Keeping On Keeping On

Posted on November 8, 2020 by Athene Donald

In the UK, as in many other countries, we have entered another lockdown, mysteriously assigned in some quarters a decimal point, as in lockdown 2.0. It’s a lockdown with a difference, in that the rules are not the same as last time around (and therefore tending to be confusing), and logic in the rules is not always present to my scientist’s eye.  Life in Cambridge is hugely unlike the first lockdown, however, because the colleges remain full of students. They may not be able to live the life that generations of students have been able to before – usually portrayed as consisting of large parties, formal dining and the consumption of large amounts of alcohol in the bar. There will be no struggling out of bed for a 9am lecture. On the contrary their lectures are likely to be constantly on tap, painstakingly recorded by hard-working lecturers who resort to Twitter to rant about the challenges the different (but apparently universally infuriating) software available for the task throws up. (Retirement spares me that, if not filming videos for internal College use.) Online lectures are, I assume, available as much at 9am as midnight. Circadian body clocks may no longer impact quite so strongly on the teenage university learning experience.

However, much of what I wrote in the spring – be kind to others and, equally importantly, be kind to yourself – still applies. I fear that many of us find the latter in particular hard to keep in mind. We may all have acclimatised to Zoom, Teams or other web platforms (there seem to be an almost infinite variety that can be used for webinars), but have we developed new levels of stamina to cope with this endless, uninterrupted screen time, without the advantage of walking – or cycling – from one meeting to another to provide a welcome pause? In my case, I’m sure the answer is no. There are days with no respite, no time mentally to shift gear, or even to find the relevant notebook or ‘paperwork’, let alone a cup of tea or other form of comfort break.

Cambridge lectures traditionally run from five-past-the-hour until five-to, in order to provide time for the mass of students to migrate from one venue to another. Those of you who have lived in Cambridge may recognize that from the stream of first year natural scientist cyclists along Tennis Court Lane rushing from the New Museums Site to the Chemistry Department around 10am three days a week. Unfortunately, convention does not yet seem to have decreed Zoom meetings operate in the same way, although the better organised convenors of longer meetings do seem smart enough to allow for mid-session comfort breaks. We live, in this lockdown age, in ever more pressured ways. The brief aside at the end of a committee meeting with one key person to resolve a niggling concern is impossible; the casual getting to know people in advance of meetings in order to marshal cogent arguments better has gone west. These losses can impact on how committee business gets done and we are the worse for that.

Nevertheless, the pressure doesn’t go away, just because we are all having to find new ways to work, as well as novel routes to unwind. I see the Guardian has produced suggestions from their columnists, with a strong flavour of ‘be kind to yourself’, but also ‘enjoy nature’. I am lucky. My current ‘office’ has enormous windows overlooking the Fellows’ Lawn, with its greenness and majestic Metasequoia, a joy to watch through the changing seasons. Outside at the front this morning there was a flock of long tailed tits in the crab apple (possibly) trees, and squirrels doing their duty of squirreling away acorns. Live in the country I may not, but I can – and do – enjoy the open feel to the College as, I hope, do our students as they go about their lawfully permitted exercise. Nevertheless, the low sun through the large windows is a complete pain for Zoom: my face is always illuminated all wrong (never mind the anxiety about the black circles under my eyes): I’m either blinded by the rare sunshine, or in complete shadow, or so it feels.

I don’t feel I’ve established a new routine to relaxing, though, now almost all the normal evening activities of a Cambridge head of house are banned, by which I mean a regular diet of formal, working dinners, possibly interspersed with hosting lectures or attending concerts. I started off lockdown intending to learn how to use Tableau and watch videos of all the Mozart operas. I started…..but failed to complete either, like so many other good intentions we all set out with. My reading veers from the grim if highly educational (Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukarjee, telling me things I need to know about Churchill not through the lens of a UK-centred view), to the thought-provoking Head, Hand, Heart by David Goodhart, but regularly reverting to much lighter fare (EM Delderfield’s period piece series of The Provincial Lady, for instance) not to mention Twitter. However, in recent weeks, blogging has required more creative energy than I typically have left at the end of a long day of Zooming, as regular readers will have noticed by my comparative silence.

But, here we are again, confined to barracks, metaphorically at least. Still glued to the screen, day upon day, trying to maintain an equilibrium in the face of constant buffeting by external matters over which we have no control (but at least there is good news from the USA).

