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.

Posted in Education, Equality | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Where is Social Mobility Heading and for Whom?

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.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Humane Scientist

What Does Excellence Look Like?

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Athene Donald

Harnessing the Metric Tide, the recently-published follow-on to the 2015 Report The Metric Tide, provides a welcome focus on our cultures and practice within HEIs. It imagines an ecosystem where metrics are collected which inform the community about the health of their working world, where inclusion is the norm. It fleshes out some of the ways the aspirations of the R+D People and Culture white paper produced during Amanda Solloway’s tenancy as science minister could become a reality. That was a document full of good intentions, but sadly lacking in any levers to transform the hopes into practice.

Finding ‘good’ metrics seems a sensible way to go. Except…..the problem is that metrics are so very hard to get right. For instance, how many PhD students do you have in your department? It sounds like a deceptively easy question, but how do you define a PhD student? Is it those who are fee-paying – that should be easy – or do you include those who have passed that point but haven’t submitted? Maybe that would be a better measure of whether PhDs are being supported to complete their PhDs in a timely manner, but might cause havoc in the numbers if part-timers are to be included. Anyhow, should it be submission that is the cut-off point, or the viva or the University approving the degree, or its conferment? It is important to be precise, but also to work out what is the question that needs to be answered. Sheer volume of students or some measure of how well they are supported? A lot of students over-running may be an indicator of something going wrong. I use this example simply to illustrate that data is not that easy to get in a precise way.

There are statistics out there, for instance from HESA, but these will be gathered for their own purposes, which may not precisely mesh with what is needed for a research exercise. In this case a specific example highlighting the problems arises from changes to what data is collected in 2019/20 meaning that data on non-academic staff, such as technicians, is no longer collected. Consequently, there will be no easy way of accessing these numbers from data collected mandatorily by HESA. As has always been said regarding Athena Swan applications (something the Review panel was very mindful of when it reported in 2020) there are very substantial difficulties in collecting the necessary data, and this will apply to all sorts of metrics.

One of the troubles, visible over successive cycles of the assessment exercise (whatever it has been called at the time), is the ability of institutions to game the system. In 2008, when I was on the Physics sub-panel, there was one institution that managed to hire a surprising number of eminent scientists from around the world and industry, who worked only for about the crucial 48 hours around the census date. Technically within the rules, but definitely not within the spirit of how things were to be done. I forget how the panel dealt with this flagrant breach of intent, but deal with it we did. Others fail to understand the rules such as, in the same exercise, the institution (also nameless, although I remember its name well) that didn’t flag any of its early career researchers and only listed prizes won (measures of esteem as they were called back then) of a handful of their most eminent researchers. This became a substantial handicap for them.

In the latest exercise, in which I chaired the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel (IDAP), we would have wanted there to be some way claims about interdisciplinary working could be backed up by evidence, perhaps linking the environment statement to outputs to demonstrate warm words were being translated into practice. Was the environment really conducive to collaborations across disciplines? This wasn’t possible this time around, maybe some of the recommendations of this new report will foster better measures of success in this space, although there is little attention paid to this specific issue. The use of the flag, IDAP constructed hoping it would facilitate the work of the panels, was so arbitrary it was completely useless. How do you construct something more meaningful that everyone understands and uses in the same way? This matters. The ability to transcend disciplinary silos is a key part of moving fields forward, and should not be judged solely from impact case studies, where indeed much evidence of success crossing boundaries can be found. Good team working (even without any sense of interdisciplinarity) may exist within a single research group, across groups in a single department, or be much more complex. What measures can be established to judge whether team working is indeed working, or whether there is still a strong hierarchy where only some of the participants are valued?

Excellence is, as many have said, not a useful word because it has a nice warm feel about it but is ill-defined and essentially non-quantifiable. The idea proposed in Harnessing the Metric Tide of establishing a ‘Research Qualities Framework (RQF)’ in place of a ‘Research Excellence Framework’ to be more inclusive has many attractions, but the devil will be in the detail. Requiring the gender pay gap to be reported is one way of establishing aspects of the environment in terms of inclusivity, although grade segregation needs to be separated from within-grade discrepancies in pay. However, as more and more work is done about how women are, and more importantly are not, included in networks of collaboration, and how most simple metrics show disadvantage, I think a lot of thought needs to go into how metrics regarding inclusion are chosen. For instance, given the evidence regarding women’s tendency not to use self-citations, and how men tend not to cite women’s work as often as men’s, I do not feel comfortable with the idea, already implemented in REF2021, that quantitative data in the form of article citation counts are provided to sub-panels that request them. Will this not be likely to provide a false measure of success or ‘excellence’? There are many reasons feeding into these discrepancies, both cultural and sociological, but I am concerned that there may be an accrual of disadvantage with some of these metrics that need to be carefully scrutinised before implementation.

