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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Another Year, Another Speech

Posted on October 5, 2019 by Athene Donald

Writing and delivering uplifting speeches comes with the territory of being the head of an Oxbridge College. Although my interview for the position at Churchill did not require a dry run of this, to check that I was capable of exhorting the troops appropriately, perhaps it should have done. Over the five years I have been in post now, I have become more relaxed about the delivery, making it possible for me to sip a little wine without feeling I will fall over the words and start slurring my diction. In 2016 I wrote about the challenge of delivering a Graduation Dinner speech on the evening of the referendum result. That was a tough nut to crack to find the right balance. By comparison last week’s speech to our alumni Association Weekend was a piece of cake – other than having to speak after a brilliant speech by Christopher Frayling (alum and Extraordinary Fellow; yes that really is the title!), former Rector of the Royal College of Art and ex-Chair of the Arts Council. I was merely giving an update on the past year of the college, mundane but I hope also of interest.

Christopher spoke about where the two cultures stand 60 years after CP Snow’s famous Rede Lecture given here in Cambridge: Snow was a founding Fellow of Churchill College. Christopher and I agree that the divisions Snow saw are still lurking. For instance, we share a fury over how the word ‘creative’ has been hijacked, as in ‘creative industries’ meaning those of an ‘arty’ bent and excluding the techie stuff; the way some see creativity as the prerogative only of humanities’ studies and absolutely not to be found in STEM courses, an issue I have also highlighted before. I know Christopher’s views are equally strong on this point because I have discussed it with him at length, both last week and on previous occasions. Churchill College, home of Snow, will continue to work to ensure all our students appreciate the importance of not living in disciplinary silos and of becoming well-rounded citizens. Inclusion and inclusivity need to reach this strand of education as well as encompassing gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and the rest.

But, to return to the matriculation speech I need to give to the Freshers, the challenge for me now is not unlike that I faced before the 2016 graduation speech. Everything is so uncertain, the situation changes day by day. We seem to be in a world where untruths may be uttered on both sides of the Atlantic with comparative impunity; we see incitement to violence and despicable behaviour. But I want to encourage all who are just starting out on the adventure that is university and college life, to be positive not ram the distasteful stuff of UK politics down their throats. There will be those coming from unsettled regions of the world or chaotic family backgrounds, but many more who come from backgrounds whose futures might once have been thought to be secure. We, collectively, need to ensure they are able to thrive here whatever the state of the world outside, so that they can go on to forge a better future for everyone on issues from climate change to equity. The one thing I will certainly be doing is to encourage every fresher who is eligible to register to vote; the date of the next general election may still be unclear but it cannot be far away.

I definitely believe that my role is to oversee a college where academic striving is encouraged, if not to the exclusion of everything else. Perhaps I should be encouraging the girly swots in the audience (in which I would include students of any gender). Baroness Hale has definitely turned it from a political jibe from one prime minister to a predecessor into an appellation to be proud of. She of the Supreme Court, a woman who has more professional firsts to her name than most, whose school encouraged her to apply to Cambridge (she was a student at Girton about a decade before I was there) to read law because

 “my headmistress didn’t think I was clever enough to read history!”

she is also a woman showing that lack of clarity about a career path at 18 or 21 is no barrier to subsequent success. There is so much today’s students can learn from examining her career.

Stereotyping by gender is every bit as bad as stereotyping the humanities as ‘creative’ and STEM subjects as cut and dried and dead (to paraphrase William Blake), the idea that Christopher Frayling took exception to in his speech. Reading interviews with Baroness Hale it is clear that stereotyping has dogged her career, even if ultimately she has overturned many people’s expectations. As the interview in ChambersStudent explains

“Those making the decisions had never worked with women on an equal basis. They’d had them as typists or secretaries, but not as colleagues.” …so it was “harder for them to judge who was a good candidate or not – or who had potential or not.”

That will sound familiar to the women in STEM subjects (and probably the men in subjects such as those ‘allied to medicine’). How often are young women told ‘you don’t look like a physicist’ in tones of astonishment? Or selection panels overlooking the smart woman because, well, she’s a woman and so not a leader. However, one should take heart from Brenda Hale and just get on with the job. If one can. If one can defeat the feeling of ‘I don’t belong’ so many internalise.

In Churchill I hope everyone feels they belong. We worry about stereotypes, the different hostile –isms, the need for students to find their feet within their discipline and far beyond. I hope our Freshers will be able to shut out the uncertainties and appalling behaviour of some of our so-called leaders and just make the most of time here to work out who they are, what they want to do and where to put their best efforts. And to make sure they don’t end up disrespecting others’ choices or mentally put their peers into neatly-labelled but totally inaccurate boxes.

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What Do We Know about the Research Ecosystem?

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Athene Donald

While funders make decisions about where their money goes, and PhD students decide what to study, with whom and where before they go on to wander along the career maze; while publishers decide who to publish and universities around the world make decisions based, at least in part, on these same editorial decisions, who looks at the Big Picture? There is a need for more understanding of the decisions that are taken where and by whom in the research ecosystem and what the implications of these decisions are as they ripple through higher education and far beyond. A new research institute – the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI for short – was launched this week at the Wellcome building (a key partner) in London , with a wealth of snappily short talks to illustrate the range of issues RoRI might elect to study. Meta-research (scraping – of data – was a word frequently used) is facilitated by new tools, but there are many other tedious longitudinal studies of people, places and impact that will probably need a rather more old-fashioned approach to gathering data too.

RoRIlaunch2

Topics for the day included Priorities, Careers (in which I had the unenviable task of summing up and being ‘provocative’ about the other contributions, the panel is shown in the photograph), Culture (featuring fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry), Decisions and Partnerships. Each, as you can tell, a massive topic with many strands to delve into. Of course the next challenge is to work out just which parts of this vast array of possibilities for study RoRI will concentrate on. Something I think the partners are currently thrashing out.

In the Careers session, we heard James Evans (University of Chicago) consider connectivity of researchers and the impact on research outputs. He described the research system as ‘deeply complex’ with ‘emergent phenomena’. One of the results of his study of the networks formed and the groups that acted as nodes in the networks was that as fields grow new work is exponentially less likely to impact that field radically. In other words, just having more people working in any given area is more likely to lead to incremental research than breakthroughs. As he put it ‘social connection leads to cultural collapse’ and he felt that ‘aliens’ from other disciplines were crucial for new insights. Funders should definitely take note.

Sally Hancock from the University of York talked about data on career pathways following the PhD. (Her co-authored working paper can be found on the RoRI website.) She particularly highlighted how different disciplines have different patterns, and how there are quite distinct differences between the genders. But the data is incomplete. It is hard to find out what happens to those who leave research completely or to analyse more nuanced issues that may impact on individuals. This could of course range from having a disastrous relationship with a supervisor to an equally disastrous relationship with a piece of equipment. Continuing on the theme of PhD students Megan MacGarvie (Boston University) and Kolja Briedis (DZHW, Germany) gave international perspectives on the careers question, also with an emphasis in the former case of international students who travel to the US for study and then may – or may not – return to their home countries thereafter.

My task was, in six short minutes, to bring together these different threads and join them into a coherent whole. But, this session coming immediately after one on Priorities, I pointed out how funders, policy makers and indeed the tax payer to some extent, have big decisions to make about choosing what student(ship)s to fund. I have written before about the danger of the ‘lumpiness’ of the UK’s research council (and specifically EPSRC’s) programme for doctoral training. Bearing in mind the comments of James Evans regarding radical new ideas tending not to come in large fields (he referred to people sometimes as living in a bubble chamber), I think it is worth considering whether such lumpiness is even good for getting the science we need done. We should ask what are we training students for and who are we training. I certainly strongly believe that those who leave research completely (be it academic or industrial) should not be regarded, as they so often are, as failures. We need people educated to think critically, to solve problems and to be aware of context to enter many different professions. These people are not failures.

Perhaps inevitably I picked up on the gender disparities Sally Hancock identified. If the THE is to be believed, I said female students are ‘forced out’ by a hostile environment. I don’t remember saying that but, since my comments had to be produced on the hoof, it is quite possible that I did. I certainly said I thought it would be useful to carry out exit interviews for students as they complete their PhDs, to find out what went right and what went wrong. Such qualitative data would be invaluable to help interpretations of the quantitative data that is so much easier to collect.

Later in the day, we heard from Molly King  (Santa Clara University) on data extracted from JSTOR articles which showed an appalling mismatch between women as last (and so presumed senior) authors and their expected benchmark figure. Building on an article Melinda Duer and I wrote earlier this year I questioned the role journals play in this, by virtue of bias (no doubt predominantly unconscious) in their editorial processes and decisions. I am delighted to say this was picked up by some of the Nature team present and I hope to follow this up with them in due course. Our concerns, as expressed in that earlier article, are that there is insufficient scrutiny given to factors such as relative time in review for men and women, or whether referees’ reports ever contain clear evidence of bias. There are many places where the editorial process collectively shows bias, as has been shown for economics but not, as far as I can tell for other disciplines.

I can only give you a sample of the fascinating talks we heard covering this broad and burgeoning topic. If I’ve whetted your appetite here are some further links to fill you in further with the intentions of this institute (I may not have a complete set here).

Overview by James Wilsdon, Director of RoRI, in WonkHE.

Commentary in the THE.

Blogpost by Richard Jones,  Associate Director, on his own talk at the launch.

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Talking Leadership in Toronto

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Athene Donald

I’ve recently been in North America meeting up with Churchill College alumni, flying into New York City and out from Toronto, with a delightful flight with gorgeous views over New England in between. It was rather exhausting but was also something of a trip down memory lane, initially triggered by a nasty incident. A few days before travelling I had had my wallet stolen in Cambridge, pickpocketed, and although this became clear very quickly so all my cards could be stopped, it meant significant worry and inconvenience. In fact the replacement cards came fast enough that I was able to travel abroad with them (taking piles of cash feels so old-fashioned, although I got myself prepared courtesy of my husband’s visits to holes-in-walls), but it reminded me of what happened when I went to the USA for the first time.

Immediately after the end of my PhD and accompanying viva, in early October 1977, I was due to travel to Cornell (in Ithaca, NY) to take up a post-doc position, my husband already having travelled earlier to start his course. It was the time of ‘standby’ flights across the Atlantic, the idea being that if you turned up early enough in the day you could purchase any empty seats on major transatlantic airlines. I dutifully turned up at crack of dawn and got a seat at my first attempt (I think I even managed to buy a ticket for a connecting flight on to Ithaca). Having a lot of time to kill before the flight I set off to buy a cup of coffee, managing to leave my purse behind in the café. My final phone call to my mother for many months was therefore ‘please tell the police’, so I could claim on my insurance. My finances, my state of mind not to mention my ‘status’ as it were, were very different upon arrival this time at JFK compared with that previous trip! The timid and impoverished postdoc who turned up that first time could never have imagined that 40+ years on I would return, essentially also wallet-less but otherwise a totally different person.

One of the events I did for Cambridge University alumni was with Churchill alumnus Bruce Simpson, a Senior Partner at McKinsey, in Toronto. Together we talked about leadership. Bruce discussed leadership in the present day, while I could steal lots of appropriate quotes from papers held in the Churchill Archives when talking about the very different styles of leadership of Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher, including their attitudes towards science. In this vein it has always struck me, however bad Churchill may have been at maths at school and lacking any formal science training, through his friendship with HG Wells he developed far more interest and curiosity in science than really comes across in Thatcher’s actions, despite her degree in chemistry.

Churchill had a child-like curiosity towards inventions, whereas Thatcher’s attitude seems to have been far more utilitarian. Jon Agar’s recent book Science Policy under Thatcher spells this out in depressing detail. In Thatcher’s view scientists needed constant scrutiny, a view which in turn led to the introduction in 1986 of the (much lighter touch) predecessor of the Research Excellence Framework. Churchill, on the other hand, was prepared to commit huge sums of money to the uncertain end of nuclear weapons through the so-called Tube Alloys project, work that later crucially underpinned the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb. Whereas Thatcher expected to be fully engaged in decisions about scientific policy, dispensing with or ignoring the chief scientific advisor for much of her premiership, Churchill just wanted to be kept informed and involved by his close friend Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), despite the latter being such a contrasting personality in his approach to food and drink.

Nevertheless Thatcher’s scientific background stood her in good stead when it came to some of the big scientific issues of her day: the first signs of climate change and AIDS/HIV. On the former she spoke passionately at the UN in 1989.

“It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself.

What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.”

Ronald Reagan at the time would not have uttered those words, and it is perhaps even harder to imagine the current President echoing them, even over Twitter.

Both Bruce and I referred to the gender angle in leadership. He referred to a recent Harvard Business Review article discussing the skills women possess when it comes to leadership, an article I had read when it first appeared this summer. Surveys of corporate America using so-called 360o techniques have showed that women most certainly are viewed as possessing the necessary attributes to succeed. Indeed on many fronts they out-perform their male colleagues, according to the evidence. But there are still only a tiny number of senior female leaders in Corporate America. As the article says

“Leaders need to take a hard look at what gets in the way of promoting women in their organizations. Clearly, the unconscious bias that women don’t belong in senior level positions plays a big role.”

It isn’t that women aren’t competent; it is that too often they aren’t believed to be competent.

I faced this myself years back when told kindly to my face by an older male faculty member that ‘it would be my turn next’ to be head of department, despite the fact that I was older both in years and seniority (if you call possessing an FRS as I did at the time ‘seniority’) than the other – needless to say male – contender. He got the job. He was, I hasten to say, a very good head of department, but that completely biased statement based on very little (it was not a faculty member I’d ever worked with or knew more than distantly) rankled then and rankles now. It is anecdote not data but I internalised it as how, in the absence of other evidence, gender trumps facts.

Yet, the evidence is constantly building up that diversity in an organisation’s senior leadership really matters in achieving successful outcomes. A study from 2018 showed this clearly when considering profits (not, of course, the only important outcome), but to be effective it does require diversity to be broadly defined not just in terms of gender, but also including ethnicity, education and socioeconomic background. If we are to get the best leaders we must not just look for clones of past CEOs. Interestingly, the colleges in Cambridge are now essentially equally split between male and female heads for the first time this coming October, with several powerful new (external) heads joining colleges old and new.

Leadership is a tricky beast. Many of us (certainly when it comes to heads of colleges) learn on the job rather than through the formal training of an MBA or equivalent. Our present-day politicians likewise seem to be making it up as they go along. Watching them is not edifying. Whatever one may feel about Churchill and Thatcher and their policies it is hard not to think they made a better fist of leadership than the current bunch.

 

 

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