Learning on the Job

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Athene Donald

Cycling is one of the many life-skills beyond the curriculum that freshers need to learn rapidly upon arrival in Cambridge. However much they may have cycled previously around their homes, there is something peculiar about Cambridge cycling. Whether it is the on-the-hour rush along Tennis Court Road between lectures, swarming along with hundreds of other students in the same tearing hurry, or remembering your bike lights as the nights draw in, there is much to absorb. This is not something we provide training in; as with so much of life it is ‘on-the-job’ learning.  I was reminded of this today as I watched a young cyclist fail to cycle defensively, coming up on the inside of a bus as it was turning left. Luckily the bus driver was considerably more wise to the ways of cyclists than conversely, and disaster was averted.

At the graduate level we do a slightly better job, not of teaching cycling but of some of the other soft skills needed to survive a PhD: such training might include how to give presentations, writing up their CV’s or thesis planning. However, as one progresses up the slippery pole it seems to me that we are back to learning on the job by one’s mistakes. Some years ago I was asked to participate in a training day for young women at a different institution, entitled ‘If I had only known then what I know now’.  I was supposed to be one of the ‘voices of experience’, but I found it very illuminating for myself. We got to ‘role play’ a committee, with some of the attendees being given specific characters to play out. For myself I was charged with being an inefficient chair of the committee, with a disruptive dean (played by the facilitator) constantly interrupting my attempts at keeping the meeting in order. We all then collectively dissected the dynamics of what had happened.

For myself, I found having this disruptive ‘dean’ a nerve-racking experience, despite it merely being in fun. The moment that stood out in my mind, however, was the woman who had been given the character of ‘just saying no’. She was asked, by me (who didn’t know the character she was supposed to be portraying), to take on some dreary task and she simply looked me in the face and refused. When asked about it afterwards the word she used was that it ‘liberated’ her, that normally she would –like so many of us – have felt obliged to say yes whether she wanted to agree or not. Being given permission, as it were, to say no made her feel positively light headed. We don’t provide such training in the run of things and so, too often, people end up being put upon. Some people are no doubt born with either sufficient confidence, self protection or possibly a complete absence of what it takes to be a good citizen that they apparently have no trouble refusing any sort of chore. For most of us it is a challenge to say I will do so much, but no more. This leads to the danger of being overwhelmed by tasks which may range from the pointless to the thankless, encompassing also those not very appropriate to the skills one does have.  It may also lead to the danger of doing all the wrong sorts of things for the benefit of one’s career, and freeing up others more selfish or self-assertive to make better career progression.

One support system which can help the navigation of such dangers is that of mentoring, as I was reminded today by the receipt the American Physical Society’s CSWP Gazette (CSWP stands for the Committee on the Status of Women). This particular issue – which seems to be openly available – was mainly devoted to a discussion of mentoring, from the viewpoint of both mentors and mentees.  For many women mentoring can prove a vital support system. It does not have to be provided by women for women (in my own case essentially all my mentors have been men), so small numbers of women in an institution need not in itself be a hurdle. Mentoring can be invaluable for obtaining advice about how to tackle an issue, or where to turn to for further information. But even if you know what you want to do, carrying it through can still be a major challenge. I have found the books by Anne Dickson very helpful in this respect (for instance Women at Work , A Voice for Now and Difficult Conversations: What to say inTricky Situations without Ruining the Relationship ) in terms of putting into words some of the confused thoughts with which one may approach a tricky situation and working through them.  But these books still remain at the theoretical level. The ultimate challenge is acting out what needs to be said. I have discussed previously the way support groups can be helpful, and it may be that they can provide a safe environment in which to practice verbalising difficult responses. But beyond this, it seems to me that those providing professional development courses need to consider offering more opportunities for role play to enable the less assertive of us to try out ‘saying no’ in unthreatening situations.

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Writing the Right Stuff

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Athene Donald

Almost everything I have written over the last 30 odd years has been in the standard format of so-called ‘scholarly articles’ and grant applications.  There is a certain style to this, rather formal and usually retaining the passive voice – though that is a fashion that is fading – a general style that has been referred to as ‘didactic dead-pan’. (If I were properly ‘dead-panning  didactically’ here, I would give you the reference for that quote, but I  will refrain).   Occasionally, if I were feeling daring in a review article I might have used a rhetorical question; that was as exciting as it got. But in the last few weeks I have had to think much harder about genre, and not just for writing posts for this blog.  This was brought into focus as I composed a speech at the end of last week to give in the distinctly archaic format of a Cambridge University Discussion, held in the Senate House (and for which appropriate academic dress, in the form of a gown, is a requirement to add to the solemnity of the occasion).

I have only spoken in a Discussion once, when I was Chair of my Department’s Personnel Committee. At the time we were all very concerned by an initial set of proposals regarding assimilation of staff onto a payscale with a single spine, a payscale that appeared to advantage those at the top at the expense of those near the bottom (I should point out that the payscale was substantially modified before its introduction, in part because of the views expressed at the Discussion).  And that time, counter to the solemnity I have just referred to, the dignity was disturbed by a spontaneous burst of applause at the end of my speech, much to my surprise.  Nevertheless, as I composed my remarks this time, and thought about what I wanted to say, I realised that the how was also much in my mind: the style that seemed appropriate felt rather like a Victorian novel, Disraeli perhaps or George Eliot. Maybe it is the ghost of Discussions Past that has been hovering over my typing fingers.

The current subject of the Discussion is the introduction of a Combined Equality Scheme which has slowly traversed its way through the layers of university committees, all of which I appear to sit on – so I have seen this document multiple times in subtly different versions.  As one part of this Scheme, Champions have been introduced for the three equality strands of Gender (that’s me), Disability and Race.  As champions, we wanted to turn up to this Discussion to state our total commitment to mainstreaming Equality within the University, even if not a soul turned up to oppose the Report on the Scheme; in fact two people did, one of whom seemed to think equality was a luxury which could be done away with in times of financial stringency.  I reproduce my remarks at the end of this post, so you don’t need to wade through them if you don’t want to, but they are there to illustrate my point about genre. Read the speech, and then compare it with my style in the Fight Debate published in Eureka last week; if you can get behind the paywall you can read the whole thing, but a part of it is also included at the bottom of this post. Or indeed compare the Discussion style with this blog and you will see what fun I am able to have now in constructing different ‘voices’, an opportunity I don’t recall ever having had previously during my professional life.

But there is also a serious scientific as well as linguistic point here, relating to interdisciplinary working.  If you compare how physicists and biologist write, for instance, they approach things in different ways. That is true even in the very titles they choose for their papers. Looking at the table of contents in last week’s PNAS, a journal I have deliberately chosen since it encompasses essentially the whole breadth of pure science within each issue, the differences become very obvious.

The first two titles in the cell biology section of this recent issue are:

Polyunsaturated liposomes are antiviral against hepatitis B and C viruses and HIV by decreasing cholesterol levels in infected cells

Lateral opening of a translocon upon entry of protein suggests the mechanism of insertion into membranes

I’ve marked up in bold the active verb in each; such verbs are missing if you look at the first title from the Chemistry section:

Hydration dynamics at fluorinated protein surfaces

and verbs are equally missing from the Physics section:

Direct search for a ferromagnetic phase in a heavily overdoped nonsuperconducting copper oxide

With no verbs in the physical science titles there is no active sense of discovery, nothing to let you know (from the title alone) what the key conclusions of the paper are, just a description of the scope of the paper. I don’t know where these stylistic differences came from – I hardly think it is because physicists are less certain about what they are discovering – but it seems to be fairly general. There are titles in this issue that buck the trend, but I suspect if I applied a statistical test I would find the difference was significant. I say this with some confidence because I have for ages wondered why it was that biology titles felt somewhat alien, and I think now I’ve worked it out.

You could argue that the wording of the title is immaterial, but I think it is symptomatic of differences in style and approach throughout; somehow there are cultural norms ingrained in us as we are taught and trained in our particular discipline. There is nothing spelt out, and it isn’t clear why the differences have evolved. At school, children may explicitly be taught about genre writing, and how to write in different styles for a broadsheet or a tabloid, for instance.  Nothing is said about writing styles for science; indeed, far too little is said about science writing at all!  Nevertheless, if I want to start publishing my interdisciplinary work in a journal from a different branch of science maybe I need to tune into this with more care if I want to satisfy the referees, regardless of the quality of the science itself.  It looks like another challenge and potential pitfall for progressing interdisciplinarity.

My remarks at this week’s Discussion:

Deputy Vice Chancellor, I speak to you as the University’s Gender Equality Champion, one of the three new champion’s roles formalised in this Combined Equality Scheme.  The role initially was created in the mind’s eye of our previous Vice Chancellor, who wanted to focus thoughts on the importance of true equality.  As a university we have certainly not succeeded particularly well in the past; our history is glorious but also formally excluded women for more than 90% of its existence. Even recently segments of our multicultural and diverse society will have continued to feel excluded or under-valued. It is high time we dealt formally and properly with the consequences of failings consequent upon our long history.

The creation of this Combined Equality Scheme brings together many actions needed to bring the University into compliance with the Law. Currently we are not doing well on the compliance front, and this should be a source of shame. What we have in the Scheme is a clear statement of the approach of the university in dealing with the different equality strands. It gives a brief overview of the University’s functions and activities in order to fulfil its aspirations to be a good employer, which extend to actions beyond mere compliance.  By bringing together a previous grand total of 38 policies and papers into a single, easily digestible document we will not only have much greater clarity of vision and purpose and greater transparency, but in the process reduce the administrative burden on both the central bodies and individual members.

The law may upon occasion be an ass, but the new duties incumbent on us under the Equality Act 2010 require us to respond, as does natural justice for our students and employees. I have watched this Scheme during its gestation. I have followed it through a series of committees – the Equality and Diversity Committee, the Human Resources Committee and finally University  Council, all of which I sit on – so I have seen how each committee has helped to mould the final article, to ensure a balance of pragmatism and aspiration wrapped up in the necessities of the legislative framework. I believe it represents a significant step forward for the University and all its employees. I warmly commend this Combined Equality Scheme to you.

Compare that with my response to the question Are TV science presenters more important than leading practising scientists? in the Fight Debate from last week’s Eureka magazine. I was putting the ‘No’ view, to counter Evan Harris’ ‘Yes’ piece. I can only include part of the article here; for the full thing it’s back behind the paywall I’m afraid.

What would TV presenters of science be able to present if it wasn’t for the work of scientists?  They can be as charismatic as you like, brilliant at enthralling the public and communicating the wonders of science. But if the scientists weren’t beavering away day by day, however uncharismatic they may be (or perceived to be) there would be no wonder of science for the presenters to communicate.

And who makes more lasting difference to the world we live in? Let’s look at some figures from the past to see whose legacy is longer and more important.  Back in 1964, because of my interest in ornithology I was given tickets to the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures given that year by Desmond Morris. Some may remember him as the author of the once controversial book ‘The Naked Ape’. In 1964 he was better known as a presenter of Zoo Time on ITV. Contrast his current status, and the contribution he has made to science in the long term, with Dorothy Hodgkin who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in that year for her beautiful and ground-breaking X-ray studies, notably of the vitamin B12. Her seminal work continues to be an inspiration to many; her appearance on a Royal Mail stamp this year is testament to her impact.

Fast forward a few years, and the media darling was Magnus Pyke, an eccentric scientist who succeeded – with a great deal of arm-waving in a literal sense – in putting complex ideas across to a lay audience. Consequently in 1975, he was the highest rated living scientist in a New Scientist poll for the ‘best-known and most characteristic scientist of all time’………

Posted in Biological Physics, Communicating Science, Equality, Interdisciplinary Science | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is Travel Good for your (Career’s) Health?

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Athene Donald

In order to move up the rungs on the academic career ladder it is inevitable that one needs to fill in an answer to the question of ‘talks given’. At the lower levels, departmental seminars and small national meetings will suffice to satisfy, but moving upwards the demands get greater: invited lectures, international talks and plenary talks at international conferences become de rigeur.  This immediately poses a problem if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to travel. Perhaps you have a fear of flying but, for parents of small children, there is another obstacle. Quite simply, you don’t want to leave them. This is particularly acute for women and may hit them just at the time they are applying for a permanent post, senior fellowship or promotion. How serious a problem is this?  I would like to propose that there are in fact significant advantages in restricting travel – and if more parents believed this, it could reduce career-angst a little.

I was a lecturer when my children were born and for a number of years I restricted my travel to only about 3 days a year – or more accurately, 3 nights away from home a year. Really. These days I am frequently away 3 nights a week but back then I absolutely tried not to travel, not to be away from my children, however much I knew my husband was there to look after them and was more than capable of doing so.  Whatever biological differences there may or may not be between the sexes, I do think the maternal bond is very strong!  So, did that disadvantage my career?

In some ways I am sure it did – my international visibility was not great and if you turn down invitations, it soon becomes well known and the invitations dry up. However, and why I think the answer is less clear-cut than might first be thought, there are some definite plusses. Just think of all that time you don’t waste in airports – though a long layover in Newark once enabled me to read an entire thesis cover to cover, which I suppose was a positive – or the overheated hotels with lousy food you can give a miss, the many identikit convention centres you can avoid.  All things which one’s soul is better off without. Furthermore, while my colleagues were out on the road, I was back home talking to students and hopefully inspiring them to better things whilst keeping them on the straight and narrow.  I kept in very close touch with them and had time to read and comment on their thesis chapters, write the papers and produce grant applications (as well as being able to keep my carbon footprint down) – naturally at the expense of less time to network, raise my profile and make useful contacts.

I believe that this is an acceptable trade-off for a few years. When my children were small I basically didn’t travel; that was fine, I had my lectureship and I wasn’t trying to get promoted. When they were a bit bigger, say 5 and 7, I started travelling rather more, got some US talks on my CV so that I looked convincing when it came to promotion to Reader. Then I (and they) found their adolescent years sufficiently troubling that I cut back on travelling again – but amazingly/luckily I had already managed to get my Chair by then, so this mattered less. The timing maybe worked fortuitously well for me, but I think it is worth saying loud and clear that travel has a significant opportunity cost – in terms of useful working hours lost – as well as an obvious opportunity gain. But for parents, and most particularly for women for whom this is undoubtedly a particularly acute problem, trying to balance home life and the apparent necessity of jet-setting, I would say step back and think carefully. Some travel is vital, much may be as much about ego-stroking and having interesting experiences in exotic parts of the world as actually being productive for your career. Don’t assume more is necessarily better.

Finally, I would like to invite those drawing up promotion criteria to think carefully about this issue.  Is a long list of talks given an unnecessary hurdle for young parents? How many talks are needed on a CV to be an indicator of quality? Aa an alternative would it be reasonable to ask applicants to list invitations received, as opposed to talks physically given? The invitation is the true measure of esteem, the fact that the talk was delivered is less material, unless judgement is actually going to be made about the inherent quality of the talk – and no one does that on a promotion panel!

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Eureka! -Choosing the 100 Most Influential People in British Science

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Athene Donald

This piece also appears as a guestblog on the Times’s Science blog “Eureka Zone” (behind the paywall).

When an invitation to join the panel to help draw up the Eureka100 powerlist in science arrived in my inbox, my fancy was certainly tickled and I readily accepted. However, as the process evolved it became clear in just how many different ways the phrase ‘ most influential people in British science’ can be interpreted. Does it mean simply practicing scientists? Certainly my first assumption was these would represent the majority of entries.  Over what time period did influence need to have been exerted; in other words were we trying to produce a list of ‘old farts’, to use Will Carling’s memorable phrase, or those at the peak of their profession now whose influence would continue to increase? Or perhaps we should be searching out those who were clearly upwardly mobile but perhaps not yet reached their peak. How widely were we to spread our net beyond actual practicing scientists? Should it include politicians, policy makers, captains of industry and those associated with the media? These may well not be scientists, may not even have studied science beyond GCSE/O Level but that definitely does not preclude them from wielding power and influence within the sector. Each of us came to the table with different internal weightings of these sorts of factors, and that led to some lively banter and discussion as we tried to draw up an agreed ranking. Throw the need for good journalistic copy into the mix and things only got more complex. Ultimately the ‘editorial decision is final’, as they say.

So at the end of the process am I satisfied the list does justice to all, and that it really does represent a meaningful take on the UK today?  Well no, I think we could have produced many variants of this list each of which would have been equally valid. There simply isn’t a single figure of merit that can be accurately quantified for this purpose. We have produced a list of spurious accuracy – as I described it at the time – and the scientist in me is worried by a measurement that may look precise but is so inherently inaccurate. Unfortunately I am also used to ranking other imprecise things, grants and departments come to mind, and so rather too well-used to having to compare apples and oranges in ways that can also make one feel very uncomfortable. There will be many people on the list whom readers will think ‘why on earth are they there’; for me that group would include Prince Charles and Heston Blumenthal.  There will be other names which some readers will see as dreadful omissions – insert your own favourite omission mentally here. Everyone reading Eureka would have created a different list according to their own internal weightings, prejudices and knowledge.

However I am quite sure that there will be some people, such as our number 1 Paul Nurse,  about whom everyone can agree. He clearly should be there or thereabouts; furthermore, he is a prime example of someone bucking the apparent brain drain that has been hitting the news in recent weeks.  We also got it right about Andre Geim , ranking him high even before Tuesday’s announcement about the Nobel Prize More debatable is whether George Osborne should have been on the list – he was very high up at times, and then in the final iteration simply banished to the politicians’ list, along with Vince Cable and David Willetts.  From my contribution to the Fight Debate, it will be clear that I was not that keen on public communicators being high up on the list. People like Brian Cox zoomed up and down the list; he eventually settled at number 24, with David Attenborough somewhat higher at number 7.

There was a debate (initiated by Evan Harris as I recall) about whether we needed a woman in the top 10. I argued against any such tokenism (I’ve written previously about the pros and cons of women-only prizes here). Women had been proposed on merit, and were placed as accurately as the males. That’s how it should be.  In the end the top-ranked woman, Nancy Rothwell, came in precisely at number 10, just below her Manchester colleague Geim.  Had women mysteriously not been put forward at all I would have adopted a very different position about this, but the number overall in the list strikes me as reasonable if hardly impressive at 12. We must hope that if the process were to be rerun in 10 year’s time the position would be significantly different.

In the end I think the list has probably downplayed the influence of government advisors such as John Krebs and Adrian Smith in favour of individual scientists, although I am delighted to see my Cambridge colleague David MacKay well regarded because of the importance of his role as CSA at DECC  – see my comments on him here (scroll down, but behind the pay wall). I am not entirely comfortable that the CEO’s of the Research Councils are separated out to another list (with the exception of the outgoing chief of the MRC Leszek Borysiewicz , because he doubled up as the incoming VC of my own university), but Mark Walport seemed to be regarded entirely differently as head of the Wellcome; no one else had problems with this but I saw it as a slightly artificial distinction.

I could go on; we all had pet issues that made us nervous, so don’t ask us to defend the detail of the outcome.  But then, what do you expect if you ask a committee to produce a list like this? To adapt Nietzsche “You have your list. I have my list. As for the right list, the correct list, and the only list, it does not exist.”

Added 1145 am Oct 7 2010: See also fellow judge Alice Bell’s blog on the meaning of ‘influence’.

Added 1300 Oct 7 2010: It has been brought to my attention that the full list of the 100 names has been published at the UCL STS blog without a paywall, and including some comments.

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What does Dagenham have to do with the Higher Education sector?

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Athene Donald

This week sees the release of the film ‘Made in Dagenham’ , a film about a group of women sewing machinists at Ford in Dagenham who went on strike to get equal pay with men doing the same job. And it raises the question, is equal pay the right target? Anne Perkins in the Guardian has used the film as a basis for saying ‘it’s the wrong cause at the wrong time‘ to work to close the gender pay gap. Germaine Greer, also in the Guardian, seems to believe that focussing on the idea of equal pay for equal work has meant ‘a generation has been sent off at a tangent’. Are they right? And why should that matter for us in Higher Education?

My university is one of the few in the UK that publishes its Equal Pay Review (e.g.2009 report).  To my mind this is a crucial first step in establishing what is going on in any organisation, but it is only a first step for many different reasons.  Esther Haines has taken this debate about equal pay (though not in the context of the film) through a statistical analysis, and concludes ‘an institutional gender pay gap is an incomplete and ambiguous measure of inequality.’

Absolutely true, the figures in themselves – like any statistics – cannot be used without thought and interpretation about what they mean. There will almost always be vertical segregation in a population such as a university – in other words women are over-represented in the bottom grades which include cleaners and clerical staff, but under-represented at the top where senior professors and administrators are overwhelmingly male. Different numbers and different proportions in the various grades can distort the value of the ‘gender pay gap’ in several misleading ways.  So, such an equal pay review must simply be used as a kicking off point. Nevertheless, it is predicated on the basis that people should receive ‘equal pay for equal work’, exactly what those women in Dagenham fought for and for which we in the 21st century should be grateful.

The reality is that they didn’t actually succeed, they had to settle for receiving 87% of the men’s rate, an increase equivalent to a mere 2p an hour, but they did make a real difference. In part this was because they provided ammunition for Barbara Castle to move towards the 1970 Equal Pay Act.  Just like Rosa Parks they awoke consciousness in places not awake before and started off the politicians – and society – on a long, tortuous path which appears still to have no ending. I find it rather patronizing to be told that this was the wrong cause, because to my mind that is looking at it from the (relatively) comfortable position of 2010 and shows little recognition of the 1960’s reality when there were, for instance, entirely different pay scales for men and women. Equality was so far away it must have seemed unimaginable in a way that is hard to envisage now.

So why do I believe Dagenham is relevant to the Higher Education sector? The mathematician in me tells me that equal pay for equal work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for equality, despite the limitations that are implicit, and the myths that Esther Haines identifies that have become associated with the phrase.  For academics it is actually quite easy to see that rather simple ideas and hypotheses can be examined in some cases. At lecturer grade for instance, the gender of the lecturer is irrelevant, the work is ‘equal’ for all and we are not trying to compare sewing machinists with spray painters as at Ford in the original case.  So, if there is a gendered distribution in pay, that must be telling us something about the organisation’s practices.  Perhaps men are systematically being appointed at a higher point on the pay scale; or women are progressing more slowly through the grade (you will note I am making the tacit assumption that women are being disadvantaged if there is a pay gap).  Identification of any pay differential should enable us to analyse why, and in principle do something about it. In practice, in Cambridge University if I am interpreting the tables correctly – and the payscale here is sufficiently complex  (even if formally transparent) that I should issue a health warning – there is less than 2% difference. This is sufficiently small there is no statutory duty to do anything about it. But we can still just pause and think if there is an underlying issue we need to consider.

However the problem for academic pay here – and I would hazard in most universities – lie at the upper reaches, where the number of women in the professoriat are small, the bands cover a wide range and we have market supplements on top of this which can be negotiated to aid recruitment and retention. All of this information is publicly available as statistical information, but of course not the details of any actual deal. When numbers are small it is extremely difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions, except that the numbers are small. But we cannot readily say there is anything systematic about the way women are or are not rewarded.  A lot more work needs to be undertaken (and will be) to explore that.

I also believe that there will be issues within my own university (and I doubt it is alone) about non-academic pay where it is not so easy to see if there are systemic problems because of our grading system. In particular, historically there were separate pay-scales within the University for clerical and technical staff.  In practice, of course, women populated the former pay-scale much more than the latter though this didn’t add up to actual different pay-scales for men and women. These pay-scales have now all been assimilated onto the single spine, but one can imagine that in some way this assimilation may have continued to favour the historic assumption that technical staff ere ‘more skilled’ than clerical staff. This situation is much more closely equivalent to the original Dagenham case; at that time the crude view was undoubtedly that anything a woman did was inherently less skilled than a man, and this was a view the Unions at the time fully supported (a  useful description of this position is presented by Beatrix Campbell in the second half of the article I mentioned above).  So here, even more than in the academic part of the university workforce, there will be a need to monitor, gather data and then analyse to see whether a substantive pay gap exists and if so why.

The University has set up a Gender Equality Group, as a direct response to last year’s Equal Pay Review, to look at the full spectrum of grades across the university in order to assess how well we are doing. This work will, one hopes, ultimately provide the ‘sufficient’ condition to go with the ‘necessary’ element of equal pay for equal work. Maybe then, to continue the mathematical metaphor, we will asymptotically approach equality. In the process we should not forget or demean the original women at Dagenham who made a stand and made a difference.  I don’t think I need to see the film to understand that much.

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