Living in Silos

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Athene Donald

When I first started writing this blog in 2010, I imagined I was going to write about the science that interested me, the latest papers in my field that caught my eye, and specifically highlight the excitement and challenge of working across boundaries in interdisciplinary areas. I was troubled by the difficulties scientists who worked, as I did back then, in areas that crossed research council boundaries faced in obtaining funding. Specifically, I worked at the interface between physics and biology and saw, despite the good intentions of those working at EPSRC and BBSRC (there was no UKRI back then), who regularly assured me that every grant would find a home, that what was meant by a ‘home’ was a panel that would evaluate an application. And this was not, and would not be now, the same thing as finding a panel that was able to judge it fairly because of the breadth of their expertise. I saw a grant I had written for EPSRC be rejected by them and sent to a BBSRC panel for which it was totally unsuitable, something I knew full well as I was the chair of that particular panel. Of course it failed, as I wrote about previously.

In time, my vocal raising of this issue wherever I could, did not lead to any more success in grant funding, but it did lead to me chairing the REF2021 Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel where I hope we were able to do a little to change the monoculture of panels involved in decision-making during the process. In particular, we stressed that excellent research could be done which did not need to be cutting edge in all or indeed any of the component parts: the excellence could lie in the overall integration. I hope some similar approach will inform the current REF round, in which I will play no part.

It is a long time since I last wrote a grant proposal, successful or not. During the last decade I served on the European Research Council’s Scientific Council (across the Brexit referendum) and discovered that a single overarching research council does not solve the problem of grants that transcend any particular boundary imposed between panels. UKRI faces exactly the same issues only now with two tiers: gaps between research councils and gaps between panels within a single research council. In an attempt to solve this problem, there is now an explicit interdisciplinary research strand, the cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme which has recently closed its second round. Although I was involved in training panel members for the interdisciplinary college for this call, I have no information on how well the first round progressed or was received. I would be interested to hear from any readers who know more.

But the disjunction that occurs when people work in silos can be found in many places far beyond academic research. Now much of my work is in the policy arena, rather than research science, I have been rereading Roger Pielke’s classic text The Honest Broker. I was struck by the following text inserted into a section on the failure of the so-called linear model, in which it is naively assumed that basic/pure research leads to applied research leads to product in the market. Apparently a reviewer of an early draft of the book said there was no need for a discussion of this because ‘the STS (science and technology studies) audience know all this already’. I remember I got a similar comment regarding my own draft manuscript in which I presented data about gender and science from the social science literature and was told this was all well-known to social scientists (although I cannot immediately lay my hands on the exact quote). The idea that an author might be writing for those who already know the stuff seems to me to be a strange way to approach a book draft where, surely, the whole point is to reach those who don’t know the stuff. But reviewers can be narrow-minded – as anyone who has ever received a referee’s report will know only too well – and not appreciate that an important point of working across disciplines is to bring solid facts to new audiences and to new problems. In my case, I wanted practicing scientists to learn about what the social scientists could tell them about gender issues in the classroom and whether specific interventions might work. I was not aiming my book at the social scientists who knew their own literature already.

However, the reality is, any organisation – be it a university, a UKRI, a business or a government – has to structure itself into some sort of units, and there will always be joins with friction or gaps between them. A recent HEPI blog by Gavin Miller took exception to the whole of the concept of silos as being inappropriate, claiming ‘The term ‘silo’ invokes a mystifying metaphor – that of the university as a living, intelligent organism’ (I’m not sure most readers would claim a university as intelligent, although they are often organic). But nevertheless, whether an organisation is considered to be living or not, there can be no doubt that junctions between units can be problematic and the need for keeping them as frictionless as possible is vital.

In a different guise, but arguably a far more important space, the new Government has recognized this in identifying its five cross-departmental missions, instead of relying on individual departments to solve the myriad problems of the day (subject, of course, to Treasury approval). There is no doubt that science will have a major role to play in just about all these identified areas, but how easy it will be for different teams to share enough of a common language (often a problem in interdisciplinary university research, where local jargon and acronyms can rule the day), or shared goals of both a short and long term nature, will remain to be seen. In the not-too-distant past, universities benefitted from having a minister (notably David Willetts and Jo Johnson at different times) who had a foot in both BEIS, now of course defunct, and the Department for Education. Sometimes a minister who sat in Cabinet. Now that formal linkage is gone, but if the ‘opportunity for all’ and ‘growth’ missions are to succeed the linkages will be more important than ever across different groupings of departments (issues far beyond universities themselves). Breaking down silos, departments, disciplines, whatever language you want to use, does really matter.

