Joining the Dots Around Skills

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Athene Donald

You don’t have to read beyond the first few lines of the summary of last week’s House of Lords’ Science and Technology Select Committee Report to recognize they are sceptical about the Government’s direction of travel when it comes to research and innovation. Indeed, the title rather gives the game away: ‘“Science and technology superpower”: more than a slogan?’ With a long-standing commitment to raising spending in the UK to research and development to 2.4% of GDP, the report spells out that ‘Despite welcome steps and laudable rhetoric, we are concerned that the Government is not on course to meet its ambitions.’ (They don’t comment on the fact that GDP might not be as healthy as pre-Brexit, pre-Covid predictions might have suggested, so that 2.4% in absolute terms may likewise represent a smaller figure than anticipated, while inflation surges so that anyhow the cash goes less far.)

They have now put out a call for evidence around people and skills in STEM, recognizing in the course of their earlier enquiry that achieving ‘superpower’ status requires an appropriate supply of the right people in the right place. Some of these people will be in academia, of course, but many will not. The usual rule of thumb is that there needs to be twice as much private investment in research, as public – and the power of the government to influence that is limited. Particularly if, as the report spells out, ‘industry does not yet feel engaged with the strategy process.’ One might ask, what strategy? There are plenty of warm words and aspirations, few explicit actions, levers or incentives in evidence in (prime) ministerial words. Indeed, currently we don’t even have a Minister for any or all of Science, Innovation and Research, unless you count the Secretary of State himself.

Getting the skills issue right is crucial in order to ensure we move in the right direction for innovation and productivity, including as we move towards net zero.  The current soaring temperatures highlight just how important it is we (globally as well as within the UK) should be focussing on this latter, but rhetoric again falls short of action in this space. The Office for Science and Technology (OSTS) has identified ‘the sustainable environment [including net zero]’ as one of its four priority areas, but specific targets of the aims under this, as well as the other three headings, are sadly lacking. How will it be achieved if the appropriate mix of skilled personnel are not available, including those who can translate novel research and ideas into practical solutions, followed by scale-up? Diffusion of information requires the presence of adequate absorptive capacity both in individual firms and across a given region, a topic I have written about before in the wake of this Spring’s report from the Royal Society on Regional absorptive capacity: the skills dimension. Bright ideas alone will not increase productivity or contribute to the wider economy if they cannot be delivered at scale.

The levelling up agenda (if the next Prime Minister remains serious about this phrase) means it isn’t sufficient to have lots of graduates moving to London for big salaries. Indeed, salary is a very imperfect measure of educational outcome for many reasons, and won’t have any immediate relationship to local needs or job opportunities. (It is certainly not a reason for pitting arts and humanities against the STEM disciplines, as too often attempted). One of the key concerns is that workers with sub-degree skills and qualifications are less likely to be willing to move away from their home area than graduates.  They are also in short supply, as highlighted in a 2018 report for the Gatsby Foundation by Simon Field, which showed the UK had the lowest number of them (in terms of numbers per thousand in the population) relative to comparator nations. So, if there is to be a high-quality clothing factory to be opened or expanded in Alfreton in Derbyshire (to take a recent example written up in the media), where will workers skilled in logistics capable of designing the requisite supply chains come from or alternatively will they be trained locally? These individuals don’t need to be STEM graduates, but they certainly need to be adequately competent in maths and IT.

Opportunities in ‘left behind’ regions are crucial if they are instead going to be ‘moving ahead’ regions, but the lack of coherent strategy in government thinking, highlighted in the Lords’ report around research and innovation, is just as visible in the skills agenda and needs to be swiftly addressed. To take another promising recent media story, directly relevant to the green economy, are the plans by Scottish Power to build a 100MW green hydrogen plant at Felixstowe, to provide fuel for the expanding fleet of lorries transporting goods from the docks (Felixstowe has freeport status and is due to expand very significantly) and machinery on site. The port itself is already struggling to recruit workers with the right set of skills, a problem that can only be exacerbated – in the absence of a better supply of people – by the creation of a new plant on this scale competing for the same sorts of people with technical expertise. Yet such a plant, aiming to be able to fuel 1300 trucks when at capacity, is sorely needed to reduce emissions from lorries on our roads (or trains in principle).

