Giving Due Credit

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Athene Donald

Due Credit

When I was setting out as a young PI, the standard thing to do (on acetates, once we’d moved on from 35mm slides) was to acknowledge co-workers – students or postdocs, or wider collaborators – via a simple list at the end, with affiliations as appropriate. These days, mini mugshots on the relevant slide are de rigeur. It is very nice to see the human face behind exciting results.

However, whichever way it’s done, what matters is that it is done. Because upon occasion, even if the whole act of acknowledgement doesn’t get omitted, individuals may do. Too often, that implies bad behaviour, bad faith, on the part of the senior scientist. Let me give a couple of examples. I once observed a senior scientist, now dead, give his talk in honour of a prize he’d just been awarded, carefully listing every person he’d collaborated with in whatever capacity – bar a couple. Both female as it happens (although in my experience gender is not necessarily a contributing factor), and substantially more junior than him, albeit already independent researchers. Both people he had had pretty public fallings out with after extended and fruitful collaborations starting during their student years. It was noted by others in the audience with some revulsion. It was shocking behaviour, and yet there were – of course – no consequences for him. He was the one winning the prize; they were ‘merely’ being short-changed.

I find this kind of behaviour deeply depressing. It is just one way in which the established scientist feels they are untouchable, as they indeed almost invariably are, and can get away with whatever they feel like. It involves no active aggression, bullying or harassment, and yet the damage may be substantial. It does not have to involve women or even junior scientists. On another occasion I watched a different (male) senior scientist give a conference talk about his work with industry. He was very proud his fundamental work had such relevance to manufacturing; indeed, that was rather the thrust of his talk. Yet the industrialist I was sitting next to, who was funding the work, someone I too had collaborated with, turned to me in disgust at the tenor of the talk in which team members – both from industry and academia – were being written out of the presentation. No acknowledgements to the wider team, it looked as if the work was almost entirely down to this single senior scientist. The industrialist felt such dislike of the behaviour, which was clearly of a long-standing pattern in his eyes, that he admitted follow-on funding for the project from his company had all but been cancelled because of the professor’s behaviour.

Why do people do this? Why do they feel it necessary to take all the glory, or withhold other’s fair share, when they – as senior professionals – don’t need it. Furthermore, no one is going to be fooled that the professor was spending long hours in the lab, rather than sitting on committees, running a department or devising new teaching courses. Few professors are going to be doing the legwork of lab or computational work, even if they are the ones who have to write the grants to fund the work and exhort their team to better things. In an ideal team, everyone plays their part, even if not necessarily equally. And everyone should be appropriately credited.

Ottoline Leyser, as UKRI’s CEO, and Amanda Solloway, as the Science Minister, talk a lot about research culture. What will and should they do to stop this particular sort of inappropriate and unattractive behaviour? How will whistleblowing be made easier and less painful for the whistleblower? Should my industrial colleague have stood up in the Q+A and challenged the professor’s behaviour, pointing out how Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe should have been credited with carrying out the finite element analysis, and Ann Smith and Tom Brown the experimental studies? After all, he was close enough to the project to know exactly which students and postdocs had done which part of the work. If he had, no doubt an embarrassed silence would have fallen upon the room. That sort of thing simply isn’t ‘done’. When the first professor I mentioned had omitted the names of Dr X and Dr Y from their credits, when many in the room knew this, should I have stood up and challenged him (goodness knows, I’d challenged him enough in private on other matters) and said how come those names were omitted?

In this particular case, I had indeed raised the issue behind his back in a different context, by pointing out to a (different) prize-giving committee he had a reputation of not giving due credit. My intervention was not appreciated – even though I did it privately and discreetly to the chair of the committee – and I was brushed off, essentially told that it didn’t matter. But it did and does. Not giving credit where it is due means those written out lose street cred, impact and citations, and hence their own prospects are damaged. Said professor duly won the highly prestigious prize.

The trouble is, our cultural norms make silence the name of the game, so that the victims continue to suffer. Speaking up when one knows the truth of the matter should be everyone’s responsibility. Yet, even for those of us with standing, there is a cost to such speaking up. Without such matters falling necessarily under the usual terms of whistleblowing – although in some cases omissions, particularly on papers, will be straying close to research integrity territory – we who call out bad behaviour are in danger of simply being dismissed as troublemakers. I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I did. I do feel more noise should be made about those who don’t always give credit where credit’s due. I think, given a room sprinkled with people who can spot what is going on, it should be possible to introduce a scientific form of sending to Coventry, of marking down future grant applications and refusing to allow such people conference slots. I fear this is just a pipe dream of mine.

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Red Tape

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Athene Donald

The announcement of a review of bureaucratic red tape in universities may bring either a smile of relief or a hollow laugh. Why are universities (and funding bodies) so entangled in this nasty stuff? Is it because they love to hire lots of makeweight administrators regardless of need (I think not!), or is it because the Government imposes endless layers of regulatory checks and balances? Once upon a time, before Margaret Thatcher’s suspicions alighted on academia (if you aren’t aware of this history, I recommend Jon Agar’s Science Policy under Thatcher to fill you in, an open access pdf), there was less determination to scrutinise academics’ every move. It wasn’t academics who dreamed up ‘impact’ as something we all needed to have if we were to be funded; it wasn’t the bench scientist who thought the REF was a desirable way of measuring university outputs and thereby creating some of the myriadleague tables we are now plagued with. The design of forms for research grants is just another example of evolution rather than intelligent design.

So, it is hard not to believe some good might come out of this recently announced review. Who wouldn’t want to cut red tape? However, it does rather depend which particular bits get cut. To give an example of a particular form I’d love to see simplified, one that I cited to a senior UKRI employee recently, I’m all for scrapping the format of the referee’s form for UKRI. It comes in many parts, which tends to lead to a lot of tedious repetition – tedious for both the referee to write and equally for any soul who has to read it before a committee meeting – but that fragmentation often ends up making it extraordinarily difficult actually to express a coherent and accurate assessment.

Once upon a time, a referee form simply asked for the grant to be judged in free-form text, so one could more easily say this bit is good, that bit is bad, but overall it’s likely to be illuminating/rubbish or whatever. Now, the requirement to address numerous specific criteria means that a distorted perspective can so easily accidentally be transmitted, and words need to be dreamed up to cover issues that perhaps aren’t so relevant to a specific grant. I’m sure the intention behind the form’s creation was good, and probably driven by concerns about issues that too often got overlooked such as researcher training, but it’s overly complicated and not fit for purpose in my view. Time for some pruning back, I think.

The news that the link between Athena Swan and funding was to be broken with no clarity about what might ensue predates this recent announcement but – as the Athena Swan Review Group recommended a year ago (I was a member) – there is no doubt that the Athena Swan process needs its bureaucracy lightening. AdvanceHE seems to be moving slowly and, I might say, confusingly towards implementing the Review’s recommendations. The tardiness towards introducing a more fit-for-purpose application procedure is to be regretted. Nevertheless, whatever shape the process may take in the future, as with the referee forms I mention above, some things are much harder to capture than others. This was the reasoning behind the Review’s recommendation to implement a culture survey, so that the lived reality in a department could be captured and assessed.

To give an example of what fundamental behaviours will never be caught by a form of metrics and good intentions, let me cite an example of sickening public behaviour I watched on a webinar recently. This was not organised by an academic institution, although academics were involved, and many minorities would recognize with a sinking heart the behaviour I observed. A panel discussion was the particular format of this webinar, with a white male chair, who was a non-academic, and two men and two women as the panellists. What ensued was that the women were persistently interrupted by the chair, the men never. One of the women tried to intervene to shut the chair up when he – yet again – jumped in to silence the other woman. As a tactic it didn’t work; the chair was impervious to this attempt. The male panellists did nothing.

That, as I say, was not a meeting in an academic setting, but it is too easy to imagine exactly the same occurring in a department meeting. Indeed, one hardly needs to imagine it because many readers will have seen something similar at first hand. It infuriates me that it is the women who have to attempt the corrective measures, while the men sit complacently – or blindly – by. My first ‘excuse’ for the chair was that he was simply old (he certainly looked it!) and out of touch with current social norms. A quick Google about him, however, indicates he’s somewhat younger than me, so I feel less forgiving.

