On Passion

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Athene Donald

In the past few weeks there have been a number of articles commenting on the lack of women fronting up science on TV. First there was Jenny Rohn writing on ‘In which I Contemplate the Ranks of the Invisible’, quickly followed by Alom Shaha in the Guardian on ‘Where’s the Female Brian Cox?’ (to which I responded Do we Need a Female Brian Cox? , which provoked a lot of comment in the twittersphere tending to agree with me that it wasn’t a vital step to encourage girls into science). More recently Jenny Rohn wrote about why ‘Women Scientists Must Speak Up’ wanting to encourage young women to practice making themselves heard, to prepare for what she terms punditry.

Jenny in particular has identified a number of possible reasons for the absence of women in the science media, ranging from lack of self-confidence to the feeling that public debate, with its potential for cut and thrust, is not palatable to them. But she also implies that there is unconscious and unintended sexism occurring, when producers are looking for people to front their programmes, quoting one TV producer saying that the public wouldn’t accept science if presented by  “a young, blonde girl” who was under consideration.  So if young blondes aren’t suitable, are older women, or is one then up against the ageism the BBC has been charged with in the case of newsreaders such as Moira Stuart? Certainly the BBC has recently been willing to get ‘mature’ women to present major programmes in arts subjects: the historian Amanda Vickery being At Home with the Georgians, and my Cambridge colleague Mary Beard considering Pompeii, both being broadcast during this month. So it would appear there is something peculiar to the way science ‘needs’ to be presented – in the eyes of a TV producer – which women, of any age, appear to ‘lack’ (note the inverted commas).

Since, as Jenny has said, there are plenty of women with appropriate skills and enthusiasm to take on the media challenge (though obviously fewer than men) perhaps there is something in the way they speak which implies to the producer a lack of gravitas, or a presentation style which isn’t believed to mesh with weighty matters. Is this some hark back to the original 16th century ideas of Francis Bacon that science is all about the mastery of man [sic] over nature, with implications of domination and control? This underlying theme of aggression pervades much of the language of early science writing; power was seen to be at the heart of science. This view was still present well into the 20th century (at least). If such an attitude towards the underlying scientific method lurks in the producer’s mind, no wonder a feminine face might not fit their bill: hard science would then be unable to be presented by the soft face of a woman since the subliminal message of male domination over nature would be missing

This effect looks to be another version of unconscious bias, that uncomfortable phenomenon identified by so many authors in their discussion of why numbers of women rising through the scientific ranks remain so low. In which case, the exhortations Jenny presents encouraging women to stand up and speak out will be insufficient. We need to challenge the assumptions about how science can be presented – as well as simply identify the appropriate media-savvy and microphone-comfortable women to stand up in front of the camera with the swagger and style of a celebrity, which also seems to be a sina qua non.

I would like to suggest one particular form in which unconscious bias presents itself in this context, in perceptions about style of presentation. Not about dress (we don’t need to consider hemlines or hairstyles here), but about verbal style. My hypothesis is that there are male and female adjectives to describe speaking styles, akin to the well known pairing ‘men are assertive, women are aggressive’. Here I would propose ‘men are charismatic, women are passionate’. Have you ever heard of a woman being described as charismatic? Because, when I think about it, I don’t think I have, and yet it is always seen as such a desirable attribute in a public speaker. But, an enthusiastic woman who talks forcefully and fluently about her science is liable to be labeled with the word ‘passionate’ – I know I am, and I have grown to hate it. I shouldn’t, it isn’t in itself a bad term, but one knows that in the context what was meant was that I wasn’t quite lady-like, that as a (female) scientist I should be moderate but I actually looked as if I had fun with what I was doing and it was excessive. The Victorians certainly believed enthusiasm was most improper in a young girl, it was unseemly to be keen about anything rather than act merely demure, and I fear this attitude unconsciously lingers. So, if I am viewed as passionate I am being marked down for simply enjoying my science; yet conversely and perversely, if the Brian Cox’s on TV demonstrate their own enthusiasm, this is seen as a plus by making science approachable.

However, until we have an Amanda Vickery in science stacked up against Brian Cox, we won’t know what the viewing audience really wants. The producers may be making entirely erroneous decisions about who can ‘sell’ the science by eliminating half the population, if not half the scientists. As scientists we should stand up and require evidence-based television productions, so – as Jenny said – let us do the experiment of having a mainstream science series fronted by a woman. Then we can judge the success of the experiment from the ratings.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 31 Comments

Where’s the Wow Factor?

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Athene Donald

Where’s the Wow Factor? was a question posed at the Physics Meets Biology meeting in September in the context of teaching Biological Physics, as I discussed before.  I was reminded of this question while attending this year’s Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (CMMP) Division meeting. The Division has held an annual conference close to Christmas, certainly ever since I was a graduate student (which is going back a bit now), but up till now I have never attended simply because at no point did its programme seem relevant to me.  This year three IOP groups – Biological Physics, Polymer Physics, and Liquids and Complex Fluids – have come together to ensure there is a new strand in the programme.  Traditionally it has concentrated on ‘hard’ condensed matter, things like metals, semiconductors and quantum solids.  This year, additionally, 4 out of the 7 Plenary Lectures also have some relevance to this ‘soft’ strand.  So I, and a fair number of my colleagues from this field have ventured to Warwick to see whether this meeting now has more relevance. (OK, I’m one of the Plenary Lecturers, so I don’t actually have a choice about attending, but I could have breezed in and out of again, but have chosen not to do so.)

Listening to the first talk in the Biological Physics Symposium, given by my Cambridge colleague Ray Goldstein, I certainly felt the ‘wow’ factor was there. It was a beautiful talk about cytoplasmic streaming, a phenomenon known about for more than a hundred years, but still barely understood.  It occurs in plants, in which there is a strong circulating flow within the cytoplasm of the cells, but the biological relevance of it has not been obvious.  Working on aquatic plants such as chara and nitella, which have huge cells maybe a centimetre or more in length, he has been able to image the flow in great detail, via both fluorescence microscopy and MRI, and begin to study how it varies from place to place within the cell; he has also studied the behaviour of the internal membrane, the tonoplast which surrounds the vacuole, in response to the circulation. He has shown that the tonoplast circulates too, and he had an amazing video to demonstrate this.  Although there is not yet a complete answer to why this cytoplasmic streaming happens, Goldstein argued persuasively that this is an excellent micromixer, predating microfluidic designs by many millions of years.

At the September meeting in Oxford the speaker who posed the wow factor question seemed to think that only topics like astrophysics would grab the imagination, particularly of the young who we need to entice into physics. I cannot agree. As ever it seems to me that it is horses for courses – some schoolchildren will doubtless look up at the night sky and be inspired to ask questions and demand answers which may indeed lure them into a physics/astrophysics degree; others will be less excited by this and want to know about totally different things. Astrophysics is only one facet of the joy of physics and it depresses me that some of these other aspects, perhaps more ‘mundane’ because closer to our everyday world, are so readily overlooked. As a teenager I quite explicitly turned my back on cosmology – having briefly flirted with it – because I wanted to study things that seemed more relevant to our lives, but which were still ‘physics’.  That has of course been the course I have followed ever since, as I have wandered through the study of metals, polymers, food, colloids, plants and ultimately cells (the header at the top of my blog illustrates three of these topics, but not in fact plants).  I am sure other school children also will find the ‘wow factor’ in things that are neither millions of light years away nor only to be found in the Large Hadron Collider (high energy physics being another subject that is assumed to hold the attention of the young).

This is one of the reasons I so welcome the broadening of what the CMMP sees as part of its remit.  Soft matter and biological physics are both subjects which touch upon our everyday world, both lend themselves readily as topics which schoolchildren can relate to, and so we need to ensure the physics they encapsulate is recognized and disseminated. It is no coincidence that Ray Goldstein’s work, coupled with his colleague Alison Smith from Cambridge University’s Plant Sciences Department, featured in last summer’s Royal Society’s Exhibition (Meet the Algae), a key part of the Royal Society’s outreach activity and attended by some thousands of schoolchildren.  Another example of using this topic to explain the excitement of science to the young was the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures given by the University of Sheffield’s Tony Ryan on ‘Smart Stuff’ in 2002. For too long our schools and our university courses have excluded so much potentially exciting physics in their teaching – and indeed (in the case of university departments), their research.

Posted in Biological Physics, Education, Interdisciplinary Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

The Media and (Un)Constructive Reporting – the David Lammy Saga

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Athene Donald

This week, universities and their funding have been much in the news, coupled with telling images of the anger of many students around the country at the proposed hike in fees.  Another story also hit the news about universities, or more specifically about Oxbridge, with David Lammy – the black former HE Minister in the last government – lambasting Oxbridge admissions’ policies and processes .  The impression he gave was that Oxbridge simply didn’t try, that these universities have no interest in admitting minority students. However, by concentrating simply on black Caribbeans he chose a peculiarly narrow grouping to ‘prove’ his point, and a group that are well known to be educationally one of the worst-performing groups along with white working class children. Even so, as many commentators have stressed, his analysis of the statistics simply don’t stand up.  I list just a few of these commentaries, since it is not my intention to deconstruct the figures here  (Royal Statistical Society which covers the statistics pretty carefully; Liberal Conspiracy, which points out that Lammy’s implication that only by using a FOI request could he get the facts, is also wrong and misleading  – the figure are readily available; and the Oxford PVC for diversity, who made a clear statement, summarising Lammy’s article as ‘eye-catching but misleading’).

No doubt Lammy thinks Oxbridge is fair game, and the statistics for (some, but not all groups of) minorities are indeed not as good as one would like – though equally nothing like as bad as he implies – but I simply don’t understand what he hopes to achieve by writing such an article, other than a lot of media attention for himself.  If, in order to increase the number of applications from minorities to Oxbridge (clearly the colleges can’t admit them if they don’t apply) we need to raise aspirations in their communities and to remind them that Oxbridge isn’t just for toffs, the last thing that is needed is a public figure in essence saying, don’t bother, you’re not wanted.  It immediately undoes all the hard work of my colleagues who go out to schools around the country trying to eradicate generations of negativity.  Cambridge University also instigated  GEEMA (the Group to Encourage Minority Applications)  more than 20 years ago, whose mission is described on Cambridge’s website as

‘to ensure that talented UK black and minority ethnic (BME) students were not deterred from applying to the University of Cambridge. Since GEEMA was founded the number of UK BME undergraduate students studying at Cambridge has increased considerably. The full-time GEEMA Coordinator and current undergraduates work hard to raise the awareness of academically able (ie Gifted and Talented) BME students in the UK that studying at Cambridge is achievable.’

My fellow University Council member Anthony Andrews (the graduate student member, and himself from Trinidad and Tobago) said in a letter he wrote by way of rebuttal to the Lammy article – though I cannot find that it has been published-

‘I have been personally consulted by the admissions team of my own College to help generate ideas to bring the message to black and minority students that, WE WANT YOU!!!’

If Lammy screams foul, then the problems we have in attracting minority students are just pointlessly amplified.  Hardly constructive I’d say.

I have seen a similar media furore in the context of women in science, where a good scare story appears to be regarded as excellent for newspaper sales, whereas a story whose implicit message is ‘successful women scientists aren’t freaks’ is not. In this case the issue is whether you can be a successful woman scientist and have a family. The message that young girls receive is that the combination is impossible; only a couple of years ago a female PhD student of mine said exactly that to my face, despite the evidence that as her supervisor I had indeed managed to progress up through academia and have 2 children. I was completely gobsmacked that intuitively she believed this, despite the evidence to the contrary. And I attribute this to the drip-drip of negative media coverage.

In 1999 when I was elected to the Royal Society, 5 women were elected, the largest number ever in a single year up to that point.  So the media was interested. Who did they interview? One of the new fellows who had no children (2 of us did, 3 did not) who was quoted as saying that it was indeed impossible to combine children with a successful scientific career (whether she actually said it at the time I can’t be sure, but I do know it’s not a position she still holds). Likewise, at various points in the past Susan Greenfield has been quoted as saying the same thing – again not a position she now publicly adheres to. But the damage is done in the generation that reads this stuff, and the belief persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary (for the record I should add that it is of course not easy to combine the two, but that is very different from saying it’s impossible).  So teenage girls can be turned off quite needlessly and again this is bad for diversity.

So my question to the media is, why do you publish these inaccurate horror stories instead of trying to do something constructive? Why not look into the facts and say, yes Oxbridge isn’t doing brilliantly at admitting minority students, but it depends on the ethnicity and – even more – on their socio-economic class.  Michael White , in his commentary on the original Lammy piece says

‘it’s surely down to the advice given by schools, some of which are unambitious for their students’.

Yes, the problems cannot be laid merely at the door of university admissions’ policies; the problems are frequently in the lack of aspiration from school teachers for their students, and a lack of knowledge (in teachers, parents and the children) about the system so as not to know what is required. Funding schools decently (and not, for instance, trimming the per capita budget for 6th formers, as the recent Education White Paper recommends), ensuring all school-children are well advised about the reality of what it’s like ‘out there’, will enable Oxbridge to increase its diversity. If Lammy and company make Oxbridge seem beyond their reach, they won’t even try to overcome the very real hurdles there inevitably are. Please, let us see constructive reporting from the high class newspapers, stories that may facilitate widening participation.  Let’s celebrate those who do succeed, and enable them to be the ambassadors in the public forum of the press to encourage others to follow in their footsteps.

Cambridge University, in its response to the fees’ issue, has made a very clear statement  about its attitude towards access, listing it as the first of its 7 bullet points:

‘Cambridge values diversity amongst its student body and is committed to continuing its current needs-blind admission to its undergraduate courses in order that no suitably-qualified UK student is disadvantaged by financial circumstances from coming to Cambridge. It will also wish to maintain and develop its access arrangements.’

Even the (almost-by-definition) anti-university-establishment group The Cambridge Student said of this:

‘ For them to go as far as they have is not just out of the ordinary, but extremely surprising.’

Widening participation, increasing diversity, is a massively important issue for us (and at this point I should remind readers that yes, I am the University’s Gender Equality Champion and I also sit on University Council and so am most certainly part of the establishment Lammy is attacking. I should also stress that this blog is written in a purely personal capacity, and none of the views expressed…..etc etc).  The only good thing about the Lammy article is that, by writing for the Guardian, it almost certainly won’t be read by the families of those who might be deterred by it. It is merely the chattering classes who will point a figure at Oxbridge and say that they always knew it was only for the well-heeled kids from public schools. Well we aren’t.

Posted in Education, Equality | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Committees and Reverse Discrimination

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Athene Donald

Recently I was discussing a new working group that was being set up within the University, and realised that all the members that I had heard named were female.  I queried this and was told that that did indeed seem to be the case. This is just as unacceptable as an all male committee. OK, so the working group was going to be looking at a gender-related issue, but the idea that gender equates to female, and is therefore rightfully discussed only by women is wrong on so many counts I simply don’t want to go there.  Needless to say, I pointed out the problem that was apparently being created and, I hope by the time the working group is actually convened, it will have an appropriately diverse membership.  This is not the first time I have encountered this problem – the last time was when I was invited to join the interview panel for the Equality and Diversity Officer within the university a couple of years ago: again only female names were being proposed until I pointed out how inappropriate this was (and it was indeed rectified).

The whole point about gender equality is it is about equality, and can’t just be seen as ‘women’s issues’ which can be dealt with by women alone.  I hope that in my role as University Gender Equality Champion I will be listening to men and women – and where appropriate dealing with issues for those in the LGBT groups too. Nevertheless it is likely to be the case that issues simply relating to women, who after all represent about half of both the student and staff population, may be the most glaringly obvious, and also the ones where there are easiest ‘wins’ to be made quickly.

One of the blogs I read is that of the US FemaleSciencePofessor.  Reading her blog indicates much that differs between the US and the UK, so that some of the posts she writes don’t necessarily resonate here. But I was struck by a comment she made recently

‘Sometimes it seems like I could write a blog post about how much I like pistachio ice cream, and I would get comments like “Why do you hate men so much? Why are you always writing about sexism? Why do you always twist things to be about gender?”.’

I hope that is not what goes through readers’ minds when they read my blog – or indeed that of my colleagues within the University when they see me in action as a Champion.  Misandry – hatred of men –  is not a word that is heard as often as misogyny, but it has the potential to be just as dangerous. And also, I believe that any actions smacking of it are going to be purely counterproductive.  Some years ago Sir David Wallace (now Master of Churchill College, at the time Treasurer of the  Royal Society and VC of Loughborough University) remarked to me how illuminating he had found it when he had attended some meeting – I suspect about women in science but can no longer remember – and realized he was the only man amidst a large group of women.  He said he had suddenly realized the oddness of the sensation to be in that position, and it had made him appreciate what women in science go through much more clearly. So the slightly more mischievous side of me thinks that putting men on committees within my university where they find themselves in a significant minority, may have unexpected upsides!

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

Inspirational Gentlemen

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Athene Donald

This week I have taken on a new role as Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee. School education (like so much in the UK)  is an area of much flux and I can imagine an increasing role for this position talking to civil servants and possibly ministers.  The Royal Society ‘s Education Section is a wonderful group of people, but there are times when wheeling out an FRS is probably advantageous, and I’m sure they will be judicious in their choice of when to play the Committee Chair card.  Thinking about this, reminded me of comments one of my mentors, Professor Sir Sam Edwards, made about dealing with the Civil Service: you always had to approach someone at the same level as yourself if you wanted anything to happen. To paraphrase crudely, aim too high (they wouldn’t acknowledge your existence) or too low (it was more than their job’s worth to respond) and you would get nowhere. I will discover if this advice still applies – his experience dates back to when he was Chair of the EPSRC’s predecessor (the SRC) back in the 70’s.

And thinking about Sam, I thought I would continue on one of my previous themes of what it takes to inspire, tied in with this idea of hierarchy.  As I say, Sam was a mentor of mine although I think I only ever published a single paper with him. A grammar school boy from Wales (a fact of which he was very proud) he had an extremely distinguished career as a theoretical physicist, working on topics such as spin glasses, granular matter (most recently) and, at the time I first knew him (when he was Cavendish Professor in Cambridge), polymer physics. One of his most enduring contributions was work he did with Masao Doi in the late 70’s,  during a spell when Doi was a visitor in Cambridge, on the motion of polymer chains via a process known as reptation. The Doi-Edwards theory is still a key approach to understanding this field, although there have been some refinements to deal with additional detail.

The term reptation was actually introduced by (the late) Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, the Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 1991. De Gennes and Sir Sam were good friends, if probably also friendly competitors, and de Gennes frequently passed through Cambridge, both before and after the award of the Nobel Prize.  It is not my intention here to give a thorough description of the science either of these gentlemen did – their works are amply accessible on the web.  What I want to do is talk about their characters as exactly that, gentlemen.  Both of them to my mind exactly illustrate what I understand by the word, and are just the kind of people I would have longed for as a mentor, if I hadn’t  had the luck actually to have them in that role. (As a personal aside, I should remark that when I heard de Gennes had won the Nobel Prize, I was so excited that whilst standing at the school gate waiting for my children, I said breathlessly to a fellow mum that I was over the moon because a friend of mine had just won a Nobel; she looked at me very strangely, and with hindsight it was a bit presumptuous of me to describe him as my friend, or to expect anyone else to care much.)

One of the key qualities I identify with both these individuals is the fact that they absolutely did not adhere to the advice Sam gave about dealing with civil servants. They both were just as delighted to talk to a graduate student as to a visiting dignitary. Sam by now is very frail (de Gennes died several years ago), but right up to the time he stopped coming regularly into the department he would attend all our seminars, and always invite the postgraduate students to stop by and discuss their research. The problem was much more that some were too nervous to do so, rather than that he put them off. He used to complain that people didn’t come and talk to him as much as he would like.

De Gennes had a very similar character, as far as I could judge from his various visits to Cambridge.  I had a number of opportunities to test this. On one occasion, when I barely knew him and was a very junior lecturer, I had been sent a paper of his to referee (this was back in the days when I worked on glassy polymers and the paper was a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of crazing, a mode of failure peculiar to glassy polymers and which I had extensively studied as a postdoc).  I didn’t agree with him, not least because I had unpublished experimental data to contradict his conclusions, but I had written my referee’s report before I knew he was visiting. So when he turned up in my office wanting to discuss his ideas I had to make a quick decision. Did I admit I had just written a critical referee’s report or simply stall, cover up and not have to defend my position in conversation when dealing with this heavyweight. I chose the former strategy and he was generous and delightful as we thrashed it out. In reality, the fact that I had experimental data I could share with him was a clincher, as I should have known it would be in advance.

De Gennes spent a large part of the period following the award of the Nobel Prize visiting schools in France. He was a passionate advocate for science, and used the additional clout the Nobel Prize afforded him to push his views on the importance of science on policy-makers within France. His influence was immense and his legacy lives on. He cared passionately about education, and also about the need for academic scientists to engage with industry.  Although that is not so unusual in the UK, or indeed the US, within France – with its (as far as I can judge) rather élitist academic attitude, it was not the norm. As Director of ESPCI – which as I have written about before does have a strong industrial tie-in – he was able to be a vocal proponent for this, but because of his status in France he was able to push this concept out much further into the community.

Both Sir Sam and de Gennes had charisma and charm, both were very approachable – and wanted to be seen as such – though both could equally be formidable if crossed or when trying to push an argument.  They were gentle with juniors, but ferocious when needed to be with more senior scientists, civil servants and the like. I always found both of them immensely encouraging as I moved into more interdisciplinary areas (such as starch and food physics more generally), areas which some members of my department had trouble getting their head around.  Sam’s phrase was ‘physics is what physicists do’ – in other words quit worrying and get on with it. They were not interested in setting out to prove they were better than those around them (though quite obviously as scientists they towered over most) or scoring points. They were not, if I can put it this way, interested in demonstrating they were alpha males, although quite clearly they were. An amazing pair to have known, and people whom it was impossible not to look up to.  As role models and mentors one could not look for better (and that they were male and I am not is, in my view, irrelevant).    They were truly inspirational and, in my book, true gentlemen.

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