Conflicts of Interest

Posted on February 15, 2026 by Athene Donald

Many years ago, before I was even a professor and still a newbie when it came to sitting on decision-making committees, I had a very disturbing experience at one particular grant-giving meeting. The details of what, who and where aren’t important, but the behaviour of the Chair and his (yes, it was a man, though that’s probably not relevant) pals around the table is what I want to discuss. I wasn’t the only woman on the committee, but the other woman was out of the room, as it was a grant from her husband that was under discussion. Again, although this couple were quite unknown to me and their research far from my field, it was clear some of the others – including the Chair, who I’ll refer to as Prof A – knew the couple well.

On the face of it, the grant application was not well received and the referees’ reports were not supportive. The startling thing was when Prof A said ‘ah well, we all know what he was trying to say’ and wanted to argue that the proposal should be funded. Others around the table nodded that the guy was a good guy and the grant should be supported. I sat there gobsmacked. I was not alone. I may, in those far off days, have felt too far out of my depth and of insufficient seniority to object, but someone else did. (I’d like to think if no one else had spoken up, I would have done, but who knows at this distance in time.) They pointed out that interpreting what the applicant wanted to say in this case but not in any others, was unreasonable. In essence, that the committee were attempting to rewrite the application mentally and on the spot.  After some discussion, the proposal was scored (appropriately) quite lowly and we all moved on.

It left a very nasty taste in the mouth. Up till that point I had regarded Prof A as a good chair. He was business-like in general, kept the discussions moving on without allowing anyone to grandstand so that we kept to time, and held the committee together when there were internal tensions between what one might term the old guard who had one view of the field, and the more modern quantitative side. However, his manoeuvring on this occasion really shocked me and it made me wonder how much other grants had been steered to success (or failure) in more subtle ways. I may say, Prof A went on to a senior leadership role in the UK, and I did wonder (although our paths never crossed again) whether he still had this blind spot about his mates. This would have mattered greatly in that subsequent position.

I would like to think conflicts of interest are handled better now, with more explicit guidelines being common. However, they are differently interpreted between different bodies. Sometimes a grant-assessing committee requires anyone from the same institution as the applicant to leave the room. If the application is actually from, say, three universities, then numerous people may leave the room. Those left in the room may not be the experts, and it is hard to believe the applicant(s) are getting a fair hearing. I’m not sure what the answer is to this problem, but sometimes excluding someone from a Zoology department because an application from Maths in the same institution has applied may feel a bit like overkill.

Then, particularly with fellowships of different sorts, there is the question of who can be a referee. Sometimes a collaborator, who knows the individual well, is excluded because they’ve co-written papers (often a time limit of five years is put on that), or a PhD supervisor is ruled out, either (or both) of which can leave, particularly if anyone from your institution is also excluded, the early career researcher scrabbling around to find someone suitable. Excluding those who know an individual well means that references may come in that are very bland, offering little more insight than the stuff already available in the submitted paperwork.

Moving up the career ladder, it may not be simply your science that is being judged, but also leadership skills, the ability to chair meetings or effect change. But, again, those outside your institution may not have had much opportunity to see an individual act in these capacities. A colleague you know well through your research may have little to say about your strategizing.

I am minded to think through this as I wade through a pile of applications for early career overseas fellowships. In this case, someone at the intended home institution has to write a reference explaining their willingness to host the person concerned. These letters are intensely variable, in ways that may have no bearing on the candidate. Obviously, it’s good if the applicant and the host have had some interaction, but not when it is the student’s recent PhD supervisor who has just moved overseas and wants to take their student with them. That seems to me to be missing the point of the fellowships of broadening experiences. On the other hand, if it is the head of the overseas department, however strong a bond may have formed between applicant and the group they are going to work with, all that may appear on paper is a letter promising to provide space and IT support. That may be the bare minimum required, but it is not helpful. Sometimes one feels one email between hosting PI and applicant is all that has so far transpired, which does not give confidence either. But none of this may have anything to do with the strength of the applicant.

