of their nomination

3)      Share 7 random things about yourself

4)      Thank the blogger who nominated you

5)      Post the award badge.

I’ve already completed rules 4 and 5, but before I complete the other 3, let me just put in a caveat about this process. When I was a child there was a postcard-writing chainmail that occasionally came my way. If I remember its rules correctly, you were meant to write out (and I mean write, in longhand, indeed in painfully childish longhand, since this was long before computers were in every child’s bedroom and typewriters still belonged in the office) the form letter and send to 7 friends. In the form letter you yourself received was a list of 7 names: you entered your own name at the bottom of this list and removed the top name and sent this first child a postcard, ideally I think of your own home town. The story/letter went that if you participated in due course you would receive some massive number of postcards. If you didn’t maintain the chain you were promised lots of bad luck, a modern day gypsy’s curse I suppose. As a young and gullible child, I of course did my bit – and never received a single postcard back. I have no idea if similar email versions exist now, though I have no recollection of being aware of my children receiving anything similar by snailmail or email. It isn’t quite equivalent to the typical email scams of today, where money rather than postcards are the primary aim; indeed it seems to me rather sweet, but it certainly didn’t result in a deluge of postcards for me and probably not for most participants.

I don’t think the Versatile Blogger award fits into a  similar category, although it is of course entirely possible that those bloggers I myself nominate will not thank me if they feel obliged to write anything themselves, but as my own nominator said to me, it is of course optional. It seems to me it is a nice way to disseminate those blogs one likes to read, particularly as I don’t myself exhibit a blogroll of blogs I read on my site. So here goes with my nominations (and brief reasons). I will state at the outset that I don’t read a huge number of blogs, due to time more than anything else, so (short of nominating all my fellow Occam’s Typewriters bloggers to boost the numbers) the list is a little short and in no particular order.  But I will start with a couple of my colleagues on the OT site, because I really enjoy their posts, albeit I may offend the others!

1No Comment by Steve Caplan.  An interesting look at academic life and nature on the other side of the Atlantic, plus an interesting and male take on misogynism, sexism etc.

2 Mind the Gap by Jenny Rohn.  A thoughtful and very personal account of life as an early career researcher, with the horrors and joys of lab life very much to the fore, as well as a more political and gendered dimension.

3 Bishopblog by Dorothy Bishop. Full-on writing about many of the ills of academia and its characters, as well as more technical stuff on autism, dyslexia, bad science etc.

4 Soft Machines by Richard Jones. This was the first (and for a long time the only) blog I ever read – and later the first on which I ever commented. Written by a long time collaborator and friend, it has been primarily a blog on nanotechnology, albeit increasingly it has become an erudite deconstruction of our government’s policies, or rather lack thereof.

5 Some Beans by Ian Hopkinson. Another blog written by a previous Cambridge collaborator, although this one went over to the dark side and now works for industry. His blog is a random collection of political outpourings, book reviews, history of science and many other things beside.

6 A Don’s Life by Mary Beard . Mary is a near contemporary of mine as an undergraduate (but she was at Newnham College and I was at Girton). If you compare her interview  on Desert Island Discs with mine, it will become apparent there are some similarities in our upbringing too; we even sit on a committee together now in Cambridge, but as a classicist her take on things is different from most of the science writers I read. She is, as her strapline says, a ‘wickedly subversive commentator’ and has many forthright things to say on academia, her colleagues and much else.

7 Whewell’s Ghost is written by a collective covering the history and philosophy of science. Reading this tends to make me feel I had a neglected education in this field and have a lot of ground to make up.

8 FSP by Female Science Professor. A wonderful – and amazingly frequent – blog on academic life by an anonymous female professor in the US. It is very much with a US twist, so not all her blogs readily translate to the UK, but she seems to have seen it all and still retained her sense of humour.

To complete the final ‘rule’ I need to tell you 7 random things about myself, but I don’t intend to give away too many of my darkest secrets. My blog probably reveals enough. So, here are 7 things that probably you won’t find very interesting to round this post off.

