Funders get Tough

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Athene Donald

This post is not, as UK readers might think from the title, a tirade about one of our Research Councils’ shortsightedness.  On the contrary, it is a plaudit for a UK ministry, who are showing admirable steel on behalf of women. As the ASSET 2010 survey results  showed (various analyses, formal and informal, are given here, here and here), women still appear to feel disadvantaged in the STEM arena in higher education. The survey itself cannot prove whether they truly are or aren’t, as it is essentially about perceptions, but plenty of other studies reinforce the message that women are less likely to rise to the top of the career ladder in science, earn the same as men, or sit on as many high level committees – exactly the sort of problems the women identified in the survey. These disadvantages have been talked about repeatedly, but overall the situation has improved only very slowly over the years. Within any given institution there may be good policies developed, but not necessarily fully utilised or implemented. I suspect too often heads of department or their equivalents want to do the right thing, but there are other issues that absorb even more of their attention such as the RAE/REF.  It’s hard to keep a soft, intangible thing like equality and diversity near the top of the agenda when funding issues focus the mind so much more.

Unless….unless the funders themselves focus the minds of everyone on the fact that they care about these matters. And that they care so much, and think it matters so much, that they will start to withhold funding from organisations that haven’t considered their environment, and cleaned up their policies and implementation thoroughly, on this front. For the first time (to my knowledge), a funder has stepped in to do just that.

The Department of Health has been reviewing applications for their so-called BRC’s and BRU’s (Biomedical Research Centres and Units).  These grants are for many millions of pounds and run for 5 years, I believe. This is big money of huge importance to the institutions that apply for them.  However, when it comes to the situation for women in some of these places, the message from the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, was stark:

responses varied from excellent to frankly appalling.    I was embarrassed on behalf of our nation to hear some of the responses.

So, she has decided to do something. In the future, when the next round of applications are considered for these multi-million pound enterprises (some of these may be for more than £100M), they

do not expect to short-list  any NHS/University partnership where the academic partner (generally the Medical School\Faculty of Medicine) has not achieved at least  the Silver Award of the Athena SWAN Charter for Women in Science.

There, that will concentrate the mind! Institutions have the 5 years until the next funding round to get their house in order.  Some may be well on the way, but a quick look at the Athena Swan website does not appear to show any medical schools per se as having even a Bronze award yet, as far as I can see – I hope I haven’t overlooked anywhere. There are some departments named that might form part of a medical school (eg both Cardiff and Queen’s University, Belfast have bronze awards for their Schools of Nursing and Midwifery), but clearly there will need to be a lot of work done.

I, for one, applaud this action. I hope other funders will follow suit (so the post’s title could be regarded as an exhortation; otherwise it is inaccurate since only a single funder so far has got tough). By giving notice of their concerns over this issue, but giving realistic timescales for organisations to sort themselves out, the Department of Health is imposing both a stick and a carrot.  Organisations should realise that they may well need this period of years to get on top of their own local issues. Monitoring statistics, examining trends, working out what isn’t working for their particular workforce and what simple steps would make easy gains all take time.  The Athena Swan Silver award is not something given lightly for a few glib sentences prepared by a hastily convened committee, but needs thought and stamina. Even so, it isn’t asking departments to do impossible things, it just requires buy-in from the very top and some thought and hard work.  It also requires that the whole university has signed up to the Charter and acquired a bronze award. I haven’t checked to see if all the relevant universities are actually Charter members, because if not some organisations will have even more work to do.

I think Sarah Hawkes, who is the Senior Policy Adviser responsible for Athena SWAN is going to be very busy in the months ahead, working with the various Medical Schools to help them understand what it is they have to do. If other funders follow suit, she really will have her hands full.

 

For information, the 6 Charter Principles, which Athena Swan Charter members are asked to accept and to incorporate into their action plans, are given below. More information and help can be found on the Athena Swan website.

1.      To address gender inequalities requires commitment and action from everyone, at all levels of the organisation

2.      To tackle the unequal representation of women in science requires changing cultures and attitudes across the organisation

3.      The absence of diversity at management and policy-making levels has broad implications which the organisation will examine

4.      The high loss rate of women in science is an urgent concern which the organisation will address

5.      The system of short-term contracts has particularly negative consequences for the retention and progression of women in science, which the organisation recognises

6.      There are both personal and structural obstacles to women making the transition from PhD into a sustainable academic career in science, which require the active consideration of the organisation.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Research, Science Funding, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Numeracy

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Athene Donald

Do we have a numerate workforce? I’m afraid it is far too obvious the answer is no. I’m not just talking about the relatively low numbers of students taking maths A level, as detailed here in the recent Royal Society report on the transition to HE, but a much lower level of general numeracy allowing people to use the calculations they need to make their way through life: making sense of interest rates and mortgage repayments; working out how far their pay will stretch when it comes to thinking about a summer holiday; or, for a builder or dress designer, working out how much material they need to complete a job.  Not exactly rocket science, not needing calculus or complex numbers, just confidence to manipulate a few figures and possibly the odd formula.

