Talking to Strangers

Posted on November 12, 2023 by Athene Donald

I was struck by an article in the Guardian written by Catherine Carr about the pleasure she derives from talking to strangers, which forms the basis of her podcast ‘Where are you going?’ (disclaimer, I’ve never listened to it or, indeed, come across it before today; perhaps I should). Conversations with strangers, she opines,

“are perhaps a cross between the confessional ….. and the last few ticks of the clock in the therapy room. Interviewees are always anonymous and – after we chat – we go our separate ways. Even though the conversation can become intimate very quickly, it is also only a brief moment shared, which then sort of closes up behind us.”

I can absolutely relate to this. I can remember some quite extraordinary conversations with people I have confidence I will never meet again. There was a usefully therapeutic conversation I had with a journalist in Paris. She and I had both been attending the L’Oreal For Women in Science awards (I as a member of the judging jury, she in her professional role of interviewing one of the prize-winners), but the ceremony was over and we ended up in the hotel bar, having sat next to each other on the official bus that had brought us back from UNESCO HQ where the ceremony had taken place. I have no memory of what we specifically discussed, possibly aided by some lubrication by alcohol, but I absolutely remember the pleasure of the conversation and the feeling of finding someone on the same wavelength with whom I could be open. I do remember worrying the next day that I had opened up to a journalist, a journalist who could make hay with whatever personal angst I had downloaded, but as far as I know she never did. (By this point, I neither remember her name nor the newspaper she represented).

That conversation had felt safe in a way talking to a colleague from my department, or indeed anywhere in my own professional sphere, probably could not have done. It was an accidental encounter with someone I found I clicked instantly with, but none the worse for it’s unplanned nature. Sadly, such meetings are rare, and far too often a chance conversation never gets beyond the easy exchange of facts. Or, as Carr put it, “Not the drinks party kind with all that, “Did you come on the B359 or via Porchester?””.

However, you never know what may transpire from a stray encounter. I am of the generation that travelled as a teenager and student quite often on my own and on trains. Back then there were no airpods and headphones into which one could sink and cut out the rest of mankind with loud music or, indeed, a podcast. It was not uncommon for casual conversations to be struck up with strangers to pass the tedium of the journey. It still happens a bit, as I spot on trains, but to a much lesser extent and I, for one, almost certainly will be working on my laptop to keep up with the dreaded email mountain. I don’t think I ever looked particularly encouraging (my sister seemed to manage far more of these conversations than I ever did; I was quite shy at 18), but one particular conversation sticks in my mind. I was reading Vera Brittain’s moving memoir  Testament of Youth, and the guy across from me asked me how far I’d got through it. He then helpfully told me that page xx (I forget the page number) would absolutely have me in tears. And he was probably right.

But perhaps the most important conversation I fell into was on a Greyhound Bus between Ithaca (I was living in the city; it’s where Cornell University is situated, where I was a postdoc in the Materials Science and Engineering Department) and New York City (where my husband then lived, and whom I was visiting for the weekend). This was at something of a turning point in my career, although I couldn’t know that at the time. I was in the second year of my second postdoc at Cornell, and an opening had arisen for a faculty position in any of the Engineering departments at Cornell, if a suitable woman could be found. These were the days of affirmative action in the USA, and this was the condition. My problem was that, the first two years I’d spent at Cornell had been an unmitigated disaster from an academic point of view. Essentially no papers, not even joint ones, and a poor relationship with the professor who’d employed me and who was still in the same department in which I continued to work. How could I make a case that I was worthy of consideration – as my current employer, my great mentor Ed Kramer, believed – when I had these two years of nothingness behind me and which would undoubtedly be used to question my abilities and potential?

It turned out that the woman I was sitting next to on the bus taught at Ithaca College, the other, but non-Ivy League university in the town. Somehow, I opened up about my quandary. Again, I don’t remember any details from our conversation, but over the approximately five hours of the bus journey, she encouraged me to be upfront. She felt I should write a clear statement stating my position. Based on her own experience of what she thought would be acceptable, she provided me with a framework to make my previous failure seem more explicable, even if not exactly justified, and to make a case for why I was worth taking a punt on to the faculty. I got off that bus feeling far more excited and positive than I had got on it. Pure chance, but I put her advice into action.

Ah, you might say, but you didn’t get that position and ended up back in England. That is only partially true. I applied for the job and, over an extended period, the faculty made their decision about who to appoint. Initially I wasn’t offered the position but, when their first choice (working in an area far from mine, which may have been relevant) turned them down they turned to me, by that time on a short-term fellowship in Cambridge. Ultimately, for reasons not least associated with my family all being in the UK, but also because of the opening up of the Royal Society’s University Research Fellowship scheme the summer before I would have left the country, I turned the Cornell position down. Having five years of guaranteed funding under the URF scheme meant the incentive to return to the USA decreased. So, in Cambridge I have been ever since.

I’m quite sure that random conversation with a woman – whose name I may never have known and whom I certainly never saw again – made a difference in both giving me confidence and a stronger application for the faculty position to set against those first two miserable years at Cornell. Talking to strangers, of course in safe situations only, can be strangely beneficial and perhaps therapeutic too.

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The Things You Don’t Know You Know

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Athene Donald

It is very easy, at any stage in a career, to look at your peers and think they have everything solved while you are wandering around in the dark. This is, of course, an illusion. They will be looking at you and, as likely as not, thinking exactly the same in reverse. That’s true, I believe, of everyone apart from an obnoxious few who have no idea of their (in)capabilities, and assume that everyone else is looking at them in awe. For myself, given my fellow heads of house (heads of the Cambridge colleges) come from a wide range of backgrounds, the majority of which are not academic, I find it all too easy to think ‘well they went on a change management course’, or whatever particular facet of leadership one currently feels one is lacking, and hence feel relatively ignorant about the case in hand. Of course, being an academic, I haven’t been on such a course but, in reality, they may be struggling to grasp the academic cycle or something similar which is, by this point, second nature to me. How would I know?

I was brought up by a mother who always suffered under the belief – as she frequently told me – that there were rules that she alone didn’t understand. I think this came from being a teenager in the Second World War, someone who got roped into adult situations without any instruction. For instance, she was a rare female member of the Royal Observer Corps as soon as she hit 16, but was also the daughter of the local head of the district team, so had an awkward path to negotiate. But she instilled in me this belief there were ‘rules’ I needed to find out if I were to succeed. And of course, I failed, because as often as not there are no such rules and everyone else is also muddling around trying to make the best of some complex situation or other.

Whatever stage of your career you’re at, therefore, it behoves you to remember things that others apparently know but are a closed book to you, are not the only things that matter. You will have a battery of knowledge up your sleeve that others are looking at and being impressed by. It may be that you have green fingers when it comes to making some particularly recalcitrant piece of equipment fire on all cylinders; perhaps it’s because in a previous role you had come across some obscure paper that has the precise answer to the question your team are struggling with. Maybe it’s that you’ve spoken at a conference before and can reassure the newest member of the team about what to expect, or perhaps it’s further removed from your research and concerns information on local schools or nurseries. The chances are you an ‘expert’ in something who can pass on that knowledge to someone who is feeling adrift. But it is all too easy to take this ‘expertise’ as given, and not notice that you have many skills to hand that others perhaps lack but would like to learn from you.

Nevertheless, at a moment in time when it’s you that’s feeling adrift, it is important to realise that a feeling of being out of your depth is not likely to be a permanent state of affairs. And yet, just as it’s far too easy to fall into the trap of only remembering the negative comments (those that stick like Velcro) when perhaps you got something not quite right, and forget the times when you were the one with the knowledge others were seeking.

One of the behaviours that we should all worry about is when a belief in our own excellence becomes inflated. As fellow head of house Simon McDonald (Master of Christ’s) puts it when discussing the process of making appointments with fellow senior diplomats

‘We behaved as if we were a circle of perfection. Assuming ourselves to be perfect, we looked assiduously for candidates in our own image. We labelled such candidates the ‘full package’…. Of all the odd ideas expressed in our talent meetings, this seems to me the oddest. No one is the full package.’

So, remember that. You may be ignorant about some aspect of your current role, but no one around you is perfect, nor the ‘full package’. You are not alone in sometimes, even frequently, feeling you don’t know what is going on. Equally, you almost certainly know more than you, yourself, recognize.

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Being Festive about Women in STEM

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week I attended an event at Murray Edwards College, a Women in STEM Festival. Dorothy Byrne, their President though not herself a scientist (she studied Philosophy at Manchester), had done a fantastic job in bringing together a wide range of speakers to discuss the thorny topic of the lack of women across the STEM disciplines. Should pride of place go to the discussion she chaired between the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge? For the first time both are women, and both come from a science background. Irene Tracey is Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience at Oxford (as well as former Warden of Merton College) and Debbie Prentice, rather freshly arrived in Cambridge from Princeton where she was Provost, is a psychologist. To hear them talk about their ambitions in their roles, and their wish to see collaborations grow between their universities, was refreshing. They emphasized the importance of ensuring the academic environment does not allow so many female academics to ‘leak’ from the career ladder (see the write-up already published in the THE) and making sure there are on-ramps at different stages in a career.

Or maybe the highpoint was Chi Onwurah’s slightly breathless visit to talk about her career as an engineer (she studied Electrical Engineering at Imperial, a place she appears not to be very fond of judging by remarks I heard her make previously when I interviewed her during the pandemic). Not only did she talk about the satisfaction she got from her engineering career, including setting up the networking infrastructure in Nigeria encompassing her father’s home town, but also about what an incoming Labour Government has its eyes on doing in this space. She talked with great passion and commitment and, of course, is – through her role as a Shadow Minister for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – well-placed to see these ideas come to fruition. Someone definitely committed to facilitating careers for women in STEM.

Her talk was followed by that from another key woman in the engineering world, Hayatuun Sillem, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering, another person with the opportunity to make a real difference for nascent engineers. After her speech she joined a panel discussing STEM careers ‘image problem’, as the programme put it. All speakers were clear that engineering covered so many areas but, sadly, too many teachers did not know the breadth of opportunities that the field opened up. As Hayatuun put it, there is a hard hat problem in images (for instance on Google), as well as a lack of gender diversity. Indeed, she pointed out there was more diversity in hat colour than sex to be found in such photographs.

I am quite sure that for many in the audience – itself diverse in age although less so in gender, ranging from Murray Edwards’ alumnae from the college’s earliest years to KS4 girls from schools in Cambridge and the East End of London – the highlight was the inaugural talk from Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Jocelyn was characteristically modest, but her wry comments about some of the statistics she presented highlighted the problems women still face in their careers. One point she identified that I had never myself previously put into the ‘unconscious bias’ category, is the habitual way forms requesting people to identify their sex as M or F, always put the M box to tick first. Not, as she pointed out, alphabetical order but a symptom of bias. My somewhat similar bête noire is when lists (e.g. of committee members) identify the woman with an F, while not identifying the male as anything: male by default as the head of my university’s HR put it some years ago when I complained. I am not convinced the practice has been wholly eradicated though. Allowing for non-binary choices may mean all such identifying initials disappear in the future.

There was far too much that was excellent to spell it all out, but the one additional point I will make which worries me was identified explicitly in the Q+A after my own talk about my book. Aren’t you preaching to the converted? was the question. And of course the answer was yes: within the specific audience at the Festival who were, I believe, all invited and who were overwhelmingly female, this was definitely the case. But also more generally, the wider world does not necessarily notice the issues which arise in this arena. I’ve said before, I wish I could find a way of reaching teachers, because I believe the problems of stereotyping around what boys and girls ‘should’ do and find interesting arise at very early ages. Teachers have the opportunity to try to counter the stereotypes portrayed in the media and in the way toys are marketed but, as far as I can see, advice to do so, let alone how to do so, do not form part of a teacher’s training. Certainly, the remarks Katharine Birbalsingh made to the Commons Diversity in STEM enquiry last year showed how ill-informed even highly-rated (head)teachers can be.

But there is also the problem of women talking to themselves. That there were few men there, as at so many similar talks, is also a concern. Women cannot solve this problem by themselves. Men have to understand the loss to the economy and to scientific research, as well as the damage to the individuals who lose out due to our current structures. And then, they need to recognize what needs to change. Many women are fed up with fighting this fight; many men seem oblivious to how the system propagates so that women need to go on fighting. When I talk, for instance to student or early career researcher talks, I am always pleased to see the men in the audience nodding at my arguments, but sometimes they may be thin on the ground.

And finally, and perhaps more controversially, is it right that an event should have no male speakers? Many a conference has been pilloried for not having an adequate percentage of female speakers. Although I totally understand why there were no men on the platform in Murray Edwards and all the women I heard (I missed the final afternoon) were absolutely outstanding in their talks and discussions (I exclude myself!), nevertheless, this is a problem for the whole population and we should all be talking about it, thrashing out solutions together. I always feel conflicted about this, just as I do when I’m asked, as I was, about whether an all-woman’s college – as Murray Edwards still is at student level – has a place in the UK today. I understand why some people still feel it has, and appreciate the splendid things it does, and yet…we don’t want to reinvent all male colleges. I worry about the asymmetry of this situation.

 

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Voice: Finding Yours

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week I was the protagonist in the curious ritual called a ‘post-prandial’ talk at my College (Churchill). In other words, after the whole Fellowship had met for the formal governance activity known as ‘Governing Body’, and after dinner (prandium is actually the Latin word for the midday meal, but somewhere along the way this name for the after-dinner seminar has stuck), I had to give my talk. The last time I had to go through this particular ordeal was as part of the interview process for the job of Master at Churchill, when I was asked to talk for about 20 minutes to a general audience of the Fellowship (ie scientists and non-scientists alike, who all had a vote as to who they wanted to be the next Master back in 2013) about my research after dinner. A challenge to make it both exciting to the former and accessible as well as accessible to the latter. Now 10 years later, I was asked, at about 3-days notice, to step in and talk about anything I wanted (I chose some of the work I’ve been doing about science policy) to a similar generalist audience.

Of course, the first thing to get through on such an occasion, is dinner, with quizzing from some younger members of the College. “Do I still get nervous?” – yes. “Really?” – yes, and as I said to them, it’s definitely worse talking to your friends and colleagues than to a much larger group of complete strangers who you’ll never see again. How do the nerves manifest themselves? My voice does not often shake these days (I’m sure it used to). But in the circumstances of the Labour Party Conference Fringe event I wrote about in my last post, undoubtedly my fluency departed, as confirmed afterwards by a friend in the audience. On that occasion, I was largely reading from my scripted notes, to make sure I covered all the bases that I intended, rather than ad-libbing around a Powerpoint presentation. Since the notes had had to be hastily amended in scrawled handwriting, as I described before, I felt both thrown out and overly anxious. My speech was more jerky than fluent as I tried to piece it together into something coherent. On this more recent occasion in College, with a rapidly written Powerpoint to hand, once I’d got underway I felt the words flowed quite easily (I had not drunk much of the wine proffered over dinner; flow is different from slurring).

My observations on my own research students and postdocs suggests a shy demeanour and/or nerves does not necessarily manifest itself in any visible or audible signs, nor is an excellent presentation predicated on daily exuded confidence. One of my Friday dinner companions remarked their voice tended to rise when tense, but you’d have to know the person well to detect that. However, there is no doubt that voice pitch can matter, at least to some people. I have never forgotten the comment made to me many years ago by a well-meaning departmental colleague, to the effect that perhaps I should take voice-coaching lessons to lower my voice. I was utterly appalled by this, the very idea that gravitas is more readily conveyed by a low (presumably male?) voice, regardless of content stunned me. But, this was a trick Maggie Thatcher clearly believed in, even though the rumour that she went to a voice coach may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, she certainly did lower her voice and, if the article in that link is to be believed, probably damaged her vocal chords in the process since she had not apparently had any coaching.

If you’re concerned about your voice, there are those who advocate thinking yourself powerful before giving a talk apparently, not a tactic I’ve ever used. I’m usually more concerned about content than sonority. However, this specific study suggested those who imagined themselves in a ‘powerful condition’ deliberately raised the pitch of their voices, in contrast to the comments about Thatcher. I suspect, as this commentary about the publication in Forbes points out, there are gender issues at play here, that are not pursued in the original paper. However, as this comment piece spells out, and in line with what I say above, ‘In fact for me, what conveys power is the substance of what the speaker says, not the pitch or the variability of volume.’ Quite. This journalist and I are both more interested in content than auditory tricks.

But voice has other meanings, such as that of authenticity. Management gurus such as Brené Brown are great believers in authenticity as a powerful way for leaders to speak. I think it would be true that, when at the Labour Party fringe event the words were carefully chosen for that audience, and in that sense less authentic than many of my talks, since political speech is not my natural language. At the post-prandial I would have been talking about my own doings (in that particular case, also in the policy arena) and not some hypothetical wishlist for policy-makers to hear. I hope that more recent talk made me sound convincing, as well as fluent.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book, In a Different Voice, which I am currently re-reading, discusses yet another sense in which ‘voice’ is used. Gilligan is talking about how adolescents, and particularly young women, develop a voice (in the sense of content, not pitch) that is what they believe to be right, even if it isn’t what they genuinely believe. They lose their authenticity in order to fit in with what they perceive to be expected of them or, as Gilligan puts it, they lose their connectedness with their inner self. She sees this as one of the ways in which women shortchange themselves, and are shortchanged, by a patriarchal society where the male voice/view is taken as the norm and any deviation as ‘less developed’, allowing women to be seen as sub-standard men rather than fully-rounded women. These are ideas she builds upon in her much more recent (2018) book Why does Patricarchy Persist?, co-written with Naomi Snider. These approaches are not ones that I utilised in my own book, Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science, but perhaps I should have done. My book is rested far more in the social sciences (such as gender and educational studies) than in psychology.

Voice is not simple, and we each develop our own tricks for survival and for communication. Sometimes what we use relates to our audiences, and sometimes – perhaps not often enough in our daily lives – to our inner selves.

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Beyond the Comfort Zone

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week started off in unfamiliar ways. I’ve written before about the challenges of doing something for the first time, and this week I had two consecutive days of things that felt stressful and unusual to me. These issues of strangeness do not necessarily go away with age and experience, or at least not if one is pushing oneself.

On Sunday I travelled, with some difficulty due to tube closures in London, to ExceL to participate in New Scientist Live. I’d not been to this conference before, but was delighted to be able to talk about my book Not Just for the Boys to a general audience. The venue is massive, and in a single large hall there were four platforms with simultaneous speakers, plus an exhibition. I’d been slightly startled, when I arrived and asked the security man at the door where to go for speaker registration, to be greeted by a surprised look, and the response ‘Speaker? For New Scientist Live?’, as if he’d never met a female speaker before (although there were plenty on the programme). It felt symptomatic of my topic.

Standing on the platform I was very conscious of the background hum from everything going on around me, indeed rather more than hum, even though the sound system for my particular platform was excellent.  There was a good-sized audience who seemed receptive to my topic, and fired plenty of questions at me, and the book signing was also well attended. But, whereas a recent talk to scientists on the Biomedical Campus felt familiar because I had a good idea of the background of the audience – although one never knows at talks about my book, whether there will be many men present; at LMB there were – this isn’t true when talking to a more generalist audience. Judging from the questions, both publicly and even more from those who came up to me privately afterwards or who came to the book signing, there were a significant number of year 11-13 girls, those thinking about their futures and wanting encouragement to stick with science and, even more, the physical sciences. I felt I had definitely reached them.

From London I went straight on to Liverpool, to do something even more unfamiliar. On behalf of the Royal Society’s new Science2040 project I was talking to a Fringe event at the Labour Party conference, a joint reception with the New Statesman. Never having been to a party conference of any hue, this was walking into the unknown. Just trying to work out which of the multitude of Fringe events I would try to get to, distributed within and beyond the secure zone, was complicated enough. In the end, I only got to a couple; another one I was aiming at was standing room backed up so far into the lobby that I gave up. The whole conference was an extremely well-attended event. Those who know more about such things seemed to think it was overfull, no doubt reflecting the state of attitudes in our current politics.

My job was to give a brief speech about this new Royal Society project, initiated to explore what the science system should look like in 2040, and the need for long-term funding commitments regardless of the persuasion of the Government. This project is exploring the breadth of issues from the economic to the people dimension, from infrastructure to our place in a changing world. In other words, what needs to be done to address the major problems we are all facing. The centrepiece of my speech was meant to be a call for Labour to commit to long-term funding, talking after the Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, and before the Shadow Minister for Science, Research and Digital, Chi Onwurah.

By the mid-afternoon it was clear my  speech needed to be rewritten, as Peter Kyle – in his major speech to the main conference – had made precisely the commitment we were seeking, saying: “a Labour government will create certainty with 10-year R&D budgets.” So, a hastily scribbled-on piece of paper was what I had to read from at the event, reworking my words in an anxious way. I certainly felt my fluency was diminished, however much Kyle’s announcement was welcome news. I am used to being able to modify my written words on the fly, to suit the specific composition and reactions of an audience, but this required a more fundamental rewrite, and I hadn’t brought the technology into the secure zone to do this in more than an illegible way on the script to hand. Unfortunate, but I hope I could still deliver an appropriate message.

There were good things about attending the conference, not least a long chat with one of Chi’s new aides, and I am glad to have had the experience. But it is a salutary reminder that things that feel like old hat to some – colleagues both scientific and from the media who make the trek every year to wherever the party conferences are being held – can feel very strange and stressful when doing them for the first time. For those just setting out everything may feel unusual and uncomfortable, but it is worth remembering everything gets better with practice and you are not alone in your discomfort. Most people feel it, even if less often.

 

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