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.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Science Funding, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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.

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

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.

 

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

We’ve Come a Long Way But…..

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Athene Donald

When Rita Colwell was born in 1934, neither Oxford nor Cambridge Universities had yet appointed a female professor in any discipline; Dorothy Garrod, the first woman to hold such a chair (the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge), was not appointed until 1939. Colwell herself went on to a distinguished career in environmental microbiology – she was particularly important in unravelling part of the life cycle of cholera, especially the nature of its dormancy – which contained many ‘firsts’ of her own. Notably, she was the first woman to be Director of the National Science Foundation (from 1998-2004). In her recent book A Lab of One’s Own: One Woman’s Personal Journey through Sexism in Science  she details her career and all the hurdles she had to face before reaching such a position of eminence.

It made for sobering reading. It is good to be reminded of just how far we, collectively, have come, even if the playing field remains less than even on multiple fronts. The book reflects the author’s nationality (American) and discipline, so that in some ways it did not totally resonate with my own experience of the world, starting out 20 years later. It nevertheless included numerous fairly horrendous episodes, some of which I could certainly relate to. For instance, Colwell reports another woman remarking

“If two women stood at an elevator, a man would come by and say ‘What are you two ladies plotting?’”

That took me back to 1992 when we had the ‘grand opening’ of the new Tabor Laboratory, our new lab for colloid research at the Cavendish, which was officially opened by Edward Leigh. He was then a junior minister whose ability to do a competent job of unveiling a plaque was thrown into question, as the photograph shows.
edward leigh 92However, that laugh aside, the relevant comment I remember being made by a male colleague catching myself talking to Anne Campbell, then our local MP, and the female editor (whose name I can’t recall) of the local newspaper  was

“Having a hen party then?”

It struck me then, as it strikes me now when the Colwell anecdote brought it back to mind, just how inappropriate such a remark was. Clearly the man – who I got on with perfectly well in general – just couldn’t abide three senior women chatting over a sandwich. Did he feel threatened?

Some anecdotes, mercifully, are beyond my personal knowledge. Such as the one in the book told by Nancy Hopkins

“Before I could rise and shake hands, he had zoomed across the room, stood behind me, put his hands on my breasts, and said ‘What are you working on?”

The man was Francis Crick. The year was 1964. Perhaps the indignity closest to this that I’ve suffered was at a reception for the University at St James’ Palace, when a senior professor marched up to me, said

“I do like kissing games”

and proceeded to act that out. Why didn’t I slap him? I guess because I was too surprised and it hardly seemed appropriate to make a fuss in such august surroundings. After all, nice girls don’t make a fuss. That would have been in 2009, when the University was celebrating its 800th anniversary – 800 years during which women had, of course, only been allowed to be full members for around 60 years (Garrod would not have been allowed to call herself formally a BA, even though a professor, as women could only gain ‘titular’ BAs before 1948).

There are still many men out there who assault women to greater or lesser degrees, and many of them will never be called out. Many women will be deterred from pursuing their dreams because men – not all men of course, but some – will harass and ridicule women and overlook them when it comes to career opportunities. My experience tells me you don’t have to be junior to be harassed; you can work out how old I was in 2009. We continue to need firm action to ensure the talented women are just as likely to progress as the talented men. Because of this I am worried by the announcement last week by the Science and University Ministers, Amanda Solloway and Michelle Donelan respectively, that – as part of the ‘bonfire of bureaucracy’ – Athena Swan awards (and other similar accreditation kitemarks) will no longer be valued by UKRI in forming judgements about departments, nor a requirement for those institutions seeking NIHR funding.  As they say

“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 a member of the Athena Swan Review Group I am deeply disappointed that our work over the past 18 months looks like it may be wasted. As the Review Group said right at the outset of our Report

“… it is clear that the Charter process has become increasingly burdensome in terms of the amount of time and internal capacity required to comply with the needs of the application process. Given the multiple pressures on staff time, the Athena SWAN Charter must reflect a more proportionate use of time and resources so that universities and research institutes are able to make the commitments needed to improve outcomes around gender inequality for staff and students and meet wider inclusivity aims.”

Our recommendations, not immediately wholly accepted by Advance HE, to our regret, were very much designed with lightening the load in mind. There is no doubt that the sector has struggled with the burden, and many resented the time required to obtain all the data, taking time away from actually making the changes needed. The trouble is, without the carrot (or was it a stick?) of getting such an award, I fear many institutions will simply decide equality issues can be permitted to slide down the agenda. In this pandemic age, that was always going to be a danger. Without such external pressures, however, too many departments and organisations may just feel it is a ‘luxury’ they can do without, even though equality is indubitably not a luxury for those who are at the sharp end of disadvantage, bias and outright harassment.

With Ottoline Leyser at the head of UKRI, at least one can be confident that there is someone at the helm who cares passionately about ensuring the individual survives and thrives and that equality does not get neglected. I will look forward to seeing what alternatives to the formal Athena Swan award she may wish to introduce. I still believe the Review Group’s recommendations – and you can see them in full on page 10 onwards of our Report ­– would have made a huge difference, without necessitating downgrading the value attached to the whole process. In the meantime, all those people, predominantly women, who have battled so resolutely to get Athena Swan applications ready may be feeling both relieved and angry. I hope that in the bonfire we don’t lose the progress we have made so far, when there is still so much to do.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Feeling the Fear

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Athene Donald

Readers of the Guardian may, over the years, have had reason to dip into Oliver Burkeman’s columns. As he hangs up his metaphorical boots, he summarised what he had personally learned from the exercise of writing these ‘self-help’ articles. In this last article he advises, for instance, something that will resonate with many an academic, harried even over the summer vacation by the endless to-do lists and the innumerable tasks that don’t ever get ticked off on those lists. His advice:

“There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.”

Whereas I accept the first part of that sentence from bitter experience, I’m not sure I have ever managed to reach the stage of being liberated. In my experience, there is nothing less liberating than waking at 2am remembering the urgent task on that list, however small, that you have neglected to do for the nth day running. It simply leads to the next day being less productive than it should have been – so even fewer tasks get completed – because of a lack of sleep. There will indeed, always be too much to do. The challenge is to sort the urgent from the important. Burkeman gives no advice on that.

However, his take on impostor syndrome is something that academics, aspiring and established, should definitely take to heart.

“Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.”

I have always stressed that just because other people look confident, you should not be fooled. His words are a different version of the same belief. Most of us are capable actors, at least some of the time. Even if we don’t ooze bravado, we are often capable of hiding our fears behind a mask (an imaginary one not textile, of course, in this case). Often it is very necessary to do so. We, naturally, know that this is indeed a mask and the inner person is a shrinking violet, a nervous wreck or whatever other metaphor you choose to describe the internal turmoil that lies behind that mask. But the person you are talking to doesn’t know that. They see the swan gliding smoothly on, while they feel a muddle of jitters and insecurity and wonder how you manage to be so calm. Burkeman’s advice here is pertinent and worth remembering:

“It’s that you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.”

Academia is not alone in being stuffed full of insecure individuals, but the nature of our sector means it is rife with competition and the knowledge of being constantly judged by that evil referee 3 (for grants and publications) as well as less anonymous folk – your supervisor, your departmental head even your peers – is ever-present. We know, whatever may be said to our face, others are forming their opinions every time we utter. It’s not surprising we can feel nervous if not downright scared. The inner impostor should not be allowed to win. As Burkeman also says

“The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it.”

In other words, if you feel nervous today you will probably continue to feel nervous in the future, although not necessarily about the same things. In my experience, whatever stresses you face, other people telling you ‘you’ll be fine’ doesn’t necessarily get rid of the nerves. The best cure is simply doing something repeatedly – speaking in public, for instance – learning from what went wrong (better, what went right) and making sure you improve the next time. However, there will always be new challenges if you follow another of Burkeman’s suggestions: choose ‘enlargement’ over happiness.

I take this to mean, don’t rest on your laurels. Knowing you’ve achieved something well, may give you happiness in the moment. However, if you let that mark the end of your trajectory you won’t grow, which is how I translate ‘enlargement’. Complacency can go hand in hand with happiness, but will ultimately lead to boredom – and that most certainly is unlikely to equate with happiness. So, although I most definitely never had a career ‘plan’, I’ve consistently believed in the need to try new challenges. Some challenges are more welcome than others. Leading a Cambridge College during a pandemic is most certainly not something I would ever have wanted on any career plan or to-do list; but there it is.

Enlargement, trying out new things, never staying still, of course is a wonderful way to keep the inner impostor alive and well. If you’re trying out new things then, by definition, you will not be experienced in the new challenges. One’s training at the bench is not going to help with many of the skills needed as a faculty member. This, I believe, is often a problem for new group heads, who suddenly find themselves expected to be expert in everything from HR to costing grants, yet feel inadequate on all fronts. Sometimes, their inability to empathise with a struggling student, or even to see the mask of bravado a struggling student may adopt, can lead to misery all round. I well recall getting caught out in this way, fairly late in my supervisory career when I should have known better, when a student who was writing up their thesis, repeatedly assured me all was well. I believed them until, as the weeks passed, I finally managed to appreciate he really was fobbing me off. Once I’d broken through, so he felt safe admitting just how badly he was struggling, everything went better, both for him and for me.

Professors, however eminent, will – if they are seeking ‘enlargement’ – be just as likely to be doing something for the first time as a PhD student. I’ve written before about how wide-ranging a day can be, and nothing in my current life makes me feel I am stuck in some well-worn rut where the inner impostor is unlikely to get loose. The crucial thing is not to let that impostor get the better of you. There are many wise words to help you get beyond the instantaneous feeling that you can’t do something. whereas everyone else is an expert. Some of my favourites are

“Feel the fear and do it anyhow”

(not that I’ve read the book of that title, but the sentiment resonates with me); and

“Ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”

– a few useful sentences from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The important thing is to find your own route to suppressing that impostor that lurks within (nearly) all of us.

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