Remembering the Women

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Athene Donald

This week Yasmin Alibahi-Brown wrote a piece in the Independent entitled ‘This is still a man’s world’

She said

At every level, still, even in the West, women are invisible, neglected, kept down, slighted, patronised, objectified, denied and demeaned in everyday life……we women can devalue ourselves and our sisters, often gamely playing along to avoid the dreaded “feminist” tag.

The occasion of her angst? That she had just taken part as panel member in a seminar about broadcast interviews, and during the session not a single woman’s name had been mentioned – including by her – until a woman from the audience explicitly drew attention to it.  In other words she found herself being sexist in the names she was putting forward, despite the plethora of good female role models she could have cited ranging from Martha Kearney to Jenni Murray.  Although the words I quote from her article seem overly dramatic to describe this situation, what she is saying is that somehow it is simply too easy for all of us – men and women alike – to overlook women. In the world of science, familiar examples would be conference (or seminar) programmes drawn up without a female speaker in the original list. People are now sufficiently conscious of this problem that often a second pass will be explicitly made in order to come up with some women’s names. And the absurd thing is when these names are mentioned the likelihood is that the relevant committee will then say ‘of course, how could we not have thought of her – and her, and her?’  A recent article in Nature highlights a similar problem when it comes to learned societies’ prizes and exhorts

‘Scientific societies must examine practices for selecting awardees.’

But somehow, time and time again, this same thing happens. What is it about our psyches that make both sexes fall into this trap of overlooking well-qualified women? The trouble is, when one thinks about it too hard it starts to reek of affirmative action/positive discrimination, the stuff I wrote about a little while ago as being inappropriate and, in the case of jobs. illegal in the UK, although it is not jobs that are being discussed here.  Because this is a sensitive issue, it is extremely difficult – at least for me, the more I think about it  – to know where to draw the line about when it is appropriate to ‘notice’ if the numbers of men and women are anything like equal (or rather, in proportion to the appropriate pool) or not.

How about this phrasing which offended at least two male heads of department on behalf of their female colleagues when a request was made by HR personnel about nominations for a senior committee and which they were keen to draw to my attention:

We are expected to have at least one, if not two, women on the sub committee and therefore would you please take this into consideration.

Personally, that doesn’t offend me, but clearly the men felt that women should only be being nominated on the strength of their professional abilities, but at the same time of course women should be being nominated and it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with names.  They seemed to be more sensitive on my gender’s behalf than I felt myself.  When an appropriate name was proposed, they got even more annoyed by the wording of the minute which said

We would also propose to nominate Professor X, in the interests of gender balance…’

And that does strike me as a singularly inappropriate way to record the decision, and it was going to be rewritten the last I heard.

This week I appeared on Radio 4’s Start the Week (more on this later) with three other guests all of whom were male: they were respectively a psychologist, a historian and an English scholar, whereas I was the physicist and (obviously) a female at that. Does it matter? Should I think, well at least they had one woman, or why didn’t they have two or – what I actually did think – which was it really doesn’t matter, it’s simply a fluctuation!  Going up an escalator in London en route to the studio I noticed a series of posters explaining that one of the escalators was being renovated, illustrated by series of images of ‘engineers’ (schematic) doing the sorts of things engineers do (at least when renovating escalators and as imagined by Transport for London): wield pick axes and drills and weld. There were, I would guess, 6 different images repeated up the escalator of which one (but only one) was obviously a woman. My first reaction was that this represented progress. Then I noticed that the woman was the one passively standing around with a clipboard and I wasn’t sure how much progress that really was. One can go round and round this loop of is this right or isn’t it?

At what point do things really matter? Because it is only at that point that it is worth drawing attention to any inequities that may be occurring – if they’re slight, then let it be, if they’re slights then make a fuss.  When women’s names are being unreasonably overlooked – in panel discussions, for plenary lectures or for committee membership – then we should press hard. We should also try to work out, for each and every one of us, why it is that women’s names don’t necessarily come to the fore despite there being – as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown berated herself – obvious and respected names that should trip off the tongue.  But we should not go for equal numbers simply for the sake of it or constantly beat ourselves up about it.