Men as allies has become something of a ‘thing’, but at times like this it is crucial that they step in to ensure all voices are heard equally. It was outrageous for the chair to treat half of the panel as second-class citizens by virtue of their chromosomes. But, no amount of form-filling by a department will capture such noxious behaviour, particularly if it happens to be the head of department talking down those who don’t conform to an expected ‘cis white male’ norm. All one can hope is that processes such as Athena Swan, once they are tidied up and our recommendations carried through, facilitate the honest dialogue about what goes on in a particular institution to highlight inappropriate and damaging behaviour.

Getting rid of red tape could be wonderful. I’ve highlighted one example of where simplification of forms could really help (in my experience) and one where no amount of form-filling will necessarily capture reality. Every reader will have their own favourite examples. I worry, though, that as long as this Government (indeed, any Government) feels academics are not to be trusted – viewed as too radical, or at least as containing too many ‘well-meaning Guardian readers against the bomb’, to quote an old CND badge – forms will continue to be a staple of our lives, forcing us to jump through hoops, provide numbers of dubious utility and never, unless it is in the mythical beast that will be ARIA, just allowed to get on with our jobs using some common sense and constructive imagination.

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Burnout

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Athene Donald

As we ‘celebrate’ the anniversary of the UK’s first national lockdown this week, reflection seems in order. Things that seemed unimaginable last March, we now take in our stride, in the sense that we simply get on with them. Coming to terms with them is a different matter. For all those who’ve lost family and friends, inevitably things will never be the same. Grieving their loss will continue to be a heavy burden to bear. For those who haven’t seen some of their closest relations or pals during the past year, but with that possibility conceivable in the months ahead, circumstances permitting, there will still be much grief at what has been lost. As for those who’ve lost their jobs, for students of whatever age whose education has been disrupted, for the joys of youth (or indeed of any age) that have been upended and left in tatters, there is so much to mourn.

In academic establishments up and down the land, Zoom burnout is pervasive. We’ve sat staring at screens till our eyes and heads hurt, our backs and legs are stiff and our brains frazzled. Zooming friends for a chat no longer seems such an attractive option, when it is just another screen of pixels to stare at, however much the support and gossip received may be welcome. We’ve adapted and committed to trying our outmost in these far-from-ideal circumstances, working long and hard to keep universities functioning as best they can. A College can provide much support, from food to good wifi, even libraries (Churchill’s is open in a restricted way) for those students who are here, with tutorial advice always to hand at the end of a screen.

I’m sure the community is divided into those who believe spring is a positive time of rebirth and those who see this anniversary of lockdown as simply commemorating a year of misery. My mother always used to regard spring as the cruellest time of year, because new beginnings in Nature just reminded her of all that she hadn’t achieved and never could (she did, after all, leave school at 14, and in later years I could never persuade her to embark on an Open University course). For many years she was trapped in London with caring responsibilities, and not able to get out to breathe the country air or hear the cuckoos and chiffchaffs arrive, things that meant so much to her. That sense of being trapped in an urban environment is one that feels all too familiar to me currently: no opportunity to visit the sea, no mountains to relish and – even in the best of times – to my knowledge, no cuckoos within the city, although I’d expect to hear chiffchaffs soon.

bee in spring flowers Mar21 Bee visiting Chionodoxa at Churchill College today

But I will try, harder than ever, to believe in the spring-as-rebirth motif this year. Take the bee I saw today in the College grounds as a positive message. The hope that the successful vaccination roll-out and the most recent lockdown really does mean that normality seems more than just a distant dream. Cambridge term has now ended and, although it doesn’t mean the mass exodus of students in the usual way, it does – thankfully – mean fewer committee meetings to pin me to my screen. There are many challenges to keep us all on our toes, but I will try to remember my own advice of last year ‘In time of crisis, be kind.’ For all those who have been struggling with productivity (I’m inclined to think everyone will be nodding at that point), we need to remember that being kind extends to ourselves as well as everyone else.

As the Master of a Cambridge College, this past year has been intense. Decisions have had to be taken on the hoof with incomplete information, particularly in the first few months.  I am deeply grateful to the wonderful team and sense of community spirit around me. But just because we’ve all been trying to jump through ever-changing hoops as government directives have come and gone, it doesn’t mean the normal work of the College can stop. I have not had to adjust to on-line teaching, because I’m retired and no longer teach. (Although last summer, I did have to undertake online examining as part of my swansong from the department, and tricky I found that. In those early days we were still getting to grips with on-line marking of scripts, sharing screens and virtual whiteboards, not to mention the incompatibility of Microsoft Teams when wearing different institutional hats, something that is totally frustrating.) But all the usual round of decision-making committees continues, and some particularly challenging and unusual circumstances have made this term more complicated and worrying than most for me. Such occasions, when both ‘sides’ choose to see the one in the middle as an enemy, are part of the uncomfortable reality which can rear up unexpectedly for anyone in a leadership role.