A few months ago, my fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry wrote a plea for maths A level to be seen as a necessary prerequisite for entry to biological HE courses, and followed this up with an opinion piece in the THE. Both these pieces stimulated a huge amount of discussion, predominantly supporting the idea.  These ideas are relevant to the more skilled part of our population, those who are going on to science in higher education. For the population at large the problems are different and even more fundamental. This week saw the publication of a report (downloadable from here)  on maths education more broadly by a group led by Carol Vorderman and commissioned by Michael Gove and David  Cameron when in opposition, but likely to be all the more influential now that they are in Government. It is a report which is well worth reading in full, because it is full of sensible suggestions about how to make all our school-children functionally numerate and what could be done to break the current vicious circle our maths education finds itself in.  Its messages are closely aligned with other recent reports including the Royal Society one I allude to above, and one launched in June by ACME (the Advisory Council on Maths Education).

The key recommendations from the Vorderman report are clear, and the one that the media homed in on is one of the most important: with the school leaving age being raised, everyone should continue with some form of maths education until they leave school. What form that should take will depend on ability and future aspirations, it most certainly cannot be one-size-fits-all (as unfortunately the current GCSE essentially is).   Currently, as cited in the Vorderman  report, we have a cohort of school children more than half of whom cannot correctly work out what the sum 1/2 + 1/4  equals. The most common mistake is an answer of 2/6, showing a complete lack of understanding of what fractions are all about. I would hazard a guess that give a child an apple cut up appropriately, and a far higher proportion would instantly grasp what the correct answer was, so it is to a large extent an ability to deal with the abstraction of an equation that is missing.

That these children leave school with skills so woeful that they will be let down by them in almost any job is not going to help this country out of the economic straits it’s in. There is an interesting commentary in the Vorderman report giving information provided by the Fashion Retail Academy, not – you might think – an obvious place for lack of maths skills to be a problem.  But inevitably it is. Ranging from working out the necessary square metre space in stores to calculations of percentages in profits and sales reductions, anyone in the retail industry will face the same problems. School-leavers may fancy a career in fashion is all about clothes so who cares about the maths, but they’d be very, very wrong.

To take another part of the landscape, if someone wants to train to be a primary school teacher, all they need is a grade C at Maths GCSE (which can in fact be obtained even from the lower tier exams). After that, they might get a tiny bit of training in teaching arithmetic in their ITT (initial teacher training), but there isn’t room for much in that crowded curriculum, so essentially their numeracy skills will remain – optimistically – at that GCSE level. In many cases they may forget much of what they knew, and they are likely to lack confidence (not unreasonably) that they have a firm enough grasp of the concepts they need to teach maths/arithmetic even to young children, perhaps particularly to young children. But teach it they must. Somehow they are supposed to know enough to put the next generation of school children’s understanding onto a firm footing. Inevitably many of them find this dreadfully hard, but too often there is no one to turn to for advice. Putting a specialist maths teacher into every primary school would help; ensuring a higher degree of confidence in their own abilities in every teacher’s mind would be even better. If post-16 maths education (with different strands for different end-points) were mandatory to help students retain what they have already learnt through more practice with basic number-handling skills or stretching them a bit further, then for the primary school teachers of tomorrow just as much as for those going on into degrees in history, business and other non-STEM subjects, there would be clear benefits.  This might also go some way to solve Stephen’s identified problem of biologists entering university with inadequate maths skills.

However, for all its sensible suggestions it may, as previous similar reports have done, end up simply gathering dust on the shelf.  Mike Baker, the BBC’s Education specialist reporter said on his blog

However we have been here before. Sir Mike Tomlinson warned years ago that GCSE maths and English failed to provide functional numeracy and literacy. The subsequent reforms for Diplomas, and the associated requirement that all pupils  needed to pass at Functional Skills to gain the Diploma, would have sorted out this problem. But the current government has allowed the Diplomas to wither on the vine.

Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for something radical to be done which could solve a number of problems: for STEM departments in HE where we aren’t impressed by the skills incoming students have; adequate support of those schoolchildren who find maths difficult and for whom the current system is letting them down as they enter the workforce; and those of employers who are frustrated that their workforce are so ill-prepared for the tasks they need to complete. The one thing that perhaps makes me marginally optimistic is the comment Michael Gove made to me before his recent speech at the Royal Society. He said that, as he had been educated in Aberdeen and gone through the Scottish Highers system, he appreciated the fact that he had taken maths at Higher level and felt the breadth of education he had obtained was very important. Indeed, the very fact he had come to the Royal Society to talk about education in STEM subjects was in itself a very positive message. But I, as no doubt many of you, will be watching this space to see what actually transpires.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Whoever Said Life Is Fair?

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Athene Donald

Any parent will be familiar with a child’s endless whine that ‘it isn’t fair’ – that their sibling got the larger slice of cake or that their classmate’s bedtime is half an hour later than theirs. And the parent’s logical repsonse is to say something along the lines of ‘whoever said life is fair?’ That life isn’t fair applies just as much at every stage of life, and all you can do is the best you can with the hand you’ve been dealt with: the genes and the parental upbringing; the teachers you encounter at school and university; the state of the job market when you graduate and so on. These are things that you have no control over so that your only option is to try to cope with the situations in the ways that seem best at the time and without 2020 hindsight. Plus plan and guess what the probabilities of certain outcomes may be. With that preamble, I am now going to risk getting thrown off the Occam’s Typewriter website by posting a response to my co-blogger Jenny Rohn’s latest moving implicit plea to research funders about the rules they impose on fellowship applications. Whilst having great sympathy for her own story, and those of postdoc B that she describes, I think the counter story needs to be told from the view of the organisation. I am sure there is a biological term describing the good of a collective society at the expense of the individual, be it an ant or whatever. There is an element of that organisational good versus the individual researcher’s fate going on here. So, apologies in advance to Jenny and all of those early and not-so-early career researchers who find themselves in horrible situations due to intransigent research funders, but I’m going to put the other side of the story and hope I am not too vilified.

Research funders want to fund the ‘best’, but the reality is there is no single metric to describe this. I note the emphasis on first author papers in the biological sciences as a key parameter in Jenny’s post; in the physical sciences I think this is less baldly used and there will be many additional factors which are (sub-)field specific. Nevertheless, judging what is ‘best’ is a tricky business to say the least. I will now give a little background not to URF’s (whose panel I have never sat on), but to the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships – also from the Royal Society – whose panel I chaired for 6 years. These were initially set up to fund women, specifically. Set up in 1994, it awarded fellowships to those who had maybe taken time out for a family or who had had other non-traditional career paths. It also aimed to provide flexible support for young women at a time when they might be thinking about starting a family, but hadn’t yet done so, so that they had the confidence to take the necessary time out (this was at a time when most fellowships weren’t very helpful about this) and not merely drop out completely because it all seemed just too difficult. By the time I took over as chair in (I think) 2001, the world had moved on. That a fellowship could be advertised only for women was regarded as legally dubious and over the next few years the eligibility criteria constantly changed – to everyone’s confusion – as the Royal Society tried to find ways of making the criteria clear, legal but (if possible) still conform to the original intention of the scheme. It simply hasn’t been possible to fulfil this latter, however. You cannot advertise a fellowship for a woman who is hoping to start a family in any watertight legal way (“you mean you thought you wanted a family when you applied in 2007, but by the end of the fellowship you’d changed your mind? Give us the money back!” – would hardly work). The law may or may not be an ass, but it makes things very tricky.

One year the Dorothy Hodgkin scheme had no eligibility criteria whatsoever other than early career (exactly what that was defined as at the time I can’t remember): the numbers went up massively and, on the physical sciences side, now had a very large proportion of men applying, fewer on the biological side. It was all but impossible to winnow that down ‘fairly’, based on the evidence we had in front of us, to the single figure number of fellowships we had to give out (applications to fellowships ratio I recall as being something of the order of 30:1). Did the ‘best’ win? Impossible to tell. The one consolation one always has – as an organisation, not as an individual – is that although the outcome has an element of luck in it, one can be sure that all those appointed were thoroughly deserving. The fact that another, let’s say 10%, would have been equally deserving is just depressing – for the organisation as well as the individual of course – but at least one knows the money has been well spent.  After that the Royal Society moved back to tighter criteria to try to make sense of the situation, which is where the current rubric of needing a ‘flexible working pattern’ comes in; it is a way of encouraging junior women to apply without being restrictive, and means that male parents are just as welcome (a topic people may feel strongly about one way or the other), or people with health problems, caring for others with health problems etc. It doesn’t fulfil its original objective perfectly, and maybe it shouldn’t, but it does at least go in something of the right direction and the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellows are predominantly, but not solely women. It is worth pointing out that changes to the scheme were not well received by the community; despite all the good intentions and legal necessity for the RS to act like this, people got cross that a simple ‘woman-only’ fellowship appeared to have been taken away and, I suspect, assumed the worst about the RS’s motivation.

For the URF’s you can imagine a similar situation. Here the restriction is on years’ experience. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and somewhere that is legally watertight which is why it is so hard to deal with the sorts of situations that Jenny described (it is possible some private funders feel less constrained in what they can do than organisations receiving public money). If you start making exceptions, based on whatever good intentions, you immediately run into problems. If you don’t have a limit on years’ experience, then the committees would be swamped even more than they currently are. The numbers applying are huge and, despite what one might anticipate and Jenny and the comments on her post indirectly imply, women appear to be having a slightly higher success rate than men currently. Whether this applies equally to women with and without children I have no idea, but URF rules make it straightforward for women to take time out to have children while holding a fellowship and also return to work part-time if they want. Many women do just that.

Given the immense amount of time spent on each application, by the applicant primarily of course, but also by the administrators of the scheme, the referees and the panel, widening the potential pool by relaxing criteria isn’t going to lead to a fairer let alone more cost-effective scheme. BIS, who are the primary funders of the fellowships I talk about here, want to see wise use of tax-payers’ money and removing all restrictions, say, for any fellowship scheme, would probably not be seen as wise whilst simultaneously creating an impossible burden of work which still wouldn’t resolve many of the issues that Jenny addresses. More applications inevitably will mean more randomness. As it is, trying to rank individuals who have variously (as in the Dorothy Hodgkin scheme) barely finished their PhD in comparison with those with a couple of postdocs under their belt is well-nigh impossible. Extend the eligible number of years further and the impossibility of realistically comparing apples and pears would just become even more obvious. This applies equally to the URF scheme. Would it be fairer? I don’t think so.

So, regrettably, however much one may sympathise with the plight of postdoc B, from the point of view of the organisation awarding the fellowships what is happening is not unreasonable. The competition rules are set to encourage a well-defined cohort who have the potential to be the scientific leaders of tomorrow.  As it is, the numbers of applications are huge and the workload on everyone involved in the decision-making process equally substantial. Injustices will inevitably be done, but probably not as systematically as Jenny implies: after all postdoc B would have been eligible to apply for a Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship at the end of her 2nd postdoc and got independence that way, rather than waiting till the end of the third one to aim for a URF. Let me assure the community of anxious postdocs out there, no funder wants to disadvantage any group, or be unfair or unreasonable in its judgements and that is why criteria are constantly tweaked to try to overcome any inadvertent pitfalls; any panel most certainly will factor in circumstances, including career breaks but also how adventurous an individual might have been in changing fields (relevant to postdoc A) and the planned research proposal, as a decision is reached. On the other hand, funders have to be pragmatic and set criteria which lead to manageable pools of applications. They know all individuals who make it through the process are worthy winners. They also know there will have been equally worthy individuals who lose out. No it isn’t fair, but it may be doing the best that can be done with the money available.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Science Funding, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 73 Comments

Do You Recognize this Person?

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Athene Donald

Since it is the vacation, and few committee meetings are being held, I thought now might be a good moment to revisit the characteristics of Committee Chairs I promised a little while ago . Given the timing, my colleagues are least likely to think I am referring to any one in particular in anything I write, because I won’t have been shut away in a room with them for extended periods any time recently. The classifications have been helped by the range of comments that earlier post got, but no doubt you can come up with even more variations of people you would far rather were never allowed to be in charge of anything that you are involved with. I should add, anyone I describe here is entirely fictional and not based (at least particularly closely) on any person, dead or alive, although my thoughts will undeniably be prompted by an amalgamation of strands of many individuals I have met over an extended career. So, disclaimer out of the way, here I go.

The Benevolent Dictator Chair has many things going for them. They know what they want, and they intend to get it. But they also know that folks must be allowed their say, to get things off their chest so that they feel better whatever final decisions are taken. So, meetings may be run quite effectively because it is so carefully orchestrated to reach the appropriate end point. The chair will have decided the night before over a nice glass of wine what this end point is, as they read through the papers. These people are pretty organised, so they will have read the papers and know how to marshal the arguments to achieve this end point. As long as your view and theirs coincide all is hunky dory. If you wish to argue you may do so, and they will say

how very interesting

and

you raise some important points,

but you won’t actually make any dent in their original plans. Once you know this is their modus vivendi you may decide it isn’t actually worth saying anything at all, but on the whole I think that’s the wrong strategy. You may make no immediate impression, but they are in fact quite likely to work out if you are smart (by which I probably mean useful to them in the months ahead), and so you can at least affect some future situation, even if not the current one.  However, if you go at them too hard their benevolence may start to crumble, at which point they may start huffing and puffing.

