Do We Need International Women’s Day?

Posted on March 8, 2020 by Athene Donald

It’s International Women’s Day. Another year when many of us are thinking how amazing it would be if we didn’t need such a day any longer, specifically celebrating women, because people of whatever gender, colour, age, health status….. were celebrated according to what they’d actually done. That the day is still needed tells us how far we are from equality. One day – as somebody once wisely said – we’ll know we’ve reached equality when mediocre women get top jobs at the same rate as mediocre men. That will be the time when men are as likely to stay at home with the kids/meet them from school as women so that we no longer take note of which way round these things are done. When there is no gender pay gap and equal pay for equal work really means exactly what it says. When women are no longer encouraged not to report rape because it will merely prolong the pain and trauma without leading to an appropriate outcome. When the world of everyday sexism has vanished.

However, although I may dream on that my grandchildren will see such a day, it’s not coming anytime soon. So, let us celebrate International Women’s Day once more, and remember not only those outstanding women in every walk of life, but also the women who have no choice but just to get by, along with all those who support those women, day by day, around the globe.

The higher education sector is riddled with hurdles that are slowly being unmasked as just that much higher for women than for men. Be it double standards – a topic I wrote about previously, where the perceptions of identical performance from men and women are not treated equally – or a higher bar for women for publishing articles, as highlighted recently by the RSC’s analysis of its own publications. Or maybe it’s the way letters of reference are written, with so-called ‘stand-out’ adjectives significantly more likely to be used for men in letters written by women just as much as by men, a fact identified in a wide range of studies (e.g. here) across the disciplines. Or perhaps it’s how often their papers are cited – again there are numerous studies in different disciplines showing how men are less likely to cite papers with women as lead authors (e.g. here). All these are factors which will feed into promotion prospects and accompanying pay. All these systematically disadvantage the typical woman.

Fixing the women, getting the women to lean in as Sheryl Sandberg would have us do, simply isn’t going to transform the world around us. And until that world is transformed the numbers of women who rise through the ranks to senior positions will remain unrepresentative of the talent that starts out. Brains will be wasted and collectively our impact, solutions to the challenges of the world as well as pure intellectual output, will be diminished to everyone’s detriment. Finding (male) allies to speak up in appointment and promotion meetings, at editorial boards or as co-authors on papers, is – regrettably – still the best hope for eradicating the tilt of the playing field. I am pleased to note how many men in leadership positions do seem to have grasped the basic fact that the problem is not the women but the system.

I am quite sure when I was mid-career this was not the case; few of my male colleagues ‘got’ this. If I wasn’t persuasive I (like Maggie Thatcher before me) should apparently have been thinking about having voice coaching. If I was attacked in a committee meeting by someone whose pet candidate I was not sticking up for, it nevertheless seemed to be assumed I should have been the one doing the apologising afterwards. The sense of injustice those two events provoked in me still lurks, because the responses seemed so unreasonable and yet I had no defence. How could anyone feel an apology was due from me after I was the one verbally attacked? Nevertheless, for women who are ‘difficult’ – i.e. not fulfilling the role assigned to them by wider (predominantly male) society – that is not an uncommon position in which to find themselves.

Progress is slow towards the mythical utopia of equality, and nowhere more so than in coping with those who work, not just not 24/7, but not even ‘full time’, whatever that phrase may mean in academia. A visit to another university last week highlighted just how challenging working 60-80% (for instance) can be for some. Naturally the ‘some’ will be predominantly women. One thing is clear, you only get paid for the hours for which you are contracted (regardless of how many more you actually work). However, not all employers – or peers – recognize that all parts of the job should get cut back proportionately. If the teaching load you are expected to do is the same as for a full-timer, it inevitably means everything else gets hit. That, naturally, includes time for research – which is what is most likely to matter when it comes to progression. But a woman who says, hang on I don’t want to do more than my fair share of teaching in proportion to what I’m paid overall, is likely to be labelled – yet again – as difficult. She may even be accused of shirking her work. (Never mind those other members of the department who somehow seem to get out of teaching because they’ve managed to convince the leadership that their research is too important).

I remain convinced the only way to get near to parity is for more men to occupy the same spaces as women – by being the ones with caring responsibilities (and not just parental leave, but caring for teenagers and parents too) – and, in this case, working part-time so they know what it’s like at the sharp end and can spell it out to the senior leadership. So, by all means let us celebrate International Women’s Day, but please can we remember the women on every other day of the year too, and remember that it is the system that needs fixing if we are to progress beyond mealy-mouthed promises for change in the decades to come.

Here are some ideas of actions every single one of us can do to help, from several years ago, but just as relevant today.

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Building Resilience Throughout a Career

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Athene Donald

How do you develop resilience? This was a question I was asked recently by a mid-career researcher. Not, please note, someone just setting out, but someone who was already well-established. This problem is ubiquitous and does not go away just because of seniority. Academia – though one might say all of life – has pressures from every direction and surviving these pressures is inevitably going to be a challenge. Students – again at any stage – will recognize the problem of competing demands pulling them in every direction simultaneously. Problem sheet/essay versus laundry versus catching-up with lecture notes/thesis-writing versus a social life….Everything needs attention. Resilience is talked about at school as well as university; self-help books and articles in the popular press abound, and yet we all face up to the challenge on a regular basis and not necessarily successfully.

I am not going to attempt to solve the problem, although I think there are some things that one should – except in the most extreme circumstances and only temporarily – avoid. And one of these is to work 100 hours a week. The THE devoted a feature to this topic of massively long hours recently, stimulated by an off-the-cuff tweet from Mary Beard. The trouble is, for many of us in academia, some of the things we do will bring joy. Too often these are the things that get squeezed out by the mundane but urgent.

One can enjoy teaching, but not necessarily the stress of preparing a new lecture at 24 hours’ notice because there has been no time to prepare it any earlier due to all the other tasks on the to do list. Writing lectures gets squeezed in between preparing exams (and any student who thinks their examiners don’t spend huge amounts of time preparing, checking questions are unambiguous, not to mention correct, needs to think again); pastoral care; departmental admin and of course research. Life is full of deadlines, and sometimes it is simply impossible to make all of them. But you cannot turn up empty-handed to deliver a lecture! One of the authors in the THE feature refers to the fact that writing – as in this blog – can either feel a terrible burden or indeed a joy. How to squeeze it in amongst everything else, feeling the joy and not the burden?

Lee Cronin is one academic who believes that working long hours is the only way to get cutting-edge science done. Last summer, in an article on the long hours culture, he wrote

Some people have suggested that large teams are not productive and force people to work longer in a type of sausage factory. This argument, constructed using anecdotal evidence, is not proven. Personally, I’d posit that small teams can also be sweatshops and sausage factories. And bullying, sadly, can take many forms beyond the expectation of long work hours.

The sausage machine allegation was almost certainly directed at me and the post I wrote around the same time. His view on large groups was brought to my attention again in an article in a recent THE article on interdisciplinarity where he proudly talks of a group of 65 necessary in order to achieve the many different strands and disciplines needed for his projects. I understand that a diverse group of individuals bringing different skills to the table from their own disciplinary backgrounds is often crucial, but the evidence is that it is small groups that are disruptive, whereas large ones may be more incremental. As that particular article (by Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang and James Evans) on the impact of group size on outputs says

Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher-impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work.

I paraphrase that sentence as: large teams are in danger of doing incremental stuff rather than the paradigm-shifting variety. It should be recognized, however, all such evidence is statistical and any group, whatever its size, may have its own recipe for success.

However, are you more likely to develop individual resilience better in large or small groups? And, how resilient is the group overall? To look for evidence on this I turned to the Harvard Business Review, where tactics to ensure teams work well together (and are well led) are often discussed. A recent article identifies four attributes of a resilient team.

  • They believe they can effectively complete tasks together
  • They share a common mental model of teamwork
  • They are able to improvise
  • They trust one another and feel safe

This article of course refers to the very different world of business rather than the academic laboratory, and yet I would hazard a guess these traits still apply. Improvisation when you can’t afford the kit and need a quick-fix, knowing how each part of a project fits together to achieve a common goal and a clear mental model of how to work together to achieve that goal – these would all still be relevant. But perhaps where I suspect many scientific groups up and down the country would fall down is on trust and feeling safe – although that in itself has little to do with group size.

I have been dismayed to hear group leaders talk about setting the same project to more than one PhD student to see who achieves the desired result first. Can you synthesise this compound by route A or B? The professor’s favourite team member will be the one who gets there first, and the outcome may bear little relationship to inherent skills. Safety will not be the first emotion a student feels in such a situation. They will certainly not develop resilience when things go wrong, because they will always be looking over their shoulder and worrying a peer is going to win the prize. That anxiety, verging on fear, will additionally not lead to constructive working relationships amongst the team members themselves. And in terms of lab safety, trust is also vital if people are to be willing to speak up about potential risks – again a fact well-established in diverse situations (read, for instance, Margaret Heffernan’s Wilful Blindness for a wide-ranging discussion).

Just as with a developing child, who will not develop future resilience if they get criticised every time they fall on their face (perhaps literally), so with a student learning lab skills. When things go wrong, they need support and advice not the worry of someone else ‘beating’ them to a result on the adjacent bench. Otherwise they will not develop confidence and the ability to bounce back from those future set-backs that are bound to occur. The mid-career scientist who asks me about resilience may or may not have suffered from this sort of early-career angst, but they are still full of worries that they do not know how to prioritise, they do not know what to do when one of the balls they are juggling gets dropped, and they are constantly on edge that that dropped ball will in some sense be terminal for their career.

Academia needs to be more forgiving, but the pressures leadership are put under by successive governments makes it hard for our cultures to permit that. Each of us individually needs to do all we can to support those around us. To reiterate the HBR article, resilience develops best in teams which trust each other and where every individual feels safe – regardless of team size. We all have a responsibility to try to ensure that can happen, because it is self-evident that many laboratories and teams up and down the land are failing at this.

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A Holistic CV

Posted on February 16, 2020 by Athene Donald

Just recently at a dinner for heads of the Cambridge colleges the issue of the toxic culture some research students find themselves in was raised. We all know the issues exist and, in this context, the question was what could our colleges do to assist. Where it is the relationship with the supervisor that has gone wrong, and the student is willing – by no means guaranteed to be the case – to raise it with the college, there are steps that can be taken. Every student (undergraduate or postgraduate) will have a tutor to whom they can turn. However, not all students feel safe raising these matters even informally let alone making a formal complaint. These facts are well known.

This discussion reminded me of other aspects of our research culture that equally urgently need addressing. One is the vexed question of what excellence looks like. This question is as hard to pin down when it comes to a research proposal as when discussing a job applicant. We may all believe we know it when we see it but, as the evidence builds up about bias we must recognize our judgement may not be as objective as we might like. This issue is more likely to be an issue when it comes to individuals, but since it is individuals who write grants it can indirectly impact on assessing proposals too.

In the context of a job application – at whatever stage, be it for a postdoc or a professorial position – the CV is likely to be the first documentation read. How that CV is written will colour our perceptions, probably just as much as the facts it contains. Facts might include names, thereby immediately bringing into question of whether a woman’s or an ethnic minority’s name will thereafter affect the lens through which everything else is read. Blind (removing the name) reading of the application may be able to solve this problem at the postdoc level; it would be much harder at the most senior levels where the applicants will often be personally, or at least anecdotally, known.

But there are many more subtle ways in which our reading may be impacted by style of presentation. While I was part of the ERC Scientific Council I learned to my surprise that the ‘Anglo Saxon’ style of CV was much more prone to hype and hard-selling than the Mediterranean version. It seems northern Europeans are much more cocky collectively about what we’ve done and liable to market ourselves more than those from warmer climes such as Italy or Spain. Restricting how many publications, prizes or awards can be listed may partially offset some of these cultural differences, so for funders or employers to use a standardised form which doesn’t simply require an entire life-history’s worth of publications may have advantages.

In this spirit, the Royal Society has proposed a rather different sort of CV, which will not lead to a judgement simply based on the collected weight of publications or total grant funding. Instead it requires the applicant to provide a narrative and reflective version of their work up to the point of application. There are various sections to be completed, giving scope for discussing achievements in a more holistic way. The sections covered are

  • How have you contributed to the generation of knowledge?
  • How have you contributed to the development of individuals?
  • How have you contributed to the wider research community?
  • How have you contributed to broader society?

These four sections are then followed by a Personal Statement in which the applicant is asked to provide a statement that reflects on overarching goals and motivation for the activities in which they have been involved. At different career stages one might expect very different types of answers: a postdoc is unlikely to have had an opportunity for international conference organisation, but they may have been responsible for the logistics of their group’s away day. An early career researcher may have gone into schools to enthuse the youngsters but is less likely to have talked at the Hay Festival or been on national radio or TV. Nevertheless, the topics are broad enough that most people will be able to find something to say about each of them.

Undoubtedly there is still plenty of scope for the cocky to hype their life story, but if they can only answer the first bullet point above, and give no account of mentoring, outreach or conference organisation, or can’t explain why what they are doing is making a contribution to their peers or society, then they probably aren’t ‘excellent’ after all. This format of CV makes it much easier to include the citizenry aspects of a person’s life, the things that make so much difference to how a research group or department run but which typically don’t garner much kudos. It is, as I say, more holistic.

What I don’t know, and I hope the Royal Society is collecting evidence on this, is whether people are taking advantage of this format, tweaked as may be according to circumstance, and if so what their experiences are – be it as applicant or reader/judge. I feel just emphasising there is more to a job applicant than a pile of papers in some disciplinary-relevant top-notch journal is a step forward;  as more and more universities are signing up to DORA, I hope the panels in those institutions know never to rely on impact factors as a proxy for quality.  I hope listing that they run a research group of 65 but can’t explain how they mentor them properly will be ‘scored’ appropriately (maybe they barely recognize some of the team). We should be seeing excellence in the round: bright ideas, clever skills, good mentoring, appropriate good citizenship, success in winning grants and/or giving plenary talks, concern about the impact of their work, involvement with outreach – delete as appropriate according to career stage and discipline.

I hope refocussing of attention on excellence of an individual in all that needs to be brought to getting good science done both today and, consequently, also for tomorrow will remove the need for college heads to worry about the toxic environments that some researchers currently experience. However, I fear we are still a long way from that happy state.

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Hierarchies and the Power Imbalance

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Athene Donald

It is perhaps helpful, if depressing, that stories of harassment and bullying in many spheres now reach headline status.  Helpful because it means these issues get an airing instead of simply lurking in the long grass. Just this week there have been the resurrection of accusations of bullying against the former speaker John Bercow, and the resignation of a high profile MSP for inappropriate (for want of a better word, since it doesn’t appear actually to be criminal) texting of a youth 26 years his junior. Power imbalance sits at the heart of both these examples from the political sphere, and power imbalance is so often manifest in the toxic situations that arise in universities. Hierarchies abound throughout our institutions.

The most obvious case is the supervisor: research student relationship. Here a student may well feel the power all resides with the supervisor, and ‘inappropriate behaviour’ has to be swallowed. Inappropriate here may mean sexual harassment and worse, but even more common is bullying, denigration and humiliation.  Postdocs and technicians may equally feel they suffer from regular tongue-lashings or explicit put-downs. Those at the receiving end of such behaviour, particularly if over an extended period of time, are likely to end up doubting their worth, their research abilities or their futures in an academic sphere. They may walk out because a PhD, or a paper with their name on it, is simply not worth the pain of achievement.

Each of us has a different degree of tolerance for such behaviour, but no one should need to find out what that tolerance level is. Why do supervisors feel they need to use the power imbalance to make someone else feel small? I guess there are three categories of people who are likely to exhibit such unpleasant and unacceptable behaviour: those who lack all empathy and cannot put themselves in the other person’s shoes; those whose upbringing has given them such a sense of superiority they believe they are entitled to treat those they deem to be lesser mortals like dirt; and those whose own sense of self-worth is so shaky they can only believe in themselves if they believe those around them are insignificant. Maybe you can think of other ‘types’. But all of them should be made to recognize that this behaviour will not be put up with.

Unfortunately, of course, all too often it is put up with, because the victim(s) sees no way out. In some ways this sort of bullying should be easier to put a stop to than sexual harassment. That sort of behaviour typically occurs, literally, behind closed doors or in other private spaces. Bullying – shouting and humiliation – frequently occurs in front of other students or staff. This is why it ought to be possible for others to act. It is all too clear that a victim making a complaint is likely to find their path painful and anecdotally frequently it leads them nowhere, except possibly the exit. How many victims feel they have to put up and shut up because they have no confidence the system will work for them, however egregious they feel the behaviour they are enduring may be? Universities may try, but story after story suggests that too often the ‘centre’ would rather the student just quietly went away without a fuss in preference to a star performer being sanctioned, let alone sacked.

So, if due process is slow, painful and likely to lead nowhere, intervention by others may be more likely to lead to better outcomes. With bystander training spreading for dealing with harassment cases, can we not do something similar with bullying? Watching a supervisor humiliate a nervous student attempting to give a presentation, could the rest of the group step in? The answer to that must be yes, but it is never going to be easy. Anyone who speaks up will feel they may be the next victim, even if in some senses there ought to be safety in numbers. Bullies typically have favourites, so they may be the best people to intervene, but of course equally have the most to lose and may anyhow be favoured because they share similar characteristics to the supervisor.

I heard someone recently state that they thought universities did better in this space than industry and business. I can’t say I agree. In a company there are likely to be more formal reporting chains, more people involved, reducing the dependency – in terms of letters of reference, opportunities and funding for instance – compared with a PhD supervisor. Collectively we need to find solutions that don’t simply involve formal complaints and grievance procedures. Interventions sooner and in lower-key ways ought to be viable in a supportive environment, with supervisors knowing that their behaviour is being watched for inappropriate language and actions.

Hierarchies are not going to go away, nor are power imbalances, but what one does with that power should be a matter for reflection. Paul Nurse – a man of immense power in his capacity as former President of Rockefeller Institute, past President of the Royal Society and now founding Director of the Crick Institute, not to mention a  Nobel Prize winner, puts it well:

We need a supportive environment so it’s important to be nice to each other. Also it is very important in science to disagree, to argue, but you don’t do it in a way where you attack the individual: you attack their ideas.

Would that more of those who wield power recognized the power that niceness itself confers, in enabling people to be the best that they can, not simply a cog in someone else’s wheel. That attacks (and this could also include virtual attacks over social media, although that is not the primary location to which I’m referring) should not be ad hominem but based on facts and evidence. One must be an idealist, and, if this problem is given more visibility, collectively academia ought to be able to mitigate the potential damage inflicted on individuals before their careers are irreparably ruined.

 

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It’s Not My Brexit Either

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Athene Donald

I am trying to decide whether to remove the Twitter ‘Scientists for the EU’ twibbon from my profile. I still am a scientist and I’m still pro EU, but there’s no longer quite the same message to be conveyed. Fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry has written eloquently how January 31st was not about his Brexit, so I won’t repeat his arguments, with which I wholeheartedly agree. I do, however, have to decide about this twibbon (inertia, as well as sentiment, probably means it will stay a while).

On the other hand, I have made a decision about what to do about my Bollocks to Brexit badge, purchased on the first of the two massive London demonstrations I went on. Whether they want it or not, I’m going to add it to my ‘papers’. That means the College Archives can file it in due course for any researchers to happen upon it if they are wanting to study what life was like for a female scientist in the years around the turn of the 21st century. (I do find it pretty improbable that my patchy archives would be of interest, but that’s beside the point.) I did decide, on January 31st, not actually to wear mourning black, appropriate though it would have been on other fronts when I addressed a student group in another Cambridge college about violence and harassment against women.

However, we are where we are, and my job must surely be to make the best of what currently feels like a very bad lot. As head of a Cambridge college which employs many EU nationals and welcomes many EU students, I must be sure we help and support the former, if and when they want to apply for settled status, and reassure the latter as required. I must make sure that racism – or any other kind of -ism – does not raise its ugly head within our walls just because we are now outside the EU and someone might want to see some people as ‘other’ and therefore fair game for insults and worse. I hope no one in the College thinks like this, but vigilance will be needed.

As a scientist I need to focus on anything I could do to do to ensure that UK science is not set massively back by our departure. The news on Tier 1 visas is welcome, but slightly cosmetic; that is not where the biggest problems for UK science lies. We need to worry, not just about ‘exceptional talent’, but all those who contribute to what has been (and I hope will continue to be) a world-leading community: the postdocs and technicians in particular, who haven’t (yet) reached the heady heights of ‘exceptional talent’ but who are nevertheless essential to the more senior folk who will get fast-tracked into the country. We know these key but more junior people are not likely to be particularly well paid, so any salary thresholds introduced into visas at other levels will need to be carefully watched. Our whole enterprise may founder if we lose too many of these vital and smart individuals.

I have frequently written about my admiration for the ERC (e.g. here), having watched it at close quarters as a former Scientific Council member, and this is another area which is likely to be hugely important for the scientific community (and here I mean not just scientists in the standard, narrow English meaning of the word, but the much broader sense to include social scientists and researchers in the humanities too). Can we associate with the new HorizonEurope programme or can we not?

It’s such a fundamental question to which, of course, as yet there is no glimmer of an answer. And even if an Association Agreement is fixed within the next 11 months – an extremely tall order; it took Switzerland about two years to be readmitted into the EU fold after their own referendum on Croatian workers excluded them – what will it mean? The UK has been extraordinarily successful, winning more from the ERC than its contribution amounts to and usually winning more grants than any other country. Continuing to take out more than it puts in seems almost inevitably to be an unacceptable outcome for the EU to grant.

We should recognize that investment in science potentially benefits everyone – through reinvigorating the economy, through solving our major societal challenges and through enabling better decision-making by our policy-makers. We must not allow anyone to think scientists wishing to see protection of funding are merely self-interested. Too often I fear the scientific community comes across this way.

The ERC’s focus on excellence as the sole criterion when judging proposals has made it stand out, but it does not mean that the work funded does not have major impact and societal benefits. The 11 years of the ERC have been extraordinarily successful. A review of the research it has funded demonstrated just how much the work has been seminal and innovative in ideas and impact. If formal association cannot be achieved, how can we replicate its strengths within our domestic sphere? The Smith and Reid Review provides a set of plausible alternatives to consider, but the devil will be the detail of any new funding as much as in the money. With the government’s pledge of a significant uplift in funding for science, the money may even (for once) not be the primary challenge. On the other hand it could turn out that the ARPA-like entity now so much in the news (see the recent collection of essays published by Policy Exchange) swallows up much of the public money uplift for its own more targetted purposes.

But, money aside, there are other problems that the UK will face without access to HorizonEurope and specifically the ERC. According to the Royal Society’s 2018 factsheet, around 17% of researchers in the UK came from the EU, compared with 12% from the entire rest of the world. In Cambridge, about 15% of the academic staff are EU nationals. If visas for visiting researchers are forthcoming without months of waiting or high cost (and not, as I said before, just for the most senior), maybe these people will still want to come. But the costs for healthcare, for dependents and so on may make us pretty unattractive as a destination by comparison with simply moving within the EU. My main concern in the absence of an Association Agreement, however, is that the ‘brightest and best’ the Government is prone to refer to will wish to remain in a country where they can still access HorizonEurope funding. The ERC’s prestige and success mean that to opt to remain in – let alone relocate to – a country from which applications cannot be made, when as an EU national living within mainland Europe the option will stay on the table, may seem a quixotic choice.

I know anecdotally how much these concerns have been and are being expressed by EU academics already well-established here. Some of them have already left; many more are sitting tight waiting to see what happens. Well, we’ll all know soon what the answer is. I fear that the EU brain drain will rapidly increase from a steady flow to a flood if we are excluded from Horizon2020. Putting more money into the system by whatever mechanism is unlikely to stem that flood, however welcome many of us will find it. Our research and our communities will be the poorer for not being part of the wider scientific endeavour. Our children and our grandchildren will look back in astonishment.

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