Parliamentary Activity

Posted on May 2, 2022 by Athene Donald

This week has brought some curious interventions into the STEM landscape in Parliament. I will return shortly to the much-publicised, if seemingly ill-informed remarks about girls and Physics made by Katherine Birbalsingh – a headteacher and the Government’s social mobility commissioner – but let me start with a different story, also close to my heart. Ottoline Leyser was talking to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee session on delivering a UK science and technology strategy in her capacity as CEO of UKRI (relevant section about 35 minutes into the evidence). She openly admitted that UKRI was (still) not really coping well with interdisciplinary work. As she put it

‘where I think we have not yet delivered is what I would call research that is so interdisciplinary that it has no home’.

Interdisciplinarity is something that the 2014 Nurse Review highlighted as a challenge that a new over-arching body (that body which subsequently came into being as UKRI) ought to be well-placed to resolve. In the so-called Strategic Prospectus of UKRI in 2018 (no longer apparently available on UKRI’s website, although I have a downloaded copy), the emphasis in this area was on the Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF), which has indeed put money towards a range of interdisciplinary initiatives, including my own research area of the Physics of Life. However, these are all specific, targeted calls under eight identified themes. This fund is not the place to go for blue skies interdisciplinary research in general. In the 2018 prospectus it was said that the Fund would

‘drive an increase in high-quality multi- and interdisciplinary research and innovation by encouraging and funding work in areas which previously may have struggled to find a home. It will ensure that good ideas are supported that might once have been more challenged by organisational boundaries. It will give pioneering research the space to develop, laying the foundations for future capability.’

That the SPF calls are instead highly targeted means this aspiration is not met. Instead, numerous applications will continue to fall down the cracks, as they have for many years and as I described a decade ago in the relatively early years of this blog. At that time I said ‘We should have a seamless funding landscape and we do not.’ Nor do we now, as Ottoline admitted in her testimony in the Lords.

It is a conversation I started having with funders more than 15 years ago and, despite many warm words directed towards inter- and multi-disciplinary research in many documents, things don’t seem to have moved particularly far forward. In the 2019 UKRI Delivery Plan, there was a promise to ‘Review our peer review mechanisms to best support multidisciplinary research’ , but I have seen no sign of such a review being set up in practice; maybe others have. One of the key problems for such research is the failure of referees to appreciate that originality and excellence do not have to reside in every single part of a proposal. For this reason, IDAP – the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel for REF2021 which I chaired – stated clearly in its criteria that

‘the criteria [of originality and significance] do not need to be demonstrated across all of the constituent parts brought together in the work, but may be identified in one or more parts, or in their integration.’

Generations of referees often fail to appreciate this simple fact, based on my experience on grant-giving panels (although I hope the REF sub-panels have managed better). A review of peer-review for such grants is extremely overdue. I hope it is in Ottoline’s sights.

As for the second story, the recording and transcript of this can also be found on the web (at about 10.20), but Birbalsingh’s attitude towards girls and physics is so outdated and stereotyped, that when approached by the Guardian for a comment I described it as ‘terrifying’ in an off-the-cuff remark by phone. I’d have been much more guarded in an email, but I was in the coffee break at a conference and trying to battle with the absence of a reliable phone signal to make any contact at all.  Birbalsingh’s comments included:

‘From my own knowledge of these things, physics is not something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it. They don’t like it….

There is a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do. That is not to say that there isn’t hard stuff to do in biology and chemistry—there is— but it is not mathematics’.

You can listen to the whole of her evidence on the recording, or read the transcript, if you think I might be unfairly picking out one small part, but you won’t find anything to counter that position in the rest of what she says. As a result I do find her attitude  ‘terrifying’, because it comes from someone who is meant to be a leader in the field. To hear such words spoken by a supposed expert really is deeply dispiriting, a view many other female scientists also expressed in the hours after her statement (see the full Guardian story here; there are other comments from experts on the Science Media Centre’s website).

Birbalsingh did not make her position any better when in her intended defence she subsequently tweeted that this was ‘my guess’ i.e. not based on evidence. Had she read the IOP’s 2012 report It’s Different for Girls, she might have had some evidence to the contrary to rely on. Interestingly, back when that report was released and I was asked to talk about it on Radio 4, I was faced with a different female headteacher (whose name I don’t recall) who tried out exactly the same line of ‘girls just don’t like physics’, a position I tried to debunk when I wrote about it at the time in the Guardian. I won’t repeat the arguments I made then but, ten years on, those arguments have stood the test of time. It is depressing that some people seem to want to believe that cultural expectations placed on young girls have no impact on their choices, that we are somehow hard-wired differently from birth from those systematising boys so that we are all empathetic and should stay as nurses or whatever.

We will never shift the dial on how many girls enter the Physical Sciences, Computing or Engineering as long as educational leaders (presumably primarily those, such as Birbalsingh, with arts and humanities backgrounds as opposed to first-hand experience of what STEM is all about) believe such inaccurate tropes without studying the evidence to the contrary, of which there is plenty. Much of it is summarised and the background given, for instance, in books by Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex) and Gina Rippon (The Gendered Brain).  A school leader who discourages half the population from pursuing Mathematics or Physics is not doing the best they can for their pupils.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science, Science Culture, Science Funding, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

The Human Face of the Carbon Queen

Posted on April 3, 2022 by Athene Donald

In my Twitter feed, there has been much publicity about the recent biography of US physicist and electrical engineer Millie Dresselhaus, Carbon Queen, by Maia Weinstock. Dresselhaus’ lifetime of research spanned over five decades, studying many different forms of carbon, from graphite to graphene via nanotubes. I never met Dresselhaus to my knowledge, though I find it hard to believe we didn’t attend one of the huge APS meetings at the same time, but I believe I once met Weinstock at a meeting held at the Royal Society (although that may be an inaccurate memory). The book is an interesting read, and very easy to get stuck into. But more than the style, there are the stories about the life this remarkable woman led at a time when women were considerably thinner on the ground in Physics/Electrical Engineering than they are now. For instance, she spent a year at Harvard taking science classes, because Radcliffe – where she was enrolled from 1952 – couldn’t provide any teaching in the sciences. Of this time, she said (all her quotes are taken from the book):

‘I felt a little odd because women were still very, very much in the minority, and in some classes I was the only one.’

Furthermore, women

‘had to take their exams together in the same room [i.e separately from the men] because their presence in a coed examination setting was thought too distracting for the men.’

Her PhD supervisor (at the University of Chicago) felt that women had no place in science and told Dresselhaus so, indicating he believed giving women fellowships or other recognition was simply a ‘waste of resources’. That attitude was probably not that unusual at the time, or indeed for many years thereafter, with Weinstock quoting a 1976 article on women in engineering (in Cosmopolitan) that claimed a department head had  said

‘a lot of the technical education we’re giving women today is going to be wasted. They’ll get married, have children, and their period of productivity won’t last more than a few years.’

Dresselhaus got married – to a fellow researcher in the same broad discipline, with whom she collaborated extensively  – and had four children. Her career spanned more than fifty years of research at the top of her field. Despite that prediction about women in general, she barely stopped working even when she gave birth, taking only a few days off in total around her four children.

In due course, Dresselhaus joined the MIT faculty, becoming a tenured professor in Electrical Engineering in 1968, the first woman to be appointed full professor in any of the engineering departments. (That fact doesn’t surprise me: when I interviewed, and was subsequently offered, a faculty position in Cornell’s Materials Science and Engineering Department in 1982, I would have become the first woman faculty in Engineering there had I gone. In the end, of course, I didn’t go back to Cornell, where I had held two postdoc positions, and I don’t know who did become that first woman there.) About her appointment she made a curious quote:

‘I had very low expectations for myself. It wasn’t until I became a full professor in the prestigious MIT electrical engineering department that I began to take my career seriously.’

Was this a case of impostor syndrome, or simply a lack of role models to lead her to think that she too, as a woman, could make a go of a career? (Clearly role models would have been in short supply, although future Nobel Prize winner Rosalyn Yalow had briefly taught her at college and given her much encouragement to persist, despite the difficulties for women at the time.)  It isn’t obvious to me which interpretation is right, but make a go of it she did, publishing numerous trail-blazing papers and winning honours and other accolades throughout her life.

In 1999 MIT produced a seminal and ground-breaking report: A Study of the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT (I’ve written about this report before, at the time its follow-up was published in 2011). This report was prompted by the findings of molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, who explored gender differences in the allocation of various resources, as well as women’s personal experiences. When I read this report in 1999, I realised how much the situation described echoed my own experiences, although I had not internalised that there were systemic biases at play, as opposed to (or, at least, in addition to) my own failings. The abstract to the report explicitly stated

‘many tenured women faculty feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments. Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT.’

That second sentence is very important in my eyes. Life does not necessarily get easier as you progress, although the issues a woman faces may alter over time and undoubtedly some women do have an easier time, not least, because they are less likely to suffer from sexual harassment, as someone spelled out to me recently. It is clear from the book that Dresselhaus’s reaction to the report, at the time, was similar to mine; she wasn’t involved in the study itself, since she was in the Faculty of Engineering. It made her realise that the problems she encountered were not simply of her making. An MIT alumna described her reaction:

‘I saw her change her opinions as she began to recall incidents…that she’d previously managed to ignore. I think that sort of blindness had served a useful purpose for her in the first part of that career.’

It stimulated her to recognize that she had a role to play in supporting the women around her, and that she did for the rest of her life. Weinstock’s book makes clear just how much she did to encourage, mentor and sponsor younger women whose paths crossed hers, whether or not there was any formal connection. Not only with a wonderful reputation in research and teaching, she mentored many women on to success, as well as acting as an incredibly visible role model.  She seems to have run her research group rather like an extended family, with many social occasions to help her students along.

Those generations of women who came after her in Physics/Engineering owe her a huge debt, because she was so visible, so determined and so helpful. If you want to know more, I recommend this book.

 

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Indications of Direction of Travel at UKRI

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Athene Donald

I have been reading the recent publication from UKRI, their strategy document for the next five years. In UKRI’s relatively brief history, this is the first such document it has produced, because it is only now that they have any certainty over their funding for more than a few months: the Spending Review provides them with assurance for three years. The publication is a high-level document and will need to be complemented by a delivery plan. I always get worried when I read documents that state ‘we will [do something fundamentally important]..…’ without clarity over how any of their undoubtedly laudable aims will be translated into practice, but we have to be patient in this case. I am led to believe such a delivery plan will follow in due course, to put flesh on the bones of the aspirations. Thus, in what follows I do absolutely understand the mechanics of making things happen have not been, and in many instances cannot yet be, spelled out, as I raise my questionmarks.

Having known Ottoline Leyser, the current CEO, from before her arrival in Cambridge back in 2010, I know how strongly she believes in diversity and the importance of everyone in a team. In an interview included in the book The Meaning of Success, published (free online) for the University of Cambridge, she said back in 2014:

‘The current system favours the individual agenda, so you wind up with people with big grants and fancy publications, who can be doing very little for the system as a whole.’

She is now in an excellent position to do something about it, by influencing the incentives academia operates under. The incentives which drive processes in every university, too often leading to rewards for those very people with ‘big grants and fancy publications’. Rewards at the expense of those who mentor, do the pastoral legwork, take on the least popular teaching courses and serve on committees, even those which aren’t about allocations of money or space (typically more popular than health and safety, or staff consultative committees), not to mention all those people on the teams who work with the PI with the big grant. We need to see the delivery plan to know how UKRI can start to influence the UK academic culture in the direction she has always wanted.

There are some interesting comments about excellence in the Strategy document, that word whose precise definition is so elusive. Words which tie into the importance of an entire team, not just that bigwig at the top, such as

‘We must escape the constraints of narrow definitions of excellence and excessive focus on the performance of individuals to harness the power of diverse collaborative teams.’

Translating such worthy words into the way a grant-giving panel makes its decisions will be no trivial matter.  How will their standard mental scoresheets be uprooted to encompass a broader definition of excellence? I look forward to seeing what steps are laid out in the delivery plan to achieve this.

There is surprisingly little said in the document about early career researchers and how to resolve the long-standing issues around precarity. I found two mentions of both, with precarity explicitly tied in with the challenges for early career researchers, the first appearance of which says:

‘The career paths people can take through the system are restricted, resulting in precarity, particularly at early career stages, and creating silos between sectors, roles and disciplines.’

These words echo those in last summer’s R&D People and Culture White Paper:

‘we will look to understand and address the impacts of short-term contracts, which particularly impact on the careers and progression of women and those from disadvantaged backgrounds in research.’

Understanding, consultation, are all very well, although I’d have thought there would already be plenty of evidence to inform UKRI. However, what is not spelled out – in either document – is what can be done about the problem. To remove short-term contracts would require a major shake-up on the part of funders such as UKRI, as well as within universities. This is no trivial task, essentially requiring a change to the whole current academic ecosystem (and not just in the UK). When I was first appointed a lecturer at the ripe old age of 32, that was quite old to achieve that status. No more; it would be average-to-young I’d guess. Desirable though such changes to early career trajectories may be, it is not simply going to be a quick tweak and all will be well.

One of the major challenges in this space is the shape of the academic pyramid. As long as a PI trains, say, twenty PhD students over their career (the relevant number will tend to be discipline-dependent), given there is only one of them, unless there is a sudden vast expansion of permanent positions, nineteen of them will not have a position to slot into. Hence many of the nineteen who don’t replace the one at the top when they eventually retire, will feel cheated. Some may always have wanted a career outside academia and be perfectly content. Some may not have anticipated that outcome but also be content when they join a consultancy, a think tank, the civil service, train as a teacher or enter an industrial lab – there are after all plenty of highly desirable and important jobs that don’t involve becoming your boss’s clone. But some will be left struggling through that precarious postdoc experience on a succession of short-term contracts, feeling cheated and increasingly bitter. However, as things stand, that has to be the reality given the structures we have in place. (This has been analysed quite recently in a more scholarly way for US data, but the conclusion is obvious).

Another strand of thinking, more prominent in Ottoline’s words since her appointment and indeed in the People and Culture document than in the recent UKRI Strategy, is the idea of porosity between sectors: that people may move to and fro between different sectors over their lifetimes. The most obvious example (in STEM at least) would be to move between academia and industry, maybe several times during a career. Currently that is a real challenge, since determining the ‘excellence’ of someone who has worked in industry as part of a team and not had the opportunity to publish a stream of first author (or, indeed, last author) papers, for instance, may not be recognized as having an adequately superlative track record by any grant-awarding panel when that person attempts to move back into academia and secure funding.

Even sticking within these quite narrow themes of diversity and excellence, there are many other points I could have made. For instance, UKRI’s diversity statistics do not currently make pretty reading, particularly when it comes to black scientists. What concrete steps are going to be taken to overcome this apparent significant bias against such researchers? If you want to know more about these problems, I’d recommend following @TIGERinSTEM and @profRachelGaN (Rachel Oliver) on Twitter, who are fantastic at keeping this topic in the public eye, and who recently spoke to the Commons’ Science and Technology Select Committee about the issues. Then when it comes to bullying, another of Ottoline’s bêtes noires, I’m afraid the Twitter feed of UKRI’s chosen service for reporting outcomes and impact,  ResearchFish has rather blotted the copybook, with the hostile, indeed somewhat threatening tweets they sent out last week:

“We understand that you’re not keen on reporting on your funding through Researchfish but this seems quite harsh and inappropriate. We have shared our concerns with your funder.”

In summary, there are major challenges to address if the desired outcomes laid out in the Strategy are successfully to come to fruition, but even modest steps in any of these directions might lead to a more healthy work environment for many. I look forward to seeing these.

 

 

 

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Accrual of Disadvantage

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Athene Donald

Another year, another International Women’s Day. Sometimes I get frustrated that so much action happens on this one day of the year, and isn’t distributed uniformly throughout, so that the discussions, the highlighting, the signposting – all those necessary actions – percolate the full twelve months. Of course there is much going on, but often below the radar of many academics, so that only those who are already thinking about these matters participate. There is no point in only preaching to the converted. Perhaps having this one day to celebrate the amazing women in our midst does indeed make sense, even if they should be celebrated as often as the men.

Change does happen and will happen. The more companies recognize that board diversity leads to better financial outcomes, the more they will be willing to throw away their old prejudices requiring all board members to look like the Chair and open up their executive suites. Diversity also helps the generation of disruptive science and technology but, as a 2020 PNAS article by Hofstra et al put it

‘demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions.’

The authors called this the ‘diversity paradox’. Being innovative doesn’t mean academic progress if you don’t fit in.

Wherever you look in academic science there are still inequalities baked in. Be it in how CVs are read according to your name (see here and here), or how long papers take in Review and what their success rates are (as evidenced by a study from the Royal Society of Chemistry); from how lecturers are assessed by their classes to how often academics’ work is cited (see here for a specific example in neuroscience, but there have been other studies too). The Matilda effect – a term coined by Margaret Rossiter back in 1993 – is alive and well, whereby women’s work may be inaccurately attributed to a male.  Awarded grants are typically smaller for women; they rarely lead the largest grants, both as shown in data from UKRI. HEI’s have significant gender and ethnicity pay gaps, as can be found by looking at each university’s published results (my own university’s is published here). At every stage disadvantage can build up. The evidence base is accumulating. Albeit a particular study may look at only a single (sub-) discipline, yet it is hard to believe the trends do not apply across the board. Organisations talk a lot about this, yet the biases persist.

Of course, some of the actions and actors are not down to the HE Institutions themselves, but individuals and, as is so often said, they may be (still) entirely unconscious of the bias they exhibit. I know I am never consciously aware of the names (let alone genders) of the authors of papers I read or cite – unless I know the authors. You can see the biases creep in there. I am no more free of them than anyone else, but I do at least try to think about these things. I am, however, sure that I cite a paper because it is relevant, not because it’s written by someone with particular characteristics. That this is not so, with men apparently systematically citing men more than women I find bizarre. But, as the authors of the study about neuroscience I cite above hypothesise, this may all be connected to the way our social networks operate. Men may ignore women at conferences, and so never realise they should talk to them about their science, which would perhaps interest them greatly if they did. On the other hand, they may of course be more interested in acting as predators at these same conferences, for which there is only too much evidence, but that’s another story for another day.

In science research, as in just about every other sphere, the playing field has a significant tilt to it which we are only slowly beginning to rebalance. Work to do – but not just on IWD, but on every day of the year!

 

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A University Education and a Lifetime of Debt

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Athene Donald

Finally, the response to the Augar Review, for which we have been waiting for the rather splendid number of 1001 days, has been released. I will not accuse the Government of choosing a good day to bury bad news, because its publication on Thursday had been trailed for several days in advance. Nevertheless, it has received much less air-time than might have been expected (indeed hoped for) had it appeared on a day without a horrendous Russian invasion of Ukraine occurring. The implications of the published response, for students, universities and further education colleges, are substantial and far from universally positive.

Writing (albeit in a personal capacity) as someone who is the head of a Cambridge College which has always prided itself on its focus on widening participation, I read the details with unease. Cambridge is constantly being challenged to do more about reaching out to the socially and financially disadvantaged from all over the country and not just the prosperous south-east. What will this response do to help us in our work? As many commentators (see e.g. here and here) have pointed out, the changes being proposed – to reduce the level of income at which graduates start to pay their loans back and to extend the period over which payments are made from thirty to forty years – will hit hardest those with the lowest earnings (disproportionately women) rather than those who go on to highly paid careers, for instance in the City. There were plenty of analyses and models published by a variety of bodies in advance, which pointed out such moves would be regressive. These have been ignored, as has the proposal of maintenance grants for those from families with the lowest incomes, a crucial issue that simply wasn’t mentioned, let alone addressed, in the response.

It would seem that the Treasury’s view of finance (which I will paraphrase as ‘we need to get more of the student loan off our books’) has trumped the Levelling Up agenda. Only a couple of weeks after the Levelling Up White Paper was published, the actions implied by the Augar response go directly against its direction of travel. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations said, in introducing the White Paper

‘For decades, too many communities have been overlooked and undervalued. As some areas have flourished, others have been left in a cycle of decline. The UK has been like a jet firing on only one engine. Levelling Up and this White Paper is about ending this historic injustice and calling time on the postcode lottery.’

Those areas which are suffering from this ‘historic injustice’ will be those with a lower number of graduates (which is likely to contribute to lower local productivity and poorer local economic indices) and with struggling schools; struggling in terms of budgets and teacher skills as well as the numbers of students from disadvantaged families, however one wants to measure them, via indices of multiple deprivation, free school meals, children in the care system….. Levelling up should mean ensuring that all who have the aptitude to go to university are able – and that includes having the financial means – to do so, and that appropriate training and career paths are open to those for whom university is not the right place.

There may have been a brief moment of hope after the White Paper (albeit there seemed to be no new money associated with it), which the Augar response has probably dashed. A regressive policy, which is going to saddle those with least social and economic capital behind them with the highest total repayments during their entire working life, is not going to encourage those students to take on that debt, even if they simultaneously know that a university education is what they desire and what would most benefit them. Even if the university system, and colleges such as mine, wish to admit those who would thrive with that education and go on to deliver benefits to their community and the economy overall, they are likely in many cases to be deterred by the lifetime financial implications. It should be noted that universities too (and hence the College) are also being hit, in this case by a freezing of the fee level we receive.

One of the key features of the original Augar Review was to look at the whole education system, Further Education Colleges as well as Universities, to attempt to make a coherent whole. That aspiration, like quite a number of the other recommendations including maintenance grants for the least financially secure, is not dealt with. The current system pits the two strands of education substantially against each other in unhelpful ways, and traversing the further education landscape is a complex, unwieldy path for employers and students alike, with inadequate funding in most instances. The Lifelong Learning Entitlement would look like a good solution to some of these issues, providing an entitlement to students for loans

‘for post-18 education to use over their lifetime. It will be available for both modular and full-time study at higher technical and degree levels (levels 4 to 6), regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities.’

These plans are now out for consultation. However, the issue of the lifetime cost of these loans, if the same as in the latest revisions for loans already available for university courses, may remain a real turn-off to potential beneficiaries, whatever the good intentions behind this new move.

I feel dismayed by the regressive nature of the plans, the lack of support for the most disadvantaged, the damage this will potentially do to the work of institutions such as mine which are serious about widening participation, and the lack of any joined-up thinking between this latest document and any serious commitment to levelling up, the White Paper notwithstanding. There are so many ways in which plans could have been introduced which genuinely benefitted those whose start in life was tough. Instead, the new system seems set to put more, rather than less, burden on these students. Simultaneously, those who probably (but not invariably) already had a financially secure background and who progress to the highest paid jobs, will fare better under the new scheme of things. Universities, meanwhile, will be expected to make the same amount of money go further.

 

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