Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley

Posted on February 21, 2023 by Athene Donald

It is depressing to learn that the Treasury is essentially constraining any capital spending from the Department of Housing, Levelling Up and Communities. Whereas when Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State there might have been some optimism that he ‘got’ the need for investment in left-behind regions, the way the Department’s budget has so far been spent has suggested that there is not such a strong will overall across Government, and notably within the short-term financially-focussed Treasury. As Jack Shaw for the IPPR put it

‘Contrast the culture of innovation supported by EU funding with the Shared Prosperity Fund’s culture of bean-counting.’

The loss of these EU Structural Funds is a real blow for many areas, since these were allocated inversely according to the local level of economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding. The same relationship does not exist in allocations from the replacement Shared Prosperity Fund, as many commentators have noted. The more deprived areas are losing out to better-heeled regions in ways that are hard not to see as driven by political imperatives more than the need to level up. Furthermore, again to quote Jack Shaw,

‘the methodology underpinning the Shared Prosperity Fund bears limited relation with its stated policy objectives.’

An interesting recent report from the Centre of Cities, which contains a wealth of data to digest, highlights the inequalities across the regions, or more specifically across cities up and down the land. I live in Cambridge, a superficially wealthy city, though a previous report from the same organisation has identified it as the most unequal city of all. It has a great number of citizens with high levels of education, but it also has high levels of pollution together with exorbitant house prices which are second only to London. My city is not particularly typical. It seems to sit near the top or bottom of just about every figure of merit this report analyses. It sits at the very top of cities when it comes to rate of growth of the population over the decade to 2021, with an increase of 17.9%, closely followed in second place by Peterborough at 17.2%. The area is booming (which of course drives the prices of houses ever upwards), with the highest number of ‘new economy’ firms. However, our roads are choking us, public transport is still woeful into the city centre – although the council wishes to introduce a congestion charge along with improved transportation links – but cycling is available to anyone fit enough, including students, who happens to have the luxury of living close enough to their place of work to make that feasible (but beware that pollution).

Skills and education are taken seriously in Cambridge. At 3.4% of the population, it has one of the lowest rates in the country of workers with no formal qualifications. In my College we take apprentices seriously in teams like maintenance and catering, so even those who join us not having thrived at school can hope to gain useful qualifications, whether or not they choose to stay employed here. At the other end of the scale, Cambridge has one of the highest levels of the population with Level 4 or above qualifications at 63.5%, beaten only by Edinburgh and Oxford.

That high level of skills in the Cambridge population is of course immediately relevant to the city’s success. At the other end of the scale, Burnley has more than 5 times as high a percentage of people with no qualifications coupled with less than half as many as Cambridge with Level 4 or above education. Burnley, like many another northern de-industrialised city, has fallen into a low skills, low wage equilibrium. For families where the breadwinner lost their job in the mines or mills a generation or more ago, there may be a feeling of helplessness, a belief that a decent job is not there for them, with little concomitant motivation to stay on in education to gain qualifications that may take them nowhere, or to upskill later in life. The Centre for Cities report has a lot to say about these people who are demoralised to the point of not attempting to enter the workforce or to seek a new job when they lose theirs. These are people they call ‘involuntarily inactive’.

One of the problems with the Levelling Up White Paper is how little it had to say about skills. There has been a little more information published recently about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), although how helpful that will be in practice for those involuntarily inactive in regions where skilled, even semi-skilled jobs are in short supply, remains to be seen. Who will want to take on a substantial loan in mid-life with no certainty of a well-paid job at the end, a situation made even more unpalatable if there are several family dependents? Helpful though the LLE may be for some, it is far from a universal panacea to resolving the distressed face of places like Burnley.

Along with upskilling must be the creation of relevant jobs in local industry.  All the evidence is that anchor industries play a crucial role in the economy of a city, not least because non-graduates are much less likely to move away from their home towns than those with higher qualifications. Lincoln has thrived through the combination of a new(ish) university and employers like Siemens, a vision vigorously pursued by their former VC Mary Stuart.