I’m not sure what the answer to this broad-ranging conundrum is. The more I think about how we judge others in the sciences (and probably elsewhere), the less confidence I have that any assessment can avoid one kind of bias or unfairness or another. One certainly doesn’t want the kind of behaviour that I started this post off with. But whose letter of reference should one trust to be totally objective? And can one exclude oneself, the reader and judge, from having one’s own biases (as opposed to scientific judgement) about the particular group or sub-discipline that turns up on the application form?

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KPIs – a Mixed Blessing

Posted on February 8, 2026 by Athene Donald

I have sat on enough committees when KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are discussed, to know that they can be very helpful in moving an agenda forward and identifying where sticking points may be blocking progress. However, they should never be the only goal in any programme of work, nor used slavishly without thought. To take one specific item that arose at a meeting I was at recently: is the number of university spin-outs a good KPI? Or should one only count those that have had £X invested in them, or have more than Y employees. Or survived for more than Z years, licensed their product to a certain number of companies, with a turn-over exceeding some figure….and so on. Creating a spin-out company is, in many ways, the easy bit, but there are all those other metrics that could alternatively be chosen (and no doubt others I haven’t put my finger on) and choosing which to focus on may modify behaviour or lead to different ideas of ‘success’, for the individual or the university.

As criteria were being selected for REF2021 (if that isn’t an indelicate subject to bring up as the next cycle draws to a close), when I was chairing the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel, we were sent a long list of possible metrics that could be used in the context of interdisciplinary research. After a lengthy debate, we decided that none was really fit for purpose. That put all the emphasis on to the panels to make judgements about quality (as well as whether they were genuinely interdisciplinary), but we were convinced that was the right path to follow. The extensive and thoughtful evidence review, The Metric Tide, more generally aimed at the entire REF process, highlighted many potential dangers in being too dependent on metrics, even though relying on them would undoubtedly have simplified the process and cut costs (but at a cost in a different sense). And as academic readers of this blog will no doubt know, academics (and associated administrative staff) are good at jumping through hoops and complying with the rules of whatever ‘game’ is being played.

Yet not ever using metrics has its own issues. How can one tell if progress is being made? The recent HEPI report, Making Metrics Matter: A more ambitious approach to tackling racial inequity in higher education, highlights why metrics still have a huge role to play in our universities. If one looks at the admission of racialised minority students into higher education, it can be seen great strides have been made. However, if these students then fail to thrive – as one could argue both the attainment gap and completion rates demonstrate – simply counting how many start a course is unhelpful. The reality is, as ever, the right question has to be asked. Too often it isn’t.

To take a different example from education, what is happening in (English) schools? The various measures of success – for a school – derive from exam results. The period Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education saw rapid changes in what was valued. At the time I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee. We responded at speed to multiple ‘consultations’, suspecting responses from us and others in the wider community were not going to change anything, not least because the speed of decision-making hinted at no one having time to read what was submitted.  The recently-removed idea of the E-Bacc came from this time, and has met with substantial opposition over the years, so its termination will not be much regretted. However, the Gove view was always that it is simply about standards, and that is what should be pushed in schools. I had a conversation once with William Hague (back when I was Master of Churchill College and he’d been giving a talk there), when my attempts to discuss school education with him, simply led to the blanket comment that the standing of English schools had improved in the PISA tables, so we must be doing things right. He wasn’t interested in whether this focus on a ‘knowledge-rich’ education was appropriate for the current world, with Google at children’s finger-tips and the world of work so different from when he was growing up.

Every child achieving and thriving is the current Government’s mantra, and there is absolutely no doubt that they are investing in ways to make that possible, starting with substantial investment into family hubs, early years’ provision, breakfast clubs and so on. But, leaving aside those children who start school not ‘school ready’ and who may struggle to catch up, there are many children for whom the transition to secondary school is difficult and who disengage during their teens when faced with a curriculum that is only directed at exam grades. Teenagers themselves have spelled out how they would like to learn more about financial management for instance. The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review had little to say about this. A recent commentary spells out how the mood music in the profession is shifting away from the Gove ‘traditionalist’ approach, wanting to see less emphasis on the metrics of exam grades. Nor is this simply related to the huge challenge of rising SEND numbers, but rising mental health issues (a problem HE faces too) should tell us all is not well: forcing round pegs into square holes never works. Teachers need time in their working day to consider pupils in the round, according to local circumstances for instance, and not just be bound by centrally-driven metrics that may work for one locality but not another.

KPI’s – definitely a mixed blessing, and to be used with caution not slavishly.

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She’s a Feisty Little Thing!

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Athene Donald

Many women I know get their dress commented on, or their general appearance, rather than the excellence – or otherwise – of their science. I’ve yet to hear someone comment on a man’s choice, or absence, of tie, or the state of his hair. It’s a trivial example but, alongside other subtle forms of denigration, such as not using a woman’s title in an introduction while according that privilege to a man, it is intensely frustrating. It is also nothing new.

Margaret Cavendish

The very fact that Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (shown here), was known as Mad Madge back in her lifetime in the seventeenth century, immediately conveys a sense of how people reacted to her. She dared to stand out – both in dress and activities. She wrote. Copiously and under her own name. These were not suitable female tracts about domesticity or religion, but about much larger issues including those relating to science (or natural philosophy as it was known back then). She was an atomist; she experimented with lenses and microscopes during her exile in France and formed her own opinion about their utility; she worried about animal experimentation and vivisection (notably by William Harvey) when this was a barely considered issue. She wrote about all these things and set out a vision of an alternative world in what might be said to be the first book of science fiction, The Blazing World (1666). In this book she had critical comments about the rather newly formed Royal Society and its Fellows, whom she satirised as ‘bird men’, ‘fox men’ and ‘spider men’.  It is perhaps not surprising that when, a year later, she visited the Royal Society (the visit was only approved with great reluctance), the general view of her was damning.

Samuel Pepys, who would soon assume the role of the young Society’s President, referred to her as a ‘mad, conceited ridiculous woman’ and commented that her dress was ‘so antick…I do not like her at all’.  There is no doubt she chose to dress very eccentrically, including sometimes in male attire. But, then as now, it ought to be possible to go beyond superficial matters such as clothing and focus on the content of what is being said or written. Cavendish wrote a lot. She wanted to be remembered by posterity (as she now is), explicitly writing early on ‘all I desire is fame’, and continuing to hope, mainly unsuccessfully, for her ideas to be given serious thought. She simply went against all society’s rules for how a woman, even a duchess, should comport herself.

Being eccentric was one way of attracting attention, but also not one that was likely to ensure that that attention was serious. I’ve learned a lot about Margaret Cavendish over the years, having partaken in two panel discussions about her life and impact. Firstly on Free Thinking (although on that recording, most of my remarks were excised, presumably in order to reduce the length of the programme); secondly in a panel discussion last autumn about the marginalisation of women in Philosophy and Science, with The Philosopher (video here).  In both cases Francesca Peacock was also on the panel and, if you want to know more about Cavendish, Peacock’s book Pure Wit, describes her life in lively detail. Or, if short of time, a chapter about her is included in Richard Holmes’ book, The Long Pursuit.

Why have I chosen now to bring all this up? Partly because I’ve been asked to write something for the Royal Society’s celebrations of 80 years since the first women were elected to the Fellowship and I wanted to include a few words about Cavendish’s ill-fated visit to the Society as the first woman to be allowed in (but then had to trim it in the interests of length). But also because of something said to me recently by a visitor to Cambridge about her daughter. This young woman had just embarked on a university course related to Physics and was finding her environment far from congenial. It seemed that the men she was paired with simply took over, elbowed her out of the way, when it came to practical work.  ‘But’, the mother said, ‘she’s a feisty little thing.’ I felt indignant on the daughter’s behalf that this was what it took to survive, in 2026, on a Physics-related course. Whereas, around the time Yale first admitted women and Eileen Pollack found the Physics course unwelcoming, as described in her 2015 book, The Only Woman in the Room, about her time at Yale in the mid 1970’s, that could be forgiven, perhaps, as consistent with the fact Yale hadn’t really adjusted to women on campus. But now? Really?

Women wanting to pursue a Physics-related career should not need to be feisty to survive – or eccentric, or have their dress referred to or any of the other indignities both Cavendish and Pollack, some centuries later, had to endure. We need women of all dispositions in our workplace, not just the ones who dare to stand up for their corner. It is depressing to feel that our university labs are still so often hostile, and whoever is in charge of them, be they professors or PhD students, don’t think it is important enough to intervene when a woman is being patronised or bullied (on the limited information I have about this particular case, I don’t know which, but neither is acceptable).

What will it take for women to feel at home in a Physics Lab? We don’t only want the ‘feisty’ to be the ones who survive. I recall something Curt Rice said to me twelve years ago ‘Put a single woman in a group of men’, he said, ‘and she will feel uncomfortable and awkward. Put a single man in a group of women and he will feel in charge.’ (The full blogpost in which I refer to this is here; the word feisty appears there too.) Clearly, we need men to feel less at home, less entitled, less ‘in charge’. And if the men in the room aren’t able to act appropriately, it also needs a watchful supervisory eye and determined intervention.

 

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Has ‘The Rising Tide’ of Women Risen?

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Athene Donald

Last December a new Government taskforce was launched to address issues about Women in Tech. Led by the Secretary of State at DSIT, Liz Kendall, with Anne-Marie Imafidon alongside, the aim is to ensure women will be better supported to enter, stay and lead in the UK’s tech sector. There is a long way to go. The Government press release cites a 2023 Fawcett Society Report which stated that 1 in 5 men working in tech roles believe that women are naturally less suited to working in the sector. Given potential male colleagues like that, why would women want to join the sector? Yet, the case for diversity in tech has been made many times, and losing women from the talent pool can only harm the nation and its decision-making. Who will worry about algorithmic bias or the dangers of stereotyping assumed within an LLM – by race, gender or any other characteristic? Who will think about female health concerns when setting up a new enterprise or be aware of the different products a diverse population might want? These are all topics I’ve written about before (see this policy brief I wrote last year).

Issues about the shortage of women in these arenas are not new, even if what ‘tech’ is may have moved on from the 90’s. Back then, Nancy Lane Perham – who died in November – led a group charged with looking into this issue on the back of William Waldegrave’s 1993 Realising Our Potential Report about the state of UK Science, Engineering and Technology (SET as it was called then, as opposed to the more modern STEM); her report was called The Rising Tide. I well remember the publication of the Waldegrave report (indeed he visited the Cavendish Laboratory during his time as Science minister, and we were very conscious of the hideous plastic buckets in my own lab designed to catch the leaks; it wasn’t necessarily the professional look we wanted to give). But reading it now does show how the world of women in STEM has and hasn’t moved on.

For instance, I was startled to read in the Waldegrave report that changes to the school curriculum will

‘ensure for the first time that all pupils, girls as well as boys, will study a broad and balance programme of science and technology right through to the age of 16.’

That it was necessary a decent science curriculum should be made available to girls as well as boys seems rather shocking now: this is an area where attitudes have certainly changed. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that girls may still be put off pursuing STEM subjects post-16 by attitudes from peers, parents and teachers, however talented they are. The presumption that computing and engineering are not for the female sex remains strong. As the Waldegrave report also made clear in the 1990’s,

‘Women are the country’s biggest single most under-valued and therefore under-used human resource’, with a ‘widespread waste of talent and training, throughout industry and academia, due to the absence of women.’

More than thirty years later, and we are still facing the same challenge.

Sadly, I have not been able to find Nancy Lane-Perham’s Report on the web. I probably once had a hard copy, but if I did it was thrown out when I vacated my office. I do have the successor report SET Fair on my computer, as well as still being able to find it on the web. Nancy was still associated with this, although Susan Greenfield chaired the report and it was often known as the Greenfield Report. Nancy was an absolute pioneer in raising these issues, actions that led nationally in due course to the creation of Athena SWAN (Senior Women in Academia Network) and ultimately the Athena SWAN Charter. In Cambridge Nancy spearheaded the formation of WiSETI, the Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative, a programme that I assumed the leadership of when Nancy stepped down. By then I had known Nancy for many years: she was my graduate tutor at Girton (not that I had much interaction with her, although I suspect she organised a few end-of-year receptions where we mingled).

I was very conscious, when I assumed the role with WiSETI, that I, as a professor and an FRS, found it easier to get access to the senior leadership in the University than Nancy had. She never held a substantive post within the formal University structure, although she continued to do research throughout her life, funded by so-called soft money. This challenge she faced locally seemed particularly unreasonable given her external standing: she was, for instance, a non-executive director for one of the big pharmaceutical companies, and was honoured with several honorary degrees. I fear this casual attitude towards her by the local ‘establishment’ was exacerbated by the fact she was married to the biochemist Richard Perham and was too often seen as Richard’s wife rather than a scientist in her own right. When Richard became Master of St John’s College, this role as the Master’s wife probably further buried her own talents as a serious scientist. In some ways, therefore, her life story can be seen as typical of too many women, whose strengths are too often overlooked because they are ‘merely’ a woman, or someone’s wife.

Nancy was a woman whose energy was formidable, and who would continue to come to the annual WiSETI lectures, and check that I was keeping up the good fight locally long after she had retired. I have been thinking a lot about her life and work recently, after hearing the sad news of her recent deat. It therefore seems fitting to reflect on what has and hasn’t changed since she produced her ‘90’s report. Undoubtedly the numbers of senior women have increased, yet many will still be feeling they may be ‘othered’ or overlooked amidst a sea of white males. It is encouraging to see the Government’s initiative around the women in tech situation, but there is no point in only looking at the state of the workforce. We have to consider the messaging right back to the early years of children’s lives, to ensure the pipeline into tech is as diverse as possible, removing outdated messaging and stereotypes from the school. I am sure Nancy would hope her legacy will continue to have impact on both the young and more mature.

 

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Have We Had Enough of Experts?

Posted on December 21, 2025 by Athene Donald

Recently, my Cambridge colleagues Diane Coyle and Michael Kenny from the Bennett School of Public Policy took to the pages of Nature to write a cautionary Comment about the role of science and scientists in public policy. They are critical of those scientists who don’t pay attention to how to interact with policy-makers effectively, as opposed to simply baldly stating their views, data and/or evidence. Scientists must recognize, they say,

‘that the importance of science is not self-evident, and that part of the blame for the erosion of trust in science lies with scientists themselves.’

They go on to say:

‘In public policy, solutions to the problems society faces are rarely, if ever, purely technical. People’s values and interests often conflict, and scientific studies do not always provide direct answers to the questions that politicians and officials must grapple with, such as how to reduce crime rates or respond to a disease outbreak.’

There is nothing like working with policy-makers to ram this message home. As the saying goes ‘scientists advise and policy-makers decide’. Chairing science advisory committees, previously for DCMS and now for the Department for Education, clearly demonstrates to me any evidence that a scientist can bring to the table, however useful, correct and possibly even self-evident, can only inform. Many other factors, from ministerial direction to electoral acceptance, not to mention the fundamental issue of money, will need to be taken into account before any decision is made. But if we want the community of scientists to appreciate this, what action – other than writing in Nature – should be taken? If you are a PhD student, you may well be led to believe your thesis, all those results and the paper(s) you submit (and even see published) are the end of the story. In policy terms, that is not so.

Diane and Mike write of ‘science’ in the broadest sense (covered much more effectively by the German word Wissenschaft, as opposed to Naturwissenschaft; English does not have such a neat distinction), and I can really only talk as a ‘hard’ scientist, a natural philosopher if you like, not a social scientist, or indeed an engineer. But, although the details may vary, the basic issue is the same. Where, in training the scientists of tomorrow, do we introduce the idea that pure fact will not be sufficient to drive a policy. As it happens, a conversation with the head of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, Tim Minshall (he of the wonderful book, Your Life  is Manufactured), made very much the same point in a different context: the need to ensure a PhD thesis (from his field) considers not just the evidence, but  what impact it can and will have on (e.g) supply chains, scale-up or necessary skills.

In my field, the last chapter of a thesis is, typically, ‘suggestions for further work’. That covers no more than all those things the student might have wanted to do had they had another year or two of funding or the equipment had worked better, or indeed they had access to some other equipment. It would not typically address why the results had any bearing on our lives, potential government policy or saving money in production of some material. In my field, we don’t usually teach that stuff, but perhaps we should.

Turning briefly to a younger age group, the recent schools’ Curriculum and Assessment Review, with its mantra of ‘evolution not revolution’ remains wedded to standard assessments that focus on disciplinary facts, but does acknowledge there are other topics that need to be addressed, if not examined, within schools. One of these is climate change and sustainability – which one hopes has to cross disciplinary boundaries in the teaching – but a lot of material is to be crammed into (non-examinable) lessons in Citizenship and RSHE (Relationships and Sex Education, where issues around misogyny and toxic masculinity are likely to be touched upon, although I’ve already heard from some this is unlikely to be particularly productive).

In other words, in schools, some social issues will be taught but outside the main examinable curriculum, unless subject teachers find a way to bring them in. Should our university science departments be doing more of the same? It is obvious many, if not all, universities are running around trying to work out how to handle AI education and AI in education and assessment. But does every student get formally exposed to discussions around sustainability, for instance? I’m not sure they do. We don’t expect our students to be au fait with the environmental  challenges of extracting enough lithium from under the earth’s surface (be it from the Atacama Desert or China, which provoke different ecological issues) for the batteries we want for the energy transition, or to worry about the supply of rare-earth metals needed for our phones coming from fragile African states. As a physical scientist, all that is likely to be taught is how these components work.

Too often, we only teach facts that can be examined, not the issues that underlie those facts. We are unlikely to teach students to think about how to weigh up the pros and cons of the environmental plusses of moving towards a green economy reducing carbon emissions compared with the damage mining may do to a region. I’m aware many people reading this may think, well my department does, or that there is a specific ‘green energy’ module, but I fear too few actually discuss this wider context. Yet this is the context in which policy makers live, in which they have to weigh up pros and cons of any decision. These specific examples obviously come from the physical sciences, but one could raise the same sorts of questions in the life sciences.

Diane and Mike consider the impact of the growing polarisation of our society due to increasing inequality, the crude distinction between the haves and have-nots. They question whether the decisions – indeed the evidence – that ‘elite’ scientists seek and produce is, in itself, influenced by their status and not relevant to the more disadvantaged and that they may not listen to their views. That what counts as ‘evidence’ may need to be broadened to factor in what people know but which cannot easily be measured and quantified as well as their ‘tacit knowledge’. This is not a new idea (for instance, to give an early example, Brian Wynne has written a lot about this in the context of sheep farmers and the after effects of the Chernobyl disaster), but it is sadly easy to forget in many situations, although it won’t apply in all.

If we, as scientists, want our work to have impact in the way our society operates – be it about the mass take-up of vaccinations or achieving a just green energy transition – we all have work to do to think harder about how we communicate and contextualise what we do, and indeed which questions we ask. Every field will have different challenges in achieving this and it is not to say ‘pure’ curiosity driven research has no place. In our teaching, in our communications to the public (as opposed to within our own communities) we should remember the plea from Coyle and Kenney. We can each do our own bit to remind the wider world they really haven’t had enough of experts.

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