Felixstowe is literally at the end of the line (from Ipswich) and has some extremely deprived areas. The creation of new green jobs in the area offers massive potential if the relevant dots are joined up. Unfortunately, BEIS and DfE seem determined to keep their distance and not work constructively together. Despite ‘skills’ being a word tossed around liberally by politicians, delivering the education and training that is needed in schools, FE colleges and on-the-job in order to provide a workforce which can deliver and is recruited from the local area (not imported from other areas which may already be thriving), doesn’t appear to be considered holistically by the two departments. ‘Skills’ has to be more than just another slogan which isn’t thought through or invested in. FE colleges can only be effective it they are properly funded, as well as well-connected to local enterprises. The response to the Augar Review and the Levelling Up white paper were both lacking in robust plans on this front.

None of this issue is hard to understand, but the way politics is tied to soundbites and silo mentalities means that the key players seem to be unwilling or unable to join the dots between skills, innovation and industrial policy as needed to deliver a revived and greener economy, both locally and nationally, which is (to use another oft-used if now apparently outdated phrase) ‘built back better’.

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To Travel or Not to Travel?

Posted on July 27, 2022 by Athene Donald

Now the academic year has come to an end, it is possible to start to reflect on the year past and what next year might, and I emphasise might, look like. This year has not been as full of Covid-stresses as the last couple, thank goodness, but the feeling of burn out across academia still feels palpable, and my own feelings are no exception. I have no confidence the UK has seen the back of the pandemic, but at least for now it seems most people are willing to relax their vigilance about infection. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other bugs around, as a recent prostrating stomach upset reminded me. The ONS has been reporting extremely large numbers of Covid infections, although it is possible this wave has now peaked (but I still wear a mask in shops and on public transport).

It is starting to be possible to imagine a ‘normal’ existence again. The trouble is, knowing what the new normal is, or what one wants it to be. It isn’t obvious to me how to balance travelling to meetings in person, to get together with people with whom one has been working with for much of the last two years via Zoom, versus the advantages of staying stuck at the desk staring endlessly into a screen and ostensibly getting more work done. However, there is nothing like a heatwave to remind us (if not all politicians around the world) that spending carbon on travel should be carefully ‘costed’, quite apart from time taken, even if it’s only a train to London, which (for me) only adds up to less than an hour on the actual train.

How much work is productively done in the margins of a meeting, over a coffee break for instance, when one can quietly try out new ideas or strategies, find allies to demolish (figuratively) the nay-sayers or merely let off steam about long-winded committee members? The reality is these sideline conversation can be extremely helpful, although obviously not always. I think the two years without most of these conversations being feasible has definitely not helped community dynamics, at least in some communities. That is a clear argument for it being worth travelling to get to that meeting, to meet people ‘in the flesh’ and to have these less organised conversations.

Counter to that is the effort it takes to get to a meeting on the other side of the country for an hour or two’s meeting. Not so long ago I had to give a presentation to a committee (of which I was not a member), with a time slot of 45 minutes allotted for both presentation and discussion. Being used to Zoom, I chose not to go up to London (not that far away in reality, albeit there’s additional travel time at each end to add in in terms of one’s diary), and then regretted it. After my talk, the single panel on my screen devoted to the eight or so people who were physically present in the meeting room meant they were but mere pinpricks on my screen (there were others on Zoom who were much bigger!). I couldn’t see who was who at all clearly – no handy nametag to glance at underneath their Zoom faces – and audio wasn’t entirely brilliant, even though the room was meant to be well-adapted to handle this. Nor could I judge how my presentation was received as I gave it, since all I could really see were my own slides. In hindsight, I wish I’d gone.

In quick succession, and in the identical room, I attended another meeting through the screen, but this time there were fewer committee members in the room, and I knew who they were, as a committee member myself. The chair was in the room and managed to keep a good grasp of who had their hands raised both electronically and physically, and the discussion felt very engaged and constructive. And soon after that, at a third meeting of another committee (same room), I was in the room along with a handful of others, but the chair was present virtually, as were a number of other committee members. This, to my mind, was the least satisfactory hybrid arrangement of all, because the chair – in just the same way as I had found when I had done my own presentation at the first meeting – simply couldn’t see who was in the room, nor notice if they’d put a hand up, whereas they could easily spot the Zoom hands and bring them into the debate.

For some meetings, hybrid works absolutely fine, but my experience with these three variants in quick succession tells me that there are many situations in which they are far from ideal. I think that tells me that, as far as possible, I will attempt to attend meetings in person unless the meeting is set up to be entirely Zoom and not the mix and match of hybrid. Zoom has been a wonderful interim measure during the dark pandemic days. For some meeting, with few people and those ones you know well, they will continue to serve well, but for tricky decision-making meetings, for meetings with more present than fit easily on a single screen (say eight people), I think not.