But sometimes there are employers seeking a skilled workforce who cannot find them. To return to my own local area, but moving a bit further from Cambridge, at a recent meeting organised by the Royal Society in Norwich, we heard from a company based in Suffolk about their employment needs. Here was a firm, with a full order book, but it couldn’t attract the skilled and semi-skilled people it needed, with local youth not seeing being a machine operative, for instance, as of interest to them. The area is not rich in alternative industries, but still they could not attract those leaving school, and local courses were not particularly geared to their needs. Further education colleges in the area, as elsewhere, are now even more hampered in development due to the government’s recent reclassification of them as public sector. This change means they are now subject to strict government lending restrictions and effectively barred from taking out commercial loans, making capital expenditure almost impossible, preventing them from expanding or changing emphasis in their courses. This particular Suffolk CEO who spoke, felt that developments at Sizewell C, not that far away, would suck up many of those who might otherwise have thought about joining their company – and additional skilled labour for the construction of the site would need to come from much further afield.

Only if we start to see joined up thinking across Government – from the Department of Education, through DHLUC to the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – will there be any hope of seeing improvements in our urban areas, ensuring a match between the skills provision and local need as well as decent funding to go along with this, thereby creating jobs and hope where currently there is little of either.

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Celebrating a Pioneering Engineer

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Athene Donald

Constance Tipper (née Elam) was born on this day in 1894. Although some years ago I gave a talk at TWI, just outside Cambridge, to the Tipper Group – a group which endeavours to promote diversity and inclusion to wider audiences – and was introduced then to her name, I am only just learning what a remarkable woman she was. One who undoubtedly has suffered from the Matilda effect, with her name and achievements effaced by other, more famous male engineers. I am indebted to Michael Thouless, a former Fellow of Churchill College and the son of another former Fellow and Nobel Prize winner, the late David Thouless, for bringing her achievements to my attention over dinner a short while ago.

Tipper was a metallurgist who studied Natural Sciences in Cambridge at Newnham College during the early years of the twentieth century. Thereafter she worked briefly at the National Physical Laboratory and then at the Royal School of Mines (part of Imperial College London) for more than a decade, but during which she also worked at times in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, my old department. She worked closely with various men whose names are well known, including GI Taylor, with whom she won the Royal Society’s Bakerian Medal in 1923. The lecture – which I assume was actually given by Taylor – was published that year.

Tipper Bakerian

I will return to the rather sad anecdote about the evening of the lecture in a minute, but first I should admit to a mea culpa. I won the Bakerian Award in 2006 and have been saying ever since I was only the second woman to win the award after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1972. This is clearly entirely wrong, given that Elam/ Tipper won it in 1923 as part of that pairing with Taylor; I will admit I had never thought to check the listings that far back. Had I done so I would realise that even if Tipper was the first, after her there was a second woman who won the award as part of a pair: William Hardy & Ida Bircumshaw won it for a paper entitled Boundary Lubrication – Plane Surfaces and the Limitations of Amontons Law in 1925 (pairings seemed quite common during these years). Aside from the fact that Bircumshaw was also known as Ida Doubleday (presumably her maiden name), and she published a few papers on lubrication in the early 1920s, I can find out nothing about this second woman. But there it stands, there were two women winners of the Bakerian Medal before Dorothy Hodgkin, so I was in fact the fourth female winner, albeit the first two were not sole winners and did not deliver a lecture themselves.

After my own lecture, back in 2006, the Royal Society kindly laid on a dinner. That was true for Constance Elam except…she was invited when no one realised that CF Elam was not a man. Unfortunately, the Royal Society dining club of the day was not open to women joining the dinners. She appears to have been very gracious about this, apparently writing

‘I am sorry to have given you so much trouble. But it is my misfortune rather than my fault that I do not happen to be a man. I felt very much honoured on receiving your invitation, although I realised that it had been sent under a misunderstanding.’

I hope no one would be so conveniently understanding today, but I can confirm that women certainly are able to dine. All Elam/Tipper got back then in lieu of the dinner was a ‘nice box of chocolates’ apparently.

After Constance Elam married and became Constance Tipper, she worked in Cambridge but, as for so many spouses then and now, for many years she was more of a hanger-on in the University than a formal employee, even during the time she held a Leverhulme Fellowship. Even Newnham College only seems to have given her a short spell as a Fellow. But she worked away (the Engineering department do seem to have provided space and facilities) looking at the interplay between metal structure and failure. Come the 2nd World War, a number of lecturers departed to serve and she took on some of their teaching duties.

The war provided her with a fascinating case study arising from the disastrous failure of so-called Liberty Ships. These were ships built hurriedly during the war, with a change in design for the hull from riveting metal plates to welding them. Several of these ships failed catastrophically, some when not even in rough seas, as this photograph of a docked SS Schenectady shows.

Liberty ship(This photo comes from one of my early favourite books on materials science, The New Science of Strong Materials by JE Gordon, which I read when still at school. This image stuck in my mind all these years.). She was invited to be a technical metallurgical expert for the British Admiralty Ship Welding Committee. An easy target to blame for the ships’ failures was to assume the welders were at fault. These were frequently women, so-called Wendy-the- welders in contrast to Rosie-the-Riveters, given the men were mainly serving in the forces. So, blame the women for doing a bad job! But, as Tipper – as she was by then – demonstrated, the fault lay not in the women but in the steel which, in the cold waters where the failures were occurring, had undergone a ductile-brittle transition. In welded ships, with their much larger continuous sheets of metal, small cracks were easily able to spread, whereas in the riveted design with a smaller size of each plate, the cracks got stopped much sooner, before they led to critical, uncontrolled advance and fracture across the whole ship.

This Tipper was able to elucidate, with detailed underpinning metallurgical understanding. You can find much more about this in a 2015 article ‘Revisiting (Some of) the Lasting Impacts of the Liberty Ships via a Metallurgical Analysis of Rivets from the SS “John W. Brown”’ published in the Journal of Materials, which provides a detailed technical explanation of why the problem arose. In the same journal issue there is another article, containing much more information about Tipper’s life, from which much of this post is derived. Although my own PhD was concerned with brittle failure in metals, and I learned about many of the underpinning ideas, her name was not one I was familiar with, as opposed to those such as Taylor and Orowan (men) whose names continue to be associated with the issue of brittle-ductile transitions in metals.

Ultimately the Engineering Department in Cambridge did appoint Tipper to a Readership (the old name for what is now known as an Associate Professor and, back then, a high rank to rise to when most people remained as lecturer as the ‘career grade’), the first and, for a long time, the only woman on their books as a member of the academic staff. For 11 years, until her retirement in 1960, she was able to enjoy appropriate professional recognition.

It seems appropriate that we celebrate her life today on her birthday – and in close proximity to February 11th, the International Day of Girls and Women in Science.

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Inequity and Research Culture

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Athene Donald

Research culture remains a topic that is of concern to many, because it can be so very far from ideal. You don’t have to be from a minority background – of whatever kind – to find yourself in an environment that doesn’t bring out the best in you. Can anything be done because, if it can, it is likely to help all those who are ‘othered’ by their personal characteristics even more? A recent report from the University of Oxford identifies many areas where processes about the whole research system could be improved for people who fit into the category of ‘marginalised researchers’, which covers women and racialised minorities, people with disabilities and those identifying as LGBTQ+. As the report says

‘A growing body of evidence underscores that academia is not a meritocracy. In academia, as in the rest of society, systemic barriers remain to limit the success of researchers in many marginalised groups.’

As I do with many such reports, I started off by reading the recommendations. I found these, at first sight, rather disappointing. Not that there was anything wrong with them, but they seemed to be treading along familiar paths and it didn’t strike me they were likely to lead to much change. Equally, this had been my initial reaction, and this still holds, to the 2021 BEIS People and Culture Strategy document, about which I wrote

‘full of laudable sentiments though the strategy is, it appears to lack any clear indication of the path from where we are now to where BEIS aspirations would take us.’

Eighteen months on from the publication of that BEIS strategy, I’m not convinced there has been much progress.

However, when I read the full Oxford report, I felt rather differently about what it had to say. Not because I feel the recommendations are particularly novel or ones which will immediately change the landscape, but because the way they are put into context is very powerful. It identifies exactly how the current system introduces inequity for different parts of the researcher population, ranging from the less confident (who may find an interview intimidating and lead them to underperform) to those with a disability, who may have problems accessing or completing forms.

There are certain of their recommendations which really should be easily put into practice, for instance by funders. In particular, I would highlight the timing of closing dates for grant applications, so they do not fall immediately after the main holidays. It should be obvious that a closing date of early January is likely to impact more severely on those with caring responsibilities than those without, who may in fact just have had several weeks without the normal teaching or committee loads so making grant-writing easier not harder. Funding calls which are only open for a few weeks are also likely to be detrimental to carers, but these are far from uncommon.