1 I was born in London

2 I am allergic to seafood and salmon (a useful fact if you ever plan on inviting me to dinner).

3I once trained as a volunteer suicide counsellor.

4 I used to play the viola.

5 I went to an all girls’ grammar school.

6 I climbed my first Munro in my 40’s.

7 When a child I hated the fact my first name was so odd.

I’m not sure that my blog is particularly versatile, although I try not to focus too strongly on one theme in successive posts, but I will reiterate how much I have enjoyed the freedom to write in a different voice   from my standard scientist’s one. If you like, I hope I write like a human being on my blog which, I’m sure, many of the public would undoubtedly agree, is not the same thing as a scientist!

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , | Comments Off on On Versatility

Conveying the Wrong Message

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Athene Donald

This article first appeared in Times Higher Education as an Opinion piece on January 12th 2012.

Our academic lives are strongly influenced by those individuals who write letters of reference for us as we aim to move up the career ladder. Generally, although not invariably, these letter-writers are people nominated by the candidate.

But despite this free choice, there are hidden pitfalls: referees who do not rate the candidate at all highly. It is astonishing to find how rude some people can be about a colleague or an ex-student, and yet the poor unsuspecting candidate may never discover that they should not be using Professor X as their referee. This can be a permanent blight on a career.

However, there are other problems that arise in less conscious ways that may also be significant. Do referees ever stop to consider that they may be conveying something that isn’t really what they intended? Panels may be reasonably expert in reading between the lines: when the referee damns a candidate with faint praise or omits to refer to some critical skill – presumably because the candidate lacks it – this may be spotted and accounted for appropriately. But I am talking about something else here. The adjectives used to describe a candidate in a letter may unconsciously be gendered, carrying unintended subliminal messages. Research has shown this to be the case, whether the letter writers are men or women. Consequently, impressions may be implicitly conveyed that were unintentional. Since I first came across the research demonstrating this effect, I have given much greater thought to the words I use to describe those who ask me to be their referee.

The 2009 work to which I am referring (by J. Madera, M. Hebl and R. Martin in the Journal of Applied Psychology) considered letters of reference written for academics, looking at common adjectives used to describe men and women, and explored how these letters – and the words used – affected the actual hiring decisions. In general, women were more likely to be described by rather passive and emotive words (described in the original paper as “communal” adjectives) such as affectionate, tactful, sensitive and helpful. These are words that may indeed correctly describe any individual, they are not negative words, but they may not be seen as central to the job an academic does. In contrast, men were more likely to be described by so-called “agentic” words – words that stress the active sense of doing, rather than  merely being, and words that might be correlated with strength. Adjectives that fit into this category include assertive, dominant, ambitious and intellectual. These words convey a sense of mastery over a field not a predilection to nurture someone else. The reported analysis demonstrated that the use of these agentic words did not appear to have a significant effect on hiring decisions, but the presence of communal words did. In other words, describing women with stereotypical female words, disadvantaged the women. Interestingly, female referees were more likely to use these unhelpful, stereotypical words about women than male writers. One can speculate why this might be, but the concern is that – almost certainly unconsciously and unintentionally – many letters of reference contain words that are damaging to a woman’s case, and hence to her future career.

Academia may be perfectly compatible with family life, many of us (men and women) have demonstrated that this is so, but the ability to care for others – be it family members, distraught students or fellow academics – and as a result to be seen as helpful or sensitive appear not to be valued by search committees at the moment of hiring, however much these skills might be a boon in a department. So, if collectively we, as individuals hiring someone, see these words in a letter of reference, apparently we rate this negatively. This phenomenon needs to be spelled out loudly and clearly so that we can both overcome this negativity and remember that such descriptors are not helpful next time we write a letter of reference ourselves. It is depressing to realise how much we are prone to make decisions, unconsciously factoring in parameters that are irrelevant to the decision-making process. I’m sure we all think we are virtuous and impartial in our decision-making, but the reality is different. If we see words that are at the “cuddly” end of the spectrum we don’t rate the candidate, however positive these attributes may be. This being so, we need either to train selection panels to filter out these comments or train ourselves as reference-letter-writers to avoid using words that have these unintended consequences. If we don’t, we are hindering progression towards parity between the sexes in the way we make hiring decisions, with the result that the leaky academic pipeline will continue to leak women at all stages of their careers in ways that could be avoided.

