New Year, New You

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Athene Donald

We all know New Year’s resolutions tend to last no longer than the first week or two, but it does no harm to reflect at this time of year what might improve body and soul as well as output and all the other drivers of an academic’s life. I am conscious, as full-time (formal) retirement beckons at the end of this academic year when I step down as Master of Churchill College, that I need to be sure I stay fit and active. One of the consequences of the pandemic from my perspective, is the loss of casual exercise in the form of cycling between meetings. Far fewer meetings, held outside the College but within the University, at least of the ones I still attend, are now held in person. This means the need for me to cycle in and out of the city centre once or twice a day is much lessened. Likewise, many of the meetings I used to attend in person in London are now hybrid, if not totally via Zoom/Teams and so I cycle across Cambridge to the railway station comparatively rarely. I never used to think anything about my cycling habits, but reflection tells me I no longer get anything like as much casual but necessary cycling exercise as I used to. This cannot be good for me. In the summer, an evening walk simply for the sake of it may be pleasant; much less so when evenings are dark, cold and – of late – so often simply wet and uninviting.

So, I need to take much more care to exercise deliberately in some shape or form or I will find, when I finally have time on my hands, I don’t have the energy or strength to get out and about. Later life is tedious in this respect (and anyone can check on Wikipedia how many years I have now accumulated in my life), as things one took for granted no longer seem quite so straightforward. One of these days I shall squat down to lock my bicycle to the rack at ground level and find I need the help of a passing stranger to get me back on my feet, which would be embarrassing. So, exercises to ensure my leg muscles are as strong as possible are part of my new year’s resolutions, and something I hope I will have the motivation to keep up with.

However, more generally, I think I just have to concentrate on getting away from the screen. One good thing about going to London is that it provides an excuse not only to cycle to the station, but also – time permitting – to walk across London. Typically, my meetings are at the Royal Society, so that facilitates a good 45-50 minute walk from Kings Cross, healthy if one ignores the pollution levels on most of the streets I need to go along. It must be better than being squeezed into an underground train, particularly with the high levels of respiratory infections present currently, Covid, ‘flu and more (and yes, I do still wear a mask on the tube, and have been shouted at for so doing). However, there is no doubt that on some of the recent days, attempting to do this walk would only mean I ended up looking drowned and less professional than I might like upon arrival.

I attended a London meeting this week at which one of the attendees, slim and accused always of eating, admitted he walked ten miles a day. That is an aspiration few of us probably have in mind, but it clearly worked for him. Most of us in academia are probably fixedly starting at a screen, or a test-tube or an equation for far too much of our days, and equally too much for our well-being. It is hard to make sufficient allowance for our health. Personally, I am no believer in gyms, because I prefer to exercise in private. Back in the days when I would run/jog regularly, before my Achilles tendon forced me to give up, I never chose company for my runs. The pleasure – particularly back when I was a postdoc in Ithaca and the scenery was delightful even if the climate less so – came from being able to watch the changing seasons and just take it all in.

The pandemic meant every local walk was walked to excess. The opening up of the new site at Eddington (North West Cambridge, as it was initially and unimaginatively known) during my tenure at the College did provide new routes, some of which are pleasantly, if only relatively, ‘rural’, offering rabbits, foxes, kestrels etc to admire from time to time. By now, however, I’ve been that way far too often. Just as moving into the College in 2014 gave me a new viewpoint and routes, with the prospect of returning to my own house in the autumn I will have different opportunities, including along the Cam, for a gentle afternoon’s walk, even if they’re the same ones that used to be so familiar. If I can keep up my New Year’s resolutions, maybe I’ll even be up for longer walks and I should certainly have more time in which to undertake them.

It is a strange feeling to be considering full retirement, not something I’m looking forward to. Everyone assures me that ‘something will turn up’, Micawber style, to keep me busy, but equally I am told forcefully not to take the first thing that comes along. In a year’s time, who knows what I’ll be doing or where my centre of gravity will be, but I hope I will still be working hard at not letting old age overtake me and my muscles.

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Being Exceptional

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Athene Donald

One of the books I read over Christmas was the 2023 book by Kate Zernike, The Exceptions. It is a story about that committed band of sixteen female scientists at MIT, led by Nancy Hopkins, who built up the evidence base to show just how real – and substantial – the discrimination against women scientists in their institution was. It is a sobering read. I was very familiar with the outcome of their investigations, which were reported in 1999, but the stories of disadvantage spanning many years prior to the report were new to me. Gripping and dispiriting reading. I am almost exactly 10 years younger than Hopkins, and fared considerably better than she did, but nevertheless much of what is related in this book feels very familiar.

