How Long does it take to Gain Expertise?

Posted on January 3, 2020 by Athene Donald

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s right-hand man, currently is said to be set on shaking up the Civil Service. The three elements that are rumoured to be on the agenda are:

  • Better training in data science, systems thinking and ‘super-forecasting;
  • Staff will spend longer in a given post than the current expectation of 18 months; and
  • Civil servants will be ‘reoriented to the public’;

I am quoting here from what has been put into the public domain and of course can’t judge how accurate the information is. The last point should perhaps be read in the context of ‘Yes Minister’ episodes. Quite honestly, I don’t know how to read it. In principle there is nothing wrong with hoping that civil servants are able to express their views in clear language that the public will ‘get’, but somehow I suspect that isn’t really the goal. However, it is a long time since I read George Orwell, so I will move on to consider the first two points.

The first one is a reflection of the extreme paucity of civil servants who enter via the ‘Fast Stream’ route with a STEM qualification. The figure quoted was 17%. Just like the lack of MPs who have a firm grasp of science, technology or innovation issues based on their qualifications and experience, it is a matter of concern so few civil servants are well-informed about much of what should be central to their role. Julian Huppert, the former Cambridge MP, proposed upon election in 2010 (as the only MP trained in scientific research at the time) that MPs should be provided with mandatory training in relevant scientific matters. It sounds as if Cummings is taking the same line with the administrators. I cannot think this is a bad idea, although I would add into his list statistics (though perhaps he includes that in the term data science), reading graphs and some basic science facts so that they don’t make endless gaffes or misinterpretations. This might not stop their political masters making sweeping statements based on pure ignorance and/or wishful thinking.  I am thinking here of the daftness, not to mention sheer impossibility of the ‘Star Wars’ shield that Ronald Reagan was so enthusiastic about (no doubt readers can think of other jaw-dropping examples). Reading Sharon Weinberger’s book Imagineers of War about (D)ARPA, as I said I would in my last post, I was struck by her description of the reaction to Reagan’s announcement of his plans:

‘DARPA’s director, Cooper, and other senior officials – including Secretary of Defense Weinberger – sat slack-jawed as they tried to digest the President’s address. The president had just made one of the most significant military technology decisions of the past few decades without consulting the key people in the Pentagon responsible for that technology.’

These days, with fact being even less in evidence in some political statements, civil servants, however well-informed personally, may find themselves in a similar position. Nevertheless, making sure they are technologically and numerically well-informed themselves does sound like a good thing to do.

However, it is the second bullet point I find most interesting. How long should one stay in a given post? I had not appreciated that 18 months was regarded as a suitable time scale for those in Whitehall, with the implicit message that if you’re not moving onward and upward into a different role by that benchmark, you’ve failed. It strikes me as deeply troubling, possibly even reflecting a concern that if you spend longer you might start to know what you’re talking about. It’s those damned experts again that Michael Gove had such a dislike for. Yet expertise and experience is exactly what is needed in so many situations, in government or outside.

My experience of different parts of what is now UKRI highlights this. These observations may not be current but certainly in the past EPSRC had a habit of swiftly moving employees on from one programme to another. Just when you’d got to know one of the team, so you felt able to ring them up to discuss a call for proposals or a financial question, they’d disappear to somewhere else. One of my colleagues once referred to a visit by EPSRC to the department as a ‘bunch of schoolchildren’ they looked so young and fresh-faced (and this remark was made by someone a good 15 years younger than me). Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean they were not experts let alone competent, but there was the worrying sense they simply did not have enough experience to be able to answer the questions they were about to be bombarded with.

This habit could be contrasted with BBSRC, where people tended to stay in a particular post much longer. They would have plenty of experience of sitting through committees and hearing discussions, have had many phone calls with irate or anxious PIs and applicants, and would know what rules could or could not be bent. I feel that level of experience tends to lead to better outcomes. Swift rotations between programmes stops anyone ‘going native’, but also may restrict their ability to make good decisions, or indeed any decisions at all without referring up.

My most recent interactions along these lines were with UKRI in the summer of 2018 just after they had come into formal existence, when I went to discuss funding for interdisciplinary (aka multidisciplinary) work in the new structures. It was, I’m afraid to say, a dispiriting experience precisely because those I talked to did not have prior knowledge of any of the research councils and their modus operandi. One was fresh out of Oxford and admitted to being on a 3-month rotation, the others were – I deduced – ex-BEIS and may well have been expert in science but not in what goes wrong for interdisciplinary research at standard research council responsive mode panels. They diligently took copious notes (I was reminded of the jury in the courtroom scene in Alice in Wonderland) but were in no position to comment on how the brave new world of UKRI might manage things better. Indeed, I am still waiting to hear more details of the review of peer review of multidisciplinary research promised in the UKRI Delivery Plan of summer 2019.

So, I am all in favour of civil servants (and UKRI employees) being able to stay in a post for more than 18 months without that being taken as a sign of failure. It is an interesting question how long is ‘optimum’ to stay in a given role. Too short, and you simply don’t know enough to be particularly effective, too long and there is the danger of becoming fossilised and of losing all enthusiasm for change or innovation. As a head of a Cambridge college, I am aware that this is a question asked of us by our constituents. I feel, after five years, I have some awareness of where there may be skeletons. There seem to be remarkably few in Churchill, as far as I’ve discovered; nevertheless at the outset I had to chair committees where everyone else knew more about history of a given topic, what worked and what did not and should never be attempted again, and that makes things decidedly tough. But by 10 years – my statutory limit in post; every college has different rules – maybe I will be bored, brusque and impatient and everyone will be counting down the days till I leave so they can do things differently. Of course it is possible they are doing that already, but I hope not.

So I am quite enthusiastic about what appears to being proposed. Whether Dominic Cummings should be allowed to shake up the civil service given his less-than-formalised role, is of course a totally different question.

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science, Science Funding | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Leaning In or Leaning Out: Who does What (and Why)?

Posted on December 22, 2019 by Athene Donald

Girly swot Brenda Hale, otherwise known as the outgoing President of the Supreme Court with an impressive taste in brooches (see figure),
brooch
was quoted recently as saying:

“I encountered many young men from public school backgrounds who felt entitled to good jobs. And I realised that actually, quite a few of them were no better than me and, in some cases, not as good as me. And that made me feel: OK, I don’t feel entitled, but I’m going to try.”

Male or female, or anywhere in between, there will be many readers who recognize those dear folk around us who ooze entitlement. It might be due to their schooling, their upbringing or – conceivably – even something in their genes, but it does not lend itself to being good company. Perhaps Sheryl Sandberg would tell us poor unentitled characters to lean in, to try a bit harder in the face of others’ arrogance. And that same message of ‘lean in’ directed at women could also be taken away from a recent study of styles of paper-writing. Women’s papers fare less well on average, apparently, and this could be related to the fact that some women, unconfident feeble creatures that we may be, don’t use words like novel or unique, let alone refer to our work as exciting. So women, it’s time to lean in….or should that be, time for men to lean out? I think we should think a lot harder, culturally across society, about whether we should be expecting (some) men to step back and not work so hard to be explicitly the top dog leaning in.

If I were to be skeptical and nasty, I could describe a summary of this recent paper as

‘women just need to lean in more and boast‘,

or alternatively

‘men hype more and aim for high impact factor journals.‘

Oh yes, did I say, a further result is that men (some, I’m not lambasting all of them! They probably know who they are, but they may well not read this blog) do better at getting their papers into high impact factor journals by virtue, so it would seem, of talking up their results? Because that appears to be the corollary of using lots of stand-out words in a manuscript, based on the evidence presented.

So, why does this sense of entitlement and this willingness to hype, really matter? It matters, as I wrote last summer with colleague Melinda Duer, because so much of our professional academic careers are determined by our publications’ record. If you don’t get the papers out, and as fast as possible without the multiple rewrites some women report being required, if you don’t get papers into high impact journals your progression may be stymied, unless, of course, your institution has signed up to DORA (and possibly even then, since there may be ignorant pockets of resistance).

What stops women praising themselves to the skies? Maybe another couple of recent papers give some clues into this. It could, according to one of these studies, be attributed either to confidence or to strategic incentives. However what Christine Exley and Judd Kessler found in the context of job applications, as described in a write-up of their paper in the Harvard Business Review, indicated neither of these were the root cause for holding back.

Women systematically provided less favorable assessments of their own past performance and potential future ability than equally performing men. And our various study versions revealed that this gender gap was not driven by confidence or by strategic incentives…

From this study, therefore, the jury is still out as to why women don’t talk themselves up to the same extent (on average). But another paper, specifically looking at the academic context of referees’ reports, shows just how much referees’ comments can impact on minorities, including women (and even more so for women of colour). This study illustrated their analysis with some truly appalling comments, including:

‘The first author is a woman; she should be in the kitchen, not writing papers.’

‘The author’s last name sounds Spanish. I didn’t read the paper because I’m sure it’s full of bad English.’

At this point I would like to ask what the editors thought they were doing by returning comments like these to the author. More to the point would have been for them to tear up the report and delete the referee from their database, making a point of telling them exactly why they were being blacklisted. Unprofessional – and plain nasty in some cases – refereeing should not be tolerated. However, the really sad thing was the authors’ finding as to the impact of such comments:

Specifically, women of color and non-binary people of color, white women and white non-binary people and men of color were mostly likely to select a 3 (moderate level of perceived negative impact on productivity), whereas white men were most likely to select a 1 (no perceived impact on their productivity…

[where the number refers to the severity of the impact].

The consequence is that women and other minorities (such as that Spanish-sounding author) are more heavily penalized by the unprofessional behaviour of referees. Next time they submit a paper they are hardly likely to be peppering the abstract with words like novel and unique. A vicious circle ensues. They might even quit the field completely.

We all have a part to play in trying to level this particular part of the academic playing field. This last study I cite highlights the need for editors to check referees’ comments for appropriateness and act accordingly. (I may say, during the time I was editor for EPJE twenty years ago, I never remember seeing any comments that I thought were beyond the pale on any front. Are things getting worse, I wonder?) As referees we all need to think carefully if we are offering constructive criticism or merely being offensive. That is something each of us should take responsibility for.

The recent Royal Society of Chemistry report has plenty of statistical evidence backing up the gender gap in publication outcomes. I summarized some of their findings last month, but to reiterate a few of the key ones:

  • 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.

As Brenda Hale spells out, some people presume they are entitled, others find out all too often that entitlement does not apply to them, indeed that the system is set up actively to knock them back. In academia, as the evidence mounts regarding systemic bias, the whole community in their roles as, editors, referees, and members of appointment, funding or promotion panels, need actively to work to counter this. Otherwise, a generation on, we will still be wringing our hands about the lack of women at the top, the leaky pipeline and the gender pay gap.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Post-Election Christmas Reading List

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Athene Donald

The general election is now done and dusted. The UK’s future is determined, for good or ill. Scientists (along with everyone else) now must work out how to interact with the new policies, new ideas and – if some of the Tories statements are to be taken at face value – substantial new money going into fresh initiatives. One of those touted in the run-up to the election, courtesy of Dominic Cummings, is the idea of a (D)ARPA like funding entity, sitting – as far as current rumours go – outside UKRI. I am sure I won’t be the only scientist up and down the country reading up about (D)ARPA over Christmas; my copy of Sharon Weinberger’s book Imagineers of War is on order (as referenced in David Willetts’ The Road to 2.4%), ready as a distraction from family and turkey.

That possible initiative is not the only thing the community may need to get to grips with. Time to think more concretely about what life post EU-funding means and the loss of both the ERC and structural funds. Reading the Smith/Reid report leaves many questions unanswered. Will yet another extra-UKRI agency be set up to oversee any new replacement funding? How efficient would having three, distinct public funders be (to be clear, I mean UKRI, ARPA-UK and replacement-EU), if that really is the plan. Would the same senior scientists be involved in oversight of three such bodies; would their back-offices reinvent wheels, even if the conditions of funding were not identical?

Post access to EU funds, the possibility of new structures to serve a fully global world, no longer with a special emphasis on collaborations with our nearest neighbours, opens up. How would that work in practice? Would an international strategy be more focussed on facilitating capacity-building in sub-Saharan Africa or ensuring we have good links with the Chinese economy, as it itself invests so much in its own science? Whatever direction and shape these new structures might take, it is absolutely clear that resolving issues around immigration and access to visas has to remain a central plank in our collaborative efforts.

But what about all these newly blue constituencies in the Midlands and North of England, what will ensure they stop being ‘left behind’? On this front, to echo Tony Blair’s past mantra, I would say education, education, education. But it has to be education for a purpose. As Richard Jones has pointed out in his essay Resurgence of the Regions: rebuilding innovation capacity across the whole UK, low skills in such areas result in part from the absence of local jobs at which to aim. Why bother to upskill or study hard at school if there are no jobs waiting for you? Regeneration of these areas in tandem with thinking much harder (and investing more) in education and skills is needed. So, to add to the Christmas reading list we should probably be dusting off our copies of the Augar Review, remembering that university isn’t going to be the goal of every 16-year-old in the country. Further Education colleges rightly need to be reconsidered. Ensuring that this part of the educational ecosystem is fit for purpose, including being properly funded, is going to be a vital part of turning around those parts of the country not currently well-served by innovative local companies and jobs a-plenty.

In this context, I would add to my Christmas reading list the US report from the Brookings Institution The Case for Growth Centres: How to spread innovation across the US to join my (re) reading of Richard’s essay discussing related issues. Getting a grip on the ‘place’ agenda is going to be critical in reducing inequality across the UK. Unsurprisingly, the distribution of cities with thriving economies is comparably uneven in the US. Left behind towns and cities, in the Rust Belt for instance, old manufacturing towns whose livelihoods have faltered as the production of steel or cars has faded and moved elsewhere, are just as significant a social issue in the US (and equally contributing to the rise of populism) as over here. The Brookings Institution solution is to propose that huge sums of money should be invested into a few of these centres, carefully done so that the benefits diffuse widely away from the actual centre. This need for diffusion – in tandem with a workforce sufficiently skilled to provide the necessary absorptive capacity of money and innovation – is crucial if invested money is to impact on all those who need it. One of the challenges for the somewhat overheated city of Cambridge, is that its impact does not reach to Wisbech or Newmarket, let alone to Cromer and Lowestoft. The Combined Authority of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is seriously impeded in its ability to transform the region by the huge discrepancies between the utterly different nature and economies of the cities of Cambridge and Peterborough and their surrounding fenland. There is simply no one-size-fits-all approach and therefore a lot of stasis, despite all the good intentions.

I come back to the importance of skills. The move to improve coding and IT skills in our schools, starting at a young age, is to be welcomed. It is vital that it isn’t simply middle-class kids who get given tablets at a young age and who thereby gain confidence in these areas. The robots may or may not be coming to take away all the lesser-skilled roles (actually not at all likely in areas like social care), but it is hard to imagine the workforce of the future being successful without computer-literacy of some sort, as well as literal literacy. Regrettably I don’t expect the new government to reinvent Sure Start, but the gap between the haves and the have-nots in education starts incredibly young.

If parents don’t have confidence in their own numeracy, literacy and IT skills, how can they facilitate their toddlers and young children not to be fearful of education. David Willetts, in his 2017 book A University Education, implied that pouring money into higher education was much better than, for instance, into the early years centres of Sure Start. I don’t buy his arguments (nor was I convinced by the evidence he adduced). I feel it begs the question of how an 18-year-old who has been consistently failed by the education system (possibly even permanently excluded) is going to want to be turned around and packed off to university, particularly if they are struggling with absolutely basic skills. And, if their whole family has been unemployed for years because of the local economy, what optimism can they have that it would be an investment of their time and money that will provide returns?

So, over Christmas, I will have plenty of reading to dig into. I need to improve my knowledge of the evidence base and comprehension of the political and economic landscape the general election has brought us and where we might be heading. I strongly believe it is not sufficient, as a well-heeled, middle class Oxbridge don, to bury my head in the sand and think ‘I’m all right Jack (or Boris)’.  There will be many in those newly blue constituencies who may briefly be feeling optimistic. We, collectively across the sector, need to do our bit to ensure their optimism is justified.

Posted in Science Funding, Science Policy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Travelling Hopefully to 2.4% GDP

Posted on December 6, 2019 by Athene Donald

David Willetts, for a number of years the Minister of State for Universities and Science, now an FRS, President of the Advisory Board for a think-tank (Resolution Foundation) and writer (most recently, A University Education), has just published a pamphlet about The Road to 2.4%.  All the three main parties (in England) are supportive of an uplift, a substantial uplift, in the amount of funding for science and innovation in the UK. The figure of 2.4% – as a percentage of GDP – is not simply plucked from thin air but is the OECD average and hence the number homed in on by the Conservatives. The Labour party has even greater ambitions. But, and this is a big but, this isn’t simply Government money. It requires a huge increase in financial input from the private sector too, roughly in a proportion of 2:1 from industry to government. Hence talking in terms of a ‘road’ seems appropriate, since we may be more likely to travel hopefully than to arrive. Pessimists in the room have been heard to say that it will be easy because post-Brexit GDP will plummet, and so the figure could be achieved simply with flat cash, but I will put their negativity aside. Willetts makes no mention of Brexit, or its impact, apart from a couple of fleeting quotes from the Tory manifesto referring to ‘getting Brexit done’. This omission of potentially the largest change to the UK landscape on the horizon seems too blaringly obvious to be accidental in Willetts’ writing.

I recently wrote a blogpost about a report on science within government departments and their interactions with the wider community, in which the culling of research establishments during the Thatcher era was implicitly mourned. Willetts makes similar points about the damage to the UK R+D ecosystem in his pamphlet.  He is absolutely clear that when it comes to getting to 2.4% – which will need all that industrial input and plenty of innovation to kickstart increases in productivity and hence economic growth – it is not appropriate to look to universities alone. To quote at some length a part of his analysis

The Heath Government took money from the Research Councils to go to departments to purchase applied research. But over the subsequent decades departments proved to be very poor protectors of their own R&D budgets. They behaved like short-sighted British businesses cutting their R&D budget whenever they were under financial pressure. As the customer who is supposed to be purchasing R&D regularly cuts their budget, that leaves behind only the science budget which is allocated under a different model and protected behind the Haldane principle. It means the science budget is under pressure to fill the gap in applied research left by departments. ….

There is one more twist to this. The minister who received Rothschild’s report was none other than Margaret Thatcher who was then Secretary of State for Education and Science. Some time after she arrived in Number 10, in the mid-1980s, the Rothschild doctrine that applied research requires a customer, was taken to its next stage. Business not Whitehall was to be the customer…..

This doctrine creates the funding gap called the “Valley of Death”. It means public spending stops long before applied research is commercially viable.

Yet universities have been fingered as the key player in growth by innovation by many. Why don’t they have more spin-outs? Why don’t enough of these spin-outs turn into the next Google or, more locally, ARM? Questions like these get bandied around all the time, with the added rider that ‘of course’ the UK has always been bad at capitalising on its inventions. Sentiments neatly illustrated by the headline The Brits: great at inventing, not so good at monetising are common. Furthermore, the various instruments of university accountability – most noticeably REF and KEF (the latter as yet fully to materialise) – put explicit value on ‘impact’ so often (but not invariably) translated within an economic framework leading to, I believe, unrealistic expectations.

As the ‘scientist of the moment’ (to quote from this article) my friend and physicist colleague Richard Jones has said

I think British universities are really good at interacting with industry. That’s not to say that they couldn’t be better, but we’re not starting from a bad place at all….People expect too much of universities…the British system has become very unbalanced because it’s over reliant on them to deliver all the R&D.

Richard’s view is in line with Willetts on this point.

And since Richard is the scientist of the moment precisely because his extended views have, apparently, been endorsed (not necessarily to his unalloyed joy) by arch-Tory-policy-driver Dominic Cummings, perhaps his thinking on how to move forward will get some traction. His analysis of how to get the economy moving, particularly in those left-behind regions that are impacting so significantly on polls, has suddenly penetrated beyond simply the readers of his own blog, although the article itself has been there for months.

What David Willetts, the review on Science Capability within Government and Richard Jones all home in on is the lack of those research establishments that once provided the mechanism to take a neat academic idea through the next phase of development that must occur before a company is likely to wish to invest substantially or be able to scale-up to large scale production. An extremely detailed and comprehensive analysis of all the things that can go wrong in this intermediate stage has been provided by Uday Phadke and Shailendra Vyakarnam’s book Camels, Tigers and Unicorns: Rethinking Science and Technology-enabled Innovation. In Germany, the existence of the network of Fraunhofer Institutes provides the structures whereby this intermediate work can be done. There is no expectation there that universities will do the necessary leg-work. Yet in the UK, in the absence of such organisations (the nearest equivalent would be the Catapults, of which there are few and not all have been notable successes) is ever more clearly becoming a factor in the lack of disruptive and innovative ideas turning into disruptive but successful and pervasive technologies with consequent positive benefits for the UK economy.

Universities have many issues on their hands ranging from widening participation to Brexit, from Prevent to the giant issue of financial sustainability and survival. And of course the burden that REF (and KEF-to-be) place on their people and structures. It would be helpful if future ministers for science and education would do battle with the Treasury to propagate the understanding that universities cannot act alone to be the solution to this aspect of the economy. The road to 2.4% needs strong financial support (such as, to quote Willetts again, full economic costing of research grants meaning full and not the 80% it has been for so long) but also investment in other parts of the innovation chain so that our bright minds’ best ideas actually turn into solid returns for the UK and don’t get lost in translation. To conclude with more words culled from Willetts pamphlet

Exceptionally but above all we need to promote more applied R&D outside the university. It would be wrong to do this by cutting research funding for universities who face their own funding pressures.

 

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Working Together for Equity

Posted on December 1, 2019 by Athene Donald

This week I was honoured by the THE as the winner of their ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Award during their annual awards’ ceremony, for my work around gender equality issues.

THE Lifetime Achievement Award

Photo courtesy of THE. With me are John Gill (L), their Editor and Atul Chauhan, President and Chancellor of Amity Education Group who sponsored the Prize.

I am obviously delighted to receive this award and not only at a personal level: it is a platform demonstrating the commitment of the THE to the importance of this work and a testament of recognition also to all the others around the world who have stepped up to try to improve the working environment for everyone. It is important to remember that well-known trope, what helps improve the situation for women will help everyone. Of course intersectionality issues make the challenges even harder, but if we could level the playing field for women it would be a step in the right direction, however many steps are still left to be taken.

It is perhaps not irrelevant that just a few days before, the THE ran an opinion piece by Irina Dumitrescu (a Junior Professor at the University of Bonn) about how being toxic can enable you to be ‘upwardly mobile’. It was ironic parody I hope, but like all the best parody it included far too many grains of truth for comfort.  Many women – and quite a few men – would say how a toxic atmosphere at work has driven them out of HE. Toxicity is central to what needs to be eradicated if everyone is to be able to progress in line with their talents, and not merely according to skin colour, chromosomes, accent, country of birth, academic genealogy, sporting prowess, societal background…..you can probably extend that list based on your own observations and experiences. Bias of many sorts, not to mention outright bullying and harassment, are all contributory factors in maintaining an unhealthy atmosphere in many dark corners of the educational landscape. Good policies are themselves insufficient to remove every dubious action. We need to move on from having a few champions – a word used to describe me in my citation – to an embedded culture in which everyone is prepared to challenge toxic behaviour whenever and wherever they spot it. I was pleased to use my ‘acceptance’ speech as a vehicle to remind the 1200 people in the room at the award ceremony, held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, of their own responsibilities in this space. What I said was roughly along the following lines:

I am deeply honoured by this award, although slightly shaken to be offered a Lifetime Award before I’ve even retired. I am sure I will continue to champion diversity issues, whether they are part of my job description or not. Although they are much talked about there is still such a very long way to go. In everything from harassment issues to bias, conscious or otherwise, in appointments, promotion and the handing out of awards or tasks, there is work to be done. This applies across the spectrum of minorities, although my focus has always been on gender.

One of the undoubted advantages of growing older is the feeling that speaking out is a less dangerous thing to do. I have very much enjoyed using my voice – through my blog, twitter (however evil you think that is) and elsewhere – to speak for those who can’t, and to push for change on many fronts. It is always encouraging to meet early career researchers who tell me how much they love my blog. I feel it gives it purpose. If it encourages others, then it’s brilliant. Let me remind those of you in the room who have voices – speak up.

Being a champion is all very well but it’s totally insufficient to overcome the systemic problems in our society and our institutions. I call on every one of you to join me in the fight against inequality and against assuming the status quo represents the best workplace for everyone. When it comes to bias and harassment each and every one of us can call out bad behaviour – if we don’t we are complicit. Think about that next time you observe something that makes you uncomfortable and act. Join me in championing a better workplace.

There were those who subsequently ‘called me out’ over Twitter for not being on strike. I am not a UCU member (and the local UCU branch have made it clear the dispute is not with Cambridge colleges). I would not consider a dinner such as this a part of my daily job, even if I were. There were no picket lines to cross.  Nevertheless, I appreciate that many of those who do stand on the picket lines in the cold and wet are motivated by the same desire to see equity, along with the removal of precarity and unfair treatment – not to mention the core concerns over pay and pensions, which as constituted may also perpetuate gender disadvantage. In that spirit I recognize that they are ‘doing their bit’ in this space. However, it saddens me that they felt a need to attack me because I choose to champion gender equality in ways different from their methods. (Readers with longer memories may even recall during the last UCU strike I took a very public stance as Master of Churchill College, publishing an open letter to UUK’s Alastair Jarvis.)

Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, their own attitude to what they best can do personally to improve our universities and different opportunities to act. We should not be pitching one form of ‘virtue’ against another, implying that one’s own approach is the only valuable or viable one, the only one that counts. If diversity and inclusion mean anything, it should be a recognition that there is strength in difference. So, whatever is open to you, in whatever sphere you move, I can only urge you to take that particular action to ensure that we don’t see cohort after cohort continue to be disadvantaged, let alone generation after generation.

It is good that the THE recognize and themselves champion the need to improve our universities to achieve genuine diversity. I hope their global readership takes heed.

 

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