 

Posted in Academia, Equality | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Heroines and Role Models

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Athene Donald

Recently I had a rather upset email from a younger colleague who was worried because she had publicly disagreed with me in a discussion and feared she had been ‘strident’.  What made it worse, she said, was that I had been something of a scientific heroine for her and she clearly was bothered that this made it inappropriate for her to express any disagreement. Well, no, she was absolutely right to do so if I was wrong, and certainly in the case in point I had – at the very least – been sloppy and she was simply correcting my inaccuracy. She hadn’t been strident, or inappropriate in any way and it wasn’t a problem for me – nor should it have been. But I’m flattered she thought of me as a heroine, perhaps even more so than if she had described me as a role model.

Early in one’s life/career, having role models – possibly also heroines/heroes – matters to many people (though equally, plenty of people manage perfectly well without). Individuals whom you’d like to be like, succeeding in ways you’d like to succeed, doing things you aspire to do, or simply giving you a glimpse of possibilities even if they still seem unimaginably far away.  Exactly who anyone selects for their role model is a combination of opportunity (whom you come across) and personality.  But problems can arise later when, as is probably inevitable, you realise these role models have feet of clay. They may be succeeding in ways you’d like to succeed, but when you finally meet them you discover they are jerks. If they’re doing things you once aspired to do, it may turn out that your aspirations were hopelessly misplaced given your own skills. Perhaps it is easiest to retain them as role models – possibly long after you really need them –  if they simply served the purpose of opening your eyes to options in your future life. You don’t have to like them as individuals, they only have to have expanded your horizons.

But in some instances, heroines (or indeed heroes) and role models can ultimately have a detrimental effect, not only or necessarily because of anything they do themselves, but because of the effect any pedestal-placing can have on those who place them on that pedestal. Thus, I have known individuals who feel unable ever to believe they are able to challenge a previous mentor, head of department or senior colleague even when they have reached a position of seniority themselves; in order to break this spell distance – geographical probably – is required. It is extremely hard to turn around a hierarchical relationship into one of equality.  But ultimately it is necessary for one’s academic health.

There is also the possibility that the role model can actively be unhelpful, by smothering the individual’s opportunities if they come too close. In this category I would place those senior individuals (I’ll call this person, who could be male or female, Professor Uncaring, Prof U for short) who may be able to attract many bright youngsters to work with them but then, far from nurturing them or making sure their careers develop and flourish, simply use them. The commonest form in which I think this occurs is for them to be used as drudges to produce the results requisite for Professor Uncaring’s own greater glory. Prof U does this without giving credit where it is due by not ensuring the hardworking Dr Drudge is the first named author on the high profile papers which are produced or facilitating the person who did all the work presenting it at relevant conferences. If Dr Drudge’s career is to develop, they may find it is possible only if they continue to fit into whatever role Professor Uncaring thinks is appropriate: this may require continuing to work within Prof U’s ambit, merely picking up any crumbs tossed in their direction.  They may find it impossible to do anything else, if Prof U’s arm is long enough to prevent the newly appointed lecturer/research fellow getting grants to continue to develop the work they themselves started, because the prof wants to keep it as if it were genuinely their own brainchild. Thus staying within the role permitted by Prof U may appear to be a fruitful strategy in the short term, indeed the only safe one to pursue, but if they have any guts and gumption at all, ultimately Dr Drudge must strike out on their own and not remain a drudge permanently, even if in a tenured post.  This would be an extreme example, but one that I have seen more than once in different places. Sometimes it is less malicious/self-serving than this description implies, simply driven by the fact that Prof U is unseeing rather than uncaring, so convinced of their own rectitude and brilliance that they expect the lesser mortals around them to fall into their grand cosmic plan.