 

 

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Mentors and Role Models

Posted on November 4, 2020 by Athene Donald

Five years ago I received a package in the post, with a covering letter from someone I’d never met. Dan Davis, Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester and apparently a fan of this blog, had sent me a copy of his book, The Compatibility Gene, ‘in case it would be of interest’. A former physicist himself, he had written – as I discovered when I read it a while later – a fascinating book about immunology accessible to a lay-reader with no prior exposure to that complex world. The current dire state of the world seems like an appropriate moment to reread the book, to derive as much benefit as I can about a discipline that is now so crucial and at the forefront of everyone’s minds. It is as good as I remember: accessible, informative and full of intriguing historical vignettes about how the field developed.

One key character in the field is Peter Medawar, a giant – literally and metaphorically – whose insatiable thirst for knowledge, coupled with endless energy even after suffering some near-death strokes, produced such significant advances in the burgeoning field during the post-war era. On my blogpost I’ve cited Medawar a few times, both in the context of creativity and as the opposite of an arrogant scientist, whose advice to young scientists still resonates today. He was clearly a remarkable man, although I will admit to being disappointed by his own reflections, Memoir of a Thinking Radish,which seemed to  have none of the panache of his other writing, but was laboured and less informative about his life and work than I’d have hoped. Medawar was clearly a hero to many people including, I would judge, to Dan Davis.

Julia and Athene from Gove photo copy

That set me thinking about role models, mentors and sponsors once more, spurred on by WISE’s campaign around encouraging more women and girls into the STEM subjects for 1 of the Million day ‘to recognise the role models – the mentors, cheerleaders and allies of any gender – who inspired you’ for November 4th. This, coupled with the news from the Institute of Physics last week that the polymer scientist Julia Higgins had been awarded the Sam Edwards Medal and Prize, prompts me to write. Julia – pictured above with me at a Royal Society event some years ago – was always the highly visible female polymer scientist a decade ahead of me, who was the nearest person I ever had to a (female) role model, and who was undoubtedly something of a mentor and sponsor to me throughout my career. (Sam Edwards was an even more key figure in my life, as I’ve written about before. This pairing of prize name and winner was particularly sweet to me.) I don’t think she and I ever quite felt comfortable about the role model aspect; she once said I’d shocked her by referring to her as such. I suspect the whole concept was much less well worked up 25+ years ago and it seems to have mattered less to us than to early career researchers of today.

However, mentoring is another matter. Julia was the person I turned to for advice – because of her extensive experience – when I was first asked to chair a research council funding committee. Her wise words I still remember: give everyone a chance to have their say, stop the discussion going round in endless circles, and bring things to a close with a clear summary of the ‘verdict’ before moving on. She was absolutely right. Cutting discussion off too soon leaves a feeling of being aggrieved. Letting it drift on – which, in my experience, is much the commoner sin – is just maddening for all not immediately concerned in the discussion. Additionally, Julia was a helpful ear when I wasn’t sure where my career was going, once I had been deemed not suitable to be head of department by my peers.

Julia has had a long and distinguished career as a neutron scatterer of polymers, moving into the field just as beamlines were becoming accessible for such experiments. (Sam, although a theoretician himself, was – if I recall one of his many dinner conversations accurately – significantly responsible for obtaining approval to build ISIS, the UK’s neutron source, during his time as Chair of the Science Research Council from 1973 to 1977. Sam and Julia were something of a mutual admiration society.) She made seminal contributions in understanding polymer structure, thermodynamics and motion in solution.

She has also been a great champion of women in science and this is another arena in which I owe her quite a lot. At least I think I owe her. At the time I was far from sure when, as the Athena Forum came into being in 2007 once the original Athena Project came to an end, and the Athena Swan charter moved elsewhere (and she had been very instrumental in setting Athena Swan going in the first place), she and Jocelyn Bell Burnell fingered me to take over from Jocelyn as Chair after she had served for a year to get it going. At this point I had barely entered the field of gender as a policy issue, although I had been active in Cambridge (through WiSETI for a couple of years). I felt very ignorant about what had been done nationally, and what could and should be done in the future. There is nothing like getting stuck into something to learn about it. Learning on the job is scary but no bad way to get immersed in a subject fast!

A little later it was again Julia who set me up – by passing on her own invitation to me – to present my first formal, international academic talk about gender matters in Austria, a talk I wrote about very early in my blogging days. This was a nerve-racking experience too; I felt such a novice in the face of eminent speakers like Stanford’s Londa Schiebinger  and Evelyn Fox Keller. But the only way to learn is to give things a go. Do not believe anyone springs fully armed (like my namesake, the Greek goddess) ready to do battle. Like every other novice, the first time was the hardest for me and thereafter it has got easier with practice.

Julia threw me in the deep end, an end she no doubt had survived herself at the outset of her own championing of gender issues. She gave me advice and opportunities and was always encouraging. I noted two of my slightly younger (male) polymer colleagues remarked over Twitter just how encouraging she had been to them in their earlier careers when this most recent prize was announced. She may have been awarded the Sam Edwards Prize for her polymer physics skills, but for many of us, she shone in far broader ways than just her science. So, for WISE’s 1 of the Million Day, I nominate Dame Julia Higgins, DBE FRS FREng.

 

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Getting Behind Diversity Statistics

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Athene Donald

Earlier this year UKRI published ‘harmonised’ diversity data across all its councils. These did not make for comfortable reading, with attention being particularly focussed on two findings:

  • Female and ethnic minority awardees tend to apply for and win smaller awards: median award value for females ca 15% less than for males (£336,000 vs £395,000;
  • Median award value for ethnic minority awardees is approximately 8% less than that of white awardees (£353,000 vs. £383,000).

Now EPSRC has presented its own disaggregated data for gender (but not ethnicity), reinforcing the message that women are awarded smaller grants than men and apply in lower numbers than their proportion in the academic workforce would indicate. Furthermore success rates diverge as the value of the grant applied for increases. For the largest grants – greater than £10M – there have only ever been two awarded to women over the period from 2007-8 to 2018-19, a pretty shocking statistic.

The trouble with statistics, however, is that they don’t tell you what the underlying causes are, and these gender differences could arise from many different causes, not all of which – indeed potentially none of which – can be laid at EPSRC’s door.

I foolishly put out a tweet

in which the inverted commas sign around ‘timid’ was too subtle for some readers. It is of course that there will be some academics who indeed do believe the alleged unwillingness of women to take risks – an interpretation neatly skewered by Cordelia Fine in her book Testosterone Rex ­– lies at the heart of women not successfully receiving these mega-buck grants, but I think we have to look further and harder for potential explanations. And then try to work out how to design analyses that may tease out which are the key factors.

During the time I was the University of Cambridge’s Gender Equality Champion (2010-14) we were faced with a similar conundrum. We found that women were more successful than men in receiving promotion and wanted to know why, but they applied at lower rates and typically there were longer gaps between successive promotions. I proposed the following possible causes:

  • Women waited longer to apply until they were absolutely confident that they would succeed, whereas men were less worried about failing by applying too soon.
  • Women were not tapped on the shoulder by mentors encouraging them to apply at the earliest moment.
  • Women’s productivity had been slowed in child-bearing years and so they needed to wait longer before they felt ready for the next stage.

We tossed these ideas around, but the data we had could not possibly confirm or refute any of those ideas. The one thing we did know was that historically women had seemed to be less certain about processes and presentations by the relevant PVC helped to demystify processes, something particularly important if – again – women were lacking informal mentors who would help them through what might have seemed like the maze of applying. The University could, and did, address through appropriate presentations to clear the fog.

So, with the current EPSRC data, it is possible to come up with a whole range of explanations, of which blatant bias at panel meetings is probably the least likely. I am sorry to say that I suspect some of the discrepancies may lie more squarely in the domain of the applicants’ universities than at the research council.

Let me start by considering the miserably low number of women who have successfully been awarded ultra-large grants. As some of my Twitter feed pointed out, grants this large are typically for doctoral training accounts or some sort of infrastructure award. In some cases, these huge grant applications may need to be submitted under the name of the Research PVC ex officio. I do not know the proportion of women who hold such roles. I do know that the present EPSRC CEO, Lynn Gladden, was my university’s PVC-R for six years. I understand Rachel McKendry (UCL) is the only woman to lead a doctoral training centre*, but it is perfectly possible that Lynn is the other woman in the select group of two holding such big awards; I have no idea.

However, for grants of between £1.5M and £10M the proportion of women applying is only just over 11% compared with a benchmark percentage of ~17% in the EPSRC academic population. The figure below shows that, whereas for women, success rates are fairly constant independent of grant size, this is not the case for men; for them, the larger the grant the more likely they are to succeed. This seems very curious. What follows is highly speculative, but I hope someone will do some proper analysis.

EPSRC diversity copy

Firstly, for many of the larger grants – probably occurring under specific calls – there is likely to be a university-level sift. If women attempt to lead such applications, is it the university that is favouring a male-led bid in preference to the woman? Based on my experience in university politics, I can see only too easily how the man may look more forceful and command more favour than the woman, regardless of intrinsic merit of either the specific application or the particular woman who wants to lead it. Bias may well creep in at this point, unconscious though it may be. (I have always worried about pre-sifts for fellowship competitions and the like, because I have yet to hear of a process that properly takes into account different factors including diversity, rather than a gut feeling about who is ‘best’. Some universities may have this cracked, and if so, it would be good to hear about it.)

Secondly, as another person postulated over Twitter, the women may anyhow have found themselves stuck on so many committees to give gender balance; or have so much pastoral care dumped on them because ‘they’d be so good at it’, that perennial guilt-inducing argument; or indeed they may be juggling home-schooling during a pandemic, or whatever equivalently happened before this interminable wilderness of strangeness. Women, in other words, may have too many other demands put upon them to allow them to devote the huge amount of time required to put together a large grant. If they are not perceived as the stand-out academic in their department, little leeway may be given to them.

Finally, they may actually prefer not to go for the large grants, not because they are ‘timid’ but because they think smaller enterprises are better for those within them. Ottoline Leyser – UKRI’s Director has, certainly in my hearing, spoken up for the ‘small is good’ model of research groups. Women may be opting out, in some cases, of applying for the largest grants because they would prefer to stay close to their research team.

So why do men do so well when applying for large grants compared with women. I have so far put the blame on universities to a large extent for the relative paucity of women applying for large grants, but I do wonder about the data in that figure. I find it deeply worrying. When women do put their hand up with a large grant application, what is it that makes them less likely to succeed? It could still be that universities don’t offer the same support to a woman putting the application together. Or it could be that the grant panels subconsciously really do see men as being ‘better’ at running a big show. Or that all the legwork was done behind the scenes before the grant was submitted anyhow. I’m not sure – other than by having trained social science observers attending decision-making panels to see what is going on – how to examine the possibility of bias entering into decisions, and the small numbers may mean statistics defeat an analysis anyhow.

As a final remark, I’d like to highlight one of the steps the EPSRC are apparently congratulating themselves on, namely that they have increased the number of women on panels and as panel chairs. It sounds good but having 30% of women on panels plus 31% acting as panel chairs when they are only at 17% in the pool of researchers, means women are expected to give up – on average – twice as much time as men to this community service. There is no doubt that sitting on panels is wonderful experience (although I sometimes used to think I learned more about what a bad grant looked like, rather than a good one, which only used to throw me into paralysis when writing my own).

It is great that more women are being given the opportunity to see how the system works. But, simultaneously, they are also being asked to give up time to this service when they could have been writing their own grants. If the evidence supported the view that having more women on panels led to fairer decisions the case would be stronger. But all the evidence I saw during my time at the ERC** showed, across the board of all disciplines, a larger proportion of women on a panel tended to lead to women being more disadvantaged rather than less. I fear that sticking more women on panels may smack more of doing something that looks like a quick fix rather than resolving the issues the current data is showing up.

So, great the Research Councils are doing this analysis. Not so good that the numbers aren’t encouraging and the reasons for this are still obscure.

*Correction: In fact Rachel led an IRC not a DTC, but the fact that she is one of only 2 women to hold such large grants remains the case.

** I have now been able to establish where this data is, with some help from Claudia Jesus-Rydin from within the ERC who pointed it out. Isabelle Vernos, then Chair of the Gender Balance Working Group, published an article in Nature including this.

 

 

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Of a Retiring Nature

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Athene Donald

The end of this month marks my retirement from my professorial position at Cambridge, something that I still find rather surprising. My career on that front has just faded out, yet another victim of the pandemic; the conference planned for the week just past to celebrate my career, bit the dust a long time ago. There is absolutely no rite of passage, other than (mistakenly) being sent an ‘exit questionnaire’ asking me why I was leaving. When I pointed out that this was pretty inappropriate, I then found myself having to negotiate the status of my university card to enable me to get – eventually – back into the department. Pandemic past, I will need to sort out my office. This all feels a sad end to 35 odd years working for the Cavendish.

Of course, my life won’t change radically. I continue as Master of Churchill College, with a somewhat increased notional time allocated; I will continue on the various committees I serve on for different bodies, writing my blog and so on. My research group had slowly been winding down anyhow, with my last PhD student being awarded their degree in February. This year’s bizarre examination season – a mixture of virtually-conducted vivas and online papers to mark was my portion – will be the last I ever have to wade through. What should I do with all my own (hard copy) notes on exam setting and lecture notes? The latter include both those I personally took all those years ago, and those I have given, or at least those I gave up until the advent of everything being done via Powerpoint. I cannot believe the beauty and neatness of my own lecture notes, as evidenced by the photo; my handwriting has deteriorated a long way since those heady teenage years. I chose that image because Electromagnetism was the first course I myself taught some dozen years later, and with an identical syllabus. Those lecture notes of mine came in handy….
lecture notes

It is strange to look back on what has changed and what really has hardly budged at all. The proportion of women taking physics in their final year in Cambridge has perhaps doubled, from around 10% to a little over 20%. The number of women on the Physics staff has, however, mushroomed. From my appointment in 1985 as the first lecturer (imperceptibly pregnant) formally on the staff, to now, the change is remarkable: after I retire there will be four female professors, two readers and six lecturers, plus two other women who hold joint lectureships between physics and another department. There has yet to be a female head of the department (not for want of trying on my part). The department currently holds a Gold Athena Swan Award although, given the bonfire of bureaucracy I wrote about previously, will they bother to continue? I hope so, but I am deeply concerned about Athena Swan’s future.

Looking back from a position of undeniable seniority, it is sobering to realise that at one point I was so miserable, over a number of years, that leaving Cambridge seemed the only sensible thing to do. As an interdisciplinary scientist surrounded by purists, as a woman leading a burgeoning group yet whose voice never seemed to cut it, my mid-career years had some really dark moments. This, note, was when I was already a professor and an FRS. As I discussed this week with Anne Glover – former Chief Scientific Advisor to the President of the European Commission – in advance of our (recorded and soon to be available) public Conversation, mid-career can be every bit as hard as the early years for women and even, at least in both our cases, worse. That moment when you become a player but equally an alien threat, clearly bothers some men.

When during my unhappy years, I described my interactions with one particular colleague to a friend, he shrewdly remarked that the professor in question probably didn’t know whether he should interact with me as if I were his mother or his girlfriend. That felt about right, after I’d had to chair a committee (I was deputy head at the time) and this guy had publicly berated me but then privately asked me afterwards if what he had done, in another part of the meeting, was OK. I suspect I just grunted at him at the time. Now I would have the luxury of greater confidence enabling me to be a bit more explicit about my view of how he had behaved.

I was fortunate in the support I received from other colleagues, both senior – such as Sir Sam Edwards and Archie Howie (who also happens to be a founding Fellow here at Churchill and very much still active) – and more junior. To keep going when it feels like your head is continuously hitting a brick wall, is hard. My research was always rewarding (if often frustrating), and I loved moving from topic to topic. Maybe I did this too much, but for me that was how I got my kicks, something I described in a relatively early blogpost. It is something of a cliché to say that it is the people who make your job worth doing but, just as there are those who make life miserable, those students and postdocs who challenge and stretch you are immensely satisfying and mind-expanding. But, equally, the students who start off slowly but blossom as their research progresses – ideally, but not always, because of your own input – are a pleasure to watch and to interact with.

Even those students who are most difficult to deal with, for whatever personal or scientific reason, bring their own reward as they finally sail through their vivas: I have never had a student who failed their PhD, although I have had a handful none of whose work ever saw the public light of day in a publication. And, in at least one of these cases, it was because every experiment they tried – and there were many, this was not in any sense a lazy student – came up with a null result. These days one could have posted such negative results on a preprint server to demonstrate that, despite differences in production of the particular material (chocolate!), none of the physico-chemical tests we attempted showed an iota of difference; back then it was formal publication or nothing.

People ask me what got me through the difficult years. Obviously I owe much to my supportive colleagues (not to mention my husband) who listened to my moans and gave me advice. Often the advice was to leave and go elsewhere. To a large extent the reason I did not go was my sense that if I went – and some encouraged me to go citing constructive dismissal, although I’m not sure how well that would have worked out in practice – I was letting down all the women who would come after me. If I couldn’t stick it out, who could, was my fairly conscious thought. It felt important to weather the storm in which I felt engulfed. Ultimately, I am sure that was the right thing to do. But I did get angry and, in due course, this anger led to me getting involved in the issues facing women much more explicitly. That deviation from the purely scientific in due course gave me a voice that was taken seriously within the University when, as a scientist, it seemed I frequently was not. Accidentally, I found an alternative path to being able to make a difference.

Others said, even at the time, “it doesn’t look as if you’ve done so badly”. Fair enough. As I say, I was both a professor (at a time when this was still a Cambridge rarity) and an FRS. But the frustrations were real. I found it bizarre that I was taken much more seriously outside Cambridge, including at the Royal Society even as a newbie FRS. That gave me confidence that it was something peculiar to the Cambridge of the time. As I head off into (semi-) retirement, I hope the current generation of mid-career women find a much more supportive environment in which they can thrive, whether in their science or in their wider contributions to the community. That their voices are heard, without the need to raise them, and that obstacles are not put in their way because people find them different from the male-by-default attitudes I suspect I faced in my day.

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Research Culture, Fairness and Transparency

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Athene Donald

A week after the Science and University Ministers announced with respect to chartermarks such as Athena Swan

“We have therefore asked the OfS, UKRI and NIHR to ensure that they place no weight upon the presence or absence of such markers or scheme memberships in any of their regulatory or funding activities”

as I discussed in my last blogpost, there seems uncertainty what that means in practice. Research Professional quoted a UKRI spokesperson as saying

“UKRI has made clear that embedding equality, diversity and inclusion in all our processes is critical to supporting our commitments to address barriers and inequalities, and drive transparency and accountability…. In that context, UKRI will continue to utilise recognition awards where they contribute to the achievement of our aims.”

Does that mean they will give a toss about Athena Swan awards, the Race Equality Chartermark and other sector kitemarks? I have no idea.

The Athena Swan process in its recent form undoubtedly needs substantive change and it would appear that the reforms the Athena Swan Review Group recommended are being implemented, after an initially rather lukewarm response from AdvanceHE. The Review Group (of which I was a member) published an open letter this week, in response to the ministers’ announcements, stating

“Our report was published in March this year. It included 41 recommendations which together we believe would deliver a streamlined application system, a robust and transparent assessment process and an effective mode of governance. …. Initially, there were warm words of welcome from Advance HE but it soon became evident there was no real appetite to drive the change needed. We have continued to make our case behind the scenes and we now have greater confidence that the process of implementation is about to begin…..Is it too late? Does Athena SWAN no longer have a place or a value? We sincerely hope not. The pandemic has shone a cruel light on gender equality across the sector, as it has on other equality, diversity and inclusion matters. It is women who have borne the brunt of lockdown and the additional burdens it has brought of caring and domestic chores; not surprisingly, the impact on academic outcomes is already being felt. So let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Meanwhile UKRI is also exploring the need for real cultural change in our universities through the medium of a blogpost from Ottoline Leyser, the rather new CEO. I have known Ottoline for some years both as a fellow professor in Cambridge and around diversity work: for instance, she took over from me as Chair of the Athena Forum back in 2013. I know she is a passionate believer in equality and wants to see a research culture that is supportive not toxic. Her appointment should mean UKRI can act decisively to improve the working environment for all, and reconsider what is rewarded – and encourage universities to do the same. As she puts it in her blogpost

“‘A central question for the community then is how to create a system that values difference? What does this really mean for our day to day interactions, and what does it mean for our definitions of excellence?”

But, so far, she gives no hint of how she would answer the question. It is reasonable that she wants to carry the community with her, but I hope she will soon be setting out what concrete steps she believes need to be taken by UKRI itself, even if set out as a consultation. There is no doubt that currently UKRI itself is seen as part of the problem in the landscape. For instance, I know how long it took those who were challenging UKRI to release detailed breakdowns of grant funding by different characteristics to get any movement, and how the challenge was taken to the Science and Technology Select Committee in an attempt to get hold of the data. When the figures were finally released this summer, they did not make for pretty reading on various fronts, with the headline figures demonstrating

“The median award value for female awardees is approximately 15% less than the median award values of males (£336,000 vs £395,000). Similarly, the median award value for ethnic minority awardees is approximately 8% less than that of white awardees (£353,000 vs. £383,000).”

I am sure that Jennifer Rubin, as their Executive Champion for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Karen Salt, who is deputy chair of the ED+I Committee, will be working hard to see how things can be improved.

Yet my Twitter feed tells me there are ongoing problems, not least with regard to transparency and equality, and ones that Ottoline did not address in her blog. In what follows I can only base my reflections on what others have written and not first-hand knowledge of the specific situation. The challenge that I am seeing comes from 10 black women who have written an open letter to UKRI concerning a call for funding relating to the impact of Covid on the BAME community. The letter states that none of the six awarded grants went to a team with a black academic lead, despite the relevance of the call to this community; and that

“UKRI confirmed that no equality data was collected on this call; and that one member of the awards assessment panel is co-investigator on three of the six successfully awarded studies.”

They are calling for three specific short-term steps:

  1. Make transparent and public the panellists and selection criteria involved in forthcoming research call assessment
  2. Consistently collect equality data without exception
  3. Remove any panellist from the call assessment process if they are also associated with applications in that specific call.

These do indeed look fundamental and important. I would particularly like to pick up the last point, on which I have quite strong views. I have written before about the rigour of the ERC processes when it comes to making funding decisions. Ottoline will be very familiar with these, as she has served on their panels; I know having encountered her on one during one of my drop-in visits (as a Scientific Council Member) on panel meetings in Brussels. The rigour extends to the fact the referee pool is drawn from around the world and not, almost exclusively, from the relatively small and potential close-knit community of a single country, as UKRI panels often are. Furthermore, you may not serve on a panel and submit – or be involved with – a grant application to the same round. Thus, it would be impossible for a member of an awarding panel to be a co-investigator, as seems to have happened in this recent case highlighted in the open letter I mention.

UKRI will defend themselves, and probably already have done so, that the panel member would have been sent out of the room during any discussion of a grant in which they were involved. However, bias is a funny thing, in whatever unconscious way it appears, so let me tell a cautionary tale as to why I think that being out of the room as opposed to ‘being out of the call’, as the ERC put it and require, is inadequate.

This story derives from my time as a rather young researcher, serving on what was a committee of BBSRC’s predecessor AFRC (the Agriculture and Food Research Council). It will be seen therefore to have been a long time ago, but it stays in my mind because of the lessons to be learned. We had a firm and decisive chair, and a scientifically diverse committee because it was a wide-ranging committee (I was there covering food physics, but there was much that was fundamental biology and animal health). For one grant the applicant was a panel member who, of course, left the room. It was not a well-written grant and the raw scores would have seen it fall well below the cut-off. At which point the chair, a friend and I suspect collaborator of the PI, said something along the lines of

“well, we all know that Dr X will do a good job, and what they meant to write so we should bump the scores up.”

This was a shocking comment, and I’d like to think there was a stunned silence although I don’t recall. You cannot rewrite one person’s grant because you know and approve of them, and judge everyone else’s simply on what is on the paper in front of you. The chair, on this occasion, was stepping right out of line – and was called out on it (not, I’m afraid to say, by me; I felt far too junior to do such a thing at the time). Did the chair know how biased they were being? I have no idea.

The key point is, because the panellist was well known to us all and was a good panellist, there was a real danger that that approval-as-panellist or as colleague could have overwhelmed the objective rating. It is hard to avoid being biased. It is hard enough, within the UK community, not to know many of the people applying and being swayed by how you’ve interacted in the past – for good or ill – which is why I believe UKRI should be using a much broader range of panellists and referees from all round the world (possibly easier in the current zoom-driven world), just as the ERC does. But, discussions of conflicts-of-interest need to be taken very seriously and need to be declared. It may be hard to say that you once had a furious argument that has never been resolved with the PI whose grant you’ve just been sent to referee, but it is nonsense to say you can’t judge someone from your university whom you’ve never meet, but can judge a grant from someone who you have a close professional relationship with elsewhere (even if not formally a collaboration). And there should be no opportunity to serve on a panel to which you are submitting grants, either as PI or co-I. Such a conflict of interest should mean you are instantly removed from serving on the assessment panel.

I hope as Ottoline moves to set UKRI on the path to facilitating a better culture for all researchers, she will be able to oversee a transition to greater transparency and fairness, including addressing the concerns of the black women who have written to her.

 

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