I hope the Easter vacation, such as it is, will give all of us time to pause, to smell the metaphorical roses, to curl up with the novels that we’ve wanted to read for months, even if we still can’t see the grandchildren/grandparents/godchildren/best friend and other much loved but now distant people in our lives.  Burnout may be pervasive, but it needs to be factored into the lives we lead. It means we must treat ourselves, and everyone else, with kindness, to escape the burden imposed by incessant emails by venturing out into whatever fresh air is to hand, savouring the warmer weather and lengthening days. Every time I hear a blackbird or dunnock sing, I take heart.

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How are Universities Supporting Those Worst Affected by the Pandemic?

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Athene Donald

This pandemic has thrown all kinds of inequalities into sharp focus, ranging from fundamental matters of health and wellbeing to job security. The consequences of all these issues will echo down the years ahead, long after the pandemic is a fading nightmare. In terms of (higher) education, the digital divide and who does the homeschooling will both cast a long shadow on opportunity and career progression. Whereas I can say little knowledgeably about the digital divide, which will have significantly magnified other forms of disadvantage already entrenched in UK’s society, I want to say more about the inequalities that homeschooling and caring responsibilities have placed on those who have shouldered the brunt of these, typically women.

In the USA the combined National Academies have recently produced a report Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine looking at the impacts and what measures have been, or should be, introduced to mitigate this impact. (It is worth stressing that of course it isn’t only women who have been impacted but, as I’ve written about before quite early in the pandemic, along with many others, it is clear the impact falls disproportionately on women and, typically, those at relatively early stages.) The simple measure of extending the tenure clock, in US terms, may not help and can actually hinder relative to men, a point reinforced in this recent study.

For many of us, the blurring between work and home – given that you don’t have a commute of more than a few paces when working from home – causes all kinds of problems, again spelled out in this report. We are all used to the person on a call who blanks the video briefly to deal with a child’s worries. But these interruptions matter, impacting – once the Zoom call is over and concentration should be unbroken – on productivity, be it of teaching material or research paper. Data is accumulating across all sectors which shows it is the woman who is more likely to be disrupted and disturbed in this way, or who has to fit in as much work as they can around a day’s homeschooling.

So, how will Universities factor this in? I know my own University is trying to construct appropriate modifications to the paperwork for recruitment and progression to allow some information to be given about the severity of impact on an individual that can be factored into decision-making processes. The devil will be in the detail, as well as the eyes of those who read the statements and then have to work out how to take into account particular circumstances. This will be a challenge, but at least it is one Cambridge is recognizing and working on to make as fair as possible.

Note added 18-3-21 What follows was what I understood at the time of writing, from information in the public domain, was the situation at Liverpool. However, I am now led to believe that the story may be considerably more complex than what I first wrote implies, with many other factors being considered by the University. No doubt in due course the full story will come out and I sincerely hope that the crude metrics I describe below represent only a tiny part of the complete picture. As it stands, the story looks shocking. I hope time proves it incorrect.

Will all universities do likewise? I’m afraid the evidence is no. I want to highlight what is happening at Liverpool University (I believe something different but similar is going on at Leicester) where 47 staff are being required to reapply for their own jobs as downsizing is planned so redundancies are in the air. Now, all universities and colleges are hit by financial pressures, brought about in large part by the pandemic and Brexit, so shedding jobs may be a desperate necessity although the Liverpool case seems to be about much longer term structural changes. However, what is shocking in the Liverpool case is the criteria by which people are to be axed. Metrics, pure and simple, not to say crude.

Two figures of merit are to be used. An individual’s research grant income and Elsevier’s Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) score for their personal research output. Just these two figures! Think about that….no value is placed on teaching – what an omission ­– or on general citizenship such as mentoring, pastoral care or contributing to the institution’s equality aims. These are the glue that hold a department together and which the University proclaims are important. I don’t think anyone believes that metrics such as Elsevier’s are particularly robust and grant income will be largest for those who do none of the crucial academic ‘housework’, and probably – according to UKRI’s own statistics – who happen to be white and male. Has anyone conducted an equality impact assessment on using these two criteria alone as they are required to do? Because it is extremely hard to imagine they impact everyone, regardless of their characteristics, equally.

As the NAS report makes clear, women’s careers have tended to be more damaged than men’s. A recent UKRI blogpost by Dr Sarah Arrowsmith, a researcher at Liverpool, examines this specifically in their university’s context. This analysis showed grant application rates for male academics in 2020 actually grew by over 11% compared to 2019, but applications by women fell by nearly 20%, giving rise to a net difference of over 30%. So, immediately one can see how the pandemic will impact on the metrics differentially by gender, those metrics that are to be used as they reapply for their own jobs.

Worse, if one considers a longer time period, what about all those good citizens who have contributed to progressing equalities work, such as pulling together the Athena Swan applications or helping to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum. Liverpool holds a Silver Institutional Athena Swan award, and so do some of the departments where these redundancies are now targeted. Yet, the work done – and we all know pulling an Athena Swan award together is no light touch job (at least as yet; maybe implementing the recommendations of the Review Group will finally make this achievable) – gets no recognition in the criteria being used to decide who keeps their job. This is deeply worrying. It means that the statements that the University makes such as

“Equality and Diversity will be knitted into the fabric of our Faculty and enshrined at the heart of all we do”

(quoted in staff’s open letter about these redundancies) have no value.

In the end the institution will simply be full of those people who think only about their own research, how much cash they have and where they publish. I’m not sure I’d think that would be a very nice place to work, or one where the teaching – with no weight given to this at all – is very good. It is unlikely there will be a diversity of staff and there will certainly be no one to work to improve that diversity going forward.

This planned action by Liverpool University is to be deplored as a retrograde step. I hope they will reconsider. I hope all universities will be giving much more consideration to these issues in the round as and when the pandemic finally recedes.

*Please see comment below for a correction to this statement. The 47 staff are not being offered the chance to reapply for their jobs: they are at risk of being made compulsorily redundant.

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Women as Natural Philosophers: Choosing to Challenge

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Athene Donald

When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its first Fellows would have been known not as scientists, but as natural philosophers. Science and scientists were words that came into common parlance only around two hundred years later. So, the Isaac Newton’s and the Robert Boyle’s of the day would have been happy to be thought of as philosophers; it wasn’t felt necessary for there to be distinctions between different branches. Early meetings covered a wide range of issues ranging from pendulum clocks, to birds, from the flames of candles to fermentation, and experiments were regarded as crucial. The Royal Society, after all, took as its motto Nullius in Verba, usually translated as ‘take nobody’s word for it’: no more arguing, theoretically, about how many angels danced on the head of a pin.

However, implicitly, philosophers were men. Women weren’t expected to engage in these activities. Yet there were women who wanted to venture into this territory. Who knows how many? There is little written record to give an indication. One woman, Margaret Cavendish, ventured in to a meeting of the Society (then housed near High Holborn in what is now Gresham’s College) in 1667. She was not impressed – and nor were the Fellows. Richard Holmes describes the event in his book The Long Pursuit. According to this account Samuel Pepys remarked

‘that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say any thing that was worth hearing…’

The woman, nicknamed Mad Madge, was well aware that women weren’t welcome, herself in particular. She was regarded then, and indeed much more recently, as particularly hostile to Robert Hooke and his works on microscopy. She certainly did criticise microscopy but her reasons for doing so were not inherently ‘anti-science’ but based in part on her own experiences of using microscopes, which in those early days were often extremely imperfect in their manufacture, giving rise to distorted images. Additionally she recognized the problem, so familiar to microscopists such as myself, of knowing what is the ‘typical’ image. How was an observer to know what was ‘true’.

Nor was she alone amongst her contemporaries of having such concerns, it was just that she was the only woman expressing them, and clearly quite stridently. (An extended analysis of her relationship with the scientists of the Royal Society can be found here.) She considered the Fellowship as damagingly male (to quote Holmes) and saw them as anti-Nature, views expressed in her poetry and prose. She herself was viewed consequently as anti-Baconian. Cavendish was the first and, for a long time the only woman to set foot in the Royal Society’s august building (albeit the building itselfmar changed over the centuries).

Margaret Cavendish had standing (she was the Duchess of Newcastle) and a voice through her writings. Few women had the same opportunities and so – as Virginia Woolf so eloquently expressed in a different but not unrelated context of A Room of One’s Own – we know little about their attitudes towards science. There were other female philosophers in the seventeenth century, but by and large they kept away from ‘natural’ philosophy. No doubt society conveyed then (as in some senses still too often it does today) that science was not a suitable subject for a young lady and the wherewithal to study it would not have been available to them.

One female philosopher of around this time was Mary Astell (1666-1731, so born shortly after the founding of the Royal Society). I must admit hers was not a name I’d come across until a few weeks ago, although Melvyn Bragg recently devoted a whole programme of In Our Time to discussing her philosophy and her attitude towards religion and feminism. Amongst other publications Astell 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) and was very clear that women should be encouraged to look beyond mother and nun as career alternatives, despite being high Church (and strongly royalist) herself. However, relevant to Cavendish is the fact that Astell turns out to have studied some science really rather seriously.

She was brought to my attention by the Deputy Librarian at Magdalene College (Cambridge), Catherine Sutherland, who has discovered numerous of her books lurking un-noted and uncatalogued in their collection. Some of these books are extensively annotated, demonstrating the range of interests she had, and one of these is Les Principes de la Philosophie de Rene Descartes (in French), a book that discusses issues ranging from his ideas of the laws of motion to the nature of light. This is not a book that one typically might have expected women of the day to get their hands on. However, Astell was certainly serious about her science: she spent five months in 1697/8 as an ‘assistant’ to John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, the only woman in the over one hundred assistants who worked with him.

I was approached by Sutherland to look at these annotations in Descartes’ book (unfortunately – as contact is impossible – only as photographs, which meant they were sometimes hard to decipher) and to comment on them. They were certainly intriguing. Sutherland’s has written an extensive commentary on her discoveries in the Magdalene Library, still to be published, and there is a features piece on the University website published here. From my perspective, several things struck me. Firstly, it was interesting to note that she must have had access to Royal Society journals: she makes a specific reference to a 1688 paper of Edmond Halley’s on evaporation published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. How did she get access, given she certainly couldn’t have visited the Royal Society itself and her link with Flamsteed (who was an FRS) was yet some years in the future?  Secondly, it is clear how carefully she had studied the Descartes text, with extensive notes at the end of the book as well as the marginalia dotted throughout. Finally, she wasn’t afraid to analyse things for herself: a couple of times she writes ‘False’ in the section on Descartes’ Laws of Motion and, as far as I can make out, this is in the places where he did indeed get things wrong.

Whether she ever discussed any of this with her circle of friends of course we cannot know. Indeed, who could she have discussed such a text with? It isn’t clear that the circles she mixed in – aristocratic in part, but not necessarily plugged into the world of the male natural philosophers frequenting the Royal Society – would have had any other members who would have been interested in following this particular bent in natural philosophy. Her published writings were all concerned with religion, education and politics, still not usual topics for women to entertain. (A thorough account of these aspects of her life and writing can be found in a chapter by Ruth Perry Mary Astell and the Enlightenment appearing in Women, Gender and Enlightenment.)

As any researcher knows, there comes a point in one’s development when the light first dawns that something published might be wrong. It takes confidence to recognize this. I can well remember one particular student of mine who was completely thrown to realise publication does not mean a statement or result is necessarily right, just because it’s in print. It took a lot of reassurance for them to believe their analysis (of the published data) was right and there was just some simple mistake in the paper that had slipped through the refereeing process. I am impressed that Astell had that confidence, to look at the printed word of Descartes book and say ‘False’. It demonstrates that she believed in her ability to tackle this natural philosophy, even if she kept that knowledge to herself. Or, that she had found a convivial group to discuss this with and had been able to thrash it through together. It is unfortunate that, since her interest in science does not, until now, seem to have garnered much interest, we don’t have evidence as to who that grouping might have been. I’d like to think it was her own quiet prowess that enabled her to spot the faulty logic, to her own satisfaction, so that she could jot down that ‘False’ with confidence, choosing to challenge, even if rather quietly.

 

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