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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Do You Cope with Office Politics or Leverage them?

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Athene Donald

In academia, appraisals (call them what you will) get different degrees of serious attention. Equally, people pay more or less heed to them, depending on personal circumstances and whether anything useful is said. However, a recent study shows that, as with so much of the working world, subtle gender biases are at play. However well-meaning the appraiser may be in the feedback they give, however positive the messages they give appear at first sight, in fact the ‘steers’ given may be (of course, this is a statistical statement) different for men and women.

A recent US textual study of written feedback given to a group of mid-career business leaders by over 1000 peers and more senior leaders during the course of a leadership development programme, has highlighted the differences. (I came across a useful summary on the Harvard Business Review blog.) It is fascinating because the differences are so stark, as neatly summarised in this table.

Men are encouraged to Women are encouraged to
Set the vision Focus on delivery
Leverage politics Cope with politics
Claim their space Get along
Display more confidence Be more confident

All the recommendations are positive. They’re not even subtle put-downs of the sort I’ve written about before in letters of reference, where women are described, for instance, as helpful or good team players, but the messages conveyed are not that different. What does ‘get along’ mean other than be a good team player as opposed to assuming the role of the team leader? Likewise, focus on delivery seems to suggest the woman is supposed to take someone else’s vision and get on with it, rather than be the vision setter. That belongs to the man’s domain. I find it depressing, if illuminating, that the differences are clear-cut and damaging to the idea of developing women as leaders.  This feedback, note, was provided in a leadership development programme. It sounds like it’s a course to be missed, but is (I presume) typical.

And so, to departmental politics, as captured by the title of this post. However toxic, or however driven by networks and cliques, the woman is only supposed to cope with it. Not fight back, let alone grab it by its tail and leverage it to access influence. Women, poor passive things, are condemned to not letting whatever nightmare conditions there are get them down, let alone complain about them. I’m sure that isn’t what the feedback-givers intentionally meant, but that will be the message received. This is such a clear-cut example of implicit/unconscious bias, where in-built stereotypes play out unhelpfully without conscious thought being given. And I’m sure women giving feedback would be as likely to fall into this trap as men, as all the evidence on multiple fronts suggest women are no better at avoiding many forms of implicit bias.

But I am almost amused by the last pair of recommendations. Women frequently talk about their lack of confidence and the typical sensation of impostor syndrome. It wouldn’t be surprising if this came up in a conversation with an appraiser and it is not unreasonable to be told to ‘be more confident’ as a response. But for men, they are told to ‘display more confidence’.  Is this an implicit admission that men are just as likely to lack confidence as the women, but they are told (no doubt wisely) to put on an act? There’s a lot to be said for ‘fake it till you make it’, or ‘feel the fear and do it anyhow’ or whichever other glib phrase you care to use. But, too often women are fooled into thinking that those (not necessarily only men) who manage to display confidence do actually believe in themselves, that that external confidence is more than skin-deep. They need to recognize that that may just be a superior acting job, and work on learning how to put on such an act themselves, rather than internalise the problem as feeling unconfident when they may not believe they can ever rid themselves of that.

The reality is all of us, at least some of the time, have to do something we are unfamiliar with and may have no confidence we can accomplish the task. As Master of a Cambridge college I know this only too well. Back in the day when social interactions were possible, I remember being daunted by being expected to make polite conversation with Trump’s ambassador in London, with whom there was unlikely to be a great meeting of minds. Or having lunch with a blockbuster author of romantic fiction, not a single one of whose books I had cared to read. Not roles I was trained for, but I knew my job was to be appropriately conversational, interested and interesting. Those may be trivial examples in one sense, but they illustrate we all keep having to raise our game in unexpected directions. Getting under the metaphorical table and saying I don’t do small talk would not have got me far in either case. Less superficially, there was the time I had to do a TEDx talk that did not go according to plan, as I wrote about previously: a high profile, high adrenalin situation that many a reader would find unnerving and which probably resonates in many different public-speaking situations. I could go on and on, but discretion on my part is probably desirable. You get the idea.

All of us who give feedback should take note of the implications of this study. I think the idea that writing letters of reference can too easily be gendered is seeping into the general consciousness. I hope that the nature of feedback given to early-mid career academics will likewise be more commonly identified as a source of damaging bias. Or it seems likely that the population of leaders will remain highly skewed towards the male gender.

And yes I know, not all men, not all women….

 

 

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Will ARIA Sing?

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Athene Donald

The much trailed UK version of ARPA now has a name, and it’s not BARPA or UKARPA, it’s ARIA: the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Not, note, Innovation but Invention. Is this going to be an important distinction or simply permit the old trope of ‘Brits are good at inventing but not making money’ to come to the fore again? Before this week’s formal Government announcement, the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology had already published its Report on the proposal, initially announced in the 2019 Queen’s Speech. If I were to paraphrase their report, I would say this group was a bit suspicious of what the agency might be for and what it might look like, stating:

“It is strange that more than a year after its inclusion in two successive Queen’s Speeches, the Government has not clearly articulated the need for, or intended remit of, the proposed agency. To date, it seems to be a brand in search of a product.”

And, indeed, the announcement this week still leaves wide open what the remit will be. With £50M initially on the table (out of a committed total of £800M in the years ahead), it is clear that it will need specifically to identify one or two target areas, at least in the first instance; the field cannot be left undefined and it would be unwise for the money to be salami-sliced across different challenges. However, to date there is no ‘customer’ explicitly identified, unlike DARPA in the USA for which the Defence Department (and hence the D in its name) is key, so what areas are likely to feature is totally unclear. The remit is still to be narrowed down.

The intention is that this agency will be distinguished from other funding sources by focussing on ‘high-risk, high-reward scientific research’. In other words, just like DARPA as spelled out carefully in the book by Sharon Weinberger The Imagineers of War, failure will be a necessary part of ARPA’s success. If there are no failures, then the funding decisions will turn out to have been too conservative. That attitude does not necessarily apply more widely!

However, aside from not having specified the remit of ARIA, there are also, as yet, no details of how it will operate structurally. DARPA has operated by giving programme leaders – selected for their vision and technical expertise – much freedom in selecting the teams that get the funding, by bringing together researchers (academic and industrial) into groupings to fulfil some identified and ambitious goal, a moonshot as it were. So, the two key ingredients are visionary programme managers and funding delivered to teams brought together for a specific purpose. It is not about funding individuals (as with much UKRI funding, or the ERC), nor funding long-standing collaborations. Innovation may require significant disruption to break some persistent logjam or to think the unthinkable.

This world of ARIA should recognize the importance not just of failure – and be willing to embrace it – but also of this disruption. And at this point it seems to me it is key to recognize that this means diversity in the broadest sense. Boardrooms around the world are waking up to the fact that diversity can lead to better profits because moving away from group-think, the traditional behaviours of an established customer base and managers who may all resemble each other, it is possible to bring new perspectives that open up products and markets. A US study last year of diversity and inclusion among S&P 500 companies concluded

“Diverse and inclusive cultures are providing companies with a competitive edge over their peers.”

How does this translate into innovation in science and technology research?

The evidence here is that diversity – in the sense of encompassing the work of minorities ­– again plays a major role in innovation.  A study in PNAS of over a million US doctoral theses (so here it is the diversity background of individuals which is being considered, not teams) over four decades showed that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty, according to the specific methodology used. This, you might think, would lead to highly successful future careers for these minorities, but this was not the outcome, as is probably rather obvious. On the contrary, novel outputs from racial minorities and women (typically the minority gender) were less likely to be cited and built upon by others. It has been well documented that women’s research gets fewer citations (see e.g. last year’s report from the Royal Society of Chemistry on gender bias in publishing) and the penetration of the work – for instance to lead to innovation in products – will therefore also be reduced, with subsequent consequences for careers. The PNAS study suggests this is equally likely to be the case for racialised minorities, with ensuing negative consequences for their careers too. However, not only their careers, but innovative developments, exactly what ARIA intends to aim at.

So, the evidence suggests, if you rely on the dominant group – typically white men – to drive innovation, you may be making a fundamental mistake. I hope that as ARIA gets going, it will create structures which enable those who make decisions about who gets the money to be visionary in many different ways, not least in looking beyond what one could call the ‘usual suspects’. This isn’t simply a matter of justice; the evidence suggests innovation will be more likely to arise if a wealth of perspectives is brought to bear on whatever target(s) are selected for funding rounds.

It will be interesting to see how the ARIA landscape unfolds, as the plans for this potentially exciting new agency crystallise and as – it is to be hoped – it finds, to quote the Select Committee, the product of which it is the brand.

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The Politics of White Lab Coats

Posted on February 13, 2021 by Athene Donald

Everyone knows what a scientist looks like. The species is easily identifiable because they wear a white lab coat wherever they go. It is almost as if, if you don’t wear a white coat you can’t be a serious scientist, in the eyes of the media. It was noticeable, on this week’s International Day for Girls and Women in Science, how few women (and girls) posted selfies of themselves so attired to prove their credentials as the bonafide scientists they were. Bobble hats a-plenty, but most eschewed the purported ‘uniform’. I don’t blame them.

Google ‘scientist image’ and you have to go through 19 images before you come to one that doesn’t involve a lab coat. And that is of an elderly Einstein, who probably (as a theorist) never in his life went near such an item of clothing – but of course the other frequently cited attribute of a scientist, that of sticking-up hair, is naturally present. That image is then followed by several more tens of images involving lab coats, plus a couple of historical images. It is true that there are far more women to be spotted in these images than a web search of a few years ago would have thrown up, but it is depressing that this is what is meant to convey ‘scientist’.

lab coat

When, more than ten years ago now, I won the 2009 L’Oreal/UNESCO Laureate for Europe award and publicity required a series of photographs to be taken by an eminent French photographer (Micheline Pelletier), it was a lab coat that was required (and purple disposable gloves too, another common part of the scientist’s uniform), as you can see. This was the photo that adorned the back page of Le Monde and the L’Oréal building in Hammersmith. Or rather, a suitably cropped version of it. Interestingly, the foreground containing the carrot and the potato were cut out. As a side issue you might wonder why they were ever introduced. The answer is simple: I have indeed carried out research on both. As the lay citation said, I was awarded the prize “For her work in unraveling the mysteries of the physics of messy materials ranging from cement to ice cream.”  – but it might as well have said from potatoes to carrots.

The reality is, of course, I hadn’t worn a lab coat for years. At the start of my career, yes I did wear one, and it was just as well I did. In those days, when I worked on metals not polymers, I had occasion to use a lot of orthophosphoric acid. This, it turned out, is very efficient at making holes in textiles (as I said in a recent post, I was a ham-fisted researcher, and too much acid fell on my person rather than doing the job it was meant to be doing of etching small copper discs). My lab coat ended up quite perforated. I was just glad it was that – supplied by the department – and not my own clothes, given the tight budget I was living on.

Why do I raise any of this now? It is noticeable that in recent days, our very own Prime Minister has adopted this uniform (e.g. here) to prove just how close he is to science and the scientists – almost one of them, you might say – and to prove his association with the production of vaccination. The PM carrying crates of vaccine, watching a vaccination or walking around a hospital – always wearing a white lab coat. In the early days of the pandemic we heard a lot from him and his ministers about being “guided by the science”, sometimes even “led by the science” or “following the science”, but he wanted the voters to believe science and scientific advice sat at the heart of his actions, whether or not that was actually the case. Increasingly it became clear that it often was not, with politics and/or the economy being even closer to his heart.

Having discovered last summer that those were phrases that were getting just too indigestible and so backing away from anything about science, the success of the vaccination roll-out seems to mean he feels it’s safe to get close to science again. And hence, provoking a plethora of photo opportunities for him dressed up to resemble a ‘scientist’, whether or not it’s an accurate portrayal. After all, he has pledged – on various occasions – to make the UK a ‘scientific superpower’ now that we have left the EU. To that extent we, the scientific (in the widest sense) community, should be grateful that he has agreed that the UK can sign up to Association with the EU for Horizon Europe.  This has the potential to make a big difference to the community, or at least not remove something that we have enjoyed, in all senses of the word, for many years.

We, the community, need to make sure this wished-for association status does not come at the expense of the previously promised uplift in spending on science; that when the Treasury finally produces its five year Comprehensive Spending Review, the money attributed to Horizon Europe (which, in previous Framework Programmes would have been simply absorbed in the overall contribution to the EU Budget) does not suddenly appear in the science budget, removing at least some of the ‘new’ money which all the headlines have implied will be forthcoming. That money needs to be additional not substitutional.

I am very glad the Prime Minister does recognize the importance of science. Daily, the whole country has reason to be grateful to scientists and clinicians in all kinds of ways. However, how many of our politicians really understand words like evidence, hypothesis-testing or modelling? I fear not as many as we need, whether or not they are dressed up in white lab coats.

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