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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

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Research Leadership: Are we Getting it Right?

Posted on November 3, 2022 by Athene Donald

We are stuck in an academic world where the model of how science research is done appears not to have shifted much from that deemed appropriate fifty years ago. Back then (more or less when I set out, give or take a few years), there was – certainly in Cambridge – typically only one professor in a department, even quite large ones. This person was also usually also the head of the department, and often expected their name to go on any paper forthcoming from that department, a practice that was beginning to be phased out by my day. I doubt they had any training in leadership, or indeed in anything beyond science, but they expected others to fall into line with their beliefs. And they had a platform to make this happen.

HEPI have just published a report Research Leadership Matters: Agility, Alignment, Ambition, authored by Matthew Flinders. He argues that collectively we are not doing very well on leadership in academia. As Nick Hillman says in the introduction

‘Research leadership matters because without thinking seriously about the cultures and contexts in which researchers and research users can thrive, the massive investment in research and development funding that has been committed by the Government will not achieve its full potential and the chances of failure will increase.’

As the UK waits to see just how much alleged fat is being trimmed from budgets, potentially including recent uplifts in R+D funding, there will no doubt be much scrutiny in Whitehall about whether the community is able to deliver good returns on the public purse investment into research.

I think the concerns expressed in this HEPI report are well-founded and relevant. Leadership in academia is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Many people rise through the ranks due to their research excellence, regardless of their ability to work with large teams (even if they oversee such a team), to look beyond their personal silo or to value different perspectives. They may be ineffective in their interactions with others. Project management may not be a phrase they are particularly comfortable with. Perhaps they are still burying their head in the sands when it comes to EDI initiatives, letting bullying go by on the nod (or even be the perpetrators) or failing to make sure all who need it receive mentoring.

Reading the report prompted me to consider leaders of my own department over the years, and what leadership meant to them, and so I’ll start by briefly discussing the Cavendish Laboratory’s successes and failures on this front, before returning to the report. In the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, there has been a long tradition of strong men (of course) at the top. Ernest Rutherford was an interesting example. He was referred to as ‘the crocodile’ by his colleague, the Russian low temperature physicist Pyotr Kapitza. The nomenclature has been variously attributed to Kapitza’s alleged fear of Rutherford biting off his head, or alternatively ascribed to his booming voice which could be heard before his arrival, similar to the crocodile’s alarm clock in Peter Pan; or, yet again, that in Russia a crocodile represents the ‘father of the family, and it has a stiff neck and cannot turn back. It just goes forward with gaping jaws’. Whichever interpretation you choose to believe, you may want to consider whether that is the sort of person you want leading a major laboratory. Regardless, Rutherford certainly built a remarkable team around him who definitely got results, including Nobel Prizes for Kapitza, James Chadwick, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, to add to his own.

If you read the book by Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral, it becomes very clear how much Rutherford controlled who did what in his laboratory. The same might be said, although with less success, of Lawrence Bragg, his successor as head of the Cavendish. Bragg tried to stop Francis Crick studying DNA so that he could finish his PhD, which was meant to be about the structures of polypeptides and proteins. Bragg saw Crick’s pairing with Jim Watson contemplating (theoretically) the DNA structure, as a distraction which would stop Crick ever finishing his thesis. On this occasion the word of the head of department did not cut any ice with the student. One can consider whether the ends justified Crick’s means.

By the time I was studying for my PhD, Neville Mott had succeeded Bragg and, in turn, he had been succeeded by Brian Pippard. Pippard had strong views on many things, be they people, research or how Physics should be taught. That last aspect I met first hand as, not only did he lecture me on thermodynamics (a lecture course of which my prevailing memory is the way his eyebrows bobbed up and down as he spoke; the physics went over my head, I suspect testament to his idiosyncratic attitudes towards teaching.) but I vividly remember one of the questions he set in my final exams. It wasn’t about facts, or equations. No bookwork, but a real test of physical insight provided by a drawing of some bizarre collection of charged plates, with the instruction to draw in the field lines. I hadn’t a clue what the answer was, and I certainly don’t remember what I drew, merely that I erased many versions as I scrabbled around for insight. In hindsight, it was a perfectly fair question but at the time I felt, this is unreasonable: we hadn’t been provided with guidelines for how to answer such a question. I’d like to think my scientific understanding has improved since then, even if my memory of key equations has got worse.

Turning to his attitude towards research, as a new researcher, holding one of the initial batch of Royal Society URF’s and attempting to get my first grant, I remember his comments to me over a cup of coffee (he had by now become emeritus), questioning why I needed research funding at all. Although it may be paraphrasing his remarks, the intent was very much ‘I did it all with string and sealing wax, why do you need cash?’. Even those remarks pale into insignificance with later words he uttered to me about my research (by which time I was well-established and starting to move towards biology) that ‘things have come to a sad pass when people at the Cavendish study starch.’ It was demoralising, but at least I had the enthusiastic support in what I did of the man who by then was head of department, Sam Edwards, to counter such negativity.

More damaging for others during the Pippard era was the way he did not appear to be supportive of more junior colleagues applying for promotion; a couple of lecturers were stuck at that pay grade for years because of this, even as the Cambridge system opened up promotions. He had his views and he was going to stick with them. Mentoring the pair if he really didn’t think they were up to scratch (as others most certainly did)? I don’t think that crossed his mind.

Returning to the HEPI report, there are many comments with which I wholeheartedly agree but which will need some very fundamental rethinking of the current research paradigm. This is probably well overdue, given that the system has, at its heart, changed little even as the numbers involved and the world around academe have changed so radically. I will just pick out three of the recommendations which particularly resonate with me:

  • Facilitate Mobility: A ‘Discipline Hopping’ funding scheme and ‘Research Re-Entry Fellowships’ (or ‘Returnships’) should be piloted to facilitate inter-disciplinary and inter-sectoral mobility.
  • Reconfigure Resources – The vast majority of research funding is distributed on a highly individualised basis with little explicit thought to the cultivation of collaborative skills or the creation of innovative teams. This should be reviewed.
  • Reassess What Counts – Reward structures within universities generally do little to incentivise research leadership. It is critical that reward systems are better able to assess contributions to collaborative ventures and engagement in non-academic but research-related environments.

The world in which researchers work now is not about a lone genius beavering away on their own (think Henry Cavendish or Albert Einstein); it may involve many disciplines and large teams (think about how we are going to make progress regarding the energy transition); and we do not want to reward those who have no care for their teams, however good their results. Thus it is particularly serious when someone who has been rewarded with success and risen to the top is found guilty of bullying behaviour, as was the case both for Alice Gast at Imperial and Fiona Watt at the MRC. I note these are both women, and I do worry if somehow they are being held to a higher standard than men, because statistically I find it surprising we don’t hear more about men being found guilty of the same offence. In anyone, it is pernicious.

We need to pay more attention to leadership, but also to the shape of the whole academic pyramid, the competitiveness provoked by the structures, the incentives we offer for good – and bad – behaviour and the career trajectories we recommend to ECRs. Paying attention to leadership has to be part of the incentive structures we create, as we move beyond the metaphorical weight of papers or length of citation lists when we judge others. All metrics are in danger of bias, as highlighted by the Metric Tide and increasing numbers of research papers since. We must not allow the numbers to be followed slavishly.

I hope many in the community read the HEPI report and digest its recommendations. We don’t expect to be amateurs when we’re let loose in a laboratory, and that should equally be true when we are let loose on running a group, a department or a university.

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Does Life Get Better at Mid-Career?

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Athene Donald

Julie Gould and Nature Careers podcasts have been running an interesting series (Muddle of the Middle) on what it’s like to be a mid-career/middle aged scientist. A time when precarity is likely to be past, but reality of all the different strands impacting on one’s life come into sharp focus. I certainly didn’t find it an easy time, and looking back to the years of my 40’s, I still find it difficult to judge what the primary issues were, because they don’t present themselves as black and white and they were probably a messy tangle of different factors.

At this stage, many parents face the challenges raised by adolescent children simultaneously with ageing parents, all wanting attention, time and love, albeit often in incompatible ways.  Being part of the ‘sandwich generation’ is bound to be difficult, quite apart from the demands of the job. Elder care probably needs to be talked about more than it is. Particularly when parents live a long way away, the stresses can be huge. For women, the menopause may cause significant challenges. In my day, that wasn’t much talked about, except in dark comments about some woman who was regarded as being ‘difficult’. This difficulty was attributed, in my hearing, to it being ‘that time of life’. Unhelpful. For all I know the same was said of me but if so, they had the grace not to say it in front of me.

But it is exactly this issue of how one’s colleagues approach a woman in mid-life that interests me. Having done a straw poll of around 25 women, it seems to me the population is split between those who say things got worse, to those who say it was a great improvement. I have absolutely no idea what determines which camp an individual falls into – is it their department, their discipline, their character, even how they choose to dress, or is it simply a question of luck? – but I know I certainly fell into the former grouping. As I moved up the ladder, I decided I must have become more threatening, moving from someone who could be patronised to someone who wanted their voice and views to be heard and therefore apparently had to be slapped down or ignored, even talked over. Maybe those who were doing this to me had no idea of how they came across. Conversations in more recent years suggests this is likely to be true. Indeed, in one case, it seemed they actually thought my success was in part attributed to their leadership. Hmmm, is all I can say.

Of course, I must add ‘not all men’ (and let’s face it, in my case, there were no women involved as their numbers were so low). Other key individuals were massively helpful, supportive and understanding, but there were a number of years when those around me who set strategic direction and had the power did not want to accept that, as a professor and an FRS, maybe I had a right to be listened to and treated as ‘one of the boys’. I find this a difficult topic to talk about, because I have no desire to identify individuals publicly. Perhaps they may just not have known how to cope with a professional woman, when their interactions with women were largely limited to either girlfriends or mothers. I didn’t fit in to either heading so how were they supposed to deal with me? These days, I would like to think that men are more accustomed to female scientists being quite good at their jobs, as good as the men around them, and therefore they have more practice at being professional with them. However, in the straw poll of mid-career women I conducted, there were undoubtedly a number who identified with the idea that men were non-plussed and awkward when dealing with a woman in a leadership role, or who commented how it appeared they had become a threat as they became more senior, in ways that had not been so at earlier career stages.

On the other hand, there were other women who commented how nice it was to become more senior because they were no longer subjected to the same levels of harassment. What a damning statement about the world in which we live. I am glad to hear they had a better environment as they progressed, but the reality is a number of women will have been completely lost to the system by the toxicity they encountered. If they were lucky, maybe these women suddenly found themselves with power and kudos, and that all the academics around them listened to their wise words. Sadly, it may mean no more than that their situations were better than they had been, and they felt able at least to voice their opinions. I cannot tell.

The trouble is, there remain systemic problems for women. If they are bad enough, an individual may choose to walk away, never realising their dreams or their potential. If they get through the early stages, with or without actual harassment, then they will hit the mid-career problems faced by all researchers and identified in the podcasts, as well as those specifically related to the fact they are a woman. The recent article by Julie Jebsen et al in Nature Chemistry spells out where systemic problems lie in our current system of research funding, together with some recommendations for what can be done about them. It highlights many challenges that readers of this blog are likely to recognize. Funding is just one part of the problem, a very important part, but individual actions by those around remain a potent obstacle. Women in academia have been limping on for far too long, with slow improvements visible on a number of fronts. Yet too many obstacles remain. When I set out, and when I was mid-career, I kept thinking that the next generation and the next, would find themselves in an equitable environment. We are far from there yet.

 

 

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