Posted in Education, Interdisciplinary Science, natural history, People | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Living in Silos

When to Say Yes

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve been writing this blog for more than fourteen years now, incredible though that sounds, at least to me. I rarely look back at what has gone before and if I do, it’s mainly to check I’m not repeating myself. But, looking back recently I was struck by one post I wrote more than twelve years ago about the challenges of saying ‘no’. I can well recall the conversation with AN Other that prompted it. My own situation has changed a lot since then, having been a College Master for ten years and now formally retired. However, trying to make one’s mind up about what to do and what not to do is as much a challenge as ever. I recall one friend saying their choices were made on where their personal contribution could make most difference. The danger with that approach is that one can end up staying in a narrow area in which you are already an expert (although that wasn’t in fact true of him). In my wider work as in my research, I have always wanted to keep expanding my horizons.

Much of what I have done in my life has happened by accident rather than by conscious design. When I give talks about my career I try to stress that this is not always such a bad thing. Sometimes it kicks you out of a rut, sometimes it opens up new opportunities that you might not have actively sought out. In my research, I always tried to keep a ‘safe’ research strand going while I plunged into something new. This meant I had something to fall back on if the new departure failed to ignite for one reason or another. Sometimes I felt stretched beyond my comfort level and there is no doubt I started a number of lines that went nowhere. But, on the whole, I feel it was a good strategy.

So too with what might term extracurricular activities. I may be frequently described as a ‘champion for women’, but I had to start somewhere other than simply with a feeling of annoyance with the little things that were tossed negatively in my direction (many of which I’ve written about previously on this blog). This formal championing arose because I had been interacting with more senior women – notably Julia Higgins and Jocelyn Bell Burnell – about the disadvantages many female scientists operated under; I then found myself being nominated by them to take on chairing the Athena Forum (now I think no more, but it was about promoting women in science). And, in due course, Julia passed on to me an invitation to talk in Austria about the topic of women in science. I wrote about that meeting very early in the lifetime of this blog, and it was a fairly weird experience as I and other externals got caught up in their own internal Austrian issues, but it was also something of a baptism by fire to talk on a subject I had barely begun to master. However, necessity is the mother of invention and that first talk – and all the work I put into preparing it – stood me in good stead as my visibility in this space rose.

I say this as I try to get to grips with new issues in my retirement. The only way to get on top of a new topic is to put in the hours reading the literature, as any new PhD student will know. Often the challenge is where to begin, how to find out what is the ‘right’ reading given the volume of potentially informative material out there with a mere click of a mouse. How to get to the essence of a new problem when there are many voices, not all of which will be helpful or indeed trustworthy? Learning how to critique others’ writing is of course another skill the freshly minted researcher needs to master, but it is not easy from the get-go.

Again, as with trying to work out what tasks to take on, trying to work out whose writing or interviews to trust is something that can be facilitated by talking to others. They don’t need to be people who are in any way closely connected with you, but simply people who are willing to share wisdom and their own experience. In my current situation, they are likely to be the very same people who’ve roped me in to the matter in hand, but as a student they are likely to be your peers as much as your supervisor.

I always feel I ‘fell’ into policy when I was asked, to my surprise, to chair the Royal Society’s Education Committee, a role I took on in 2010. I had to do a crash course then, but it certainly stood me in good stead when I became Master of Churchill College, since I had learned a lot about school education (not something all professors are au fait with) during my 4 year stint as chair. The importance of a good education system for all ages and all abilities is something I continue to be both concerned and interested in. Hence my pleasure when appointed chair of the Department for Education’s Scientific Advisory Council recently, but also my involvement with other activities (such as chairing the Science Policy Educators’ Alliance, a grouping of relevant learned and professional bodies). In particular, and locally, I am currently exploring the situation regarding apprentices in the region in conjunction with key players in this space.

With the creation of Skills England, it has to be hoped that policy – and indeed funding – covering  the whole gamut of education and post-16 skills training will become more coherent. As has frequently been pointed out by many another expert, this is not currently the case. A recent HEPI blog is a case in point. I won’t be writing specifically about the work of the DfE SAC, as that would not be appropriate, but other aspects of the important topic of skills may well find their way into future blogposts as I delve deeper. Who knows?

Posted in Careers, deficit model, Interdisciplinary Science, Londa Schiebinger, macho, Project Implicit, Science Culture, Science Funding, social media, Unconscious bias, Universities | Tagged , , | Comments Off on When to Say Yes

Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Athene Donald

Back in 2019, The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship was published, spelling out just how bad the environment was for would-be female entrepreneurs. She was blunt in the opening words of her introduction

“I firmly believe that the disparity that exists between female and male entrepreneurs is unacceptable and holding the UK back. The unrealised potential for the UK economy is enormous.”

There is no doubt that, in essence, excluding half the population from innovating and helping grow productivity has to be bad news. The Review stated that £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as UK men. Even with a more modest aspiration of matching best-in-class comparator countries, if the UK were to achieve the same average share of women entrepreneurs, this would add £200 billion to the UK economy.  A guide from the British Business Bank directed at would-be female entrepreneurs, highlighted the biases of society that may make it so hard for them to obtain money from the Venture Capital sector. Whether VCs (approximately 90% men) are aware of their biases when making decisions is less clear.

In the five years since the Rose Report, it isn’t obvious that a great deal has changed. Indeed, if anything things seem to be going backwards.  According to data from the Invest in Women Taskforce, all-female founded businesses received just 1.8 per cent (£145m) of the total value of equity investment in the first half of 2024, a fall from 2.5 per cent in 2023.  But this group is not just collecting statistics. This week they have announced a £250M pot for female-led businesses, with allocations being decided by female investment decision-makers across the UK. When the call to create this fund was announced last September, it received strong backing from Rachel Reeves, the first woman to hold the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, who will be attending Task Force events.  The money in the new fund has come from major companies, including Barclays and Aviva. It should kick-start many an enterprising woman’s new company, opening up novel avenues and creating value for the economy. One has to hope that it will also kick-start all VC funders to start thinking seriously about who they fund and who they reject (and why).

Ensuring that aspiring female entrepreneurs have the same access to venture capital funds as their male colleagues, is not just a question of moral fairness, although it is obviously that. It is also important for the growth that the Government is committed to, by creating new businesses and solving problems that may be particularly important for the female half of the population, no small number of people. As one of the Vice Presidents of the European Innovation Bank, Lilyana Pavolova, stated in 2020

“it makes economic and business sense to ensure that women entrepreneurs gain access to the same opportunities for success as their male counterparts.”

Also back in 2020, A PNAS study showed that underrepresented groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, produced higher rates of scientific novelty than their majority counterparts. Worryingly, their novel contributions were shown to be more likely to be devalued and discounted. Without in any sense implying there is a ‘female’ way of doing science, every scientist, engineer, technologist and inventor will approach problems based on their whole life experiences. Sometimes this means they will tackle an issue from a different angle from their (male) neighbour because of their view of the world, and they see areas where innovation can make a big difference that others may perhaps miss. Whether it is underpinning science or upstream technology solutions, perspective will colour any individual’s approach.

One such upstream area is so-called femtech, an area in which companies focus on technology-driven products, services, and software designed specifically to address women’s health and wellness needs. These are typically headed up by women who spot the need and the niche for the novel product. The evidence shows that fundamental research into health problems that predominantly affect women – think endometriosis, where the data has been analysed – are under-researched and underfunded. This underfunding occurs despite the significant economic burden of the disease in terms, for instance, of days off work for those women who are badly affected by the disease.  Women will be very conscious of areas such as this, but femtech reaches far beyond disease. Data shows that slightly over 50% femtech companies are fully female-founded, a figure that can be compared with the 6% of high-growth UK companies which are fully female founded in other sectors. It is a high growth area but could grow more if venture capitalists were more willing to invest in such start-ups.

The money announced by the Invest in Women Taskforce is a welcome addition to the funding portfolio. While many women may not want to be treated differently and, in this specific case, in a sense more advantageously because they are women, the reality is that currently they are being treated differently already, but in the opposite direction. It is to be hoped that, as more people realise that women really are capable of becoming successful entrepreneurs, we will see wider VC funds investing in female-led start ups. And this will be to the benefit of everyone, including the Treasury. Rachel Reeves sees the value in funding female entrepreneurs for growth, innovation and productivity.

 

 

Posted in Academia, appraisal, ASSET 2010, Athena Forum, Austrian science, Book Review, Careers, Equality, Evelyn Fox Keller, gender, History of Science, professional training, promotion, Science Funding, Women's Issues | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs

The Importance of Technicians

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Athene Donald

My last post discussed the ecosystem for those who consider themselves researchers and where it can go wrong if the incentives turn out to be perverse, however logical they seem on the surface. Today I turn to consider the technicians, who make many a lab run smoothly, keep the equipment running and often are the primary source of pastoral care for students who may be struggling. They frequently fall beneath the radar of decision-makers in a university yet can be the people who ensure the undergraduate teaching laboratories function and that the equipment gets fixed when a heavy-handed student has broken something vital. Their funding may be insecure: one fixed term contract followed by another, totally grant-dependent. Relatively few are supported centrally any more.

When I was a PhD student, the group I was in – not particularly large, but with several electron microscopes as their core research tool – there were three technicians, each looking after a different microscope, and a fourth overseeing the equipment needed for sample preparation. There was a workshop technician and a photographer (these were the days when slides were needed for talks and expert wet processing to produce high enough quality photographs for papers; in other words, long before digital processing, Photoshop and the like). All these technicians were there to help and several of them were an integral part of our evenings down the pub. As far as I recall none of them had degrees, although I don’t know what their qualifications were.

I interacted with all of them. One in particular stood out for me, not because he was the most sociable or outgoing, but because he was the one who kindly and patiently fixed the delicate piece of apparatus I kept breaking. I was embarrassed by my clumsiness, whereas he never seemed to express any criticism of my failure as an experimentalist. I have no idea what his background was, what his formal qualifications were, but he was an absolute wizard at putting things back together in his workshop. Some years ago, I went to his funeral.

Many years later, by which time I was running my own research group and had put behind me the dangers of actually touching equipment most of the time, I was interviewing for a mechanical technician to join our group. When I came to appoint the successful candidate, I realised he had the same surname as the hero from my PhD days. Sure enough, he turned out to be the son of the technician who’d looked after me so well all those years before. Subsequently, the son’s son also turned up in the department, although in a less skilled role. Three generations all skilled, all feeling this was a worthwhile career and that the work environment in the Cavendish Laboratory was somewhere they were comfortable.

However, technician posts like these can be hard to fill. It’s not a route that schools particularly highlight when discussing options (the paucity of school careers’ advisors is a problem in its own right). Historically, just as teaching was seen as an aspirational career for a woman who wasn’t going to go to university but could go to a teacher training college, so acquiring HND and HNC (higher national diplomas and certificates if the acronyms are unfamiliar) from your local technical college or polytechnic was seen as a good career move for men for whom university wasn’t an option (and I fear those are the correct gender stereotypes for, say, the 1950s).

That was back when perhaps only 10% or less of the population could get a university place. Times have changed, but the need for technicians has not. Some people will enter the technical workforce with a degree, sometimes even a PhD under their belt. This is not necessarily a satisfactory solution, as Paul Lewis highlighted in his 2019 report. He concluded that often a graduate does not have the correct skillset to complete a job, having too often got good at passing exams rather than ‘doing’ stuff. Additionally, a graduate may rapidly become dissatisfied with the role, feeling that the undoubted skills they do have are being underutilised. Career progression may be limited, which is also a disincentive to stay in the role.

The problem is not going to go away. The Talent Commission was specifically set up to look at the position of technicians in universities and research establishments (disclosure, I was one of the commissioners). Their report, published in 2022, highlighted that the university technical workforce was substantially an ageing population: around half of the technician population in universities were over the age of 50. Of these, almost half had worked at the same institution for twenty years or more. This means that, as these take retirement, a very substantial amount of knowledge will be lost. People like the technicians I worked with are in danger of becoming a disappearing breed.

In order both to celebrate technicians and to encourage institutions to support, mentor and promote the technicians they do have, the Technician Commitment was introduced in 2017, with over 120 signatory and supporter organisations to date. Of the different actions they want to see organisations undertake, one was to give technicians due recognition and a voice in decision-making. When I look at these expectations placed on employers, I feel guilty in particular that almost never did the technicians who did so much to enable a piece of research to come to fruition get included in the author list of papers I wrote.

A notable exception was one electron microscope technician who joined us upon retiring from industry: he had a PhD. I don’t believe the mechanical technician I mentioned earlier (long retired) would have had any expectation of becoming an author, but perhaps he should have done. His contribution to many a paper – by making all the sample holders that were so vital for the synchrotron experiments we carried out – was invaluable and not something the students could do. Furthermore, he made his contribution with few complaints, despite the fact that students almost invariably left things to the last moment before we had X-ray beamtime, so he would suddenly be inundated with requests instead of being able to pace things appropriately.

I hope PIs reading this will think harder about the recognition angle regarding any technicians they employ, as well as the wider terms of the Technician Commitment their institutions may have signed up to. I suspect it is not widely enough disseminated across institutions, so that those who work most closely with the key individuals in a research group know what is implicitly placed on their shoulders. If the technical role is to attract a healthier supply of incoming workers, it is in everyone’s interest that the job is made attractive.

 

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Dangers of Brilliance

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Athene Donald

As the detailed criteria of REF2029 are being worked through, the issue over the research culture part remains unclear. There are those who think research culture is an irrelevance in the pursuit of excellence, that it is a touchy-feely kind of thing, that woke stuff the last Government didn’t like, and who believe it is obvious what excellence is. This, I believe, is a profound mistake. We need all hands to the pump, as it were, in solving the many global challenges we face, from climate change to the dangers of AI, from (un)healthy ageing to food security. If we assume that the only way to succeed is to continue on the same trajectory we have been, at least throughout my lifetime, we are limiting ourselves. An academic world where success is determined by funding pulled in or space occupied, or even (although less true now than it once was ) the citation index of where you’ve published or the sheer weight of – figurative – paperwork you have produced, then we will never change or become a truly inclusive academic world. Yet the evidence shows diversity matters, and hence replacing like with like in the academic pyramid is short-sighted. Although the business world may slowly be waking up to the benefits to the bottom line of a diverse board or employee base, academia continues to have pockets of resistance. PNAS may publish a paper spelling out that

‘underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty.’

Yet this same paper depressingly goes on to say

‘However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted….are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities…equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups’

In Physics (as in maths, computing or engineering, but less so in chemistry or the life sciences) there is a great imbalance of the sexes all the way through the system and almost universally around the world. Increasingly, researchers are exploring the belief that you have to be brilliant to be a physicist; and also the belief that brilliance is something that boys (males) have more of than girls (females), a belief that seems to set in really young. Or, as the title of a relatively recent paper puts it “You need to be super smart to do well in math!”, based on studying children in (US) grades 1-4, roughly five to nine year olds. What messages are we giving our children so early on that leads to this belief?

Any physicist, male or female, is likely to have been greeted at some social occasion, when having disclosed their profession with ‘oh you must be so clever/I never could do maths at school’ or some variant of those phrases. It’s boring and embarrassing and I have always felt wide of the mark. I couldn’t do biology at school, my French pronunciation was atrocious and geography left me cold. I admired people who could speak fluent French and easily took on board concepts of frog development or the principal exports of Marseilles (a topic that seemed to take an inordinate amount of time in my geography lessons). It never crossed my mind that I was ‘smarter’ because my abilities lay elsewhere. Yet, apparently, on average, that’s how children and adults alike seem to think.

And this is unhealthy and unhelpful, and it feeds into a research culture many years later that is also unhealthy and unhelpful. It means we have an academy that is weighted in favour of those allegedly (more) brilliant male physicists and, as another recent paper put it, a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment in Physics departments.  They complain that

‘An emphasis on brilliance is harmful because assumptions about who has it are gendered and racialized: when we think of a brilliant person, we tend to think of men and white individuals, not women or people of colour’

And furthermore that this dog-eat-dog competitive culture arises because

‘brilliance is inherently comparative and hierarchical, so the more brilliant one person is perceived to be, the less others are.’

Interventions to alter our children’s attitudes towards the stereotyping of brilliance as a white male trait need to start early in our primary schools. These may be beyond the arena in which the typical academic is likely to get involved (I believe teacher training has a key role to play here, but children learn about cultural attitudes from far beyond the classroom.) Interventions to what and how we value being smart, at the expense of being supportive, generous, willing to do outreach and pastoral care as well as taking on a fair share of ‘departmental housework’ would all make for a better research environment and will be driven by attitudes around recruitment and promotion and, inevitably, REF2029. What incentives do we need to change the mindset we collectively currently inhabit and how can we avoid the perverse incentives that years of thinking about ‘excellence’ as a one-dimensional and easily recognizable criterion too often deliver?

Of course, it isn’t just Physics that has this ‘brilliance’ tag attached to it. In other areas, both Philosophy and Economics tend to get labelled this way too. These are also hugely male-dominated in unhealthy ways. In Philosophy a paper from last year stated that ‘people who identify as women internalize a gender stereotype and perceive themselves as less brilliant, but also share with others (i.e., men) the stereotypes of philosophy as for people who have brilliance and psychology as for people who do not have brilliance.’ The consequence, as they saw it, was that women were more likely to opt for Psychology as a discipline, where brilliance does not factor in in the same way and which ends up having a substantial female majority. As for Economics, my College colleague Diane Coyle has identified this major problem of gendering, both in her book Cogs and Monsters and in an article in the FT (so I hope many economists have read about the issue in one or other place). She highlights one version of the unfortunate ambience of what we value in the seminar room, stating

‘economics seminars are hostile occasions for point-scoring and aggressive challenge’

and in Economics journals where she says

‘Peer review rewards peers, and they are mainly men.’

So, how do we as a society, change our attitudes towards brilliance so that children do not believe that males are more brilliant than females which, in turn, could lead to both a more pleasant work culture and a more equitable gender split across the board? If anyone has any good answers….do let the world know.

 

Posted in Education, Equality, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments