Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Athene Donald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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The Importance of Technicians

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Athene Donald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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The Dangers of Brilliance

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Athene Donald

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

‘underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty.’

Yet this same paper depressingly goes on to say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and in Economics journals where she says

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

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

 

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Climate Change and Seneca Falls

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Athene Donald

Those of you familiar with American women’s call for the vote will recognize the name Seneca Falls. It is situated in picturesque upstate New York, near the top of Lake Cayuga, at the bottom of which sit Ithaca and Cornell University. Its main claim to fame is as the site of the first female convention ‘to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman’ in 1848, well before Cornell (itself an early beacon for female education) was founded. The Seneca Falls Convention was largely initiated by Quakers in this corner of the state, and took place a year after the New York State Assembly had passed a married woman’s property act (40 years before the UK got its act together to allow married women to hold property in their own name once they got married). Although its immediate impact may have been small, it stands as a landmark in the history of women’s suffrage.

One of the attendees and signatories to the Declaration of Sentiments that was the convention’s output, was a woman in her late 20’s who had moved to the town from New York City where she had grown up upon her marriage to an attorney; hre name was Eunice Foote. Although not one of the instigators of the two-day meeting, she was one of the editors of the proceedings. However, it is not the history of the vote or women’s rights I want to discuss here, but some science. Because, although her name is not one I was familiar with a few weeks ago, she does have a real claim to fame, albeit as an amateur scientist – the amateur-ness being inevitable for a woman of her day.

To change tack briefly, one of the perks of having (previously) been Master of a Cambridge College is that occasionally an alumnus/a would present me with a copy of their book. In this way I acquired a somewhat random collection of perhaps ten books which, not least because of their randomness, were (and are) a pleasure to read. One such book was given to me by Peter Stott, a climate scientist from the Met Office who has led various parts of the work of the IPCC. His book, Hot  Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change, is a somewhat terrifying read of his experiences attending and presenting his work on climate change over the last 25 years at different fora, in the face of hostility, disbelief and outright contradiction. Early on he sets the scientific scene for what the Greenhouse Effect is and why human actions have led to such dire consequences for us all. And here I read about Eunice Foote for the first time.

The early recognition of the power of carbon dioxide to trap heat is usually attributed to the work of John Tyndall, dating back to 1859 (when he showed how carbon dioxide interacted with infrared radiation) and 1861 when he discussed the potential consequence of this. However, in 1857 Foote had already published a paper (“Circumstances affecting the heat of the Sun’s rays ” in the American Journal of Science), notable for demonstrating the absorption of heat by CO2 and water vapor and hypothesizing that changing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate. She was not able, or was unaware of, the role of infrared radiation. But she explicitly said

‘An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature… must have necessarily resulted’.

The paper had been read to the American Association in 1856 by (a man of course) another scientist from New York State, Joseph Henry of self-inductance fame. She had very limited resources with which to do these experiments – I assume she was someone, like Hertha Ayrton later, who carried out her work in the kitchen – but she did get this paper into print. I’m not sure this is precisely a case of the Matilda Effect, since Tyndall’s work was more rigorous and a better platform on which to build an idea of climate change because it understood the role of infrared radiation and reflectance, but nevertheless Foote identified the challenge and recognized the implications. Whether Tyndall was aware of the work or not, he certainly didn’t cite it in his own papers.

At the time of her work (as of course continues to this day), people were discussing whether women were capable of doing science. It does seem that the US was well ahead of England at that time, because at least the schooling Foote had received (at Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School) had allowed her to study and gain a broad education in scientific theory and practice, before girls had been able to enter serious academic schools at all in England. Queen’s College in London was the first such, and it was only founded in 1848. The work of ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale’ opening up schools (such as Cheltenham Ladies College, North London Collegiate School and my own school, Camden School) where subjects such as science could be taught to young women, really only got going a decade later.