A media aside: I previously wrote about my media training  in advance of appearing on the Today programme when the Royal Society released its report ‘Preparing for the transfer from school and college science and mathematics education to UK STEM higher education’ last week. I duly got my three minutes on air and felt deeply appreciative that I had been so well prepared by the exhaustive/exhausting training I had been given. I came away from the interview with Sarah Montague feeling it hadn’t been anything like as challenging as the mock interviews I had been put through by the Royal Society, which was very reassuring.  I had practiced for the trick and trip-you-up questions, which didn’t come, and I had the necessary key facts pretty much at my fingertips and managed to fit at least most them into the allotted time.  My interview with Radio Scotland was rather longer (the Royal Society was applauding the Scottish system of Highers, as it keeps almost twice as many 16-19 year olds doing science as in England and Wales), but felt equally comfortable. Maybe it helped that I had no time for nerves due to the fact that the ‘remote’ – and consequently unmanned – studio booked for this latter interview was all but double booked so I hadn’t even had time to sit down before I was live on air – and immediately after that I was whisked straight up to the Today studio so still no time for nerves to overwhelm me.

However, one is never prepared for everything, and the Royal Society training was absolutely no help for appearing on Start the Week less than a week later and completely out of the blue. They had picked up I was giving a talk on ‘Alzheimer’s disease and yoghurt: a physicist’s exploration of proteins’ at the IOP at the end of March, and the title had tickled their fancy. The format of the programme is a structured conversation between four random individuals, and each is supposed to mug up something about the others. Consequently I was given two enormous tomes, one on poets of the Civil War (Reprobates by John Stubbs) and one on the 3000 year history of Jerusalem (by Simon Sebag Montefiore) to be read over a single weekend. This meant I really couldn’t do my homework properly; there simply wasn’t time to read both books, although we were helpfully told which chapters to read to get the gist of them (for the third guest, Simon Wessely, we merely had half a dozen pages of notes). All I could do was plan a few plausible questions I was comfortable asking when, in all truth, I felt so far out of my comfort zone as well as under-prepared in a way I never would have allowed myself for an exam. Andrew Marr as host, an impressive and experienced presenter, volunteered he found the programme far more challenging than his Sunday TV show when all he had to do was ‘poke politicians’. Start the Week, for him, was hard work.

I don’t think I should say too much about my fellow guests, but suffice it to say at least two of the others clearly shared my view of being outside their comfort zone (one actually complained about ‘how much more’ radio experience I had than him, as if it wasn’t fair), and the third guest spent most of the time fidgeting with what looked like a stress ball but I think was probably the foam top of a disintegrated microphone he had somehow acquired.  I am sure (perhaps I mean I hope) listeners will have thought we were all relaxed and totally confident about what we were doing – but they would have been wrong.

Posted in Communicating Science, Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments

Scientists are Human too

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Athene Donald

As I took a painkiller for a headache with my breakfast the other day, in advance of a first year lecture to 350 undergraduates, I was reminded of the words from the Yeoman of the Guard sung by the mournful jester, Jack Point:

Though your head it may rack with a bilious attack,
And your senses with toothache you’re losing,
Don’t be mopy and flat — they don’t fine you for that
If you’re properly quaint and amusing!
Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day,
And took with her your trifle of money;
Bless your heart, they don’t mind —
They’re exceedingly kind —
They don’t blame you — as long as you’re funny!

OK, the students don’t really want you to be funny, but they will complain if you are ‘mopy and flat’ and regardless of your state of health you have to get out there and deliver, keep them awake if not precisely entertained (though a good demo or two may even get some sign of appreciation).

As professionals we have to perform in our lectures under just about any circumstances; I even lectured when I had chickenpox caught from my children. In that case I did give the students the option of moving a few rows (even further) back in the lecture theatre if they wished, having taken medical advice as to how infectious I was likely to be.  I have only once in my entire career dropped out of a lecture at the last moment, when essentially blind with the aura of classic migraine, making it impossible to see my notes or write on the overhead projector legibly (this predated Powerpoint).  However, away from the lecture theatre we should be permitted to be human, to have factors that may weigh heavily on us which temporarily distract us from our normal even-tempered and creative state.  Despite being scientists we still have families and personal circumstances that may get in the way of the high standard of ‘service’ we expect to be able to supply: to deliver, for instance, a rapid turn around on thesis chapters for our research students or to meet the deadline on refereeing imposed by journals.  However, at times life (or worse, death) catches up with us and we should not feel obliged to try to soldier on without disclosing the pertinent facts to our colleagues.

A friend of mine recently wrote to me

I have to say, I think if more successful professors actually took on and faced up to family responsibilities, the academic world would be a much nicer place! We’re all humans first and foremost! Science can only ever be second to that, logically, though many of my colleagues have a damn good try at defeating that basic fact.

We should not forget our humanity, nor should we feel unable to explain to those we are letting down why we are being suddenly uncharacteristically ‘mopy and flat’ or indeed downright unreliable. And as supervisors of others, indeed as colleagues of others, we should likewise be aware of their own non-work-related pressures and be supportive. Ill health may strike any of us, or other members of our family. I am of the age where that horrid phrase ‘elder care’ becomes a reality, and I know many of my contemporaries who are having to face up to the associated anxiety combined with the need to make difficult decisions. For younger colleagues it may be teenage angst in their children that is keeping them awake, or the perennial crying baby that renders them tired and grumpy. All these things pass with time, but the creativity and ability to contribute to the life of the laboratory will return  – unless a hostile environment drives people prematurely out.

So next time you feel like tearing a strip off a colleague for not delivering  that report you were expecting, or chastising a student for failing to turn up to an important meeting with an industrial sponsor, check out the underlying reason before going on the attack. Once you have established the errant student merely had one hell of a hangover then it’s time to let loose, but if instead you find their grandfather has been rushed to hospital hold your fire. And go on holding fire until such time as that student has been able to re-establish internal equilibrium. And students, if your supervisor suddenly starts behaving as a zombie, don’t take it personally but try to work out if their baby is teething, their elderly mother has just had a stroke and been rushed into hospital or their wife has ‘run off with a soldier that day’. One of the more galling, if totally trivial examples of a lack of support in my own personal experience was when I told the senior examiner one year that I would not be able to fulfill all my examining duties because I was pregnant. His response sticks in my mind as just a trifle unsympathetic, ‘not again’ he said, as if I’d made a habit of being unreliable due to the vast number of my progeny (at that point they still numbered <2).  In some senses that remark didn’t matter, but it was hardly supportive or encouraging.

The non-scientist out there may have a vision of us all as passionless machine-like lunatics, based on their vague ideas about Dr Frankenstein. We should know better that we are human and allow ourselves and those around us just occasionally to step back and catch breath as circumstances require.

 
Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Indigestible Committee Paperwork

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Athene Donald

Each summer it is standard for publications to produce lists of exam howlers to remind us just how woefully ignorant some of our students are at all levels. I have never seen a list of comparable statements regarding crass errors produced in grant applications, but upon occasion referees do not mince their words.  Having spent much of the weekend wading through a pile of (metaphorical) paper – it is of course all electronic material now – consisting of proposals and referees’ comments, I was amused by the following two comments which leapt out of the page at me:

‘Within the case for support, the term “paradigm shift” is used (misused) twice and “step change” mentioned three times, yet it is never clear what could possibly be considered revolutionary about the proposed work. ….’

‘This is a badly written, ill-thought out and poorly developed research proposal that contains a number of serious flaws and is not firmly based on current knowledge of [the field].’