The report itself was one of those seminal moments in the (gradual) path towards equity for women in science, rather like – in the UK – Sally Davies’ intervention in 2011, requiring Medical Schools that wanted to obtain funding as Biomedical Research Centre to get an Athena Swan Silver Award. Whatever readers may feel about the Athena Swan awards now, Sally’s actions focussed minds, and not just in the Clinical sector but across higher education in the UK. Likewise, if rather earlier, the MIT report showed up just how much scientific research in universities was not meritocratic in the way most people wanted to believe (including Hopkins). It forced many departments to look at their own processes: around appointments, promotions and all the behaviours that constituted their culture, and take note that women almost invariably faced disadvantage of one sort or another. It might be a lower salary, not being invited to sit on key committees, not being allocated funding for students, being denied the opportunity to apply for funding, lack of space, results being attributed to someone else and, of course, direct harassment of different sorts. Sadly, too much of this will still be familiar to women in the field now, however much things have shifted in the right direction.

When I read the report, back in 1999, it was just after I was elected to the Royal Society, so I was myself already a senior scientist in Cambridge. Yet as I read it – drawn to my attention by a male scientist at MIT who I knew from my time in the US – it felt depressingly familiar, even though I hadn’t previously recognized what was described. It is so easy to attribute lack of progress or success to one’s own failings. Often that may be the right attribution but, particularly if you are a minority scientist, not necessarily always. That feeling that your voice doesn’t carry the same weight as your white male colleagues in committee meetings may well be correct. The suspicion that conversations are going on about pulling together a large grant behind closed doors in meetings you are not invited to attend, may be entirely accurate. Promotions may go to male colleagues whose CV isn’t actually any better than your own. These were events that were described in 1999, with evidence, to many people’s surprise back then. Now, there is less surprise about such incidents, but that doesn’t mean such things don’t continue to happen.

Meritocracy is such an attractive concept, but none of us are necessarily that good at ensuring it happens. Bias comes in a multitude of ways; perhaps we are still discovering just in how many ways. It used to be simply described – as in The Exceptions – for the case of women. Then people recognized that ethnic background also should be taken into account as a situation where bias might creep in. In the UK, increasingly people note that accent may matter, as indicating your class and background. A researcher’s ‘pedigree’, i.e. which department or PhD supervisor they had, may get unreasonably factored in. I suspect everyone does this to some extent, there is no point pretending any of us is completely free of bias of one kind or another, but it can still lead to a golden boy (usually) getting a job because they’ve come up some smooth ladder, unlike their competitors who have struggled against disadvantage. We have to keep trying harder.

The world Hopkins grew up in, indeed the world in which I grew up, had very different attitudes to both the idea of educating women to higher degrees and encouraging them to have careers. Radcliffe, where Hopkins attended, had in its 1964 yearbook (as I learned from Zernicke’s book) the memorable quote

‘The young women of today are a race of culturally induced schizophrenics, They are reared and trained to be the equals of men…Yet these women are also fed the Great American myth of house and home…’

Hopkins absolutely felt that tension.  I recall a woman, perhaps 30 years older than me, who told me how much easier it had been for her, since making that decision just wasn’t an option. She followed her husband, let nature take its course about children, and only returned to the academic fold as a College teaching fellow in later life. She felt that my generation, who had to make explicit choices, had it harder. I’m not sure I agreed with her at the time, liking the fact that I could try to muddle through having both children and a career (and for many years that was something of a muddle).

Women still face that choice, and may still face significant disadvantage if they are surrounded by colleagues who feel having children means a woman can’t be serious about her science, something I’ve never heard said of a man who has children. Undoubtedly the world has moved on since Hopkins entered academia. If you are in any doubt, read The Exceptions. But is simply hasn’t moved on far enough despite so many of the issues being out in the open. The pressure for further change to support all minorities, not just women, needs to be maintained.

 

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Not Being in the In-Crowd

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Athene Donald

Recently I was preparing a talk about work scientists may do that is not simply research and it has provoked me to think about when I fell into doing policy work, or at least moving out of the lab itself. The first role I took on was not exactly policy: it was sitting on a grant giving board (with fixed membership) of what was then the AFRC (Agriculture and Food Research Council), a predecessor of BBSRC. I was still, to my mind at least, an early career researcher. I can have only been in the second year of my lectureship and I can date the occasion fairly precisely, because I know I was still breastfeeding my first child, which caused all kinds of logistical problems. I wasn’t on maternity leave, though, because I only got 16 weeks paid leave back then (which was generous for the time), and my wonderful mentor, Sam Edwards, took a dim view of me saying I didn’t want to attend my first committee meeting because of the challenges of keeping a small child happy, and essentially gave me a three-line whip.

It was definitely a baptism of fire. Leave aside the comments that greeted me when I walked into the room, as a young unknown female, about the papers (yes papers, literally, and a heavy weight of them), coming out late. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the 1980s, given that it could still happen today though one hopes with less frequency, it was assumed any woman present had to be part of the Secretariat. Once I’d worked out why I was being challenged about paper distribution by some grey-haired, grey-suited gentleman, I could push back. But the baptism of fire also got much closer to the science. I forget the precise title of the panel, possibly Food Quality, but I’d only been working in anything vaguely related to food for about a couple of years and felt a complete novice amongst this bunch of established researchers from food science and life science departments. What was I, a mere physicist (as well as the wrong sex) doing there?

It was, of course, precisely because I was a physicist that I was there, with the AFRC trying to reach out to the ‘harder’ sciences to broaden its research base and spread. I was inevitably faced with the prospect of not really fitting in; I was approaching problems from a different perspective which might put others out. Not being one of the crowd can be a plus, as well as a minus. Ultimately, I’m sure it was a plus for me, but it was an uncomfortable time when working on food didn’t fit well into my Physics department (as my colleagues often delighted in telling me) but being a physicist didn’t fit well into any community of food researchers. How different should one be?

When I was writing my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), I found Paul Nurse had quite a lot to say on this subject. “Always think is there another way of looking at this problem. …creativity is often at the edges, boundaries between disciplines, or subject areas. It’s putting things together that you often don’t put together….If you want to be creative, explore the edges.” as he said in an interview for the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative in 2016.  In a 2009 interview he said: ‘I took a risk at the beginning to work on something that wasn’t that interesting for most people’.  He seems to have done this entirely deliberately, whereas falling into food research was more accidental for me, and driven by circumstance much more than design. The funding was there, obtained by my predecessor as lecturer who had then left the country, so I had to make a go of it, willy-nilly. It did, in the end, turn out well, but is going out on a limb something I would recommend to an early career researcher today?

I fear the answer to whether one should or should not do such a thing is only possible to give with hindsight. In other words, did it work out to one’s advantage? It may, as I found it, be an unpleasant experience to be an outsider wherever one is, even if there is something to be gained from it. One advantage I had at the time was that I had another research stream that was much more mainstream, continuing the work I had started during my second postdoc via industrial funding, so that was a safe line to follow, and it went well. I can also date this accurately to around this same time although when I was still on maternity leave, since the person I offered the position to I recall interviewing with a screaming baby on my shoulder. He coped well with that, as well as the rest of the interview. But here was someone else going out on a limb. He was someone who had done their PhD in superconductivity (low temperature, this was before high temperature superconductivity had been discovered) and wrote me a careful letter explaining why he wanted to make the switch to working on polymers – which he clearly thought would be much more useful than some esoteric compound that became superconducting at near absolute zero – and I found him very convincing. He made a great success of the project with me, and went on to have a productive career working on the mechanical properties of polymers in Swiss academia. He may have felt any postdoc was better than no postdoc, but he was willing consciously to make the move away from an area he knew to something else, and then he delivered on it. He was moving from what might be thought of as one mainstream area to another, rather than the bizarre world of food physics, but he still was taking a risk and it paid off for him.

As a young researcher it may feel very hard to weigh up these challenges. To stick with the straight and narrow or move into something unusual? Or, as Nurse put it, into some area others aren’t interested in. However, risk-taking is often a good way to get on, as is standing out from the crowd. I am conscious that, both by virtue of typically being the minority gender, as well as having an unusual name, I have derived the incidental benefit of being more memorable than some of my colleagues. It hasn’t been anything over which I had control, but one should use whatever accidental advantages one happens to possess, since other attributes may be simultaneously counting against you.

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Skills and Post-16 Education

Posted on December 3, 2023 by Athene Donald

In his Anniversary Day address to the Royal Society’s Fellowship last week, the President, Adrian Smith, drew attention to the state of our education system, recognizing that the Prime Minister’s intent to

“reform the education system to include some form of maths to 18 for all – [is] very much in line with the Society’s arguments for a broader school curriculum and in particular our work on rethinking what is needed for maths education.”

The so-called gold standard of A Levels in England is out of line with our competitor nations in terms of its breadth of disciplinary coverage, and the ability to drop out of any sort of mathematics education post-16 does not provide a sound base for an extremely large number of jobs, including many far away from the STEM sector itself. He went on to say

“It is also crucial to ensure that people of all ages can develop the broader range of skills – both technical and academic – they will need for the well-paid jobs of the future and to be an active participant in a life that is ever more shaped by science and technology.”

It is all too easy for academic scientists to overlook the contributions made by members of their team or department who don’t have PhDs, nor even first degrees, but who make the whole operation run smoothly, be it in their research laboratories, workshops or teaching laboratories. For this reason, Kelly Vere’s work at Nottingham leading on the Talent Commission, and their work on raising the profile of technicians in the university workplace, is hugely important. But one also has to consider wider issues. Many of the technicians who contribute to innovation and raising levels of productivity will be working in industry, in both small and multinational companies. Many of them may not have followed the linear pipeline of A Levels to university before entering the workforce.

Some of them will have chosen apprenticeships, some will have taken vocational routes into employment, perhaps via BTECs or the more recent (and not altogether successful) T Levels. However, it appears Rishi Sunak now intends to ditch these latter, before their roll-out has even been completed, in favour of the projected amorphous qualification he is calling the Advanced British Standard, even though he has no jurisdiction over the devolved nations’ education system.

Philip Augar, in his 2019 report, had a lot to say about post-18 education, remarking

“But what of the neglected, the 50 per cent of the 18-30 year-old population who do not go to university, and older non-graduates?”

As he said of Further Education Colleges over the years,

“despite widespread acknowledgement that this sector is crucial to the country’s economic success, nothing much has happened except for a steep, steady decline in funding.”

He laid out a number of recommendations, in particular around  this fundamental issues of funding, which have fallen on stony government ground. In their long-delayed response, the government had little to say about this issue.

Now, in a recent HEPI report, London South Bank University Vice Chancellor Dave Phoenix takes a further look at what happens in Further Education and other parts of the education system post-16. He identifies many problems, including the fact that the current system of incentives and distribution of cash encourages competition between different parts of the ecosystem, to the detriment of all of it. And, of course, to the detriment of the individual students (as well as employers), who are faced with a confusing landscape of choice and a lack of coherent advice to help them negotiate the maze that faces them while they try to find a satisfactory career path.

With central money in short supply, this competition between different parts of the sector – further education colleges, sixth forms being rapidly added on to secondary schools and universities offering more Level 3 courses – is wasteful.  Class sizes diminish, which will only get worse with the changing demographics going forward, and become uneconomic to run and so are terminated. Teachers across the board (at least in subjects like my own of Physics, plus Maths, Computing etc as well as languages) are in short supply and FE Colleges pay worse than other parts of the sector making jobs there even less attractive. We do not have a working system, yet this is a crucial training for parts of the future workforce.

Industry itself has a key role to play, since exposing children early on to what sorts of roles are out there may help them to understand what qualifications they should aspire to. Careers programmes in schools are too often woeful – again due to both a lack of money and qualified professionals – but, as the Gatsby Benchmarks make clear, employers and employees need to get into schools to help provide a rounded view of what skills lead where.

Finally, remembering the Government’s much vaunted pledge to level up, where there is most disadvantage the outcomes are worst. For the most deprived quintile, 53% of young adults have only achieved Level 2 qualifications (or worse), compared with 19% of those from the least deprived quintile, of whom 49% go to university. For schools with the highest number of Free School Meals pupils, 60% of teaching hours are taught by someone without relevant maths/science degree; it’s not surprising that such schools have worse outcomes than for those with the lowest proportion where (and this is still bad) the figure is just over 40%. Children are being deprived of life-chances because of our failing system. The country is losing out on potential talent, productivity gains from having the workforce we need to deliver in the right place and with the right skills, and hence overall economic benefit.

We have an education system post-16 that fails at every level, that is inefficient, not least because of damaging internal competition, and with insufficient numbers of subject-specialist teachers who are themselves inadequately recompensed.

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Conversations in Amazing Libraries

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Athene Donald

Remarkably, I have been in three magnificent rooms of books in the last week, starting off with the Wren Library in Cambridge’s Trinity College. The first photo (which I admit I have taken from Diane Coyle’s Bluesky feed) gives an impression of its massive shape. It’s very high ceilinged and consequently, as we discovered, also very cold. Equally, it’s extremely long with, apparently, 80,000 books still in situ and a wonderful smell of ancient leather tomes which greets you as soon as you walk into the space. I was there, along with Tabitha  Goldstaub, Director of Innovate Cambridge, and fellow Fellow of Churchill College and Bennett Professor of Public Policy Diane Coyle, to discuss ‘Why we need more women in science and beyond’ building on my book Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science.

Wren library Trinity College

Tabitha is the author of How To Talk To Robots: A Girls’ Guide To a Future Dominated by AI. She did not start off life in the world of tech, but got her degree in advertising, but she has moved further and further into this sphere, becoming increasingly worried, for instance, about the gender bias frequently lurking behind algorithms. Her fears about a tech world full of ‘bro’s’ as she put it, became very clear during our discussions. Diane is an economist, author of a number of books, and her concerns about the lack of women in her field have often been expressed there and elsewhere (e.g. see here). So, there was much common ground between the three of us, as we expressed worries about a world where women are so often ‘not in the room’, leading to decisions which may be biased, ignore half the population or be based on misconceptions.

Despite the chilly temperature in the library, there was a lively Q+A session with the audience after our introductory discussion, overlooked by austere male busts. I had to wonder how many books by female authors there were amongst the 80,000. The Trinity Librarian Nicholas Bell who introduced the event, tried valiantly to make a connection between the library and women in STEM, by pointing out the College possessed the papers of Ada Lovelace’s father, but I’m not sure that connection is very strong, given that Byron seems never to have met his daughter.

A couple of days later I found myself being interviewed in the Georgian Room at the Royal Institution (see the second photo) by Suze Kudu for Digital Science. As with the event in the Wren Library, this interview will appear on YouTube in due course, along with the lecture I gave, also about my book shortly after the interview with Suze, in the famous Royal Institution Lecture Theatre. The Georgian Room also contains a number of old tomes, although nothing like 80,000. Again, we wondered how many books by women graced the shelves. Not many, we guessed, and the portraiture also appeared to be only of males.Georgian room RI Unlike my previous lecture at the Royal Institution that I gave a decade or so ago, I was not required to wear evening dress, for which I was grateful. My thanks to Digital Science for sponsoring the lecture. Once again, there was a lively discussion in the Q+A session. Once again, the audience was largely female. I always like talking to audience members afterwards, as I sign their book copies, and I was particularly touched by the comments from one group: they told me how my blog had helped to get them through their PhDs. Years ago I reflected on the possibility of this blog amounting to some sort of online mentoring, and I guess their comments indicate, for some, that is exactly how it has been. I take that as a great compliment.

Finally, I ended up in a room not formally a library, but formerly the Reading Room in the Royal Society, although now it rejoices in the name of Wolfson 1. Busts adorned the room, along with splendid decoration but, finally, a woman could be spotted. The third photograph shows Mary Somerville, for a long time the only woman whose features were on display in the Society’s rooms. Far from true now with, for example, a painting of Jocelyn Bell Burnell being prominent in the entrance hall, portraits of Julia Higgins and Anne Maclaren both – I believe, although I’ve not checked recently – downstairs in the canteen amongst others. Anne was the first woman to be an Officer of the Society (she was the Foreign Secretary, as was Julia subsequently). However, Somerville’s bust was a breakthrough when it first was commissioned in 1832 (it was not received by the Society until 1842), preceding by more than a hundred years the admission of women to the Fellowship. A recent blogpost on the Royal Society’s site will tell you more about the origin of the bust.

Mary Somerville bust

I was in this particular room, not to talk about gender issues, but leading a round-table discussion considering what the PhD of the future might look like, and what needs to change, as part of the Royal Society’s Science 2040 project, aimed at imagining what an ideal overall system for science might look like in 2040. Suffice it to say, there were many views, many places where we could all identify the current system was far from ideal but with less agreement on where we would like to end up. I will be fascinated to see what the facilitators distil from our wide-ranging discussions. With Somerville watching over us, a woman whose education bore no relationship to modern structures, yet who made significant contributions to science through the translations and books she wrote, it was interesting to remember PhD’s just weren’t a ‘thing’ in her day anywhere in the world. Times have changed.

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