Science and Government, Science in Government

Posted on November 15, 2019 by Athene Donald

Before pre-election purdah set in, two interesting reports got published, one with more fanfare than the other. The one with more publicity attached was the long-awaited report (Changes and Choices) on options for future international funding by Adrian Smith and Graeme Reid. It is of course impossible currently to predict anything regarding our future relationship with Europe. If and when Brexit happens then everyone seems agreed we’d like to associate with HorizonEurope – but will they let us? How long would it take to get an agreement? What form would such an agreement take and would it be essentially pay-as-you-go/can’t take more out than you put in (as we currently do)? Given there are plenty of uncertainties including budgetary wrangling in Brussels for the next framework programme, the UK may not be attempting to negotiate at a particularly good moment (whenever that is).  It should not surprise anyone, then, that the conclusions of the report were inconclusive, as it were; there are no obvious or easy answers except we must do everything we can to ensure the UK stays open to researchers from around the world and that we invest sufficiently in science (with all parties committed to an uplift in spending as a percentage of GDP ), including through international collaborations.

Since the report was (I believe) completed, the PM has thrown a new joker into the pack in the form of the ARPA-like organisation introduced in the Queen’s Speech, the brainchild – as the rumours have it – of Dominic Cummings. If there is to be a new agency outside UKRI to carry out this ARPA-like function, plus another new structure to oversee international funding to replace Framework programmes, we are going to be creating a confusing multiplicity of structures which will probably lead to endless confusion and, one must suspect, inefficiencies of scale. I hope there will – in due course – be some appropriate joined-up thinking.

The second report, longer but probably of less immediate or obvious interest to the majority of scientists, was Realising our Ambition through Science: A Review of Government Science Capability 2019, looking at (as its name suggests) the state of science within government departments. As Norman Lamb, outgoing chair of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee explained, MPs are not exactly rushing to join his committee, a testament to the lack of interest MPs exhibit in science. We need a strong science base within government departments to offset the apparent scientific apathy spelled out in this complaint.

However, my experience at the Departure of Culture, Media and Sports a few years ago highlighted that, at that time there were remarkably few scientists in their teams: one to be precise. (I do know, with the incorporation of the digital brief this has significantly improved since.)  Nevertheless it is a fairly shocking statistic provided in the report that only 24 out of1200 ‘fast streamer’ civil servants are badged with science and engineering, and only 45 out of 400 scientists are on the generalist scheme. That really means there aren’t very many scientists to go around, compared with – say – graduates in PPE or Economics. Every department has a different need, a different composition of scientific workforce and a different culture. However, as the opening sentence of the report’s first recommendation says:

‘Every department should have a clearly defined science system’.

hat is not necessarily the case yet. It probably is hard to do with such low numbers of scientifically-qualified people in many departments.

The advent of UKRI has of late changed the landscape because there are specific funds (part, an unknown amount, of the Strategic Priorities Fund to be precise) which are dedicated to research funding for work with government departments. In order to facilitate this, each department is meant to

‘publish and refresh annually, Areas of Research Interest documents with a view to encouraging extra-mural activity and collaborations and the commissioning of key R+D.’

These documents are starting to appear (15 departments have published theirs). Of course, many topics cross departmental boundaries: AI, data science, demographic issues….- how such topics should best be handled is still to be resolved.

It was interesting to read this report having recently read Jon Agar’s book Science Policy under Thatcher, a fascinating book available free from UCL Press. Agar persuasively argues how Thatcher’s deliberate policy was to take the government right out of ‘near market’ research with the consequence of damaging science leadership within Government.  In some senses Thatcher thought, as a scientist, she knew best and could make key decisions herself. Universities were somehow supposed to pick up the pieces in ways that weren’t expected before the 1980s, and public laboratories, such as RSRE at Malvern which had done so much influential work on liquid crystal displays for instance, were sold off. The latest report is to some extent still attempting to rectify the consequences, one might say damage, that Thatcher’s decision made in our research and innovation landscape. As its recommendation 4 says

‘BEIS…should address the role of Public Laboratories across government in supporting and enabling research and development in the private sector…..’.