I applaud the report as a thorough review of how different groupings and countries are attempting to tackle transparency and openness in ‘measuring’ many different aspects of our research ecosystem. Finding ‘good’ statistics has to be a global aim, as does the goal of removing metrics that push perverse incentives (university rankings being one key bad actor in this landscape). However, there is a long way to go to establish interoperable mechanisms and data collection that will serve a maximum number of purposes with minimum workload imposition.

Posted in Equality, Research | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on What Does Excellence Look Like?

Has the World Changed (Enough)?

Posted on November 27, 2022 by Athene Donald

“The reported incidents of racism and misogyny are extremely alarming” according to Gareth Cook, fire brigade’s union regional organiser for London about the recent report into the London Fire Brigade. “Women have been “systematically failed” by the criminal justice system”, says Andy Marsh, the chief executive of the College of Policing about the way the system operates, in the same issue of the Guardian. I would like to think universities are not as systemically racist and misogynist as these two bodies, but I would not be confident about it. Just last week, a senior man (actually, he must be some years younger than me in age) felt it was appropriate to put his arm lightly round my waist at the end of a meeting? Why? What does he do to young women in a similarly inappropriate but casual way? Young, maybe even middle-aged women whose careers depend on his approval. I’ve written to him privately to point out the inappropriateness of his ways, not the first time I’ve done this to a senior man. The last time I made no headway, but one must try. Otherwise, as I’ve always said, I am complicit and I must live by my own tenets, however, anxiety-inducing it may be as I put pen to paper.

Young women in academia today certainly don’t seem to have an easy time of it in many instances. But, compared with previous generations, it is interesting to see they are willing to be outspoken about the issues, at least in safe spaces.  They expect to be able to talk about it and this, I guess, is progress from when I set out. Back then, I think we just took it all for granted as the way it was. Rather than actually trying to change it, the philosophy was probably simply a case of trying to traverse the landscape with as little damage as possible; a system which I, for one, assumed had to be this way, immutable. It took me a long time (perhaps when I read the seminal 1999 MIT report on the status of women) before I fully appreciated that the origins of some of the difficulties I faced might have resided somewhere other than within myself. That possibly the world could be constructed in a different way that recognized women fully, not merely expected us to play the part others assigned to us.

Last week I participated in an event hosted by the Lindemann Trust, whose committee I have just joined, to explore and discuss the experiences of women in the physical sciences. The Trust funds postdoctoral fellowships to the USA, but it has been dismayed by the low numbers of women applying for them. They are attempting to find solutions to the problems that obviously underlie this finding. There may be many reasons for the absence of women including: women aren’t tapped on the shoulder about the fellowships by their supervisors in the same proportions as men; women don’t have the confidence to put themselves forward in the absence of such encouragement; or their personal circumstances mean they don’t feel able to leave the UK even if they are aware of the opportunity. I worry particularly about the first of these, because there is nothing women can do if they don’t hear about the fellowships through the obvious channels and this is something that is outside their control.

The evening produced some thought-provoking comments about the barriers that women still perceive. I was also struck by the curiosity of the men who came along to try to understand the issues women face that they know they are probably blind to. The recurring problem of what does excellence look like and what criteria should be used to judge it was raised (and how stereotypes feed into those judgements): perhaps a topic requiring a blogpost of its own.  The feelings of loneliness in maths or engineering departments, when there are so few people looking like you, and tactics to cope with this. There was no sympathy for the line of turning yourself into an honorary man to fit in. This was a tactic one speaker had used and then forcefully rejected. I am conscious that at a certain part of my life I adopted such a mechanism when it came to raucous behaviour down the pub at the end of a conference day. I look back at that time with horror; it’s a persona I feel I’ve been trying to shift ever since in some people’s minds, but at the time it felt a wise strategy to allow me to gain a sense of belonging and inclusion when there were only a handful of other women around.

I am sure the Lindemann Trust will be digesting all the notes taken during the evening to see what, in their own small way, they can do to improve the situation and make sure the brilliant women out there have access to their fellowships. Communication is obviously part of it. I was pleased to see the email that goes out to all the members of my former department included a link to the Fellowship programme this week. In this way there is no need for a supervisor to point out – to a selected few only – that the scheme exists. It does still require confidence in applicants to take the next step, to find referees and to put an application together. Confidence is still a skill that is unevenly distributed amongst researchers, male or female, and may be completely uncorrelated with ability. (The Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates this sad fact.)

It is nearly 50 years since I started my PhD. Things have changed since then on many fronts, and yet the system appears to remain stubbornly static when it comes to considering what an ideal academic should look like and do. Misogyny and racism lurk in so many of our professional spheres and systems. No university should read the headlines about the Fire Service or the Met and think they are exempt from bad behaviour lurking in their corridors.

Posted in Women in Science | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Has the World Changed (Enough)?