So, by all means choose a heroine/hero, find a role model to act as inspiration to guide you through early career stages. But do not be fooled these individuals should stay as a guide indefinitely or can never be contradicted. Success means many things, but one part of it is having the courage of your convictions. Welcoming help where it is genuine, rejecting it where it is tainted or too possessive, and never looking at senior individuals through rose-tinted glasses just because they are senior.  Choose your role models, your heroines and your heroes wisely, and dispense with them – or better turn them into valued colleagues – once the time is ripe, which may be sooner than you think.

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

Nerves? You?

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Athene Donald

A few weeks ago I was asked by my University’s press office to talk urgently to the Daily Mail, where a reporter was wanting some information comparing what life was like for women at Cambridge University in the past and now. As the University’s Gender Equality Champion, as well as having been a student back in the days when there were only 3 colleges who admitted women to the University, it seemed appropriate that I should respond. I assumed my university’s press office would have vetted the background to the story for suitability before passing on the request so that there would be no obvious pitfalls. However, there appeared to be some urgency and so I had to conduct the phone interview in a somewhat public space at the Royal Society, where I happened to be that day. On the train home that evening I tweeted ‘Being interviewed by the Mail always makes me nervous’ to which I got the response from someone in Norwich, ‘Nerves – you? Go for it!’ which made me realise the nerves I was referring to weren’t due to the fact that interactions with the media are always liable to be stressful, so much as  worry about newspaper interviews in particular, because one has so little control over them.

My media training has prepared me for some sorts of interviews; I’d certainly recommend getting such training if you’re ever offered it, regardless of at which level of the academic ladder you are currently. I know, at least in principle, how to dodge the bullets and lead the conversation back to safer ground. I know how to prepare, so that the facts you want to put across are at your finger tips. But those skills are most easily brought to bear when you have a specific story you are trying to put across and time to think about how best to deliver the message. If you are rung up at short notice on a topic of someone else’s choosing, it’s a lot harder to be prepared and it’s a lot harder to be in control of the situation. I am rather unwilling to discuss the details of this particular interview with the Daily Mail journalist because the piece has still not been run (despite the apparent ‘urgency’ with which the interview was carried out), so I don’t know how (or indeed if) it will pan out. Instead, I will illustrate why I am nervous about such interviews with regard to an earlier interview. Mind you, this one turned out so badly I’m not going to give any details, dates or storyline, merely give some generic indicators.

For this particular story I was rung up as one of several people being interviewed about what should have been an entirely innocuous and good news story. From my personal point of view, the reason it went wrong was entirely my own fault. Something, I forget what at this distance in time, had got under my skin in the day-job. I was feeling extremely cross when the journalist rang and consequently somewhat careless in the things I said. I was cross with the system, and some of that rage came out in the answers I gave to superficially easy enough questions. Consequently, what I was quoted as saying – which was very approximately what I had said, though not necessarily in the context apparently quoted – was inappropriate and ill-considered. I came across as a raging harpy who had my talons into the academic world in a big way – or at least, even when I had stopped being quite so angry and read what I had apparently said again, I felt it could have been interpreted in that way. It probably didn’t actually come across like that to others, but I knew that I had let irritation over something else cloud my judgement in those few critical minutes on the phone. As it turned out, the rest of the article caused others so much rage that my own poor judgement faded into insignificance and rather quickly the story was pulled off the newspaper’s website due to inaccuracies elsewhere in the piece (so there’s no point any reader of this post trying to track it down!)

That, to some extent, has taught me to be particularly vigilant. But it is difficult when journalists want a quote fast, and you are possibly not in ideal circumstances. A previous conversation with a Daily Mail journalist took place in the cycle park at Cambridge station, but the quote of mine they used was totally fine despite the less than optimum location (noisy, windy and cold). This most recent interview was overheard by a colleague who, when I apologised to her for talking in what should have been a quiet area, merely said I’d sounded very patient. However, I will have to wait and see what (if the story ever appears) they pulled out from what I said.

The trouble is that a perfectly reasonable sentence or two can be truncated in ways that make for more titillating reading than the original quote itself. You know how it is with the brief congratulatory phrases that find themselves on the back covers of books, or on billboards in front of theatres.

‘An amazing performance’ might mean what it appears to say, or it might have been excised from the full sentence:

‘An amazing performance of such ineptitude I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry’.

‘A book that had me gripped throughout’ might be just part of the sentence

‘A book that had me gripped throughout as I waited to see what clueless action the completely wet and boring heroine dreamed up next’.

So, if – in a piece about women at Cambridge then and now – I am quoted as saying ‘girls at Girton had a hard time of it’ it might actually have been part of a longer sentence saying

‘girls at Girton had a hard time of it on their bicycles, with the college being at the top of Cambridge’s only significant hill, with a mile or two further to cycle even after the climb had been completed’;

or a phrase such as ‘the boys used to stare’ may really have said something rather different such as

‘it was hardly surprising if the boys used to stare at the lone girl in the practical class, but it seemed to be curiosity not hostility; they simply weren’t necessarily used to girls.’

So the nerves are not simply about being interviewed by the Daily Mail, or interacting more generally with the media, they are because it is all too easy for a quote not to come out quite as intended, whilst still being a legitimate, if incomplete, quote.  In live interviews, for instance on the radio, one has more chance of controlling the context and making sure that what comes across is precisely what is intended. On the other hand, you also have a first rate opportunity for making a complete fool of oneself to an audience of millions if you’re unlucky. This is on my mind having just taken part in Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on the subject of macromolecules. It is rare for this Radio 4 programme to stray into science of this sort, but I would hope that my fellow guests (Tony Ryan from Sheffield and Charlotte Williams from Imperial College, chemists both) and I acquitted ourselves reasonably and did indeed manage to say, and be heard to say, precisely what we wanted.

So nerves? Yes, when talking to the print media indubitably. Not because I necessarily feel I don’t know what to say or how to express it but because I worry I won’t appear to have said what was intended. The radio seems to me to be easier in that sense, but still potentially very scary – particularly in advance. There’s no time to be nervous at the time, you just get on with the task in front of you then sweat again later when replaying the dialogue in your head.

 

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Resolving the Resolutions

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Athene Donald

A year ago I publicly made some New Year’s Resolutions, and it is interesting to look back and see what my good intentions were and to what extent I’ve managed to stick with them.

Resolution 1 I will ensure I return all referee reports on papers by the due date in 2011

I’ve not done too badly on this front, largely because I have developed a taste for declining to review almost anything. Gone are the days when I enjoyed the luxury of looking at a paper’s title or abstract and thinking that it looked rather interesting, albeit somewhat removed from my current field of activity, and therefore it might be satisfying to referee the paper in parallel with reading around the topic.  Now if it isn’t relevant, or is relevant only to something I worked on in the past but no longer, it’s an automatic ‘no’. I can deal with that sort of refereeing request very speedily! More troubling are the ones I’d really like to read through and ponder over, but a glance at my diary tells me that I am already horribly over-committed during the time period allotted for the refereeing task. I am probably rather slower to turn these requests down, but hope I get around to it within a few days as it becomes ever clearer there isn’t a hope in hell I’ll get it done in time.  Occasionally one slips through the net and I get a chase from the editor, but genuinely these are few and far between. I think I can tick this resolution off as successfully accomplished (and I plan on sticking with this for the coming year too).

Resolution 2 I will delete unread at least 50% of all emails that arrive overnight (when the worst of my spam seems to appear)  and 25% of those that come during working hours.

