Taking Flight (Pseudonymous or Not)

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Athene Donald

I have finally caught up with the debate at ScienceOnline2011 on ‘The Perils of Blogging as a Woman under a Real Name’ through watching the video of the session, recently put online. This was the debate that kick-started a lot of discussion on a variety of blogs (including from one of the panel members Kate Clancy) particularly around the combined issues of marketing one’s blogs, pushing oneself forward and asking for retweets through Direct Messaging. This aspect of the discussion prompted my previous post on Unwritten Rules. But here, now that I have been able to follow the full debate, I’d like to revert to the topic of the debate title. I’d also like to encourage others, be they active bloggers or not, and particularly women, to watch the debate and see what chords it strikes.

Rather obviously my own blog is not pseudonymous. I did this deliberately when I set out because I felt it was important to make clear who I was so that people could choose whether they thought my experiences/anecdotes and general thoughts were relevant, convincing or helpful. That I had been knocking around the university system for a while is clearly pertinent to what I write regarding committees and ways of tackling issues scientists, particularly academic scientists, face.  Naively, perhaps, I did not think of the downside of identifying myself. Other people’s experiences, as discussed on the video, suggest consequences might include receiving inappropriate, even hateful comments on one’s blog or in emails (including about appearance or other personal matters) or worse what appeared to amount to stalking.  Nor did I think about consequences in my job, but then (lucky me) I am not trying to get my foot on the tenure ladder nor am I on tenure track itself.  Part of what I wanted to do – in as far as I knew what I was going to blog about when I set out on the enterprise 9 months ago – was to share experiences of progressing through the system, prompted in part by a more junior (female) colleague’s response to something I said in conversation:

You mean that happened to you too?!

In other words, to dispel the illusion that being a professor meant that everything had been plain sailing all the time.

It never occurred to me, as an engineer on the video feared, that this would turn me into a ‘soft skills chick’ who could be looked down on because I wrote on top of my day job.  That this is a possible danger was reinforced for me by an intriguing talk Sunetra Gupta gave in Cambridge a couple of days ago for the WiSETI Annual Lecture. Sunetra has succeeded as both a novelist and a zoologist, with different home pages for these two facets of her life.  But she stressed that, particularly earlier in her career, she had faced hostility from people who failed to understand how she could try to combine the two strands, and  had been advised not to mention the novel-writing when applying for jobs. Scientists seemed to feel that she couldn’t be a successful scientist if she wrote novels, whereas those who approached her from the literary end believed that she couldn’t be a good novelist if she did science all day. Her firm answer was that she had to do both because they were so important to her, but clearly these criticisms discomforted her.

To return to the blogging debate, I entirely understand why some bloggers, male or female, feel it necessary, or at least desirable, to hide their identities. It so happens that my fellow Occam’s Typewriter bloggers are not in this category; we are all identifiable even if I’m the only one unimaginative enough to call my blog by my name; only one of us uses a psuedonym. Since we encompass all stages of the academic career from PhD (Erika Cule) upwards, it isn’t anything as simple as seniority which defines whether or not individulas feel the need to use a pseudonym although, as my comment on tenure track suggests, it is probably easier to be upfront with one’s identity the higher up the ladder one is.

I made two conscious decisions when choosing to use my real name: not to bring my family into the blog, or discuss personal matters; and not to discuss anecdotes in such a way that individuals involved can be identified. I have no desire to enter a blame game when castigating a particular course of action, to name and shame anyone. That serves, in my view, no useful purpose. Other bloggers, male and female, approach these issues in many different ways, depending on their aspirations and motivations.

However, what watching the video taught me is that I have been fortunate. My naivety about identifying myself has paid off, or at least not proved to be a problem, but I did not appreciate what I was doing when I set out. Often, way beyond the specific field of blogging, naivety has advantages. It makes the future less frightening, perhaps enabling one to seize opportunities that if you knew more about you might be less willing to tackle.  There is a fine line between courage and foolhardiness when it comes to accepting a challenge.  I have always believed (though not always acted upon that belief) that it is the things one doesn’t do that one lives to regret, because one is then left with that lingering suspicion of missing out on something that might have been satisfying or enjoyable – or progressed one’s career. The indicators are that women are more often risk-averse, less adventurous than men, more fearful that if they attempt something new they may fall on their faces and make a fool of themselves – another point the blogging debate touched upon. But throughout our lives, if we play safe, we may never get beyond the ordinary. If we analyse each opportunity to death, do the sums (consciously or otherwise) so that the ‘play safe’ option always wins, then we are defeating ourselves.

As with entering the blogosphere, I suspect I have been far too unwary in many of the decisions I have made during my life. Sometimes I have lived to regret them, but remarkably infrequently.  Often I feel that it has been the trivial matters I have agonised over, whereas  I have made large leaps of faith without even noticing I was doing so at the time, which probably points to some fundamental failure of internal judgement. But too often individuals, not only women but perhaps more of them than men, don’t feel able to jump off the edge off the cliff believing that their parachute really will open and let them take flight serenely.  My advice would be that constantly shivering at the edge will itself be at least as likely, if not more so, to lead to bad outcomes – be it disappointment, resentment or stagnation – than taking the risk that seems so  terrifying. Writing a blog under your real name is perhaps a good place to start practicing flying!

 

Posted in Communicating Science, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , , | 19 Comments

Chinese Whispers, Truth and the Media

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Athene Donald

A couple of years ago, when I won the L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science prize for Europe, L’Oreal asked me to prepare various bits of material for press releases and other publicity. Their initial brief press release mentioned both that I did work relevant to prosthetic devices (true in so far as I work on cell-substrate interactions) and that my research was relevant to Alzheimer’s Disease (true in so far as my work on protein aggregation has shown that similar states of supramolecular aggregation can be found in the milk protein beta-lactoglobulin and the protein fragment A beta 1-40). Both statements are therefore plausibly correct, although even at the time I would have liked to reduce the weight attached to them but was persuaded otherwise. By the time this was translated into the first publicity for the prize, in the Observer, it read

A British professor whose work in soft matter physics could lead to better hip replacements and early tests for Alzheimer’s disease has won one of five worldwide ‘laureates’ recognizing exceptional women scientists.

Since then, I have continued to be badged with these two applications of my research. This is of course somewhat my own fault. For instance the title of the talk I am giving at the end of the month at the IOP is ‘Alzheimer’s Disease and Yoghurt: a Physicist’s Exploration of Proteins’ and was the trigger for getting onto Start the Week (discussed at the end of a previous post). But note in that title, and in anything I will say in my talk, there is nothing to suggest I am working on early tests for Alzheimer’s Disease since it wouldn’t be accurate to say so. I’m not.

However, evolution of what I apparently do has continued. In this week’s Guardian it is said of me [that I am]

An expert in the structure of “soft” matter, Donald researches unconventional areas for a physicist – such as revolutionary treatments for Alzheimer’s.

So, by small but oh-so-important modifications I have gone from

• Doing some in vitro experiments which show a similar state of aggregation in very different proteins including one known to play a major role in Alzheimer’s Disease, coupled with a collaboration which has shown these aggregates are seen in the brain of patients who have died of Alzheimer’s (my version, and therefore ‘accurate’);
to
• working on early tests; (according to the Observer in 2008)
to
• researching revolutionary treatments for Alzheimer’s (this week in the Guardian).

This is deeply worrying. I am sure I have never laid claim to doing anything that might be a treatment for Alzheimer’s, revolutionary or otherwise, or even that I am thinking about working on early tests. If I had indeed made that progression since the first documentation was gathered for publicity in late 2008 to ‘revolutionary treatments’ it would be truly remarkable. But the newspapers simplify and want to make good copy. In the most recent case, I knew nothing about what the Guardian was planning and writing until I discovered from Twitter on the day itself that I was in the newspaper as part of their celebrations for International Women’s Day. Not much I can do to correct the inaccuracies in a case like that. However, it leaves me very uncomfortable that virtues and skills I do not possess are being attributed to me.

In so far as the media stories here are not really trying to talk about science per se it probably doesn’t actually matter. These were, for better or worse, stories about me as an individual, and more particularly me as a woman scientist, one who

is passionate about being a role model

(again from this week’s Guardian).

Even that is not entirely accurate. I am glad that by being a successful scientist who also happens to be a woman I can act as a role model for women, and I’m passionate about what I do (or I wouldn’t be doing it, even if, as I’ve said before, I am not a fan of the word passion), but I have not set out to be a role model, driven by that as my passion.

However, if these were articles about my science I am not sure that I would have confidence they would be any more accurate about what I do. Therein lies the problem. I, like many another scientist, have had bad experiences with the media. In my case this was many years ago when my attempt to put my science into simple language led to it being trivialized in a way I found far worse than annoying. It put me off trying to engage with the press for more than a decade. I am now a ‘reformed character’ who wishes to do my bit to demonstrate publicly that science is exciting, and to make the science I do seem relevant to the public’s general lives, because it is. But, even without these stories being hyped up so far as to make it look as if I’m going to cure Alzheimer’s tomorrow, they still jar with my sense of truth, and I always want to add a sentence or two of caution and precision so that what is written really does accord with what I’m doing.

Although I can write this post based only on my own personal experiences, I am sure it illustrates a larger issue that others will have encountered. There is an unfortunate tension between scientific accuracy and journalistic snippets. I suppose that is why I’ve come to believe media training is very important but what I am describing here cannot be solved by training the scientist. In my case this is a saga of propagation of inaccuracies by people who, I’m sure, are not and would not regard themselves as scientists: they are not aware that they are in essence playing Chinese Whispers with the facts.

Posted in Communicating Science, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Life on a Bicycle

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Athene Donald

It is a particular joy about life for many of us in Cambridge that we don’t need to rely on a car, or indeed public transport. Cambridge is a city whose size and terrain makes cycling feasible, and whose drivers are well enough inured to the idiocies of some cyclists that they can generally avoid colliding with them. I’d like to think it was the visitors on their hire-bikes who have bad habits in this regard, but suspect some locals are as un-road-savvy or just plain selfish in their ways as any visitor. Cycling makes us feel green (in the nicest way), that we are both doing our bit for the environment and simultaneously keeping fit. The latter may be overridden for those (not me, sandwiches at the desk I’m afraid in my case) who mainly use their bikes for nipping into college for a good lunch; the former may be not very true if the rider is also committed to a car for chauffeuring small children around. Although of course, for them, that lovely day will come when the kids get their own bikes and can (safely, one hopes) be let loose to get to school and activities by their own means.

For me, the bicycle gives me my freedom. It is the means to get from the Physics Department, situated out to the west of the city around a growing array of new university buildings sprawling over previously delightfully rural fields, to all points further east: to ever-more-frequent committee meetings in the centre of town, to the station for (too) regular trips up to more committee meetings in London and Swindon, or even out as far as Addenbrooke’s Hospital, nearly 5 miles away, to build up links with biomedical researchers. If I had to rely on a car life would, in my view, be much more awkward. I would like to say that with a bicycle unlike a car, parking is not a problem. Unfortunately this would not be true. Finding a cycle rack, or even a spare bit of wall, in the centre of town can often be a problem. Finding space to lock up your bike at the station – particularly if you arrive after about 10am – is a nightmare. There appears to be a collective failure of will to resolve this problem, even when so much money is being expended on renovating the rest of the infrastructure around the station for the oft-delayed guided bus. Nevertheless, it is almost certainly worse (and more expensive) for car-drivers.

I suppose one can get used to anything. I have known keen cyclists who have broken an arm and adjusted to life on two feet or becoming reliant on buses and taxis, but merely having a puncture for 24 hours is enough to provoke anxiety in me. My life fits to the schedule of bike-ride timings I have worked out, and I am too much a creature of habit to enjoy this pattern being disrupted. Occasionally I have turned up to important meetings looking less like a professor and more like a tramp, having been caught in a cloudburst without my waterproof trousers to hand. Sometimes, particularly if I’m running late and cycle at speed out to the Addenbrooke’s site, I arrive somewhat red in the face. But industrialists and research council employees can stereotype me as an eccentric academic and I don’t lose much face; my fellow academics have probably done the same themselves on many an occasion and so barely notice.

The bike-ride is my daily dose of sanity when I can briefly smell the air, fresh or otherwise, and watch the changing seasons. I can day dream a little (but not too much or the drivers get annoyed) as I organise my thoughts for the day ahead, or ponder on what has gone right or wrong during the day just finishing. My ride from home to work, a mere 12 minutes, enables me to tick off a few birds en route (today I heard a green woodpecker and saw a goldfinch, small moments of pleasure before the onslaught of decision making for the day, or confronting the email mountain). I would hate to lose that space and be forced to use my car (which sits in the garage in a lonely way) or double or triple the time allocated to ‘travel’ if I had to walk. But what a luxury not to be condemned to commute by public transport! I pity those who commute into London each day on crowded trains or have no choice but to sit in long traffic jams on choked roads such as the local A14.

My trusty bike is also well provided to permit me to shift surprisingly large amounts of work/luggage around (how many of you have read Quentin Blake’s entertaining Mrs Armitage on Wheels? That’s how I feel about my bike.) I have a huge basket at the front and a place for panniers at the back. And I tend to use this capacity to the full. It makes the bike very heavy, but since the city has few hills – the worst I am likely to have to cycle up is that at Garrett Hostel Bridge which, by any other city’s standards is a mere molehill – this is not really a problem. However, I am aware, as I heft my bike around, up steps and into those annoyingly high bike racks, that this cannot go on for ever. I am not as strong as I was, age will be catching up with me all too soon if it isn’t already, and I may have to face a future where I cannot any longer rely on this brilliant mode of transport and its accompanying freedom. I should make the most of being fit enough to enjoy the healthy and green benefits my cycle confers before arthritis or other infirmity forces me to relinquish one of my life’s small pleasures.

Posted in Cambridge life, Life in Science | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

Do we want to ‘feminise’ science teaching?

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Athene Donald

This week two rather different (scholarly) articles about women/girls and science were brought to my notice. One, a study of 14 year old schoolchildren began

‘Girls are more interested in studying science if topics are presented in a female friendly way.’

Or, as the draft press release I saw and which I was being asked to comment on screamed in a slightly more newsworthy way

‘Feminine’ Science Catches Girls’ Interest…..When scientific concepts in physics, information technology, and statistics were presented in a female friendly way – as for example relating to online shopping or cosmetic surgery – the mean level of girls’ interest rose. However, the boys’ interest in these topics simultaneously decreased.

(Summary of the article here; the full article requires a subscription).

The second article dealt with an older age group, those already at university (in the States), and considered the response of students to the gender of their instructors, and suggested

Importantly, women’s own self-concept benefited from contact with female experts even though negative stereotypes about their gender and STEM remained active.

In this case, the assumption is that the young women are so ambivalent about pursuing science that they need to have female role models in the form of their instructors to ‘inoculate’ them against the negative connotations of girls+science (the title of the piece ‘STEMing the Tide: Using Ingroup Experts to Inoculate Women’s Self-Concept in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)’ makes very clear what their interpretation is).

(A summary of this article can be found here; again the full article requires a subscription.)

Both these articles, coming from the broad literature of psychology, consider specific examples of stereotyping including self-stereotyping, and by implication stereotype threat that I wrote about before and which has been much discussed elsewhere (see Claude Steele’s book Whistling Vivaldi). The basic premise is that girls see science in ways that threaten their self-image and so they turn away from it. But they can be encouraged to change this perception by appropriate external interventions: in the first case by the examples and manner in which the underlying science is taught, in the second by role models providing a positive counter-example.

When asked for a quote about the first study I was at first a bit perplexed. Superficially, of course it is good to do things that will encourage more girls to stick with science, but then I began to wonder at what cost. If my 14 year old self had been presented with teaching about lasers in the context of cosmetic surgery as was being proposed, I would have been completely uninterested by the case studies presented and simply seen it as pandering to the readers of Hello, had such a magazine existed. Moreover, it could have backfired and caused me to lose interest. I cannot tell how atypical that reaction might be, particularly amongst practicing scientists, but it seems to me that once again we are up against the problem of trying to find ways of teaching science to a mixed cohort of potential scientists and non-scientists. By teaching science in ways that may increase the number of girls who stick with it a bit longer, would we also be simultaneously losing some boys (as indicated by the study) and those girls who might already be switched on to science and able to cope with standard teaching? Would that ultimately benefit either science or more generally the population? I have no answer to that question. It is related to Alice Bell’s recent post about Science Education for All in which she argues that

‘school science should be for the many who do not take science further, as well as the few who do’ .

I absolutely agree with that sentiment, but I am not as convinced as she is that it is possible to teach the same science lessons to all 14-16 year olds in a way that will satisfy each and every one of them to achieve this goal. I don’t believe this is a case of separating out future scientists and non-scientists (as she says, at 14 they won’t know which category they fit in) or using Michael D Young’s categorization of ‘pure scientists, applied scientists and failures’. I think it is a distinction between those who are engaged and wish to be stretched against those who see science as a necessary evil or who are struggling. There will be more in the former category than simply would-be scientists. The latter are ones for whom some contextual ideas about science – which could include cosmetic surgery, but should include as wide a range of examples as possible – as well as ideas about risk, statistics and methodology may be more appropriate than formal equations or detailed pathways and mechanistic ideas.

The contextualization is what the first paper is concerned with:

Thus, if girls were interested in science and if they engaged in genuinely masculine subjects, they would threaten their own self-perception as well as their self-symbolization as feminine: prototypical representatives are primarily male, and – with an emphasis on masculine topics – scientific subjects have limited personal relevance for girls during adolescence when they develop their sense of being a woman. It then follows that the answer to the question, ‘How can we make scientific topics personally relevant and subsequently interesting?’ is to present scientific topics in a context that can be considered to be feminine.

In my idealistic view, a much better solution to the problem identified here would be to reduce the early socialization of children in which young girls are encouraged to play with Barbie dolls (the dolls who presumably would be clear targets for cosmetic surgery at a later stage of ‘life’) whereas boys get to build rockets from Lego: I use stereotypes deliberately here . It is known that the disparity in interest in different sorts of scientific issues between adolescent boys and girls is much less in the developing world where, I would posit, this socialization into stereotypes is less . So patching up the science teaching at 14 to correct a set of problems generated earlier, probably at the expense of losing other children’s interests (of both genders, although an additional strategy might be to have single-sex teaching, far too large a topic to be included for discussion here) may not be the optimum solution. But, that is my personal opinion, and others may not agree that using examples such as cosmetic surgery to keep girls interested in science is merely a sticking plaster solution.

The second study is perhaps more interesting and relevant, in that it suggests how very small changes can be significant in retaining young women in the pipeline. These are students who are opting in to science courses at university although, since this is based on a US study, this does not mean they are all majoring in science. Here the idea is that female instructors act as role models for girls who otherwise may think of science as ‘not for them’ and reject it for further study. The language of the paper is interesting, using the terminology of ‘infection’ of negative stereotypes which need to be ‘inoculated’ against. But it also shows the relevance of role models, with whom students can identify or to whose roles they might aspire:

women [who] encountered other women who were experts in science, math, and engineering, [they] expressed more positive implicit attitudes toward STEM… showed more implicit identification with these disciplines …, exerted more effort on difficult math tests…, and felt more efficacious about their ability and future performance…. compared with other women who encountered male STEM experts.

Thus, there is clear evidence demonstrating that the visibility and accessibility of female instructors can make a significant difference to how the female students both viewed themselves and the subject, and also how they performed. This is the sort of fairly simple intervention strategy advanced by Steele and shown to be beneficial in overcoming stereotypte threat. So, if we want to keep girls in the pipeline, having visible female role models in higher level roles can only be beneficial. One would hope most university departments follow the policy my own adopts of ensuring all 1st years are exposed to female lecturers.

Both these studies are testament to the subtlety and wide range of issues which need to be addressed if the problems of keeping women in the scientific pipeline are to be solved. They address the relatively early stages, and are therefore more specifically relevant to the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, where the numbers of women start off much lower than for biomedical sciences. Undoubtedly teachers and lecturers should bear these ideas in mind when preparing material for their courses. Keeping the pipeline healthy at later stages will only be possible if the ‘feed’ into the pipeline is itself in a healthy state.

Posted in Education, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Read the Question

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Athene Donald

One of the first things we tell children as they start to do exams is ‘read the question’. As they get more sophisticated we go further, and say think about what the examiners want and how to express key points clearly – or at least we can say that if they are doing more than multiple-choice questions. As examiners we have all read scripts including seemingly endless pages of irrelevant and possibly also incorrect answers, because the student has not bothered to scrutinise the question carefully enough to know what was being asked for. However, it seems that as academics we are not necessarily very good at heeding our own advice. Having spent another weekend reading committee paperwork, this time for an internal university promotions committee, I realise that quite often really rather senior people are shooting themselves in the foot by failing to read the instructions and answer the questions as posed. (Incidentally, I find it depressing that whereas most bloggers get to spend their weekends reading interesting books and then posting thoughtful reviews, I merely get to present ‘reviews’ of committee work!)

Now there are certain types of ‘getting it right’ that are just tedious. In this category I would include the boring requirements that research councils now have of specifying the font and its size on their forms. Although, having read plenty of these, I understand the desirability of being able to read the typeface of a case for support without a magnifying glass, whether someone uses Calibri or Arial doesn’t really matter very much to me. The BBSRC is however going to get tough about this. Its recent revised guidelines say:

Too many grant applications are received with faults and errors, mainly because applicants appear to be leaving insufficient time to check them before the deadline. Iterating with applicants to rectify errors in the forms reduces the time available to obtain peer review assessments and diverts staff effort from properly completed proposals. In future, the privilege of being allowed to correct mistakes may be withdrawn from individuals who repeatedly submit faulty applications, or from departments submitting them in significant numbers, in which case the corrected proposals will need to be submitted to a subsequent round.

This is part of their ‘demand management’ strategy, but also has been introduced because they suspect that some errors are not eradicated quite deliberately because then the PI can gain a few days more to sort out other problems (crucially, maybe, a few additional days to hone the case for support) while the identified error is also sorted. Would academics be that Machiavellian?

However, this weekend was not devoted to BBSRC paperwork, so I will leave that debate and return to the issue of academics failing to ‘answer the question’ when it comes to submitting paperwork for promotion. It might be thought that the prospect of a substantial salary increase would focus the mind sufficiently that the applicant would not exceed the word/page limit. But no, unbelievably, about 5% of the applicants couldn’t even get that right. Perhaps surprisingly the university kindly allowed these individuals to rework their submissions so that they did comply. Future generations should perhaps watch out in case the university follows the BBSRC and gets tough, rejecting out of hand any applications that don’t comply with the regulations. To be honest, I don’t think it would be unreasonable. We expect no less from our students when it comes to coursework or indeed thesis word limits.

There was another way in which some of the applicants managed not to do themselves justice. A few just didn’t seem able to organise their paperwork to play to their strengths. I was particularly struck by the individual who had received some notable prize which they hid away right at the bottom of their CV in a particularly unnoticeable corner. I would have failed to appreciate the award of the prize completely if one of their referees hadn’t remarked upon it. Since nearly all the submissions we see have an impressive list of publications and talks, the award of a prize is the kind of thing that stands out in the mind – if it’s visible to the eye. Other submissions simply failed to address one of the key criteria about ‘progression since the last promotion’. It is all very well to have had a stellar career back in the 90’s, but what the committee wants to know is what sort of trajectory the individual is on now. Unfortunately many of the referees weren’t much help on this front either, failing to address this criterion and merely providing a long eulogy about early work.

One of the things WiSETI (Women in Science Engineering and Technology Initiative) offers in my own university is what we term ‘CV mentoring’: the opportunity to have a senior professor, ideally one who has sat on relevant promotions committees, look over your CV and advise you both whether the time is right to apply and how to present your case to make the most of your track record. It seems to me that it is something that should be offered across the board because clearly individuals are not always being well advised, or are themselves able to stand back and look with an objective eye upon what they have written.

I’ll finish this overview on a positive note. This year, as I remarked in an earlier post, we have amended one particular part of the promotion forms to allow applicants to note any ‘additional circumstances’ that may have affected their performance. Examples given in the guidance include bereavement, ill health or other family circumstances. I have been delighted to see a number of individuals setting out cogent cases, nearly all of which have affected their ability to travel. As it happens these have all been from male applicants. The more men feel comfortable doing this, the better for everyone. I have heard too many stories in the past of women who haven’t felt comfortable declaring anything about their personal circumstances in case it was held against them: ‘ you mean you took time off to have a baby? Shocking!’ is the message that has previously been received (explicitly or implicitly) by some. Acknowledging that academics can be serious professionals and have a family is important, and it would appear that this rather small change on the forms is having a positive impact. And that has to be for the good of the individuals, their families and ultimately the institution.

The moral of this post is much more general, however. That if filling in forms – for jobs, promotions or grant applications – it really does pay to concentrate on both the literal wording of questions asked and the underlying reason for those particular questions. If I find answers – even in something as simple as a CV – which make my life harder I am going to get irritated; sorry, but that’s human nature for you. I may (and do) work hard at scrutinising each and every case equally and fairly. However an irritated reader is far more likely to exhibit bias, conscious or otherwise, against the writer because they are basically fed up at being made to struggle to find that useful nugget of information that should have been made obvious.

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments