Yet Another Source of Inequality?

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Athene Donald

It is far too early to know what the long-term social, economic and educational impacts of the current pandemic are. However, some predictions are easier to make than others. One unfortunate but obvious side-effect is the perpetuation and accentuation of inequality. This is obviously true when it comes to schooling: if you don’t have a quiet room (or a room of one’s own, as Virginia Wolff would have it) or access to a decent computer, laptop or otherwise, and unlimited wifi, you’re going to find studying much harder than if all these are to hand. Putting it crudely, on average middle class kids will fare better than those with two long-term unemployed parents. The latter may even be struggling to provide a decent diet or ever leave their high-rise flats, with all the consequent impact on mental health and well-being. Circumstances will conspire against them when it comes to home-schooling. Disadvantage will be even more entrenched. Similar issues will arise in our university populations too.

However, there is another source of inequality that will continue to resound in the years ahead: the challenges for carers may well be masked on future CVs, but that does not mean they will not have been real. Already I have read two articles highlighting the problems for academics and there have probably been many more in different media. The first, in Nature was written by a woman, an academic social demographer who ‘studies how families manage household and paid work’. Alessandra Minello (University of Florence) states

When married mothers and fathers in the United States are compared, the former spend almost twice as much time on housework and childcare. In the gender-egalitarian countries of northern Europe, women still do almost two-thirds of the unpaid work. Even among heterosexual couples with female breadwinners, women do most of the care work.

And asks, as she struggles to record online lectures while her two-year old son blows his trumpet in the background:

Will anyone in the academic community take into account our unbalanced approach to family care and work? No. All of us will participate together in open competition for promotion and positions, parents and non-parents alike.

And at that point I’d like to pause. The answer to that question does not need to be ‘no’. The evidence is accumulating – as the second article in The Lily makes plain – that by and large, as the first writer claimed, caring responsibilities are not shared equally by gender. This US article explicitly looks at what is happening right now, during the COVID19 lockdown, when it comes to academic paper submissions. It seems – for the journals and their editors considered in the article and by looking at what is being uploaded to preprint servers – the impact is already very obvious. Women are submitting fewer papers. We don’t need to rely on anecdote when this quantitative information is already visible. From Elizabeth Hannon, the deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

and from Anna Watts, keeping an eye on the preprint server at the arXiv

So, my first request is to ask all journal editors to monitor what is happening since lockdown started – shall we say March 15th, although it clearly varies by country – and for the three months after lockdown ends. It will take at least that long for those – overwhelmingly women, but by no means only them – who have been metaphorically juggling their day job with home schooling, toddler-care and other caring responsibilities, to begin to get back to their usual levels of productivity. Let’s gather hard statistics as fast as possible, by gender, and compare these with the same period last year when life was ‘normal’.

Secondly, my question is for every academic employer: how are you going to factor in this abnormal period when making future judgements about individuals? Panels need to consider not just equality – which means, as the first author implies will be the default case, treating everyone equally regardless of what this period has meant for them. They need also and at least as importantly to consider equity. Would it be unreasonable to have, for the next several years depending on how long the current circumstances prevail, a question on a CV asking what personally transpired during the pandemic? Not as a judgement on personal lives, but in order to permit due allowance to be made. It would be all the easier in a narrative CV to ask how an applicant handled juggling conflicting demands, as well as possibly dealing with shielding or their own prolonged ill health. Juggling is, after all, a fundamental skill every academic needs to have. Proof that a candidate has it should be a plus. Working when life is easy – such as when your partner is handling the childcare, home-schooling, cooking and cleaning or if you are footloose and fancy-free – should only score you so many brownie points when it comes to grants written at this time or papers submitted.

The ERC has long had a crude rule of thumb for mothers of an extra 18 months in every eligibility window per child born. Different mothers will feel this is or is not an adequate way of dealing with what are very personal circumstances, but at least there is an easily calculated allowance.  (For men, proof of time actually spent on paternity leave needs to be provided.) Should the community accept an equivalent approach to an allowance in the current crisis?

As a straw man let me propose that for every child-month you are responsible for (whether you are the father or mother, but you need to have had the responsibility; for dual-parenting couples, simply make it every two months of childcare) you can claim an allowance of either one paper, one grant or one book chapter, with some similar formula for other personal circumstances to offset the opportunities for those who have it ‘easy’ right now. (Minello proposed essentially stopping the tenure clock for the duration of the lockdown by classing it as caring leave, but I think this is an insufficient response to such challenging circumstances.)

The devil of any such scheme would not only be in the detail, but the policing of it. How many people would attempt to claim that responsibility when actually their own contribution to the household was one hour per day? Nevertheless, I’d like to start this important conversation going. How is the academic world going to ensure that all the advances that have been made on gender-equity aren’t pushed back for a generation of ECRs? What steps are they prepared to take to factor in these unprecedented days? And can they reassure the ECRs that the question ‘what did you do during the pandemic?’ is meant to permit due allowance to be factored in, not a way of tripping the candidate up or castigating them for caring about caring.

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What Should You Be Doing Now?

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Athene Donald

One of the questions you ought not to pose to someone – be it a mentor, supervisor or sponsor – is ‘what should I do?’ Because, the answer has to be: ‘that’s up to you’. There is no uniquely right career path, there is no right order in which to tick things off your career bucket list or boxes to tick all of which are the sine qua non to get you to the destination you want. There are, of course, plenty of career paths that may be wrong for you, or which take you into a dead end or facilitate career suicide, as well as a huge range of other paths that will all lead somewhere satisfactory, however different from each other. By all means ask ‘would this be career suicide?’ but my strong advice is do not ask a ‘should’ question.

I have learnt, from being at the receiving end of this question at different times, that it is an unhelpful way to explore options. The person being asked cannot tell the questioner what they should do, although they can – and should (!) – lay out a range of options as they see them. They can try to tease out how the questioner reacts to a bit of digging around the enquiry. Getting someone to elucidate why a particular option appears to be attractive with questions such as: what appeals to you about this option; where do you want it to take you in the next year or 5 years; why is it better than what you’re doing already; what skills will it teach you to get you to where you want to be in 10 years? All these may be helpful in encouraging someone to get beyond the uncertainty they appear to be facing if they pose a ‘what should I do?’ question.

I believe that many people who ask that question actually do have a preferred position, but they want someone else to validate it for them, to give them some confidence. To tell them that what they want – or perhaps fear – is indeed the right path for them and they should go ahead. But it would be better for all concerned if they approached the question with a different emphasis. For instance, by asking someone more experienced what pitfalls they might encounter if they went down the route they are tempted by. And, equally validly, ask if they do go ahead and do what they (privately) really do want to do will it cut off avenues that they didn’t mean to truncate. I know I have been as guilty as anyone else of asking these questions in the past. During times of most uncertainty I think I wanted someone else to solve my ‘problems’, but that is exactly what no one else can do. That is exactly why it’s the wrong question to ask.

Overall, though, realising that you can reach the same destination by different routes may relieve the pressure on any single decision. If I look around my fellow Heads of House in Cambridge – Masters, Principals, Provosts and so on, since different Colleges title the role in many different ways – we are a varied bunch. Admittedly I don’t suppose a single one of us set out at 21 with this as a life goal, but it is interesting to note just how wildly different our routes have been. Relatively few (much fewer than historically) are career academics. Of the five who started their roles at the beginning of this academic year, two come from Ambassadorial roles, one from politics and one from the media, plus Sally Davies who, as former CMO will, no doubt, be watching the unfolding crisis with experienced eyes. (Did I mention all five are women; it has made an enormous difference to the feel of meetings where all Heads of House are present, virtually or otherwise?) However unlikely it is that a young person may yearn to be the head of an Oxbridge College, nevertheless this example demonstrates that there are multiple paths to a particular end point.

If, as an academic or would-be academic reading this, you think that that same logic does not apply to you because you know you want to be a professor and you know there is only one way to go about it, I would still say that that is not true. Amongst my fellow Heads of House, amongst the small group of five of us (three women, two men) who are also FRSs, I would highlight Jane Clarke, President of Wolfson College, whose career path was not what you might imagine such a person would have had. She left university with a first-class degree and then went into school-teaching, not returning to study for a PhD till her 40’s. Yet still, despite that unusual start, she made it ‘to the top’ of the academic tree, winning notable prizes en route. Or, I could mention another example of a female chemist who didn’t even enter university in the usual way of things at 18 but who has also gone on to great things: Carol Robinson. FRS and currently President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, she took a long career break after her PhD to raise her three children before returning and making her research mark. She has the unique distinction of being the first female professor in both Cambridge and Oxford Chemistry Departments.

So if you are feeling desperate at home because you cannot get to the lab bench and finish some crucial experiments, or are tearing your hair out because your caring responsibilities are absorbing all your energies and there is no peace to be had, I would encourage you not to despair. These months may not, after all, derail you in the way you are fearing. You just can’t tell. Perhaps you can find some good in them. Many of you will be perfecting the art of multitasking, sitting with a toddler on your lap while attempting to prepare online teaching materials, or helping an older child with their assignments while part of your brain is mentally attempting to make sense of the last data you collected. Let me remind you, multitasking is an extraordinarily valuable skill in all walks of life and one to be prized.

Furthermore, that time when your brain is half thinking about what is going on around you in the home, but half flying off to your science, need not be time lost. I can certainly personally identify with this quote from Randy Schekman (2013 Nobel Prize winner):

My ideas often came when I couldn’t be doing anything else…Actually my best ideas come when I’m sitting in a seminar room and the speaker is droning on with an excessive detail and it’s so boring…but I can’t get up and leave….and I daydream about my own work and that’s a most productive time.

Replace seminar with child (not that I’m suggesting your child is boring, exactly, but I’m sure you know what I mean) and you can see that maybe creativity can still be achieved even in the current dire state of the world and removed from your department as you are likely to be. And then remember that all paths are different and unique and any one particular episode does not necessarily lead to the death of your dreams. Finally, put away the ‘should’s’ in your vocabulary and just try to stay afloat until the world finds its new normal.

 

 

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We’re All in This Together

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Athene Donald

If life were other, if we weren’t all ‘wfh’ and trying to stay sane as well as productive, today I would be putting the finishing touches to a talk I was due to give at the end of the week to graduate students at another university. Being the kind of person who always worries I’ll be struck down by an incapacitating migraine at the wrong moment, I tend not to leave talk-writing to the 11th hour/ on the train. So, I should currently be putting together ideas about the joys and challenges of interdisciplinary science.

Interdisciplinary science is of course nothing new. The scientists of previous centuries cared nothing for what we now term disciplines. Thomas Young (1773-1829) will be most familiar to the average physicist because of his eponymous experiment, Young’s slits, or – if more mechanically minded – the elastic modulus bearing his name. He was, however, a not very successful physician who got interested in vision and hence started thinking about the wave-like nature of light. He also – just to prove he really was a polymath who simply didn’t identify an arts-science divide – had a hand in decoding the Rosetta Stone, being an excellent linguist. Not for nothing was a biography of him by Andrew Robinson entitled ‘The Last Man who Knew Everything‘.

However, by the time we got to the mid-late Victorian age, disciplines and dividing lines started to appear in society and in education. The battles between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold pitted science against arts as to what should be taught in schools. Universities started creating new streams; at least Cambridge opted (1851) for the still-going-strong Tripos of Natural Sciences, keeping breadth in sciences, sometimes requiring a bit more too. (My memory is that in Chemistry – although not my own subject of Physics – graduate students of my day had to learn a smattering of German, because that was still regarded as the language of Chemistry research. No more.)

The wonderful thing about the Natural Sciences Tripos – which in hindsight I deeply regret I did not avail myself of – was the opportunity not to decide irrevocably upon entry that ‘you were a physicist’ or even that ‘you were a physical scientist’. The option of combining physics with some biology was there, and still is. Ultimately specialisation is required, but at least you can attempt subjects not available (typically) at A level, such as Earth Sciences or Materials Science, in your first year as well as the ‘obvious’ ones. Three subjects plus maths make up the first year and each year students narrow down their choices reaching specialisation in years 3 and 4. Contrary to what I used to believe when Physics was a 3 year course in the Tripos, the word Tripos does not imply a three part/three year programme (and for ‘clarity’ within the Cambridge system, the three parts were Parts IA, IB and II, now followed by a fourth year Part III); it instead, allegedly, refers to the three-legged stool candidates historically sat on for their end-of-degree viva.

I digress, as seems to be an inevitable part of failing to concentrate properly during lockdown. Interdisciplinarity is now back in ‘fashion’, if I can phrase it like that. My early forays into working on biological material within a Physics department were frowned upon, explicitly and fairly depressingly vociferously – this was in the ‘80s. But, of course, working at the interface with biology is now seen as entirely mainstream, even if how – for instance – to assess any such interdisciplinary working within the (paused) REF remains an issue for some. I would like to think the work of the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel that I chair may have put some people’s minds at rest, but I know full well not everyone will be satisfied or reassured.

For a new research student, however, deciding how interdisciplinary to be can be an understandable worry. If you have an eye on a future academic career, is it better to stick with the straight and narrow rather than run the risk of being a jack-of-all-trades? I would recommend you follow your passion. If working on very detailed pure research in a narrow area excites you go for it, but if you like seeing connections where none have been spotted before, if your niche sits at the junction of different fields – labelled by discipline simply by virtue of the way subjects are taught at undergraduate level, as often as not, – then you should not be afraid to tackle it.

In a typically snide remark from Jim Watson about Rosalind Franklin (in a paper in Nature in 1983), he points to her ‘monodisciplinary’ approach to science as what held her back. “Rosalind Franklin was a very intelligent woman, but she really had no reason for believing that DNA was particularly important. She was trained in physical chemistry. I don’t think she’d ever spent any length of time with people who thought DNA was important. And she certainly didn’t talk to Maurice [Wilkins] or to John Randall, then the professor at Kings.”

One doesn’t have to agree with his attitude to her in particular, or women in general, to recognize that a narrow viewpoint can hold back progress in research. The person who thinks outside a disciplinary box, may just be the one who wins – as is very obviously the outcome in this case – the prize, Nobel or otherwise. Watson started off with a Zoology degree, but by working with Francis Crick – a physicist who was meant to be studying the X-ray diffraction of proteins and polypeptides – simply because he chose to (sometimes to the annoyance of Crick’s head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Lawrence Bragg), the ultimate breakthrough in analysing DNA was possible.

So, had I been preparing my talk today, instead of blogging, I would be concluding by emphasising the joy, importance and relevance of moving beyond traditional bounds of discipline. We need researchers of every variety to make progress, something as true and as urgent now in the coronavirus era as ever. Epidemiologists need to work with immunologists, mathematic modellers with structural biologists, physicists with vets. We are, quite literally, all in this together.

 

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Is Losing a President Careless?

Posted on April 8, 2020 by Athene Donald

So what really is going on in Brussels regarding the ERC? I have had no direct contact with them in recent months, nor ever met Professor Ferrari, the short-lived and outgoing (outgone?) President. I cannot spill any beans because I have no beans to spill, but I did spend six years sitting on the Scientific Council (ScC) and perhaps can read a little between the lines. The extraordinary statement that they have released in the wake of Ferrari’s ‘resignation’, deprecates his own statement with the damning indictment that it ‘at best is economical with the truth.’

I served on the Scientific Council from 2013-18. I joined as legal niceties around the construction of the new Horizon2020 programme were being worked out, niceties which – I must admit – did not particularly excite me at the time. In hindsight I could see just how important thrashing out the details were: of what could and could not be funded, in which ‘instruments’, on what timescales, with what groupings making decisions on different parts of the grant-awarding and just how subsequent monitoring should be carried out. In the UK we may have been told, in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, just how full of bureaucracy Brussels was and what a waste of time it was. There is undoubtedly bureaucracy in Brussels, but some of it is very necessary, as the current saga will make plain.

So let me correct some misunderstandings. The President of the ERC Scientific Council is not the ‘EU Science Chief’ as the FT, who broke the story today, described him. Since Anne Glover left there has been no such person, despite how newspapers have described Ferrari. Nor is he ‘the man they [the Council] chose to lead them three months ago.’ On the contrary, the press release issued on his appointment makes very clear how the appointment was made:

‘The appointment of Professor Mauro Ferrari is the outcome of a rigorous selection process in which an independent Search Committee made a thorough study of all applications received and, on that basis, prepared a short list of candidates for the position. The list was submitted to the ERC Scientific Council, which channelled its comments to European Commissioner Carlos Moedas, who made the final decision.’

The Scientific Council may, if the process I saw during my own stint was replicated this time around, have had some minor input into the choice, but they certainly did not themselves ‘choose’ Ferrari – or indeed anyone else. One can argue about the rights and wrongs of this decoupling from the Scientific Council, but that is how it is done. Just as when new members are appointed, the Council and its President are not involved in that process either. Indeed, there were times when the Council was in the dark about who was being appointed when, almost until the day they turned up at a Council meeting.

What is the mission of the ERC? To quote their own web-pages (already updated to note the end of the tenure of Ferrari)

‘The ERC’s mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence.

The ERC complements other funding activities in Europe such as those of the national research funding agencies, and is a flagship component of Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Research Framework Programme for 2014 to 2020.’

Their mission is not to solve societal problems – there are other EU programmes to cover these – but to do frontier science. That is not to say they don’t contribute; of course they do. In 2018 an independent review of a random cross-section of grants said

‘Almost half of the projects have already left their mark on the economy, society and policy-making, whilst around three quarters are foreseen to do so on the medium- and long-term.’

That’s not a bad hit rate for a young funding agency.

If Ferrari thought, while simultaneously accepting that ERC’s role is to fund ‘elites of excellence’ bottom-up research, that

‘in my idealistic fantasies, I thought that at times like these, the very best should pick up their best weapons, and go to the frontier, to the front-lines, to defeat this formidable enemy. I argued that this was not the time for scientific governance to worry excessively about the subtleties of the distinctions between Bottom-Up versus Top-Down research….’

he obviously had not mastered his brief as leading an organisation with the mission I’ve listed above. Legally, they were in no place to do what he was asking and the lawyers would have had a field day if they’d tried.

However, although this difference of opinion may have been dressed up simply as an argument about whether or not the ERC should directly fund some COVID-19 research, it is clear from the Scientific Council’s extraordinary statement, as un-Brussels-like as it is possible to imagine, that the differences ran far deeper and more painfully. To quote just a tiny part of their published statement:

 ‘During his three-month term in office, Professor Ferrari displayed a complete lack of appreciation for the raison-d’être of the ERC to support excellent frontier science, designed and implemented by the best researchers in Europe. … He did not understand the context of the ERC within the EU’s Research and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020.’

And later that he

‘displayed a lack of engagement with the ERC, failing to participate in many important meetings, spending extensive time in the USA and failing to defend the ERC’s programme and mission when representing the ERC.’

These are damning words indeed – you may want to read the whole statement! I know that the Scientific Council will not have made their statement lightly. It would seem – I’m speculating here – that within three months he had already lost the trust of the Council and the COVID-19 story was a last straw, albeit maybe it looked like a convenient issue on which Ferrari could hang his resignation hat. I know Oxbridge Colleges occasionally lose their Masters/Principals/ Wardens etc at high speed, and it must always be down either to mismatched expectations or extraordinary carelessness. The former would appear to be at play in this situation.

I should conclude by saying that you should not not go away thinking that the ERC research is so ‘frontier’ it is irrelevant to COVID-19. You can find a compilation of funded projects of relevance to the current pandemic here, crossing all three of their scientific domains. I know that if a grant-holder wanted to divert some of their resources to address a part of this crisis, that would be perfectly feasible for them, as the Scientific Council’s statement makes clear. If the EU wants to fund an integrated programme on COVID-19, they have plenty of mechanisms open to them to do so, as Ferrari himself admits in his statement. The ERC has neither the legal mandate nor the appetite to do so themselves. Their statement makes plain their total disappointment at the culmination of what, as has now become manifest, must clearly have been three very unhappy months.

 

 

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The Story of a Piano

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Athene Donald

As working practices are turned upside down, as our whole pattern of live is disrupted in ways that are unlikely to feel pleasant, I am sure turning to music will be the solace of many. I hear – as confirmation of this – that sales of pianos and sheet music, and downloading of music teaching apps etc, have all risen in recent weeks.

Music may be of use to soothe a toddler’s tantrums or your own (particularly if you are also in bed with a temperature); it may provide some light relief in the current darkness or revive memories of happier times. Maybe, if you are on furlough but not dealing with full-on caring responsibilities, you might consider returning to the instrument you played in your youth but which has been neglected in recent years. I can imagine the idea of finally mastering that Grade 5 piece that used to defeat you, being seen as an attractive challenge all these years later, at least fleetingly. Had I a piano in the house, I’m sure I would like to think I would turn to it for some company and cheerfulness, albeit Grade 5 was probably an optimistic view of where my lessons got me to all those years ago.

However, sadly, I don’t have such a piano. The one I learned on has gone to a much better home, somewhere I’m really happy it’s gone to. It’s the home where the fifth generation of women in my family can get to play it, albeit not in any particularly constructive way yet – my elder granddaughter is only 3 after all. But the piano’s history cheers me.

The piano in question was given to my grandmother as a wedding present by her husband-to-be when they got married in 1917. He was a captain in the army, over in France for much of the war. I wish I had talked more to him about his experiences there than I managed, although I do recall him telling me just how ghastly it was to attend a court martial (presumably for cowardice) as the note-taker. But do I remember him telling me how awful the war as overall? No, I don’t. Perhaps he simply buried most of the memories. He was more willing to tell me about his second world war experiences, when he did his part in England, being too old for active service abroad. Nevertheless, he was able to be in London to marry my grandmother in May 1917, and this piano was his gift.

My grandmother, according to family lore, could have been a concert pianist (at least in principle). She was certainly very good, even in her 60s and 70s when I knew her. She would still sometimes sit down and play – for others as much as herself. She would accompany us (we all lived together) when I was practicing my viola, or when my sister and I were learning choral music parts. The main music I associate with her was Chopin – there were bound volumes of his music, as well as of all the Beethoven Sonatas, also I think part of the original wedding present.  One Polonaise in particular (the ‘Military’) was the one I most strongly associate with her and that was the one I would always ask her to play when I was a child.

My mother also learned on this piano. In my memory, she was an excellent sight-reader – she would also accompany my squawks on the viola and make encouraging noises as I moved up through the grades. However, technically, I suspect I ended up being marginally better than her, albeit much less competent as a sight-reader (something I discovered in due course when I tried to accompany my husband or my own child on violin). I don’t think she particularly enjoyed playing; singing was much more her forte, of which she did a lot in a semi-professional capacity.

In due course I came along and had various unsuccessful attempts at learning as a small child. My grandmother and I did not manage to set up a successful teacher-pupil relationship. As when she tried to teach me to drive, I’m afraid we fought more than we progressed. However, in due course, as my viola playing progressed, I was fortunate enough to be offered lessons through the generosity of the ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) which paid for a second instrument’s tuition once I’d reached Grade 5 on the viola.  Those were the days when music in schools was well supported by local councils. This opportunity for formal piano lessons I seized, although I told my lovely teacher at the school that I didn’t want to bother with scales and studies – I was by then 15 or 16 I’d guess – as there was no future in it and I wasn’t going to take any piano exams. That was my decision, but one in hindsight I probably regret.

Anyhow, I had fun playing in these mid-late teen years, working through various books of assorted classical pieces for the novice piano player plus some of the easier Mendelssohn Songs Without Words (also, I think, in the bound volumes of my grandmother). During my gap year – although it did not go by that name – messing around on the piano was a great source of recreation. Needless to say, when I went to university, all piano playing lapsed. Nevertheless, as soon as my husband and I bought our house I requested that, along with sundry bits of furniture, the piano might come to Cambridge from my mother’s house.

Here, in due course, my children learned and, in the case of my daughter, kept learning throughout her school years so that she had duly reached Grade 8 by the time she too went to university. Then history repeated itself. When she settled down and bought a house, the request came from her for us to ship the piano north. And there it is, along with all my grandmother’s, my mother’s and my own music. Ready for the 5th generation of learners. I hope they will make good use of it. It is a lovely piano, of no particularly notable pedigree by manufacturer, but it was always a joy to play even if, by now, its action may not be what it once was.

So, for me, it has to be Radio 3 for my musical companion. No chance to improve my own piano-playing, but plenty of time to enjoy the music as I sit inside during lockdown.

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