Very few referees comment specifically on the mandatory (for UK research councils) ‘pathways to impact’ statement but, given how little concrete detail of what is wanted and/or required is out there on their web pages, I thought I would proffer some personal thoughts on what not to write, and possibly the odd pointer for more positive statements that could be made by the PI (this is a fairly UK-centric post, I should say).  These remarks – like those I made in a previous post about committee membership – should be taken as composite examples of the sorts of things that can go wrong, and which may stick in the committee’s minds for unfortunate reasons. I will not put any literal quotes from impact statements I have read in what follows, but the general messages will be along the lines of those I have seen, and reflecting the nature of the particular grant-giving committee I am most familiar with currently.

Many people believe the Pathways to Impact statement is an opportunity to hype their field – just the place to discuss a paradigm shift (as above) in an entirely vague and meaningless sort of way. Whatever it is they are going to do, it will solve all the ills of mankind, revolutionise the production of something or other and allow us to fly to the moon. This is not really helpful. My impression is a bit of quantification is particularly valuable – we are scientists after all – so if a new drug is going to be developed what is the size of the potential market in the UK/ the world?  If the project is to solve some existing bottleneck, how big is the problem? If a new healthcare technology is being proposed, enumerate the number of sufferers who potentially could benefit. Surprisingly often a committee member will want to know about the economics, if a PI is claiming to be going to develop a potential new product, to see if it is ever going to be financially viable rather than just esoterically clever.

Turning to outreach, if the team claim they are going to visit schools as part of their activities, why not set an explicit target eg. 3 schools a year, or engage with a science festival twice during the lifetime of the grant.  Most people inevitably stress what they have done in the past –  perhaps they talked to a local newspaper in 2001 – whereas what strikes me as preferable is to stress what will be done in the future and ideally how it connects to the specific proposal, and that is why targets or milestones are desirable. Although it is impressive to be able to say that members of a team have presented their results to members of Parliament several times, how will they ensure they do so again?

And really it is little good saying that in the past the PI has taken out 2 patents and worked with several companies unless it is clear how patents,  licensing and industrial collaboration might work in the future. What has happened in the past is clearly relevant as demonstrating, perhaps, an entrepreneurial mindset, but it is only relevant if the future trajectory appears to have been considered too. So can something more specific be said than that a department is an ‘industry-facing department’ (horrid phrase,  but one that did turn up in a case I read); or that it might have had, in a vague kind of way, a long track record of industrial collaboration.  Rather like my experience on the REF pilot panel when such vagueness was also frequently present, such statements are really not explicit enough to judge anything beyond a cuddly feeling that maybe the particular department has had industrialists set foot on the premises. Why not say something about what sort of industrial contribution (cash or in kind) has flowed into the department in the past, how much of it in the direction of the particular PI and what their expectations might be over the next 3 years? And to say that attempts will be made to ‘upscale production’ in the future, if the grant is successful, without explaining a mechanism and an outline indication of what success – including on financial grounds – might look like, is just a bit too fuzzy

Whatever my own personal views about the motivation that has led to the introduction of these Pathways to Impact statements and the precise form in which we are supposed to describe our activities, it does us as scientists no harm to reflect on why we are doing what we are doing. We do not have any sort of intrinsic right to do science for the fun of it, but equally some science is inevitably going to be  less immediately translatable into economic worth than other projects. But we should anyhow all be thinking about what we can do to excite youngsters and the public, as well as train the personnel we will employ on grants in a variety of transferable skills, including outreach.  It shouldn’t be difficult to define these outcomes. If you are about to write one of these statements do look ahead, not just quote the past however wonderful your research and activities may have been previously; do be concrete and not vague and full of hyperbole.  You should consider that I and my colleagues will have read dozens of these statements over a rather short period of time in the run-up to the committee meeting,  so have some thought that just maybe my eyes glaze over when faced with yet another page of statements along the lines of

This proposal aims to develop new functionalities of [insert generic technology here] to support the next generation [insert protocol here] which will transform the production of [insert your favourite molecule here].   We will concentrate, just as we always have, on writing lots of peer-reviewed papers and travelling the world to exotic places to talk to our friends at high level conferences.

I’m afraid that doesn’t cut the mustard with me.

Posted in Communicating Science, Research, Science Funding | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

Progression and Backlash

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Athene Donald

One of the blogs that I try to read regularly – beyond my local microcosm of Occam’s Typewriter – is that of FemaleScienceProfessor, also known as FSP for short .  You can guess I would feel a sense of shared identity with this writer, whose name and even sub-discipline I certainly don’t know. She is based in the US and writes an anonymous blog that deals with the rather practical problems that a US professor faces, many of which don’t mesh that well with those of us on this side of the Pond. I’d like to pick up on two of her recent posts, because I think they exemplify why things in the US are probably even stickier for women (and other minorities too) than in the UK.  The two posts deal with the tenure clock and what would appear to be positive discrimination. I’ll start with the latter which is the more recent post entitled Target of Resentment.

In this country, positive discrimination is illegal.  The situation, described in FSP’s post, of creating a faculty position as a ‘target of opportunity’ to hire someone from an under-represented group could not happen here, although the recent legislation may mean (and I think there will be many battles of interpretation over Harriet Harman’s Act) that all other things being equal the under-represented group member may be hired over an equally qualified person from a majority group, shall we say a white male for sake of argument. What is legal is positive action, which means searching out individuals from under-represented groups and encouraging them to apply. So, within academic science, it would be nice to think search committees went out looking for women and ethnic minorities and drawing a job ad to their attention, although I’m not sure how often they do so in practice. However, if such people choose to apply then from that point on all applicants should be treated equally as far as UK law is concerned. Personally that’s how I think it should be because, and this was the concern FSP was discussing, otherwise there is scope for the appointee to become a target of resentment. And they will always be open to the taunt ‘you were only appointed because you were a woman’ or an Afro-Caribbean or whatever else the specific case may be.  That would be incredibly undermining. Even with the way things are here, I have heard a few women express that fear about themselves, that really they were only appointed because of their sex.  Not good for their self-esteem.

Many years ago, when I lived in the US, I was nearly in that position myself, when the Ivy League university I was at set out to appoint their first female faculty member in Engineering: only women were allowed to apply for a position in the Engineering School which was explicitly created to meet this apparent ‘need’. These were the heady days of affirmative action, when black women were known as ‘twofers’ because they solved two minority problems simultaneously and so they were very much in demand. In the end, although I was offered the position I never took it up because the Royal Society created their wonderful University Research Fellowship scheme just in time – I was one of the first recipients during that period when there were essentially no standard faculty posts within the UK system. I have never regretted the decision to stay in the UK, and I was particularly fortunate that my erstwhile colleagues back at Cornell did not seem to hold my late withdrawal from the post against me, so that I was able to maintain an excellent relationship with my former professor there.  But from afar I could see that affirmative action had its downside, and I believe led to a backlash which could indeed be summed up by the taunt I described above. Had I taken up the Cornell Engineering position the jibe would indeed have been precisely true, I could only have got that job because I was a woman. Whether or not one becomes a target of resentment, I do worry that it doesn’t really solve the problem, merely creates another one: the woman (or ethnic minority) worries she wasn’t really good enough to get the job on merit, the men around her (or the whites) believe she probably isn’t up to the job and so they can look down on her. Who wins in a situation like that?

So I believe the UK has it right: let’s have active steps taken to encourage minorities to apply (as well as good mentoring all the way up to that point), but then let the best candidate win so everyone knows it was a fair competition. The only thing in the way of this happy scenario at the moment is that I fear very few appointment/search committees actually do take positive action very seriously. Instead all too often they rely on who knows whom, who gets the job ad drawn to their attention, and who gets the encouragement from their professors or colleagues that they should apply even if perhaps they don’t tick quite all the boxes of desirable attributes specified in the job ad.  Nevertheless, I would say this was UK 1 – US 0 (I don’t know enough about the legal position in other countries to pass any comment).

The second FSP post concerned the tenure clock and was stimulated by a report produced by the University of California, Berkeley about Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline which was also discussed at length in a New York Times blogpost. The relevant point of these various articles is how universities handle women who have children during the period of their tenure track: should the tenure clock be stopped or not? Should women ask for extra time or not? As FSP says

we could discuss whether stopping the tenure clock gives women “extra” time or effectively gives them the same time as those who have not given birth or adopted a child during their tenure-track years

but she also points out that just about every US university makes it possible for women to ask for such a stoppage. What I find rather offensive about this is that they have to ask, and try to deduce in advance if the very act of asking will in fact be held against them as a sign of weakness before they do so. I think because the laws about maternity leave are so much more generous and open here compared with the US, as indeed are the regulations about all kinds of leave, we don’t have quite this bind by the time a woman is on the faculty.  Probation is not the same as tenure-track, and the attrition rate at the end of probation is mercifully extremely low. The problems arise, of course, for women who haven’t yet got that permanent position under their belt and one could argue that many of the fellowship schemes – such as those operated by the Royal Society I mentioned above – act as a de facto tenure track scheme. Nevertheless these too are covered by quite clear rules about maternity leave and part-time working so that the complexities imposed by a ‘tenure clock’ decision still don’t really apply. (I assume the same situation applies to all the charity fellowships on the biomedical side, though I am not at all well-informed about them; I know there are some complexities about continuation funding and the need for university co-funding which perhaps complicates the situation much more than I appreciate for child-bearing women.).

So my summary is UK 2 – US 0. In other words, however much we in the UK may feel that the odds are stacked against women in scientific academia, we are still better off than our colleagues in the US.  Nevertheless there is a long way to go!

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

The Pleasures of Committee Work

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Athene Donald

I have to admit I find the dynamics of watching a committee come together and work effectively peculiarly satisfying, which is an odd sort of confession to make. I am intrigued by the social interactions that need to develop if the committee is to gel, and equally intrigued by what underlies a committee becoming dysfunctional as, regrettably, some do.  These are not the internal committees where you know everyone really well before you start and so have your prejudices and preferences clearly in mind before you ever get round the table. No, these are the committees (for instance ad hoc grant giving committees) that may meet only once or at most a handful of times and where the members are by and large unknown to each other beforehand. Like a Shakespeare play or a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta there are some standard characters who crop up time and time again in marginally modified forms: not every committee has every variety but one can draw up a little list of those who never would be missed, as well as those no good committee should be without.  What follows is my own cast of characters drawn – needless to say in distorted form – as a distillation from the many committees I have enjoyed or endured.  All characters described in what follows should be regarded as purely fictional.  How many do you recognize?

Dr Mouse

I will start with this person not because they are the most irritating but because they seem so ubiquitous. To start with, they are usually inaudible. They don’t realise that most meeting rooms, particularly in hotels, have air-conditioning/ heating units giving out a constant background drone which makes their tentative remarks – and their remarks are always tentative – hard to hear. They probably haven’t done their homework properly either so it isn’t surprising their remarks are tentative, and they tend to apologise a lot. Even though they have a lot to apologise for it doesn’t add much to the decision-making process when every other sentence is prefaced with ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure/ I didn’t check/ I couldn’t find…..’This person is closely related to

Dr Under-prepared

Sometimes one has valid reasons for turning up to a committee meeting without having done sufficient preparation. These aren’t of the ‘dog ate my email’ variety so much as ‘my son was in hospital’ or ‘volcanic ash trapped me in Japan and I couldn’t access the papers’.  But some people seem to make a habit of turning up without having read the paperwork. I once (though this wasn’t a committee meeting but a meeting with a civil servant) suggested we took time out so this civil servant could read the material I had prepared. I was told this was appallingly rude of me by a third party present, whereas I thought I was merely being pragmatic. The alternatives appeared to be I read the salient points of the documentation out loud – which would have taken a very long time – or he continued to bluster and try to cover up his inadequacies. Too often it is the last course which Dr Under-prepared has to pursue, to everyone else’s irritation, particularly if they can’t find their way around the paperwork.

Dr Centre of Attention

This person is obviously the direct opposite of Dr Mouse. They are used to being in the limelight and hence think it is a God-given right to hold forth, whether or not they know anything about the subject in hand or whether they have anything useful to add to the debate.  Apologies do not feature in their language because it never crosses their mind the rest of the committee might not want to listen to what they have to say. Sometimes they may have useful remarks to make, sometimes not – they aren’t stupid so much as blind – but by the time they’ve hogged the floor for a while it is unfortunately all too easy to tune them out so that you miss the useful snippets lurking in their grandiose statements.  Rather similar to Dr Centre of Attention is

Dr Bore, who manifests many of the same characteristics but from a position of weakness; they don’t expect to be in the limelight but given half a chance – and at a grant giving committee for instance, they will of necessity be given that chance since they will have been assigned a set of grants to talk to – they will seize their moment. Usually they have voluminous notes which they will read verbatim in a monotone (possibly inaudibly). It may be obvious from the first sentence that this grant hasn’t a hope in hell of being funded, that every referee has said it is hopelessly flawed and the applicant’s letter of reply has admitted the failings, nevertheless this person will read every line of their notes even when time is of the essence and the chair repeatedly tries to intervene to cut the discussion off. This person is impervious to hint.

Dr Not Listening

There are those who seem to turn up to meetings and float through them in some dream world. The chair turns to them and asks them to speak to the next grant, which they were clearly listed as being expected to do, and they wake as if from a daze, drop their papers on the floor and then waste 5 minutes while they endeavour to find the relevant piece of paper. There are other variants of this: the person who requires a carefully expressed argument to be repeated because they weren’t paying attention just before a critical vote is to be taken, or who goes over exactly the same arguments as someone else has already made because they weren’t concentrating at the relevant moment.

Dr Mac-the-Knife

This person has few words, but those they choose to use are wielded like a weapon.  This is the person who says that so-and-so can’t be funded because they haven’t published in the top journals or that their h index is too low. It doesn’t matter how many things are right about the individual or the grant, this person gets their knife out and it is almost impossible to repair the damage. Maybe it is known there is a personal vendetta involved  – if the chair is very well-informed the bad-mouthing can then perhaps be reversed; more often there is no obvious reason for the kiss of death being applied.

The Chair

It is regrettable that just occasionally the chair has not been ideally selected. Perhaps they aren’t on top of their own paperwork, perhaps they like the sound of their own voice too much, or maybe they are indecisive or too timid to draw a contentious discussion to a close; conversely perhaps they cut off any discussion before it becomes meaty enough to develop a sense of contention which can also be frustrating .  Any of these can make the committee malfunction and leave a nasty taste in the mouth.

The Angels

And then there all the super, hard-working men and women of integrity, who have done all the necessary preparation, project their voices appropriately, stay awake and keep their remarks to an appropriate length. Would that all committees were peopled solely by such, but in the meantime I fear each and every one of us will rub shoulders with a handful of people we would rather not.

Disclaimer

If you have sat on any committee with me, please do not try and work out who I am describing; or even worry that I am describing you. These are composite images drawn through a distorting lens at the end of a long and tiring week (though not full of tiresome committee members I’m glad to say). The angels tend to be in the substantial majority, the offenders just have been known to get under my skin upon occasion. And since my blog often contains words of wisdom for more junior folk, maybe I can urge them to think what attributes to try and avoid the first time they get called upon to sit on some committee or other. In the meantime, happy offender–spotting!

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 14 Comments