Refereeing and Bullies

Posted on November 10, 2022 by Athene Donald

We’ve heard a lot about bullying at the heart of government in recent days. One defence of the behaviour of the former Chief Whip is that it used to be worse, much worse. That is of course a line one hears about predatory behaviour in academia. What was once regarded as ‘normal’, most certainly isn’t now. But it still goes on and, as today’s report for OfS indicates, universities continue to struggle to put in place appropriate mechanisms to deal with sexual harassment.

In Government, as in academia, there are power imbalances to worry about when considering making a complaint about behaviour. In a recent survey of violence (broadly defined and not just literal violence) on campus, what seemed to me telling (and depressing) in the findings was the low proportion of those who were subjected to this violence who actually reported it. Many were worried about retaliation by the perpetrator or that their studies/research would be terminated, as well as realistically worrying that going through due process might be a deeply unpleasant experience. That is why I believe it is so important, as I’ve written before, that those observing incidents – be they incidents of bullying, belittling, or actual physical aggression or sexual harassment  – should be willing to take action and not just leave it to the victim. Too often it is easier to look the other way, even if an observer doesn’t go quite so far as to side with the aggressor.

At what point does it become safe to act? How far up the ladder does one have to go before it ceases to feel potentially dangerous to call someone out? I’m not sure I know the answer to that. But, even in the more modest arena of filing a referee’s report, I was struck by the comment I saw on Twitter this week bringing home the trepidation which can strike even senior academics when faced with having to confront, virtually, a ‘powerful man’ in their research field. The situation arose because a journal was asking the individual to sign their name to a critical referee’s report, and the referee was nervous in case of ‘repercussions’. This is desperately sad. As academics we should not be in a situation where we feel worried about doing our professional jobs properly in case of inappropriate responses from those with power. The person who put this tweet out is already a member of their national academy, so not exactly junior. Nevertheless, as I wrote a short while ago, mid-career was exactly the moment I found things toughest, so I understand their anxieties. Power imbalances can still feel very real.

That tweet reminded me of a situation I once faced when still a junior lecturer. I had refereed a paper by a Nobel Prize winner in my field, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, and I was convinced he was wrong although his approach (theoretical) was very interesting. I had experimental evidence which contradicted him, although it hadn’t yet been published, so it was not altogether easy to refute his position in my report. After I had submitted it, I discovered he was visiting Cambridge and I had a slot to talk with him. At that point I could have either discussed his ideas in a totally neutral way, without letting on that I had seen the preprint and indeed had commented on it, or I could say upfront that I was the referee. With some nervousness, I chose the latter path, because anything else would have seemed somewhat dishonest.

At the time I did not know De Gennes at all well, but in later years it became very clear to me that he  was not the sort of man who needed to put others down to feed his self-importance. (He was also a great supporter of women in science.) When I set out my position, and with the unpublished electron micrographs to hand to bolster my case, we simply had a really interesting discussion. There wasn’t a hint of a refusal to accept my views as valid, or a need to show his superiority to a mere junior like me who was contradicting him. I felt relieved and also reassured that scientists, at such different points in their life, could sensibly discuss their different viewpoints. It could, of course, have all gone wrong. I did not know him well enough to be sure in advance I wasn’t going to put myself in an unpleasant situation.

Another occasion where refereeing anonymously took me into strange territory was when I refereed a grant from Tom McLeish, now sadly desperately ill. As a referee I wrote that his experimental programme would be interesting but could not work on the polymer he had selected (PMMA, which would have disintegrated in the electron microscopy experiments he was planning), but should work on a different one (polystyrene). A short while later Tom contacted me to ask for my advice, to check whether the referee was right in what they said. With a straight face I said I was sure they were right. This was a long time ago, when applicants were allowed not only to respond to referees but, at least in this case, to change their programme to accord with what the referee said. Tom duly got the grant and set about his revised set of experiments.

That could have been the end of the story, and I had certainly forgotten all about it until I heard Tom talking about his research in the conference bar, telling his circle how helpful I’d been to him in confirming the tiresome referee had indeed been right in what they’d said. At that point I had to tell him that I had been the referee. Much mirth all round ensued.

Those two personal anecdotes indicate that I have been, as I have frequently said, lucky in many of my interactions with fellow scientists. I believe both episodes illustrate how we would like exchanges around refereeing to take place, without the anxieties expressed by the tweet I mentioned earlier. But the reality is, bullies are out there and some people – however senior and in no need for more status – do feel that others need to suck up to them, and a critical referee’s report requires retaliation. Sadly, the stories coming out of Harvard about Sheila Jasanoff’s alleged behaviour in the Science and Technology Studies program which she leads there reinforce the idea that disagreeing with some academics may be profoundly dangerous for one’s career and mental wellbeing. Bullies lurk. Taking risks is not always a game worth playing, however much science should be objective and not about vendettas or power. Academia remains peppered with unsavoury characters who get far on bad behaviour and it seems institutions are not good at counteracting such behaviour.

 

 

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Refereeing and Bullies