The issue of confidence I allude to above is a more tricky one. Firstly, because having the confidence to give a convincing conference presentation is a relevant skill for success, and may feel as pressured as an interview. Consequently, I believe such skill is not entirely divorced from the ability to conduct a successful project. Nevertheless, I am sure all readers will have encountered the brash or arrogant candidate. If they come across as patronising to their audience it may cause uncertainty about how well they would do in running a group or giving an undergraduate lecture. I well recall one man, smartly turned out in a pinstripe suit that would not have been out of place in a bank (yes, I know, I should not be prejudiced against someone because of the clothes they wear), who – as part of an interview process for a lectureship position – gave a seminar that was positively intimidating in the way the audience was addressed. It was full of chutzpah. I was less convinced it was full of content, but others on the interview panel seemed not to spot this. I argued that an undergraduate faced with such a style of lecturing would not have received it well. That seemed to me a significant part of the reason for requiring a candidate to give a seminar. Again others (almost certainly all male, although it is so long ago I cannot swear to that) did not seem to be as put off as I was.

That level of ‘confidence’ I believe is dangerous. Someone can come across as persuasive and on top of things, when actually it’s simply a smokescreen of performance. Any successful leader should understand their audience and never give off an air of intimidation. At least that’s my view. Shyer people may stutter a little, in a presentation or an interview, but not giving glib answers to questions may indicate deep thinking and knowledge and not ineptitude. It is my belief we are, collectively, too easily swayed by style of delivery rather than actual content. It is totally appropriate that such an issue should be highlighted, as the report does.

Other types of bias may be well-known, but nevertheless still prevalent. The statistics about ethnic minorities is particularly dispiriting. The report cites Wellcome data which shows that the success rate for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic applicants is 6 percentage points lower than that for white applicants (8% compared with 14%), with precisely zero awards made to UK-based applicants reporting their ethnicity as Black or Black British in 2019/20. The fact that there are hardly any black professors in the sciences across the UK is obviously directly related to this. What the report makes clear is how many different parts of the system disadvantage such people, from lack of mentors and sponsors, to internal sift systems as well as grant-giving panels which fail to overcome their biases. A black woman who speaks up may be classed with the standard trope of ‘angry black woman’ when behaving in exactly the same way as a white man, who is simply seen as confident and assertive.

The report spells out the dismal situation many researchers face, identifying the different key stages where problems occur. I found it salutary reading to look far beyond those areas of disadvantage I am familiar with from my work regarding women. Not that I think we have by any means overcome those hurdles more familiar to me, but it is important to recognize that different groups face disadvantage from many different parts of the system and that all of these need to be identified and addressed.

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Where is Social Mobility Heading and for Whom?

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Athene Donald

Levelling up may have been a phrase that tripped off Boris Johnson’s lips more than other politicians, but whether or not the phrase is politically dead, the concept is as important as it ever was during his prime ministerial tenure. Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, certainly thinks so, having said recently

“I’ve always been clear since I came into this role that in the end Greater Manchester’s devolution will be judged by what it can do for Oldham and Rochdale. This is us levelling up Greater Manchester ourselves.”

Parts of Manchester are wealthy;  many other parts – such as Oldham and Rochdale – are anything but. Trying to bring new jobs, industry and money to these deprived areas will be a challenge, which the Innovation Accelerator funding, announced in the Levelling Up White Paper should help, but there is only so far the allocated £30M will go in transforming the local economy.

Inequality does not just exist in major urban settings though. Whereas my home city of Cambridge may look like a booming economy, possibly even overheated and certainly reaching the limits of expansion unless its infrastructure is urgently sorted out, it is hardly uniformly wealthy. Marked out as the most unequal city in the country, according to the Centre for Cities, there is much that needs to be done. However, unlike Burnham in Manchester, its devolution deal lead to a mayor responsible for the three utterly disparate regions of Cambridge, Peterborough and the fenland surrounding rural areas. It is inevitably hard to find solutions that fit all, and its transport links between these different constituent regions are woeful. World-class research within the University of Cambridge and the many research institutes, may seem a world away from the lived experience of the 14-year-old in the fens. Or even from the experience of a 14-year-old in one of the further flung council houses within the City, who may never have set foot in a Cambridge college, or visited one of the city’s wonderful museums. Social mobility across these societal divides needs to form a central part of levelling up.

How well is the Government addressing these issues? This brings me back to Oldham, with the Principal of Oldham College (a further education college), Alun Francis, taking over from Katherine Birbalsingh as (Interim) Chair of the Social Mobility Commission (he was formerly Vice Chair). In their joint response to the autumn statement, the pair have previously said, with concern at the lack of attention directed towards the issues,

“How early years [education] is delivered and how skills are taught are both extremely important areas of interest for us.”

So they should be. Middle class children may get to school already familiar with the idea of books as a source of pleasure; those less advantaged may barely have seen one. Early years are crucial in getting a child onto a firm footing to traverse the subsequent education system. A child who falls behind then may never catch up.

Birbalsingh herself may be head teacher of one of the most academically successful secondary schools in England, one in a pretty deprived part of London, but she came in for a great deal of flak (not least from me) when she pronounced, to a Commons Select Committee, that

“From my own knowledge of these things, physics is not something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it. They don’t like it….There is a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do.”

She later admitted this was ‘a guess’. To my mind, and I would suspect to many in the STEM community, probably including the Institute of Physics, attitudes such as these should disqualify someone from being responsible for social mobility. By casual statements such as these – ones not based on evidence – she is condemning some of her pupils to feeling their dreams are unattainable, shutting down avenues for their future study and careers. (The title of the IOP’s 2013 Report, Closing Doors, says it all. And, as the report spells out, doors can also be closed for boys in other subjects due to a school’s culture reinforcing outdated stereotypes.)

Those skills, that Francis and Birbalsingh stress in the comments I quote above, may well require the numeracy and grasp of physical concepts that an A Level in maths or physics (or equivalent BTECs or T Levels) could confer, even if a student has no intention of studying the subject at University. To be a qualified electrician or machine shop operator, helping to rebuild a manufacturing hub in Manchester, as Burnham aspires to, or to support the thriving technology industries around Cambridge, needs this kind of numerical and conceptual competence and confidence. A head teacher who closes doors to 50% of the population by out-of-date attitudes may well be ‘doing more harm than good’ coming with “too much baggage to be as effective as I would like to be as Chair”, as she put it in her resignation letter. Her comments regarding girls and Physics would seem to confirm this, although she will also have been referring to many other of her outspoken views.

So, Alun Francis, principal of an FE college in one of the left-behind parts of Manchester, now has the opportunity to shape social mobility and to facilitate local and national levelling up. His task will be all the harder, for the very reasons the pair stated in the autumn: there is little cash or attention being directed towards either early years’ education or FE and subsequent skills development for young adults, and upskilling for adults. Whereas the last Labour government put money into Sure Start, to try to overcome the early years’ hurdles for the less advantaged, this government has lost that focus and cut that programme right back. FE has been the poor relation in the education system for decades and, as a recent Sutton Trust report on apprentices highlighted, the fall in apprenticeship starts has been much greater in the more deprived regions compared with the better off and, in the total number of starts, there has been a shift towards degree apprentices for the latter group.

Social mobility remains a challenge. Cash for the education system overall remains a challenge. There is much to be done to enable cities across the country, not just Manchester and Cambridge, to thrive, but if our economy is to recover and thrive in the long term, that cash needs to be found.

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The Humane Scientist

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Athene Donald

It was Philip Ball who drew my attention to the recent memoir by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. He said, over Twitter, that he thought it would resonate with me, and it certainly did. His review of the book can be found here. There is much that is factual – about her treks to study the so-called flood basalts in Siberia, for instance – and there is much that is tragic about her life, ranging from childhood abuse to cancer. But what struck me most was her determination to find a different way of doing science, in which every member of a team is valued, not merely a cog in a hierarchical power structure. She deplores the idea of a ‘hero’, as she puts it, at the top claiming the credit. Such a stance does indeed resonate with me.

Elkins-Tanton’s arguments explore how such a structure leads to an environment in which minorities are likely to suffer. A she puts it

“I have watched graduate students, particularly men, learn the practice of harsh contradiction instead of discussion, and I’ve watched them practice on each other, and on female faculty.”

This reminds me of what I heard from female early career philosophers, who told me how much they hated the so-called Socratic method of argument their discipline favoured. In this the dialogue is necessarily argumentative, one side contradicting the other (that contradiction, no doubt often being harsh), supposedly to tease out better answers but, in the process, leaving many feeling diminished.  In philosophy, undergraduate numbers of men and women may start near equal, but certainly don’t end up like that higher up the pecking order. There would seem to be a connection between method of teaching and gender outcomes.

No doubt there are those who believe that ‘harsh contradiction’ is simply toughening up the wimps, but I do not see it as such, but agree with Elkins-Tanton’s view that

“This practice does not indicate the depth of the person’s knowledge….it’s a way of saying, I am master of my field…And this practice does not lead to best learning and discovery.”

The need of some leaders to suppress anyone whose views do not accord with theirs, whatever the seniority of the other, can only be detrimental. At its worst, it can lead to lateral thinking and alternative hypotheses being cut down, so that someone’s dominant viewpoint can thrive: that can never be good for science. I am tempted to use the amyloid hypothesis as an example of this, where ideas take hold and are not challenged for far too long. In this field specifically, it has taken more than 15 years for what looks like fraudulent evidence supporting one version of the hypothesis to come under suspicion. With Alzheimer’s such a devastating disease, and much effort directed towards a target that may not even exist, the damage globally done by not allowing alternative ideas to be developed fully is impossible to quantify.

Elkins-Tanton is equally forceful about the damage that can be caused by ignoring those who bully or harass their colleagues. When she draws a particular person’s appalling behaviour to the attention of her institution’s leadership, she is met with rebuttal, including the argument of ‘the need to keep Chris because he brought in a lot of grant money’ and that he ‘should be forgiven because he was drunk when he did it’. She persisted, and ultimately the culprit left. The emotions I felt when I tried to draw attention to a senior professor’s harassment I have detailed before. I felt sullied and appalled that arguments such as “oh yes, he behaved like that with many female colleagues, that’ s just how he was, but he was immensely supportive of women” and that “it’s always gone on” were regarded as adequate to proceed with offering further honours to the individual, although I was promised the centre would look to see if there was further evidence of harassment on file. Of course, there wouldn’t be. It is a fearful business to make an official complaint, particularly when there seems little likelihood of anything being done to remedy the situation.

Similar situations arise far from the higher education sector. Recently this has been very clear in the allegations regarding Dominic Raab’s bullying in various Cabinet roles. As expressed in the Guardian

“Sources claim that while none of the officials wanted to make a formal complaint because they felt that working for the department was a privilege, they decided to inform McDonald [Lord Simon McDonald, now Master of Christ’s College here in Cambridge] about the alleged bullying.”

Civil servants, just like many in Higher Education, do not seem to have much faith in official processes.

Bullying may be hard to define formally (where do you draw the line between exhorting a student and being excessively demanding?), but it should be possible for an institution to put brakes on people who damage others, even without sacking them. Where a supervisor repeatedly demeans students under their care, surely it should be possible to ensure that they are not permitted to take on new students for a year or two while they learn the error of their ways and realise there are consequences of inappropriate behaviour. That someone, who I know has been investigated for bullying within a University, can still be in post and be described to me by a former researcher in their team as ‘neither a misogynist nor a racist, he just bullies everyone’ is an absolute condemnation of the system as it currently stands. Often it does feel as if an institution will support those who bring in the research cash, regardless of the devastation they may wreak on those in their teams.

In his review of the book, Ball remarks that

“Elkins-Tanton’s memoir joins a small group that is reconfiguring the way science is presented and framed: not as a triumphant march of discovery but as an intimate journey in which researchers navigate their own dilemmas, struggles and traumas at the same time as they try to expand our knowledge of the physical world.”

He also notes that these memoirs typically come from the pen of a woman. It is an interesting point. Do men not want to admit to the fact that they are vulnerable, and that the default way of doing science – constructed by white men over the last century and a half within universities – has its failings? If I compare the two books by E.O. Wilson (Letters to a Young Scientist) and, much earlier, by Peter Medawar (Advice to a Young Scientist), it is clear how much Wilson falls into the camp of believing in mastery and being self-serving in order to succeed, whereas Medawar comes across as much more humane. (I commented on this comparison previously.) However, Medawar’s own memoir (Memoir of a Thinking Radish) does not come across exhibiting much vulnerability at his core. We perhaps will have to wait longer for a memoir from a male scientist written with as much humanity, as well as interest and insight, as Elkins-Tanton’s.

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