There are few Public Laboratories left, but their role needs to be carefully considered. The UK has little equivalent to the German well-funded Fraunhofer Institutes. But

‘Government has a lead role in setting the framework for innovation, marked by the publication of the Industrial Strategy in 2017.’

This includes ‘de-risking’ the early stages of innovation and using procurement as a useful tool as innovations take off. Too much focus has, here as in so many other situations, been paid to value for money rather than wider and perhaps more intangible benefits. Public Laboratories also offer scope to improve the so-called Place agenda, potentially opening up opportunities and jobs in some of the more deprived parts of the country.

Of course, a key part in any system is ensuring the right people both meet each other and know enough about broader contexts. It is good to see Cambridge’s Centre for Science and Policy – which offers fellowships to civil servants to meet up with academic experts in an intensive way – getting a shout out for the excellent work it does (Disclaimer: I am on their Advisory Board). These aspects tie in with the report’s first recommendation regarding an appropriate science system in each department. If civil servants, even if non-experts in science themselves, have a better appreciation of the wider landscape and, with a departmental CSA in place, it should be easier to create a system that recognizes the changing challenges and how policy must interface with the big issues of the day, such as climate change, privacy in the world of social media and an ageing population.

I hope this report gets traction with Government. However, since we don’t know what complexion our Government will have in a few weeks’ time, anything might happen and everything is, as one might say, up for grabs.

 

 

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Bias in Publishing

Posted on November 6, 2019 by Athene Donald

You’ll have heard the story about women whingeing about how their proudly-submitted papers got rejected by a premier journal without being sent out to referees. Or that the comments they received from referees were unduly harsh, but a male colleague’s paper got through on the nod without multiple resubmissions Just a bunch of females having a moan wasn’t it because they can’t hack it? Well, no. Turns out they (we) were right. Gender bias exists in the editorial and refereeing process according to the evidence the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has just published regarding its own journals.

Melinda Duer and I drew attention to the problems in publishing when it comes to women in an article published in Times Higher Education this spring, an article quoted in the RSC report and possibly one of its spurs. We noted that, whereas there was some data regarding a ‘higher bar’ for publishing for women in economics, journals had so far not looked in depth (as far as we could tell) at the issues in the various science disciplines. I am delighted that the RSC has now produced evidence from their own suite of journals highlighting (amongst other hard-hitting points) that, as we suspected:

  • Biases exist at each step of the publishing profile. Many of these biases appear minor in isolation, yet their combined effect puts women at a significant disadvantage.
  • Women are less likely than men to submit to journals with higher impact factors, and they are also more likely to have an article rejected without review.
  • Biases operate at editorial level too. The choice of reviewer and editorial agreement with a review are influenced by gender.

Or rather, I’m not delighted these biases exist, but I am pleased that hard data about the whole process is finding its way into the public domain. The RSC is calling – as we did previously – for publishers to look harder at their own data to identify if similar problems are found in their journals too.

Does this matter? Of course it does. When people wring their hands and enquire why there are fewer women reaching the top of the research ladder little attention has been paid to the role of journals. Publication metrics matter. They matter a great deal when it comes to appointment and promotion, for instance. The infographic below – one of a range of related figures that can be found accompanying the report – shows the steady decline in numbers of women along the publication pipeline.

RSC data

If women are losing out at each stage of the process an additional hurdle is introduced into their careers which will make their life significantly harder on average than for a corresponding man. This isn’t exactly a case of ‘male by default’ at appointment, but it is certainly a case of an uneven playing field which will hinder women moving up the ladder. There comes a point, following setback after setback in getting hard won results published, that a woman may simply feel the game is not worth the candle and quit academia regardless of the quality of her work. This is not good for research. It ceases to be the case that excellence inevitably wins out. We are all the losers, the public as well as the research community.

I was not able to attend the launch of the report, but I understand that various men spoke up about the fact the evidence shows how the current system fails many. I believe Tom Welton went so far as to say something about how the bullies win out, or words to that effect. Too true. Our current system contains perverse incentives and ‘publish or perish’ seems to be one of them. We need to do better.  The University of Cambridge’s 2014 book The Meaning of Success was meant to kickstart a discussion about what we should be valuing in our universities. It failed. For a little while people talked enthusiastically about how we should broaden criteria to take into account other factors, such as mentoring, investing time in training PhD students properly, leading on Athena Swan applications or dutifully fulfilling departmental housekeeping roles. And then the world slipped back into the bigger (or more) is better mode of operation.

The bias introduced by our current systems are highlighted in the recent and not-entirely-satisfactorily-detailed response from UKRI to the request from the Science and Technology Select Committee’s inquiry into the impact of science funding policy on equality, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. The evidence UKRI submitted shows that, for instance, success rates for women are about 2% less than for men across the years reported and they typically apply for – and are awarded smaller grants than men.  When it comes to ethnicity, there was a shocking 10% difference in success rates between white PIs and ethnic minorities for 2018/19. It isn’t surprising, given this evidence, that the number of black professors in the UK is so dismally low. It appears to have taken the hard work of Rachel Oliver (Professor of Materials Science here in Cambridge) and her colleagues to pitch successfully for this topic to be a subject that the Select Committee would explore, to lead to the request from Norman Lamb to UKRI for even this fairly limited data to be released.

It is easy to spout that academia is all about excellence, but in the face of the mounting evidence that bias lurks in many disparate places it is less easy to believe in the truth of the statement. It is more than time that all parts of the academic landscape enumerate the many different places that bias might creep in, collect evidence as to whether it does or does not, and then do something about it. Sometimes it will be within the host department or institution: who supports ECRs writing their first grants? What happens when it comes to internal sifts? Is mentoring always on offer? It might be at a research council panel where bias can (and based on the UKRI data presumably does) creep into evaluation. It could be in the publication part of the ecosystem, as the RSC report highlights. Or it could be in the letters of reference, where gendered language is by now well recognized.

Congratulations to the RSC for their report. Now over to other publishers to scrutinize more than simply how many women they have in their pool of referees and other basic but limited metrics.

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Who’s a Crazy Bitch Then?

Posted on October 27, 2019 by Athene Donald

I was interested to read an article (not such a recent article in fact, but I’ve only just come across it via Twitter links) describing the misogynistic name-calling of senior women in Canadian universities. Headlined ‘The “crazy/bitch” narrative about senior academic women’, the author Jennifer Berdahl, a professor of leadership studies at the University of British Columbia, specialising in gender and diversity, discusses how these words are bandied around to diminish senior women in a department. As she says

‘how could [I have] not seen the misogyny in it?’

referring to her own experience as a grad student when she took the words at face value. As a tenured professor she states,

‘I now wonder about their stories, their silent suffering, and how they processed and coped with the lack of kindness and respect they received from students and colleagues.’

What intrigues me about her essay is that crazy and bitch are not particularly words I associate with misogynistic name-calling in UK academia. It seems to me, from my own experience, that senior women are not so much explicitly insulted in this country as ignored.  Think Miss Triggs in that well-worn 1988 Punch cartoon, where the woman’s words need to be repeated by a man if they are to have any impact. Most women of my acquaintance recognize only too well that feeling of being passed over, their words unheard and their views disregarded. Sitting through committee meeting after committee meeting where you permanently feel invisible is probably as demoralising as name-calling, but it is different. (It is a great relief to me to have got beyond the stage of being invisible; it helps, of course, frequently being the committee chair! I hope in turn I have learned the important art of being inclusive in my chairing, amplifying people’s words where necessary, particularly those of women.)

The words I hear (about myself and others) are different. Some particular favourites – please note the ironic tone – are ‘emotional’, ‘passionate’ and ‘not-a-shrinking-violet’. I’ve certainly been called all of those and felt diminished as well as angry as a result. ‘I can hear you’re getting emotional’ was a particularly obnoxious phrase used to me once to stop me in my tracks (only too successfully) when I was winning an argument. But to be told I was ‘too emotional’ to do something or to take on some role is a phrase I have heard more often than I would like. I used to take it at face value and think, if only I could school my face better or get my feelings completely under control then maybe I’d be taken seriously. It has only been in the last few years I have worked out this wasn’t about emotion per se at all. After all, men get emotional too – they are just more likely to express it by flushed faces (OK, women flush but men have red faces) and raised voices; by table-thumping and throwing things. Oh yes, I’ve had things thrown in my direction, if not actually aimed to hit, and only ever by a man.

Men losing their tempers does still seem to be acceptable behaviour in a way a quivering lip or a moist eye does not seem to be. Being accused of being emotional is not about the actual reaction to what is going on; it is a statement that ‘you ain’t like us and never will be.’ It’s just a slightly more tactful way (to be charitable) of saying you don’t belong and there’s no hope you ever will. All those years of trying to quash what I was feeling in case I lost agency turns out, as far as I can tell, to have been so much wasted effort. I probably still lost agency anyhow. ‘Passionate’ likewise seems to convey, your behaviour is not like mine (i.e. male-by-default), it is a bit too much, OTT, you should reduce your enthusiasm level (these are points I made once before here on this blog). Nevertheless, a quick Google search shows that both Alice Roberts and Brian Cox have been described in various write-ups as passionate, so perhaps I should put aside my aversion to the word and it really is less gendered than I hear it.

But ‘not a shrinking violet’? Could that ever be applied to a man? (I don’t have much time for women being called ‘feisty’ either, because again it doesn’t seem to be applied in the same way to men as being an inappropriate in-your-face way of behaving). These words are designed to make women feel somehow wrong. Nevertheless, to take me back to where I started, crazy is not a word that I have been aware has been applied to me or other women I know. Crazy, with its connotations as horribly applied to Carole Cadwalladr, infamously referred to as ‘crazy cat lady’ by Aaron Banks and his ilk, is clearly a term of insult hurled at powerful women, but it’s not one I recall hearing in the context of female professors. Bitch I have heard, but much less in academia than elsewhere.

So are crazy and bitch more at home in the North American environment than in the UK? I put that question out over Twitter and the limited response I got suggested that the Netherlands was much worse than the UK for remarks like this and that, one optimistic tweep suggested, perhaps we should credit Athena Swan for this relatively benign environment. Or is it that, my academic followers probably being primarily scientists, that STEM subjects – being so very male dominated, certainly in a field like my own – simply ignoring the few women is a more effective strategy than individually naming and shaming them as crazy and bitches? I don’t know and to some extent I don’t care.

Whatever strategy might be implemented for isolating, dehumanising and excluding women – or any minority – needs to be rooted out and eradicated. Women, just like men, come in all shapes and sizes; with varying degrees of empathy and tendencies to being maverick; with more or less patience or subtlety; with a quick temper and/or a ready smile for everyone. We are, let us remember, all equally human. We cannot, must not, assume that crazy is inherently associated with the female of the species (or indeed with cats) or that the characteristics that the word ‘bitch’ conjures up aren’t shared by many men.

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Seeing Red

Posted on October 20, 2019 by Athene Donald

Is anger a good spur to getting on and getting by? The recommendation to use it as a positive force came from three eminent colleagues this past week. I had the enormous pleasure of facilitating (I think that’s the right word) a conversation with a trio of presidents of professional bodies who Katie Perry, Director of the Daphne Jackson Trust, had succeeded in lining up: Julia Goodfellow, President of the Royal Society of Biology, Carol Robinson; President of the Royal Society of Chemistry; and Julia Higgins, immediate past-President, by a mere two weeks, of the Institute of Physics. These three Presidents (all Dames) were left to my interrogating skills at the end of the Biennial Daphne Jackson Day. I would like to think a good time was had by all. (If you don’t know about the Daphne Jackson Trust, of which I am a Patron, do read about it. It exists to facilitate returners to science research and is going from strength to strength under Katie Perry’s leadership.)

Daphne Jackson From L to R: Julia Higgins, Athene Donald, Carol Robinson and Julia Goodfellow

During the course of our hour-long conversation, anger – and wearing red – were both proposed as good ways to overcome a setback or rejection. Julia Goodfellow described donning her brightest red jacket when she’d just been thwarted or overruled, or perhaps had had a pet project stopped in its tracks. Julia Higgins recommended utilizing one’s anger to fuel determination: ‘I’ll show ‘em’ was the advice she gave to deal with being told she couldn’t do something. Literally shaking her fist as she said this, it is clear that – although I’ve heard her say she’s never been discriminated against – she does feel she has been stopped in her tracks from time to time. But then, as her career makes clear, Julia (H) has found the strength to fight back. I’ve known Julia a long time – she is after all in my own field of soft matter and was the closest person I ever had to a role model – but anger is not an emotion I’d associate with her. Which simply goes to show that anger is not an emotion that needs to be expressed by table-thumping or losing one’s temper. Just as revenge is a dish best served cold, so cold anger coupled with determination, can be a potent force for personal progress.

Carol’s advice in this context was directed at rejection – grant or manuscript more specifically. Don’t respond at once (that may also apply to someone trampling on one’s corns, of course), sleep on it and then work out the best way to come back. I would entirely agree. That first feeling of anger on reading referee 2’s comments is liable to be hot-headed and ill-considered. There is no point venting one’s anger immediately by suggesting that said referee is an ignorant idiot who hasn’t even read to the end of the paper. It may be true. It isn’t constructive. It isn’t likely to get the paper refereed more carefully or the editor to reconsider the rejection. Sleeping on it – possibly even for a couple of weeks (depending on timescale allowed; where grant funders require responses within days to a set of referees’ comments, a couple of weeks may be an unaffordable luxury) – is likely to lead to a reasoned response in turn more likely to produce the desired outcome.

There was much more to learn from listening to these women at the top of their game. The desirability of recognizing opportunities when they came along, and then seizing them was highlighted, a point of view I have frequently advocated myself.  This was, as Julia (H) explained, a better way of thinking about the role luck plays in life. Louis Pasteur famously said of his science that

‘In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind.’

That adage applies equally well to life’s opportunities. If someone offers you a role and you aren’t prepared at least to consider it and so proceed to reject the opportunity without consideration, then the chance is lost, probably forever. If you don’t recognize the opportunity that is being proffered and simply see the challenge as outside your mindset and as, quite frankly, a bit scary, then the opening may never come your way again. Be prepared at least to pause, perhaps sleep on it (see advice above! – the same applies), before making the decision. Many years ago – before the advent of email when phoning for professional purposes was much commoner than it is now – I made an internal commitment never to make any significant decision during that first phone contact. It is extraordinarily rare that a decision in the professional scientific world can’t wait 24 hours. To ask for time to sleep on a job offer or the possibility of leading some significant piece of work is only reasonable.

When it came to a question of inspiration it was clear just how important teachers were to each of the three women. Admittedly Carol’s reasons were perhaps slightly less abstract and high-minded for taking her chemistry teacher seriously – he seems to have been a bit of a dish – but the other two seem quite simply to have fallen in love with science as a subject because of the way they were taught. Good teaching is crucial to almost everyone who goes on to succeed (I have paid homage to my own physics teacher in the past). We sadly lack sufficient numbers of inspiring, well-qualified science teachers in our schools and they are not evenly distributed. When the government talks, entirely reasonably, about widening participation it is a great shame they do not face up to the issues about poor teaching and the lack of qualified teachers (particularly in subjects such as physics, maths and computing) so many of our schools battle with.

One final comment about ‘seeing red’. As the photograph from the event shows, I was – as it happens – wearing a red jacket. Not because I was angry, but because over the years I seem to choose red regularly, something I have had occasion to note before. It is one way to stand out in a crowd, but usually I am trying to stand out from male colleagues not a trio of women. The other three were, on this occasion at least, primarily in more muted colours. I’m not sure too much should be read into this!

As far as I know the Daphne Jackson event was not recorded, which is a shame. I would have liked myself to consider in greater depth the range of answers these three impressive women gave to my questions. I did not have time to take notes! I hope the audience enjoyed the event as much as I did.

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How Many ‘Firsts’ does it take to Change a System?

Posted on October 13, 2019 by Athene Donald

As the new academic year starts in Cambridge the University Library is  marking 150 years of women studying here, even if admission to degrees came much later in 1948. Collectively we can also note that for the first time essentially half the colleges have female Heads of House (as the collective noun for Masters, Principals, Provosts etc has it): there are 15 of us now, out of 31 Colleges, but St John’s is currently in an interregnum due to the recent death in office of its Master. This is a radical shift compared even with the time five years ago that I took up the reins at Churchill. At that time there were around 1/3 of the colleges headed by women.

The incoming batch of Heads of House are a remarkable quintet of women: Baroness Sally Morgan (Fitzwilliam); Sonita Alleyne (Jesus) who is the first person of colour to head any college in either Oxford or Cambridge; former diplomats Alison Rose (Newnham) and Catherine Arnold (St Edmund’s); and former Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies (Trinity). As it happens there are no incoming male Heads of House this year.  I attended the installation of Sally Davies on Tuesday, which was done with all appropriate pomp and fantastic, specially-composed-for-the-occasion music echoing around the Chapel. Trinity, like Churchill, is a ‘Regius’ appointment, I believe the only two Cambridge colleges that are. In other words it is technically signed off by the monarch and for Sally this seemed to involve physical letters patent which were formally carried through the college, something which it certainly did not in my case (some Downing Street administrator with an illegible signature signed my letter of appointment). My public conversation with Sally at Churchill a couple of years ago provides a fascinating account of how she reached her present eminence.

I am looking forward to working with the newcomers, interested to see if the vestiges of 800 years of male domination in this ancient university are really disappearing. The University undergraduate student body may be at parity by gender but the professoriat is not (approximately 20% are women currently). The gender pay gap is still real, even if much of this is down to grade segregation. There are far more women in the lowest paid grades, where approximately two thirds of the staff are women whereas there are only one third in the top quartile.

The trouble with celebrating ‘firsts’ – such as the first person of colour to head a house, or the first woman to head Trinity – is that in themselves they do nothing to change systemic problems. The problems are so much deeper. I think prize-winning Guardian science journalist Hannah Devlin hit the nail on the head with this recent exchange with the ironic tweeter ManWhoHasItAll.

Women are still seen as ‘different’ and they need to be singled out – for instance with photoshoots or with reference to their marital or parental status – in ways that would be regarded as extraordinary for men. The academic world, like so many other professional spheres, remains stubbornly male by default.

Whilst one can be simultaneously pleased to see this change in leadership at the top of the Colleges the work to eradicate imbalances is nowhere near over.  I could reel off many more ‘firsts’ within the wider University too. The University Marshal (a role equivalent to head of the university’s ‘constabulary’) has been a woman for the last 18 months. Lucy Marshall not only is the first woman in this role, but previously she was the first female bomb-disposal expert in the UK, although I hope those skills aren’t needed in her current role. In fact the last time I encountered her she was merely advising me where to park my bike at the Vice Chancellor’s house, a much less stressful role.

We do need to keep reminding our community – not to mention the media – that progress is being made on gender equity, even if one can’t yet say the same about race; indeed that conversation is only beginning.  However I believe focusing on firsts is to obscure the reality. A few women reaching the top of their career pyramid does not equate to equality of opportunity all the way through. Women are still told far too often, implicitly if not necessarily explicitly, that they don’t fit the expected mould of postdoc, let alone professor. Perhaps, it’s implied, they’d be better suited to another career. I can still be presented with a list of applications to a university chair that is all male and yet no one had thought to take action before the list was deemed ‘closed’. When I objected that I didn’t think the search committee had done a very good job of looking for a diverse field – as of course I did – it turned out to be perfectly possible to identify in short order some strong women, some of whom (one might say inevitably) went on to make the shortlist.

As I said at the outset, the University is celebrating the progress that has been made. The exhibition opens at the University Library this coming week. Perhaps also inevitably, given I too am labelled with too many ‘firsts’, I will be speaking at the event closing the exhibition in March, and also in a related event in a couple of weeks as part of the Festival of Ideas. This latter session will include three of the women who made so much difference to starting the dialogue about women in Cambridge once we had reached a point where coeducation had become the norm, but professional advancement for women had not. I am pleased to be part of the advancement of women in Cambridge; I am not pleased it is still so far from complete. Everyone – most definitely including male leaders – have a part to play in making the progression speed up.

 

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