Putting Together and Taking Apart

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Athene Donald

A couple of my recent posts have looked at the needs of postdocs, their training (or lack thereof), aspirations and the need for them to take control of their lives. So it seems appropriate to spare a thought – or a post – for graduate students for a change. I spent a day this week in some relatively remote part of Cheshire at the student-organised meeting for the 3 Nanoscience Doctoral Training Centres (NanoDTC) based in Cambridge, Bristol and Manchester. These Centres are only in their second year, so that all the students involved were either in their first or second years of their PhD. This meeting brought around 75 students together to network, interact, present, listen, debate – and drink! Exactly what one would most hope to see at a conference and I certainly experienced it as a lively and thought-provoking meeting. (Although I could have wished the drinking might have taken place somewhere other than in the courtyard directly beneath my bedroom window, or stopped at a slightly earlier hour of the night. But that is my age speaking, and the fact that I had had a miserable cross-country train journey due to cancellations.)

These students had put the programme together themselves and between them they had come up with what appeared to be an excellent mix of ‘activities’. I was led to believe that the networking – other than that occurring in the bar or around posters – had consisted of some sort of It’s a Knockout look-alike event, involving amongst other things a bouncy castle, an obstacle course and too much sun. It certainly seemed to have had the effect of encouraging mingling of students from the 3 different centres; after all there’s nothing like watching other people being undignified for breaking down barriers. Beyond this and the standard diet of long talks by externals such as myself, there were many short presentations by the students themselves and a panel discussion, to which I will return. I only saw a handful of the student talks, as I was there for less than a day in total, but they were all of a remarkably high standard. I know it is invidious to single out individuals but nevertheless I will highlight two talks both (I think) as it happens from Bristol, one a first year, one a second year.

There was Michael Thomas, a second year, talking about his results on simulating gold nanorods dispersed in liquid crystals. He had some philosophical insights to share, as well as his results. Having set about his simulations with a clear expectation of what he was expecting, he got ‘what he didn’t want’; whereupon, instead of beating his head against a wall and getting miserable he declared instead this provided ‘unexpected opportunities’. I like that philosophy, it is something we all need to bear in mind when our research thwarts us. Although sometimes the unexpected really is the unmitigated disaster it looks at first sight, just occasionally it may kick-start a new and fruitful direction. Then there was Alex Robertson, a 1st year who (I would suspect) has not yet got a large number of results. At least, he didn’t talk about them. He gave a very thoughtful talk about interdisciplinary science, whether it was good or bad, should subjects be kept separate or badged together, what the implications of these questions are for nanoscience. He also flagged up my own hero Erasmus Darwin as an example of a Renaissance man who touched upon many fields and mastered so many (although Alex was more complimentary about Darwin’s poetry than I would have been). I was struck by this talk, not least because it fed very naturally into one of my own first slides, which I had called ‘Why I am not a Nanoscientist’. Just as I never wanted to call myself a food scientist, back in the days when I worked on foods, I have never felt a need to badge myself as a nanoscientist even if I work on nano-sized things in a particular project. As many chemists have pointed out previously, colloid science also largely deals with the nano-scaled and one could argue nanoscience is just one way of cynically rebranding some of that science.

Nanoscience/nanotechnology has flourished over the past decade, and has seen ring-fenced money directed towards it in the UK and elsewhere – hence the interest in rebranding. However, I have never been sure how productive this has been because the science of nano necessarily transcends different disciplines but still needs to retain them all. This topic formed a substantial part of the panel debate I took part in after lunch, along with David Tolfree and Peter Rodgers, chief editor of Nature Nanotechnology and chaired by fellow Cantabrigian Paul Barker. How useful would nanoscience undergraduate degrees be? At what stage is specialisation a good thing? As one might expect no overall conclusions were reached; it can of course be argued both ways, but the students engaged with it in a very mature way. (In passing I should note that it is a shame that my friend and colleague Richard Jones, erstwhile Senior Strategic Advisor for Nanotechnology to the EPSRC, wasn’t there for the discussion because he – more than anyone – has thought these arguments through, but he only arrived to deliver his talk the next morning. I suspect he would have disagreed with me, as it’s been an ongoing debate between us over the years…).

All the questions from the floor were admirably focussed and as I left the meeting afterwards I reflected on what an impressive atmosphere I had encountered at the meeting. Maybe this was a conference that the students felt they ‘owned’, as opposed to something they were passively attending merely to listen to old fogeys like me. In the organisation each of them had had some specific role assigned to them – something, which they can build on, something that may have helped them understand which ‘soft’ skills they possess or alternatively are never likely to be good at. Either way, the organisational roles will look good on their CV’s.

There was one final aspect that struck me, another side of the networking and dissemination coin and something that I can rarely recall having encountered in such a concentrated way at standard national and international conferences, namely the interactivity of the students – with themselves and also with me as the outsider. Firstly, this was demonstrated through the power of Twitter. Now that is something I never thought I would say, having started off a year ago seeing tweeting as rather silly; yes, I am eating my words. Having got in a temper about my outward journey I sent off a tweet moaning about the trains and stating where I was heading. A response came in from an interested prospective student asking me about the pros and cons of the NanoDTC’s, and enquiring if there was a blog about them. I mentioned this at the start of my talk and two students present subsequently responded to me through Twitter to be put in contact with the enquirer. I hope that led to a useful exchange (through the more lengthy medium of email). Secondly, having made some remark about the surprisingly low number of women in the audience, one of the more senior people present came up to me afterwards to discuss what they could do to attract more into the DTC. Thirdly, during the panel debate when we were discussing policy issues, I mentioned the internships available to work at POST, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology – two of my PhD students have taken these up, one of whom later went on to work in science policy. I subsequently got emailed (not tweeted!) by one of the students who wanted further information. And finally, in the panel debate I answered the question of what area of nanoscience I felt was under-rated by citing environmental issues such as water remediation; again, this was followed up after the meeting by a keen student emailing me to highlight an interesting website in the area.

So I salute the students. I would suggest this way of organising a conference is an excellent model for others to follow; I’d be interested to know if readers have experience of similar conferences, positive or negative. I hope the students enjoyed their conference as much as I did, and I wish them every success, whether they call themselves nanoscientists or not.

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science, Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Unlocking Potential?

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Athene Donald

Today I attended an event at the British Academy to launch a pamphlet produced under the auspices of the Smith Institute, a think tank which promotes progressive policies for a fairer society and named in honour of the former Labour Party leader John Smith. This pamphlet entitled ‘Unlocking Potential – Perspectives on Women in Science, Engineering and Technology’ deals with the perennial problem of the low numbers of women taking degrees in SET, entering the SET professions and possibly returning to the sector after a career break. It explores issues way beyond those I usually cover on this blog, considering a broad range of employment sectors other than HE as well as schooling and careers’ advice. Other organisations involved in the production of the report are the Institution of Engineering & Technology, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the Institute of Physics; overall it has been edited by the MP Meg Munn. The whole pamphlet (I contributed the chapter on the leaky pipeline in HE) can be found here so I won’t spell out the detail in this post. I would certainly recommend reading it. It makes an interesting read because of its breadth. Aside from my own, it has chapters on business, schooling, careers, returners, apprentices, work in engineering in Australia, the view of the employee and the view of early career researchers.

I was particularly struck by the following statement by Deidre Hughes in her chapter on career choices:

The urgent imperative is to open up new possibilities for careers aspirations to move beyond traditional stereotypes, while simultaneously providing UK plc with an increase in human capital in this sector.

At schools, few careers’ advisors have a background in SET subjects, which is in itself a problem. But the evidence is that information provided may tend to be very stereotyped. A recent OFSTED report highlighted that placements for work experience at school (typically around age 15) tended to be gender stereotyped, with few placements being facilitated which put girls into traditional male working environments, such as construction or plumbing. If schools are unable to provide information about SET careers, or encourage aspirations for girls to move beyond traditional fields such as hairdressing and childcare, we are not likely to see any substantial growth in girls entering SET – particularly the physical and engineering sciences – anytime soon. This was a message elaborated on by several of the attendees, the general feeling that careers’ advice is rarely helpful and – particularly from the engineers present – that there were too many companies that hid behind health and safety issues when it came to accepting children (boys and girls) for work experience so denying them the opportunity to find out what engineering actually is like.

However, another powerful and important message that came across, particularly from Arlene McConnell, the IET’s Young Engineer of the Year who also contributed to the pamphlet, is that we need to concentrate on the positive and not always focus on what is wrong. She is a passionate advocate for telling the world, and particularly the younger part, how exciting and creative the world of SET is. Perhaps that is a key message for us all to take away from the event as Meg Munn tries to put pressure on the Government to do a better job of mainstreaming the issue of women in SET, and reversing the damage done by cuts to the budget in this area in the last CSR.

Posted in Education, Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Unconscious Bias and the Impact on Women entering Science

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Athene Donald

This is text of the talk I gave at the Howthelightgetsin Festival at Hay at the weekend. The talk was misleadingly entitled ‘Saving Science’ by the organisers, trailed as how women can ‘save’ science, but it is really about how unconscious bias hinders women during their careers, and why we need to do a better job of nurturing talent amongst this half of the population.  The video of the talk can be found here.

What’s the first thing you think when you look at me standing here. Perhaps it’s you thought speakers would have more dress sense. Perhaps it’s that I don’t look like a scientist. But you will certainly have formed some snap judgement as to whether I am what you expect, which implies you have some expectations given what you have read about me that provoked you into buying tickets for this event (unless it was merely the very inaccurate title of ‘Saving Science, not the title I supplied!). We all make rapid evaluations all the time based on what we expect, and that in turn is based on preconceptions and bias.

This starts at birth: the way we handle and talk to newborns and babies is determined by their gender. You may have heard the story last week of a couple who are refusing to state what sex their baby – called Storm – is, to try to overcome this. Whether this will work or just cause confusion in the adults around as well as the growing child is of course unclear. So what do you expect a scientist to look like? Stereotypical images are often portrayed as mad scientists in white lab coats; more realistically one could consider leading scientists such as Paul Nurse or Martin Rees and of course, Brian Cox who is much on our TV screens. But almost certainly your first thoughts of a scientist will be male.

Can you even name a female scientist? Most of the population can’t, as revealed by a survey published last year, although there are some rather familiar examples. Historically one could cite Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin; currently Susan Greenfield and Jocelyn Bell Burnell are both very visible. The evidence is that most people implicitly think scientists are male, probably white.  This is an example of our unconscious bias.

Project Implicit at Harvard looks at many of the places in which unconscious bias lurks and tests the associations one makes. In terms of the underlying assumptions people make about science, 26% of people taking the test have been shown to have a strong association of male gender and science, and 28% a moderate association. And even I, when I do the test (which I’ve done several times) fall into exactly the same trap. Practically no one operates the other way round, associating women more strongly with science than men.

In itself that may not matter, but it does if this preconception starts spilling out into how job applications are viewed and interviews are carried out.  Let’s look at how this might impact on hiring processes, unless you are well aware of all this. It is possible to explore how men and women react to identical CV’s simply by changing the apparent name at the top of the application (for a science job). One such study (by Steinpreis et al ) showed that both men and women were more likely to vote to hire a male job applicant than a female job applicant with an identical record. So this is not about facts, it is about reaction to facts and we don’t collectively react in the same way to men and women.

Similarly, studies show there are different ways of writing letters of reference for men and women. A study by Madera et al showed that men were more likely to be described with ‘agentic’ terms and women with ‘communal’. This means that women are more likely to be described as affectionate, kind and nurturing whereas men were described as ambitious, dominant, and self-confident. Which are you more likely to hire?  But writing like this is almost certainly not intentional, it is just the way referees think about the individuals they’re writing about.

Both these two previous factors will affect who gets invited to interview. At interview itself a new set of complications come into play, exemplified by the statement ‘men are assertive, women are aggressive’.  A strong woman may well actually be marked down for doing things that would be approved of in a man. And even if an offer is made it is clear that women fall foul of attitudes to negotiation. Again there are studies which show this.  There has been a particularly interesting study from Stanford which gave female professors training in negotiation so that they could interact better with the administration when salary levels and resources were set. But the administrators weren’t trained to prepare for this and reacted extremely badly. Half the number of negotiations was successful for women when compared with men. Studies of videos of women asking for a pay rise show that men tend to penalise them, but not the men doing exactly the same thing. But, a lower salary at the outset of a career can propagate throughout its entire span to mean lifetime earnings are significantly lower for women.

None of this means that any of the actions are done deliberately – just because women are in some senses ‘victims’ doesn’t mean the men – or indeed senior women – are aggressors. We are simply all coloured by our perceptions. But we ought to be able to do better to make sure that ostensibly even playing fields really are even.

What about how well girls perform in tests? Conventional wisdom has it that girls are better at exams than boys. But there are exceptions, and stereotype threat is one factor in this. Stereotype threat is an idea due to Claude Steele, the black American psychologist. He first identified it in the context of black college students undertaking exams, noting that because black students are expected to do badly they tend to underperform, whatever their innate abilities. He has written an extremely interesting book on his – and other people’s studies – to this effect, Whistling Vivaldi. The same effects are found for girls and maths/physics tests.  ‘Everyone knows’ girls can’t do maths, so they feel the burden of this message and consequently underperform.  Set a maths test when girls are told it is actually to look at how students carry out problem-solving in general and they will do significantly better than when they are told it is to test their maths ability.  A similar effect is observed if senior citizens are given tests to do with memory. Depending on whether that is spelt out or if it is described in some other way, they will perform worse or better respectively. People appear to be much more suggestive than perhaps is anticipated.

The ‘cure’ for this, or at least a tactic that ameliorates the suggestion, is to have some sort of self-affirmation exercise in advance of the test, and this then apparently overrides the anxiety associated with the test. One recent study by Miyake in Colorado showed that getting students, girls in particular, to write about things they cared greatly about for a few minutes at the start of the year was sufficient to improve their physics test marks substantially throughout the entire year.

So far, these are fairly general findings about gendered differences and unconscious bias. So let me know turn to the specific issue of women in science.  In some senses I am working backwards through life, so let me now turn to the early years before any decisions are being made about careers or higher education.  As I mentioned earlier there is evidence that the very way adults interact with newborns is coloured by their gender, including the faces they make at the child and the way they handle it, boys being subjected to more rough and tumble from a very early age.  Everything about the way society interacts with children collectively seems to be pretty gendered.

For instance, let’s take advertisements for toys and the recent word cloud analysis. This showed that the two words used most heavily in advertisements for boys’ toys were battle and power, for girls the corresponding words were love and magic. Need I say more! Any girl who thinks she is going to sail through life on the basis of magic rather than power is in for a nasty shock.  What about subliminal messages – is it simply irony to dress your pre-teen child in a t-shirt that proclaims ‘I am too pretty to do maths’? Or if we look at the attempt Mattel has made to make Barbie more ‘modern’ we see that Barbie computer engineer is unrelentingly pink and cute.

What messages do the media convey with so few women science experts being wheeled out on mainstream science programmes? Even if the numbers of women are low so that they have to search out for them, do they have any sort of responsibility to try to find them? Indeed, as the blogosphere has been discussing at some length, where is the female Brian Cox? Where are the role models?  We should be deliberately trying to put out positive messages about women in science. For instance, we can propagate powerful images, as exemplified by those stunning black and white photographs the UKRC has produced each year to provide role models and encouragement to offset some of these negative messages. One can argue endlessly about Nature versus nurture; you can believe the Simon Barron-Cohen analysis that says there are more men at the extreme ends of essentially any parameter, and even that the ‘mean’ for intellectual or maths ability is shifted up for men versus girls, but that is irrelevant when it comes to the individual.  As a society we should be asking what are we doing that is hindering at least some girls fulfilling their potential in science?

The examples I have given above are all part of the reason why women may drop out or be forced out of science to a greater extent than men: people’s impressions, the ways hiring is done and the marks women score in exams being affected by stereotype threat, thereby weakening their applications. This has little to do with the women themselves.

Let me turn briefly to some statistics. Already by the time of starting at university we see massive imbalances in some courses: less than 20% girls on engineering courses, slightly better in computing and physical sciences, but around 70% in veterinary sciences and even higher in sciences allied to medicine.  But, once in academia the girls who enter the subjects may not stay there. For many different reasons they find the environment not to their taste. In chemistry, 30% of researchers starting out at postdoctoral level are women, but currently there are fewer than 10% at professorial level.  Even in biology we have only reached a level of around 15% professors. We have a well-documented leaky pipeline with a massive hole which needs to be plugged if we are to derive maximum benefit from the talented girls who enter university full of hopes and excitement.

The leaks have many causes – the issue of unconscious bias I have already addressed.  But many other causes have been identified. An obvious one is the hurdle of combining an active science career with child-bearing. Until too recently senior women were still heard to say upon occasion that it wasn’t possible to be successful and have a family – for instance one of the women elected to the Royal Society at the same time as me (and the one interviewed by the press) said exactly that upon election in 1999, although two out of the five women elected that year had indeed had children (including me).  This isn’t only a case of working practice (including the practicalities of flexible working) making the combination possible, but also of role models demonstrating it can be done.  At least we aren’t in the position the US seem to be, of expecting women to hide career breaks on their CV’s.

The working environment may also turn women off. It has to be said that science, not always incorrectly, is seen as ultra-competitive and needing long hours at the bench. Neither factor may appeal much to people of either gender, but perhaps disproportionately so to women. It isn’t clear that competition is necessarily helpful – much modern science is interdisciplinary and necessarily needs collaboration and teamwork. This doesn’t always seem to have percolated through people’s mindsets.  Numbers of women are improving, but at a glacial speed.

Why does this matter? Why do I think we need more girls entering the sciences and staying there? There are many answers, ranging from fairness to the individual to the good of society. Let me start with the latter. Many people have argued that diversity means exactly that – not just a diversity of constitution of boards or workforce or whatever, but also a diversity of approaches and mindsets. It has been claimed that companies with a higher proportion of women on their board fare better, so one could produce an economic argument for companies to employ more women scientists. But that does not mean there is a feminine science which is somehow different from men’s. Merely that women may approach problems in different ways and for the toughest problems you want to look at the questions in as many different ways as possible.

Secondly, there is a shortage of skilled workers in STEM, as reported by – for instance – a recent CBI study. If we are discouraging half the population from entering the workforce – or even university – in these areas, we are creating a massive and unnecessary problem for society. Finally, there is the issue of fairness for the individual. Is it reasonable that talented young women are not being assisted to fulfil their potential due to out of date thought processes and unconscious bias? None of this has anything to do with the issue of families and children, or even overt hostility, or harassment.  But, cumulatively, we are disadvantaging half the workforce in ways that are fairly systematic if unintended. I believe these factors matter for us as a society and for the individual. We all need to develop antennae to see when we are reacting in ways that are pre-programmed rather than due to the actual individual in front of us.

So, we as a community must do better. We need to start at the earliest stages – as parents, teachers and friends – to make sure we are not subliminally giving off messages that say girls can’t do science, engineering and maths. That it is OK for them to be interested in clothes or boys (or art or the media or whatever else takes their fancy) AND science, so that those whose interests lie in the scientific direction feel comfortable following their inclinations.  We need to be sure working practices don’t discourage women who do enter the scientific professions. That we support and encourage those who do, where necessary providing mentoring and confidence-building exercises; that we celebrate women who do succeed and ensure that young women can see visible role models. We need to get the best talent performing to the best of their ability.

And each and every one of us needs to scrutinise how we perceive those around us – be they women scientists or male nurses – to check our unconscious biases are not taking over our rational thoughts.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Making Hay

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Athene Donald

You know how it is with buses, you wait for ages and then 3 come along at once. Well that seems to be what has happened with me with debates. Not that I was consciously waiting for them, but certainly three have come along this week. The first – with Willetts – formed the basis of my last post. Then over the weekend I was involved in two in quick succession at the Hay Philosophy Festival, as I mentioned before.  I don’t know what I had expected from a Philosophy Festival, but I don’t think it was what I got. As a scientist I have – irony of unconscious bias perhaps, stereotyping philosophers without thinking  – imbibed the notion that philosophers are way smarter and naturally better at arguing/debating than me. I was therefore expecting to be challenged about every view I expressed, with the nuances minutely dissected. Well, no, that wasn’t what happened, and I came away feeling slightly cheated.

The first debate, chaired by Bryan Appleyard involved John Harris, Aubrey de Grey and Mary Warnock, the first two supporting the idea that increased longevity of life, and ‘human enhancement’ were desirable whenever possible; Mary and I opposed this view. The format of the debate meant that we each set out our positions for a few minutes and then got into the ‘debate’ proper. Having spoken second after Harris, I was delighted when Baroness Warnock started her own intro with ‘well I could just say ditto to everything Athene has just said’; at that point I realised not only was I talking comprehensibly, but my arguments carried weight and were philosophically and ethically logical (from which you will deduce that, up to that point, I hadn’t been entirely sure this would be so). However, as the debate proper got going there was very little actual engagement, in my view, with the concerns Mary and I expressed that everlasting life on earth did have its down side – for society as well as for the individual. The others seemed to believe implicitly that longer life was a good thing without question, and – as Harris put it – enhancement wasn’t enhancement if it didn’t make us better. But then didn’t seem to want to discuss what therefore did or didn’t count as enhancement, better for whom, or what the practicalities are.

I didn’t have time after the debate to follow up with any of them in more detail as I was instantly rushed off to the other debate I was involved with. Entitled ‘A Paradigm of Health’ this was meant to look at Western medicine in comparison with so-called Alternative Medicine. I had only agreed to do this if the debate wasn’t going to be about homeopathy, and had been assured that it would be much broader than that. In all honesty, it wasn’t. Two supporters of homeopathy versus Dylan Evans – author of Placebo which I would thoroughly recommend as a thought-provoking book – and myself. This debate I felt was even less satisfactory, with the chair choosing to steer us along her set list of questions regardless of how views were or weren’t developing. I guess in the end there was general agreement that the placebo effect was important and that the average NHS GP didn’t always have enough time to spend with patients to get a holistic picture of the problems presenting, but otherwise we didn’t really get anywhere. I was anticipating a defence of how people think homeopathy works – which I was ready to debunk – but the position didn’t seem to progress beyond ‘lots of people feel better after visiting a homeopath’, and citing unspecified clinical trials to demonstrate this ‘fact’.

So, I come away rather frustrated.  When offered the opportunity to hit the festival trail I thought this would be a good opportunity to get some science ‘out there’, as well as to challenge myself to participate in things I thought would stretch me.   Not having done anything remotely similar before, I wasn’t entirely convinced I was up to the task of the cut and thrust of debate, particularly when it came to questions of a philosophical bent. Instead of this, I think the kinds of discussion I frequently have with students or colleagues to thrash out some knotty issue are much more satisfying and valuable than set piece debates.  Then one does get true engagement, and a desire to get to the bottom of things rather than a restating of positions. At least for me. Of course, what I don’t know is whether the audience’s reactions were the same. Perhaps I did achieve in my aim of convincing the greater public that physicists can be articulate, for instance; perhaps they enjoyed just hearing different sides of an argument being discussed, even if no one shifted position or any sort of consensus was reached.  Maybe the debates I was in weren’t the best examples. I attended another one in the evening about mental health where things got much more lively – but then it turned out the two key people had been debating these same issues for at least the last 15 years, referring back to some meeting when X had said something with which Y disagreed and did X still hold that same position. Possibly old adversaries make better spectacles for debate.

I’m glad I went  to Hay. I am glad I have ticked another mental box, maybe put behind me the idea that debating is one of those things you have to have practiced from your school days on – at least for these sorts of debates if not for the House of Commons. I have reminded myself of the wise words I wrote on this blog earlier in the year, to the effect that you should give things a try because you never know how they’ll pan out. But I do regret that the discussions I got involved with were in essence superficial and I didn’t in the end find out if I have the mental agility to cope with the cut and thrust I thought went into debates. For me, a bit of homework (and I’d done a lot) was sufficient to get by with on this occasion. But who knows for next time.

I’ll write up the notes on my solo talk on unconscious bias for the next post, a talk misleadingly called by the organisers ‘Saving Science’.

 

 

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Career Progression and the Research Landscape

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Athene Donald

Career progression for postdocs is a key issue that affects the health of our science base. It formed the basis for a discussion with Science Minister David Willetts at the Royal Institution this week, an event hosted by Evan Harris as ‘guest lecturer’ at the RI, and tied in with the Scienceisvital campaign, created and spearheaded by fellow Occam’s Typewriter blogger Jenny Rohn. Jenny and I joined the panel (making it pleasantly balanced by gender). One outcome of the debate is that there will be an opportunity for comments raised both on the evening and through the feedback site to be pulled together by the Scienceisvital team and sent to Willetts’ office for further discussion, a step he positively welcomed in his closing remarks. I am not going to discuss the details of the debate, since this can be found in the podcast (plus a personal account from one attendee here) but want to discuss some wider issues in the context of funding that the debate raised in my own mind, and tie the discussion in with a talk I heard the next evening from Ottoline Leyser, who heads up the BBSRC’s training panel.

Postdocs see themselves, understandably, as at the bottom of the food chain. Jenny has written previously about the wastage she sees – not to mention the frustrations she and her peers feel – about the current system in which the pyramid of employment is steeply sloped.  The anxieties that these early career researchers feel arise from job insecurity, low pay and being exploited in some cases, by PI’s who might be only interested in large-scale paper-producing factories and not the well-being of any individual postdoc. Ottoline described this very well: instead of individuals at the postdoc stage being able to enjoy and share the discoveries of science she felt the machinery in which they were operating resembled a hamster wheel, with the consequences being a generation of disgruntled postdocs who not only felt the system had let them down, but also that any career choice other than academia represented ‘failure’.  Thus, postdocs who join a big team can see themselves as simply expendable data-producers, sometimes not even paper-writers, whose opportunity to gain first-author papers may be limited.  The knock-on effect when it comes to subsequent job applications are all too obvious. So, to use Jenny’s analogy of an ecosystem, those at the top appear to survive at the expense of gobbling up those at the bottom.

Ottoline’s suggestion to improve the situation? It may surprise readers to know the tool she sees as a way forward is the Pathways to Impact statement. By causing PI’s to think hard about the training element – and of course then deliver against it – she thought the current vicious circle which produces disgruntled PDRA’s who no longer necessarily even still enjoy the excitement of their science could be transformed. By disseminating the joys of their science to a whole range of users including the public and schoolchildren, the PDRA’s might be able to gain a wider perspective about the world beyond academia and acquire useful skills which any future employer might welcome.  Furthermore, this might encourage these same postdocs to recognize that jobs outside academia do not necessarily equate to failure, a view which I fear is one that PI’s may not only inwardly share (perhaps we need to validate the route we ourselves have chosen), but also convey explicitly or implicitly to those they employ. This is a disaster. For instance, the evidence that we need more inspirational teachers is STEM subjects is manifest, but if postdocs enter the teaching profession believing they have failed rather than that teaching is a challenge to be relished, we are dooming both the individual and the children they teach to an unsatisfactory fate.  I have written before about some of the other challenges: the PI’s must be open and honest about opportunities for progression, something not all senior academics are terribly good at; the postdocs themselves also need to take responsibility right from the outset.

Jenny’s solution to the pyramid is to create more permanent post-doc positions, something which was more common in the days when the phrase ‘the well-found laboratory’ meant something in terms of actual cash – in other words a model which has been lost in recent years.  However, some careful thought would have to be done about the numbers’ game to ensure this delivered what is intended in ways that are affordable, which doesn’t accidentally lead to shifting problems elsewhere or block off talent at a different part of the career ladder.  Nevertheless, it is clear such positions would be attractive to postdocs and PI’s alike.

However, to return to the Willetts debate, I would like to introduce another dimension. Margaret Harris from Physics World, an ex-atomic physicist, highlighted a different problem. She pointed out that atomic physics – an area undergoing something of a resurgence in research terms and accompanying grant funding – has consequently many graduate students and postdocs but, at the moment at least, few permanent positions to which they can aspire. There are many areas where grant funding may be currently flowing because of the scientific buzz about them but permanent positions are not necessarily being created in sync with this.  As Willetts was able to point out (conveniently for him), the Haldane principle means the government ‘does not’ step in to influence what research councils are funding. The research councils of course do not have any substantive influence over where lectureship posts are created in universities, though they may at the margins, or what distribution between sub-disciplines there is or should be . So, no one has responsibility to look at any developing mismatches between supply and demand by (sub-)field.  There is no joined up thinking which could ease the problem identified. We can all think of many fields where these problems arise (let alone ones which were once seen as sexy, but no longer are.  This means they may be unable to attract funding in the current different climate from when the posts were first created so faculty are left high and dry without funding, or indeed postdocs, although there are lots of staff). So, leaving aside the pyramid, we have in essence an inbuilt randomness about supply and demand. I have no solution to this to propose, I merely note the inherent instability in our employment sector and the disconnections between different parts of the employment landscape.

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