This may start to make them resemble the Passive-Aggressive Chair. This person comes in two variants when in charge of a meeting. There is the one who is all mildness as long as everything is going smoothly; this person may in fact just let things drift and take their course without too much of a steer being given to the discussions, until they are directly challenged. At this point they get irate, red in the face and say things like

would you like to retract that remark?

or

I really don’t think there is any need to get personal

(although in all likelihood there is, and that is exactly why you are challenging them because drift is not a good way to run a meeting). The other variant operates the other way round. This person is always apparently ready for a fight, even when no one is trying to fight with them, and quick to complain about some other part of the system – the administrators, HR or IT services for instance. This bellicosity continues until they are actually asked to do something such as take the committee’s complaints to these people. Thereupon they subside, mutter something about perhaps it’s a little premature to make an official representation to said people and rapidly move on to the next item on the agenda.

The Invisible Chair also allows the meeting to drift. Indeed, that is all they do. Probably completely out of their depth, they may have found themselves in the hot seat because they were out of town when the committee was convened and so failed to extricate themselves from the responsibility, or because they were regarded as less of an evil than someone who was going to do things actively disastrous, as opposed to passively so (see for instance Chair with Favourites below). They are probably under-prepared, because they haven’t really worked out what it is they are meant to be doing; they are often rather timid and so can be manipulated by more Machiavellian members of the committee; and they tend to speak in an inaudible monotone so even if they are saying something wise they are unlikely to be heard, literally or metaphorically. No fun serving on a committee with such a chair because meetings can turn into dogfights where (s)he who shouts loudest wins the day, regardless of the sanity of anything they say.

The Waffling Chair is about as effective. This person may or may not know what they want and may or may not have sensible ideas about how to achieve it. But they don’t know when to shut up. They can talk for 80% of a committee meeting, sending everyone else to sleep. One consequent danger is that no one pays enough attention to notice when daft decisions are implicitly being made; they’re too busy trying to play Sudoku on their laptops or (surreptitiously or otherwise) read their email. In this regard the paperless office has a lot to answer for: it is far easier to hide your complete lack of attention to what is going on around you when hiding behind your laptop than it used to be when committee papers were, well, paper. Doodling a caricature of the chair was so obvious in days of yore, a caricature perhaps of someone with smoke coming out of their ears.

That person might be the Impatient Chair. Nothing can ever be done fast enough. People really shouldn’t try and speak at their committee meetings, because it causes the gatherings to drag on beyond the 30 minutes they are prepared to allocate to them. Sometimes brief meetings can be wonderful, but not if insane decisions are taken because no one had a chance to air the pros and cons, consider unintended consequences (a rule of a university committee decision is that there are always unintended consequences) or to allow the representative from the group about to be affected, say the students, to open their mouths.

Chair with Favourites (not at all the same thing as a favourite Chair) makes sure that the people who agree with them get their way. They will ensure that these people always get the best of everything, perhaps more resources or a lower teaching load, but also that they get to swing decisions to make sure that they go on getting the best of everything. Unhealthy little cliques can form this way, so that Professor X asks Professors A and B to serve on their committee, makes sure that A and B get prime space or students, and then when Professor A chairs the teaching committee they can hope that their own stints in the practical classes are appropriately minimised. A system that basically stinks but is hard to overcome without a collective will for transparency from the senior management – difficult if X, A or B is the head of department….

Let’s turn to Micromanagement Chair. Oh dear, so boring the meetings they chair. It is hard to work your way down the agenda because everything has to be scrutinised so particularly carefully in case there is an i left undotted or a t uncrossed. Nothing gets delegated, no happy words such as

I’m sure we can rely on Dr N to deal with that so let’s move on to the next item.

No, it will be an endless anxious scrutiny over things that really never needed to be raised in the first place so that the minutiae take over and the important decisions are rarely considered.

Finally, there’s the Efficient Chair. I don’t really need to describe this estimable character because you recognize yourself here. This person does their homework;  knows what they’d like to achieve but is flexible if the arguments are persuasive; can quell that irritating Dr L – who has an appalling nasal whine and a touch of Asperger’s which means they aren’t aware of the effect they have on others by their moans – with a mere raising of the eyebrow. They always know who to go to for the missing bits of information, they factor in tea and comfort breaks and they never, never let a meeting over-run.

Why can’t we have training camps to turn everyone else into one of these miracles?

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 10 Comments