This of course only deals with the question of ‘local’ meetings. For those who are planning that trip to a conference in some exotic location, the calculations will be entirely different. I do hope people are working out their carbon budgets carefully, given the way the world is warming. Surely, we should all be carefully assessing what could be extremely enjoyable, but could as well be done remotely from a scientific point of view? That is, assuming conference organisers make this viable. ECRs would, of course, derive significant benefit from mixing with the big names in their field, building contacts and learning from experienced voices. However, since some of these (as was happening pre-pandemic often enough) might just drop in briefly for their own talk and, perhaps, a dinner with friends, it may be that invited speakers should be encouraged to give their presentations remotely since in reality they are not making themselves available to newcomers. I know some of my colleagues would take grave exception to such a recommendation, but we can’t go on ignoring the melting world.

The trouble with this solution is that it leaves the ECRs talking to themselves – no bad thing of course; and it can be brilliant for them – and unable to penetrate senior networks. I don’t know what the answer to this. I am sure it is a question we should be thinking about carefully before we blithely return to jet-setting conferences, from which the benefits are sometimes unclear.

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Marking UKRI’s scorecard

Posted on July 21, 2022 by Athene Donald

UKRI is still a relatively young organization, trying to find its way in a funding landscape that has been impacted by Brexit, a pandemic and now soaring inflation eating away at the value of every grant or PhD stipend. Nevertheless, it has had four years to try and work out its raison d’être and how it is more than the sum of its nine constituent parts. The Grant Review looking into its operation and which has just reported, does not seem convinced it has managed to do this, reflecting that

‘Most of the evidence I have received supports the original case and objectives for UKRI, resulting from the 2015 Nurse Review – a single cohesive UKRI incorporating nine previously separate organisations. My review notes that UKRI has partially met the objectives that were set at its formation but that gaps remain.’

Furthermore, it identifies ambiguity about how this multi-pronged organization is operating, with some confusion as to the nature of the entity.

‘In carrying out this review we found that UKRI responsibilities are currently perceived to be held either by i) one or more councils ii) jointly by all councils or iii) centrally. It is the view of this review that ii) and iii) should be seen to be one and the same and are described as such. Today they are not.’

This seems to be a serious failing. What is UKRI? If it continues to act as a nine-legged beast, how can the research community derive any benefit from the synergies that I believe were originally envisaged in the 2014 Nurse Review, which gave rise to its creation? When will it work out its identity beyond being a conglomeration?

The Grant Review covers a lot of ground, around governance and systems. Here I will just pick out a few issues close to my own heart. Others will no doubt highlight different aspects.

When Paul Nurse wrote his Review he was clear about many potential benefits, two of which were that such an over-arching organization:

  • would be able to oversee the redistribution of money between research councils as areas for research evolved, in place of the essentially static distribution of the research funding cake that had been in place for decades, and
  • would have the ability to fund interdisciplinary research appropriately, without proposals getting batted between individual councils and never finding a true home.

One can argue that the first of these has been hampered by the lack of long-term funds being committed by the government, but the recent Spending Review means such redistribution can now be done. On the second point, the UKRI’s CEO Ottoline Leyser has herself admitted (when speaking to the Lords Science and Technology Committee) they haven’t done a great job about this. At one point it looked as if the Strategic Priorities Fund would handle this strand of research, with the 2018 Strategic Prospectus stating that the fund would:

  • Drive an increase in high-quality multi- and inter-disciplinary research and innovation by encouraging and funding work in areas which previously may have struggled to find a home.
  • Ensure that UKRI’s investment links up effectively with Government departments’ research priorities and opportunities, encouraging funding for research that crosses boundaries between UKRI councils and government departments.
  • Ensure the system is able to respond to strategic priorities and opportunities.

That Fund is now being wound up, without it really having achieved these high-level objectives, although undoubtedly some interesting programmes have been funded. However, it has not been the panacea to multi- or inter-disciplinary research I, for one, had certainly hoped to see. As the Grant Review laments ‘the potential for interdisciplinary research has not been fully realised’.

However, more optimistically, it also states that

‘The 2021 SR settlement gave UKRI greater flexibility in their approach to funding multi and interdisciplinary research …. New cross-cutting funds will now be allocated through a shared pool with decisions on prioritisation and spend made by UKRI. The multi-year settlement should allow UKRI to embed this new approach …., for example there are plans for councils to pool funding for talent development and interdisciplinary research over the SR period.’

So, I will have to live in hope that one day, in the not-too-distant future, the long-standing problems around interdisciplinary research will finally be cracked. (I should make clear, I do not mean grand challenge type research which probably works well, but the vital underpinning research that can spawn new, perhaps unexpected directions and approaches).

The Grant Review report has a lot to say about efficiency, highlighting the surprising growth in numbers of staff employed in the central Corporate Hub, often with apparent duplication of function with those sitting in individual research councils. A 55% increase in staff at the centre was noted. One of the issues that has long concerned me personally lies in communications. This was an issue I raised with Mark Walport, when he was still at the helm. If my memory serves me right, I was told there were 137 staff across the whole organization involved in communication, perhaps part of this central hub swelling. Yet, I would suggest, communication has not been the organisation’s strong point. Think of how they handled the ODA cuts; or the sorry ResearchFish saga in which UKRI seems to have encouraged ‘appropriate action’ against academics who got fed up with the clunky ResearchFish impact-tracking process.

Another extraordinary episode, reported yesterday and this time involving a NERC-funded DTP, suggests an unhelpful attitude towards the cost of living crisis, with PhD students being advised they could find spare-time jobs to supplement their stipends as babysitters or Avon consultants. Although this cannot be laid directly at UKRI’s door, when I asked Ottoline herself about the problems research students face back in March, she batted the question away, stating – no doubt entirely correctly if unsympathetically – that UKRI had a fixed pot of money to dole out. Since then, they have had plenty of time to work out a strategy, not to mention a comms strategy, that does not leave students reduced to selling make-up to make ends meet.

If there really are 137 communication experts across the organization, perhaps they need additional training in how to communicate in a way that builds trust, rather than destroys it. The Grant Review does not particularly focus on this aspect of the Corporate Hub, looking more at IT issues and non-standardisation of forms and procedures, but it does note a high turnover of staff. (To be fair, this seems true in many organisations post-Covid, so it may not reflect a general unhappiness with working conditions.)

The final aspect from the Review I’d like to touch on relates to how UKRI fits into the wider ecosystem, and in particular with its masters in Whitehall. This seems to be another area of ambiguity, with the decision-making process being unwieldy and slow. Of course, the blame for this cannot be laid solely, perhaps even mostly, at UKRI’s door, but it certainly leads to problems for the community, and – again – strong messaging from the UKRI centre could reassure that there is pushback and plain speaking in the interactions. That ESRC is still lacking an Executive Chair is a particularly stark example of how the interplay with Government is failing. As the Grant Review says more generally.

‘BEIS should ensure that UKRI has the stability and autonomy it needs to effectively plan and deliver. This will require setting out a clearer line of responsibility between BEIS and UKRI on strategy and delivery, as well as the criteria used to assess performance.’

Paul Nurse may have believed a benign Whitehall would work well with a strong pan-research council organization, and that ministerial interventions would not get in its way. Sadly, that does not seem to be quite how it has panned out in practice.

Across the board, there are clearly areas for improvement at UKRI noted by David Grant. The community will hope the report has impact, as they say, at HQ.

[It will not have escaped notice that my blog has been silent for some time. The reasons for this are many and various, perhaps best summed up as post-pandemic-induced writer’s block, but of course that doesn’t really give much of an explanation. Suffice to say, it is not a deliberate cessation but equally, just because I am tempted back to writing a post by the publication of the Grant Review, I cannot promise to return to my erstwhile regularity of writing.]

 

 

 

 

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A Diversion into History of Science

Posted on May 29, 2022 by Athene Donald

As a physicist, I may enjoy reading popular history books, but I don’t expect to get involved with history. Coming to Churchill College has given me a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the Archives here and how they are preserved. I enjoy meeting those scholars who come to spend time here. Scholars such as Graham Farmelo, who used the Archives extensively when researching his book Churchill’s Bomb, as well as more formal academics, whose research may not be seen by the general reader.  However, the College’s Archives, set up to house the papers of Sir Winston himself, are a treasury of twentieth century papers and, to a lesser extent, objects. The most recent of these acquired is the late Tony Hewish’s Nobel medal, but they also include more mundane items, such as a Maggie Thatcher handbag to go with her archives.  (As the photo shows, I wasn’t allowed to touch the bag, which is kept carefully sealed.)

P1030821
However, having been born in the middle of the twentieth century, much of the collections held at Churchill don’t really feel like history. After all, I remember Maggie Thatcher’s premiership well; I could even tell you where I was when I heard she’d resigned – announced over the tannoy system in Boots in Cambridge. So getting close to history, to me, means going further past. In the past, when previously a member of the Royal Society’s Council, I had an opportunity to get my hands, literally, on Robert Hooke’s magnificent book, Micrographia, as shown, but no chance to examine it in any detail. As a microscopist by training, I’d have loved to look closely at his drawings, which (reproductions show) are mind-blowingly detailed and beautiful. I’m sure I’d never have made the grade as a microscopist if I’d had to draw everything, as opposed to being able to photograph it, be it via the light or electron microscope.

RSA_ 33

However, last week I had a fantastic opportunity to get my hands on some roughly contemporary books, and really to look at one in particular in detail. This opportunity arose to allow me to follow up on the information I’d been sent, during the pandemic and via photographs only, about Mary Astell, about which I wrote previously. Mary Astell (1666-1731) was a natural philosopher, mainly known as an early feminist, who wrote a book advocating a college for women (A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest, published anonymously in 1694). She believed that women should be encouraged to look beyond mother and nun as ‘career’ alternatives, but her plans for a college came to nought because it was viewed as potentially papist.

However, it turns out that she had a penchant for the study of science. She was brought to my attention by Catherine Sutherland, deputy librarian at Magdalene College in Cambridge, who has discovered in the college’s collections, a number of her books. The one I got to examine in detail was Les Principes de la Philosophie de Rene Descartes, a French edition of the original Latin text. Astell has made numerous, and at times extensive, annotations across the text and on the end-notes, where there were additional copies of the plates in the book. Many of the annotations were in pencil, and often hard to read, but these seemed frequently to be aids to her own translation or, at times, her objections to the words Descartes used (she seemed particularly to object to the word subtile to refer to astronomical objects, replacing the word with celeste, probably relating to her own religious beliefs). At other times she was writing out her own thoughts on the text, as a student today might do. Sometimes these were written in pencil and then clearly over-written subsequently in ink, presumably once she’d got confidence in her arguments. In other places it seemed she’d gone straight in with her quill. Her writing was small and, even with a magnifying glass to suit my elderly eyes, I had trouble always deciphering what she’d written.

Since my ability to read Descartes in French, published with the ‘long s’ (i.e the one that looks like an f without the crossbar, used in English printing as well at the time) is distinctly limited, and it is not a book I have ever studied even in English, it was hard for me always to follow her arguments and check she had mastered what Descartes was saying. But it was absolutely clear how much effort she had devoted to getting to grips with the books. The notes at the end were extensive and thoughtful and, at times, she indicated that she felt there were errors in what was said.

Spending an hour looking through the book was a treat, even if also frustrating. Frustrating, because it clearly needs someone much more familiar with the history of science, the science as it was understood at that time, to examine the annotations and to put them in context. How much could she have learned from the circle in London in which she moved as a distressed gentlewoman (she seems to have relied largely on financial support from richer women who she had got to know)? It is known she spent some time working as an assistant with John Flamsteed at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, but it isn’t obvious whether the annotations in this book pre- or post- date that period. Did she know any, or indeed many, other natural philosophers who would have engaged in their discussions largely at the Royal Society, a place she could not enter? It strikes me the books held at Magdalene and recently discovered would potentially provide the basis of a fascinating PhD in some interesting interdisciplinary way. Maybe someone will follow up on this.

I am deeply grateful to Catherin Sutherland to have enabled me to have this morning of exploration, opening my eyes to topics so far from those I usually tangle with.

 

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Getting Involved with Policy-making

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Athene Donald

Last week I presented evidence to the Commons’ Science and Technology’s Select Committee enquiry into Diversity and Inclusion in STEM. I don’t want to rehearse my arguments, which can be read in the transcript of the full morning’s session (or even watched), but to talk about other aspects of engaging with such enquiries. Suffice it to say that my impression was that this session was called to explore further the suggestion made in the committee’s previous session, that girls ‘just don’t like hard maths’ and so are put off doing Physics A Level. I think it would be true to say that none of the eight witnesses who spoke this week, including those coming from OFSTED and the Institute of Physics via a trio of school leads, had much to say in favour of that position.  It won’t surprise anyone that I likewise felt the problems in attracting girls into Physics lie quite elsewhere,

However, what I want to discuss here is the way a scientist might interact in general with policy-makers. The pandemic has, once again, shone light on the comparative lack of scientific expertise amongst MPs. Few of them have science degrees and it shows. Compare Angela Merkel’s explanations of the spread of a virus with remarks made by our Parliamentary leaders. One felt, as a former chemist, she knew what an exponential increase meant, for instance. It is, of course, not just the MPs themselves, but also those around them, be they SPADs or civil servants, who typically have not studied science to any high level. When I go to talk to student societies (at schools or in the university sector) I try to point out that there are fascinating careers in policy; studying science does not mean one necessarily has to become a scientist, but I do hope it means that the skills a science degree confers will be useful wherever a student ends up.

Looking later in a career, research scientists too have potentially so much to offer. To help researchers work out the routes by which they might do this, we (the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), the Bennett Institute of Public Policy through Diane Coyle and Churchill College) produced some online resources, outlining the different ways in which a scientist can bring their research to bear on political thinking. It’s not a topic that gets much air-time in formal structures, within my university at least. One might say surprisingly, given that this is certainly one of the ways to construct a REF impact case! For many of these academics, their research may have direct implications for policy decisions, as the pandemic has absolutely made clear. This has been a time when many scientists have found their voices through the media, as well as more formal structures. One of these – Professor Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh – will be my guest later this week for one of my public conversations here at Churchill College (there’s still time to sign up to attend, in person or online). She is someone who has had direct contact with the heart of the Scottish Government, talking regularly with Nicola Sturgeon, as she makes plain in her recent book, Preventable.

Formally, talking about girls and women and Physics is not part of my research career as a soft matter physicist, but I have spent a long time studying the issues, even if most of the ‘publishing’ has been on this blog or in other un-peer reviewed places. One could say this is a form of interdisciplinarity, since my experience as a research physicist is obviously relevant to my knowledge about the subject, but I am in no need of such a label since I’m not trying to obtain funding for the work. Nevertheless, trained as a physicist, I am capable of reading the literature and reading graphs, doing a little critical thinking and analysis and piecing ideas together.

In my reading, I was particularly struck by the graphs shown, from a paper in Science from a few years ago, that showed it wasn’t just Physics that had a hard time when it came to attracting young women into the subject, and the problem seems to be that people (parents, teachers, the media, students themselves?) associate brilliance with those subjects that are heavily male-dominated.

brilliance

Plots of percentage of women taking PhDs in US universities in different disciplines versus a measure of brilliance, taken from Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines, by Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimprian, Meredith Meyer and Edward Freeland.

Of course, many in the world believe that brilliance belongs to men. These graphs have overlapping authors with the group that highlighted that children as young as six or seven have already fallen into the trap of believing that about who ‘owns’ brilliance. Thus, before one introduces misogyny and hostility into the equation, there are cultural issues to overcome for young women wanting to pursue such subjects. Diane Coyle, who I mentioned above, has written at various times about the problems with the male-dominated world of Economics. In 2017 she highlighted misogyny in the discipline in the FT; in her recent book Cogs and Monsters, she discusses the dangers a lack of diversity – extending far beyond simply gender ­– has for decision-making in the sphere.

The Parliamentarians are right to worry about these issues. As Caroline Criado Perez has spelled out in her book Invisible Women and as the Gendered Innovations website makes clear, many bad policy decisions can be directly attributed to forgetting that essentially half the world’s population are women. In Physics, as in Economics and many other disciplines besides, the imbalance is damaging to individuals and to society.

So, I was pleased to be invited to present to the Select Committee regarding diversity in STEM, my first experience of such an undertaking. Having said that, it was a nerve-racking experience. As for any sort of interview, preparation is essential but, however carefully one mentally rehearses arguments in the small hours, the line of questioning may head off in a direction far from what was expected and throw one off balance. This time, that only happened a little. I took advice in advance from those who had participated in a range of Select Committee sessions, including for this particular inquiry, and appreciated other people’s willingness to be open. I was also struck by one of these colleagues who asked, after the event, how long it took me to ‘come down’ after the session. The rest of the day, I said, (my session was at 0930 in the morning), expecting to be derided for this feebleness. Oh yes, I was told, that was their experience too. It is good to remember that all of us can suffer from nerves and tension around a new experience, particularly when it feels – whether it is or isn’t in reality – very important. As I’ve said before about other experiences, however, nothing is ever wasted.

 

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