I’ve developed a good system to delete that boring barrage of stuff that arrives in one’s inbox in the small hours. Before I ever get my computer on I do a quick scroll through my inbox on my iPhone over that first crucial cup of coffee of the day, and delete as many emails as I can. I think that probably does amount to ca 50% so I’ll tick the first half of this resolution off too. During the day how well do I do? Actually, I’ve very little idea what the percentage that gets deleted each day is, but I suspect it’s getting too high, that I’m getting ‘trigger happy’ with the delete button. Twice in the last month I’ve had to ask people to resend messages – one was a reference request which was particularly embarrassing – because the relevant emails had got so effectively obliterated they weren’t even in my trash or deleted folder. So, I’ll claim success with the second part too, but with the caveat I probably need to be more careful on this front rather than less.

Two down, what about the third resolution I laid claim to this time last year?

Resolution 3 I won’t accept any more invitations to write reviews;

Success, definitely not written (or agreed to write) any reviews this year!

b) I won’t print out a paper without having a clear slot of time immediately thereafter to read it.

Ah well, it was too much to hope I’d get through all my resolutions triumphantly. No, failed on this one. I am still prone to print out papers, leave them lying them around on desk or floor, and find them weeks later still unread. So, this is one to work on in 2012.

All my resolutions last year revolved around the vexed questions of refereeing, papers and emails. There is of course rather more to (academic) life than that, so I should consider what my good intentions for the coming year are in addition to keeping up the good work on these 3 items. The one that comes to mind is developing a little bit of tolerance regarding my fellow cyclists. OK, this isn’t particularly academic but increasingly they are irritating me by their bad manners and willingness to ignore the Highway Code, as if it wasn’t designed for cyclists as well as other road users. So my resolution for 2012 on this front is

2012 Resolution No 1  I will not swear at those cyclists who cycle straight at me the wrong way up narrow streets, typically without lights on if after dark. I will only permit myself to swear if they make actual physical contact or cause me to fall under the wheels of a passing taxi.

I have written previously about how peevish such cyclists make me. They seem to be getting ever more numerous, as if the one way system in the centre of town is pure fantasy and I am alone in trying to stick with it. They make life very dangerous for the rest of us, however, and I could wish the police put a little more effort into enforcing the rules on this front (and the use of lights ditto).  This is not an academic grumble, but I am sure it is not good for my blood pressure to get so stressed about this particular peccadillo of other people.

2012 Resolution No 2 I will continue practicing to say ‘no’ more often to things it would be foolish – if interesting, fun or diverting – to say yes to.

I have begun to do better on this front. I refused an invitation to go and speak to a distant university forum about my diversity work for no better reason than that I already had accepted more invitations in far-flung parts of the country than are good for my well-being. I felt very churlish doing this, but having just made a verbal commitment to my family I would not accept any more invitations to give what one might call ‘random’ talks (i.e. unassociated with any of my more formal responsibilities and roles) this year, I felt if I said yes to ‘just one more’, it would be too easy never to draw the line. I was delighted the response I got from the forum organisers was very understanding, though they may well be back earlier in the academic year next time.

2012 Resolution No 3 I will do my bit for the environment, by not printing out committee papers, but try always to work with them on the screen.

I am of the generation that still finds it easier to scribble comments on a paper – for a committee or a research paper written by a group member – than to edit or comment on it electronically. This means that I generate an awful lot of paper that soon gets recycled. My university still persists in sending out many of its committee papers in hard copy, so that frequently I have no choice but to work with paper copies, and this means I don’t practice as hard as I might with the electronic route. But this year an experiment is being carried out with the promotions panel I sit on. Instead of 3 large boxes of papers we are being offered one USB stick – plus an hour of ‘training’. I find this strange; I cannot think why I need an hour of being shown how to navigate through the files (unless they’ve done something very strange and counterintuitive). But there it is, an early New Year treat of USB stick training coupled with the carrot I need to stop printing out my papers and start being greener (and yes, I do know carrots aren’t green!)

So, a new and varied batch of resolutions with which to enter the New Year. Now I have six resolutions to live up to. I am in all honesty surprised to find how well I have done with those I set myself for 2011. I wonder if I can do a repeat performance for 2012.  Happy New Year everyone!

 

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments