Working From Home

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Athene Donald

Hugh Kearns wrote this week

These are extraordinary times all around the globe. The tweet above comes from Australia (at least that’s where Hugh is based; I assume he is there). My last blogpost referred to being kind to others. This tweet tells us to be kind to ourselves.

In the UK, confined as we are to our homes however ill set-up they may be for home-working, it is easy to think ‘I’m being unproductive’ and thoughts like that will only make us yet more unproductive. In the current circumstances, particularly as we adjust, get to grips with new technology, struggle with additional caring responsibilities, timetable our shopping to try to find an unbusy time when there is still food in the shops, never mind get one’s head around the changing government statements, it is hard to find mental space actually to think.

I have heard one person tell me that this week they had managed to sit down and look at data they had been failing to look at for the last two years – and make sense of it. I was impressed. Most people are, like me I suspect, much more in the camp of just getting by, doing what has to be done and waiting for that future moment when some sort of internal adjustment has taken place sufficiently to accommodate the massive changes in our lives. Uncertainty is always challenging and, whatever stage one is at in one’s career, uncertainty will be our constant companion for a long time to come.

As a scientist it is tempting to try to read the many articles appearing in learned journals or a journalist’s analysis of what is happening around the world. However, I am afraid – as with Brexit – I am largely trying to eschew this temptation because it messes with my head. My Twitter feed alerts me to the headlines and, for now, that is really all I can handle.

“Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own.”

said Charles de Gaulle. Maybe de Gaulle managed that, but for many that is a bridge too far. As long as I am busy – and decision-making in College, interacting in new ways with colleagues near and far is most certainly keeping me both stretched and busy – I can keep going. I hope I am as capable of making decisions now as ever. But it is when the flurry of emails eases (as it does occasionally!), or when there is no immediate demand on my time, that I feel a sense of helplessness, impotence and uncertainty at what is happening at the world. I can internally rage at politicians near and far, but that would just consume me; I try to avoid doing that.

That is when the mantra of being kind to oneself is so important. Do what you can and remember “There are no wrong feelings.” as this article from New York spells out. It is too easy to believe that everyone else is managing better than you, balancing the new demands, the new technology and the new external circumstances. They may just be better at masking their feelings, although maybe some people really are coping fine. I read somewhere that committed introverts may come into their own now, not needing affirmation from others that the rest of us in lockdown (let alone self-isolation) are struggling to find.

When my mother died some years ago, I struggled with the idea of the ‘proper’ way to grieve. Why couldn’t I cry? How did other people manage to ‘get over it’? I learned then, there is no right way to grieve, just as there is no right way to feel about the current crisis. We may all be in it together – appropriately, at least 2m apart – but that doesn’t mean we will all feel the same. Or that we will all exhibit our feelings in the same way. Or that those who exhibit outward calm, competence or assurance are actually feeling that. I have always counselled young researchers struggling with impostor syndrome, that just because someone else looks confident doesn’t mean that’s what they feel under the surface. The same applies here.

Be kind to yourself. Do what you can, recognize that the average human cannot change mental gears at speed, or adjust to a different (and scary) physical world without a hiccough. Technology will make life easier for many of us because we can stay in touch, verbally and visually if not physically, for personal and professional contacts. But if that paper doesn’t get written at the speed you feel it should, don’t beat yourself up. Forgive yourself for looking at your Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/ Guardian feed at regular intervals, or creating a cute cat gif (not my own style of dealing with the situation). Or curling up with the comfort books of your childhood from time to time, baking a cake or being overcome with a fit of tidying (this last is also not my own style for coping with difficult circumstances). We all differ. If you want to sign up to online Mandarin classes or do regular aerobics with some fitness goddess, so be it, but don’t be surprised if the mental bandwidth turns out to be lacking.

Maybe in time, lockdown will feel like a new normal, but personally I’m hoping it doesn’t last long enough for that to occur. However, home-working for many in HEIs is likely to remain the norm for more weeks, or even months, than the duration of strict lockdown. I am working on my technology skills, with the remote assistance of the very kind IT team in my College who forgive my ignorance of simple facts, so that I can be as efficient as possible and derive most benefit from all the virtual meetings that I’m involved in. I’m conscious that, as yet, these virtual meetings feel more tiring than being physically present in a room with colleagues, even as I save energy from not rushing up and down to London regularly.

Be kind to yourself. Work as hard as your own processes of internal self-adjustment permit, and in time (I assume) things will get easier.

 

 

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In Time of Crisis – Be Kind

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Athene Donald

In A Time of Crisis

You might think that our present, extraordinary and challenging global circumstances might call for ‘patience, flexibility, practicality and ability to withstand misfortune’. All of those traits do indeed need to be practiced now as we, individually and collectively, try to traverse a landscape that changes every day (so far, always in a bad direction). In fact the full quote that prompts me to cite those fine characteristics is ‘The rearing of sheep calls for patience, flexibility, practicality and ability to withstand misfortune.’, a quote from The Last Wolf, a book subtitled The Hidden Springs of Englishness in which the author Robert Winder ascribes much of the Englishman’s character down to sheep-tending in the past. I found I had jotted this sentence down somewhere, because I thought it sounded like the qualities needed to complete a PhD and might form the basis of a blogpost (I still believe that would have been possible), but having stumbled upon it this week in a fit of trying to put some order into my life by a quick tidy up, it seems equally apposite now in a vastly different spirit.

However much we all wish to avoid the misfortune referred to above so we don’t have to withstand it, we can see that the likelihood of gaining far more intimate acquaintance with it than we want is growing all the time. Many comparisons have been made to the much-vaunted if inaccurately viewed ‘spirit of the blitz’, but I must under no circumstances think – as Master of Churchill College – I need to quote Sir Winston at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless I, like probably all the other heads of Cambridge Colleges, am feeling I need mental resources and decision-making skills for which my previous career has not really trained me. But then, that will be equally true of our politicians; very few within the population will have had to deal with anything remotely similar to this crisis, let alone on this scale.

For our students, as for students and school children everywhere, uncertainty and anxiety are rife. Of course. The leadership here, at the centre of the university and in every college, is well aware of this and wish we could make their path smooth. We will all be thinking about how to set fair assessments under the current crisis conditions. I cannot see, personally, we can just wait until the students eventually come back, or cancel the whole year and start again, attractive though that may seem to them: there will be another year of students coming along who equally need to be treated fairly. The challenges for those making decisions about these hugely important matters are enormous, but our first actions have been directed to ensure students’ and staff safety. Our ongoing responsibilities will be to do what we can to ensure the mental well-being of our students, as well as provide continuing educational resources. And, for those who have been unable to leave Cambridge for whatever reason, a safe and supportive environment.

Staff – in whatever kind of job from professor to housekeeper, from admin to catering – are likely to be older than the students, and all the evidence is that that puts them immediately into a higher risk category. Some will have small children to care for, others are responsible for elderly parents; some may have serious underlying health issues themselves or be living with someone who does. We have to recognize that many of the staff will need to go into self-isolation, even if they don’t fall seriously ill. Our resources (leave aside finances) will be severely depleted, possibly for a very long time, but we will continue to support all those students who remain here in college accommodation as best we can.

Trying to make decisions in this fast-changing world is tricky. What seems right under government guidelines one day, may become wrong because superseded by the next day’s diktat. As the leadership team in the college was discussing our next steps last Friday, we realised that the PMs statement had just shifted the ground again. Maybe on Monday we need to fix our final ‘meeting’ of the day (virtual of course) later, so that we can keep track of the next set of advice given in the daily press conference and incorporate it into our decisions.

Last week was a crash course in new technologies – the university rolled out MS Teams faster than planned; the College was already on the case. It had previously been loaded on my computer, but I’d only had occasion to trial it just once, the week before (for an external meeting). There remains much I, for one, don’t understand about it. Still, even at the basic level I can use it; it works for the current purpose.  We will all learn experientially.

Nationally (if not globally) we will have to see how the internet copes with everyone relying so heavily on this infrastructure to communicate with work or loved ones. We are, in this sense at least, a lucky generation because we have the possibility of keeping in touch, even visually, across continents. You only have to read Victorian novels to know the difference the telegram made to their communications. But what is a telegram – probably only sent in some official capacity anyhow, possibly referring to death – compared with beaming up a face on WhatsApp or Skype (insert alternative technology of your choice), even when that face is on the other side of the world? At least, if we are in lockdown, we have many ways to keep in touch rather than having to rely on a letter which would take 3-6 months to arrive, if it did at all.

The loneliness of lockdown or isolation will be at least partially mitigated by such means, but nevertheless for many, mental health as much as physical will be a concern. Or, alternatively, in a family the close confinement with difficult others, even if they are dear, may also cause enormous stress. As someone said to me, only half-joking, the murder and suicide rates may soar. This pandemic will cause upheaval for everyone, and possibly far worse.

Individually we each have a responsibility to follow the guidelines. The predictions if we don’t are even more catastrophic than the terrifying trajectory we already seem to be set on. (Watch this animation if you don’t yet believe this simple fact.) But, in the UK at least, we are not yet collectively confined behind our front doors. It is spring. For our mental well-being getting out and ‘smelling the roses’, or at least observing the appearance of buds and blossom, should form part of our daily routine. In Cambridge the daffodils are probably already past their peak, some magnolias and primroses are out, the hedges are greening. It is good to notice and enjoy these things when otherwise the world feels so out of kilter and scary. I will be doing my best to derive pleasure and strength where I can.

But above all now we need to remember we are part of a global community in trouble. Be kind, be thoughtful, look out for others when you can (safely) do so. Part of doing that lies in obeying the guidelines and mandates as they unfold, however unpleasant and difficult. And keep yourself safe.

 

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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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