I find it interested that what is still a small rural part of New York State produced, not only the seminal women’s convention, but a seminal piece of science too. Foote’s name is one I must add to my own mental list of ‘women who did early science which then got overlooked’.

 

 

 

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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wisdom

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Athene Donald

I came to Mary Wollstonecraft late, as it were, not even having come across her name until relatively recently. Perhaps that is a shameful admission, but I think she has become much more visible of late, not least due to a variety of interesting books. For me, my first introduction was via Clare Tomalin’s biography (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft), via Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (covering the lives both of Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley), through the relevant parts of Richard Holmes’ Sidetracks and just now concluding with Bee Rowlatt’s In Search of Mary.

This last is less a biography of Wollstonecraft, more an exploration of how her intentions and views back then might translate into the 21st century. Some of what was radical at the time (for instance, calling on a man without a chaperone) hasn’t stood the test of time as revolutionary, but other aspects of her life and her clarion call for equality are still highly relevant and as important as ever. How does one make a better society? Well, we’d all like the answer to that one and the answer is as elusive as ever. One central part of the answer Rowlatt comes up with, having talked to what felt at times during reading like a random selection of people ranging from witches to librarians, with many stops in between, is to ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’.

I’m sure readers of my blog all want to do their bit about making the world a better place, but it can feel an impossible challenge. Furthermore, it can also feel – to my mind at least – as if the bit one does do doesn’t compare with what your neighbour is doing (assuming you have a nice neighbour). By this I mean it’s all too easy to feel that you’re not doing enough because someone you know is doing more/bigger/better things/ in wider spheres, and you just feel inadequate. It’s important to remember, and I will do my best to do so when feeling low and as if I’m no longer (as a retired professor) making enough of a contribution, that all one can do is ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’. In other words, however many challenges or problems you know surround you, you can only do so much but doing that – whatever it may be – is still worth doing.

People ask me regularly what my post-retirement plans are. As yet, I don’t know the full answer, although pieces of the jigsaw may be coming together. Those who follow me on social media will know that I’ve recently been appointed as Chair of the Department for Education’s Science Advisory Council. The Council hasn’t met yet, so I can’t give away any secrets about what we’re going to be doing, but I’m sure bringing a more explicit science grouping within the ambit of DfE can only be a good thing. I thoroughly enjoyed my earlier stint as chair of the equivalent council for DCMS, where the challenge of bringing a diverse group of experts together to make progress on pressing problems I found intensely interesting and also satisfying. Now I’m no longer Master of a college, I can admit that I find such committees more appealing than those, however vital, more concerned with formal governance, of which I have chaired many over the past decade.

In the spirit of the earlier paragraphs, though, I will say that I was very touched by the colleague who responded to my tweet about taking on this role by saying ‘You never stop serving, never stop inspiring!’. I didn’t take up the role either to serve or inspire in any conscious way. I just felt this was a job that was worth doing and that I thought I had the experience to be good at. Sometimes one does things from a sense of duty, and sometimes for personal satisfaction. It is excellent when those two coincide.

I am surprised to find my diary getting quite full with different small tasks, conversations or visits. Not really roles as such, but actions that feel as if they might make a difference to someone or something and also keep my brain in gear. It is nice to feel I have time to read interesting reports that appear, it feels, on a daily basis, about education, skills or innovation (all of which come together in the recently published Industrial Strategy Green Paper, even if I feel that coming together and coherence isn’t always obvious in that document, which highlights skills early on, and then says little about them thereafter). But there is also still a lot of work to do settling into our newly refurbished house and I need to leave time for such domesticity. For the last ten years we’ve been spoiled by living in the equivalent of a ‘tied cottage’, with the College taking responsibility for the usual tedious issues of leaks or hot water systems failing. Now it’s down to us.

There is much to consider in this rebalancing of my life, but I need to hold on to that zest for living that Wollstonecraft showed during her sadly short life, and remember that each of us can only do so much to make the world a better place.

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