Which Skills for a PhD Student?

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Athene Donald

Training of PhD students. It’s a big topic and large sums of money are involved. As I wrote in the autumn, there are concerns about the decisions that are being made. With the recent announcement of 75 new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) by the EPSRC, the topic is bound to be in the air again. The blog-that-calls-itself UKRI Observatory did its third analysis of what was going on. This analysis focussed on the numbers that were not renewed and the universities that saw significant falls in the numbers they won. Their slant was that the lack of renewals implied the scheme wasn’t working and that the ‘excellence’ allegedly demanded wasn’t forthcoming. It could, on the other hand, reflect the fact that some subjects just weren’t seen as any longer needing CDTs. That might be because ‘fashions’ have changed, that the problems have been solved, or that there is no longer any relevant industry in the UK.

It isn’t clear to me what judgements about ‘excellence’ are being made: is it in the training, the topic, the PIs or the institution? It could in principle be any of these, but here let me explore what ‘training’ current cohorts of students are expected to be exposed to. I fear – from the rumours I hear – this is becoming quite prescriptive. But do courses on Powerpoint (again!), safety or entrepreneurship really prepare the student for the future? Is the EPSRC, or UKRI more generally, looking at courses on policy, grant-writing or team building? (I ask these questions from ignorance not sarcasm.)

Recently I have given two talks about my ‘life in science’ for want of a better word. In other words, talks about both my actual research and my career, given to PhD students (and some postdocs) in two universities. I talked about went wrong at different stages and, with hindsight, what enabled me to get past the hiccoughs; I talked about why I suspect most academics, however successful, didn’t necessarily set out knowing what they wanted to do or where/what they were aiming for. The number of professors who knew as they started their PhD that they wanted to be a professor in [insert chosen subject] and went in an arrow-straight line to the top without a glitch is, I would postulate based on multiple anecdotes but no data, tiny. And I spelled out that many in the audience would not be heading in that direction anyhow but should be thinking about all the skills, ‘soft’ skills (how I hate that rather pejorative word in this context, neatly skewered in a recent Financial Times article about the coming world of AI) that they are picking up along the way of their PhD.

What struck me was the response, particularly to the first talk over the ensuing sandwich lunch. ‘Why don’t we have more talks like this?’ was said to me several times. I think students are crammed with facts, indeed with ‘skills’ soft or otherwise, but given little chance to reflect or to put their experiences in context. Students need to know that confidence may only be skin deep, that their colleague at the bench with a big mouth has no monopoly on brains just because (s)he sounds off; they need to know that confusion about careers is normal; that no one finds it easy to do things the first time, be it a presentation or an interview; that being aware and supportive of struggling colleagues now is likely to make them a better leader later, whatever their chosen sphere of work. If they have a good supervisor maybe they learn these things, but too often the supervisor has more interest in chaining their students metaphorically to the bench than allowing them to express confusion and uncertainty. Somehow I doubt that any of the 75 selected CDT programmes specified they were going to offer courses in uncertainty (other than in measurements or quantum terms), let alone confusion.

The CBI frequently bemoans the fact that students aren’t being taught the skills they need for the workplace. This might be taken to mean that their ability to communicate intelligibly is weak (some supervisors may not be ideally placed to teach this topic either) or that their quantitative skills aren’t what might have been hoped for. However, a 2016 CBI survey suggested ‘By far the most important ‘skills’ factor centres on attitudes and aptitudes such as ability to present well.’ OK, maybe that Powerpoint course was necessary, but where do CDTs teach ‘attitudes’. Indeed, in any graduate or undergraduate course it is not a word that regularly turns up. Maybe this means resilience (which is more discussed currently than in the past), or even confidence; it could, of course, mean deference but it almost certainly also means leadership and management skills. Our university graduate courses have a way to go in meeting those needs.

I am not seriously suggesting EPSRC should judge future CDT allocations based on whether courses in confusion are provided. But I do believe we should be wary of filling timetables with more and more prescriptive courses, leaving little time for individual development and reflection. Universities should, in my view, do far more to train the supervisors and then let their newly-acquired skills be transmitted in the course of a research project to their students.

The word ‘excellence’ sounds so, well, excellent but it begs many questions. What should our training – even our education – for PhD students really comprise?  Research-specific skills of course; that has to remain at the heart of what PhD students learn, but are we in danger of getting rigid about the courses that students are exposed to, and not leaving enough time for real-life skills that matter in any workplace. Dealing with the difficult colleague who constantly disrupts your plans is as ubiquitous a problem in the office as in the lab and we should not forget the desirability of learning about interpersonal skills, as well as personal ones, as courses are devised and delivered.

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Reflecting on International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Athene Donald

Today – February 11th – is the UN’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science, a day not only to celebrate those who have managed to study science and forged their careers within it, but to focus minds on how to open up science to many more girls around the world. In some parts of the world education of any sort for girls is hard fought for, as Malala has made so manifest, but in others – including much of the western world – science education is available but subtly discouraged. For a 10 year old girl to be told, at a school in my own home city Cambridge, that she does ‘maths like a boy’ beggars belief, quite apart from the fact I don’t actually know what it means. It would seem to amount to ‘no trespassing into the maths arena: your chromosomes are wrong’. (This was a tale told to me by a professorial colleague about her god-daughter.)

As the UN says on its website

‘Science and gender equality are both vital for the achievement of the internationally agreed development goals’.

We are losing the talent of many; we are losing the diversity of viewpoints by excluding women from the science agenda. Think about healthcare. If we focus on the third goal of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – Good health and wellbeing – then education of girls and women has a central role to play. The oft-quoted proverb (originating in Ghana) ‘If you educate a woman, you educate a nation’ is a major part of this issue.

But, turning to research, increasingly it is becoming obvious how following a white heteronormative approach to medicine means that the problems that afflict women – childbirth, gynaeocological issues and the menopause to take some very obvious examples – get less attention than diseases such as cancer and heart disease. According to the United Nations Population Fund a woman dies approximately every 2 minutes somewhere in the world due to pregnancy or childbirth. Many of those deaths are entirely preventable. When I highlighted a study enabling a model placenta to be developed as my highlight of the year for the Observer at the end of 2018, one of the Cambridge authors wrote to me saying

I am grateful that you have highlighted this as basic science. Research in problems women experience during pregnancy has been a struggle to get funded and it has always been out of the mainstream.

However, enabling women to study science and medicine, even in the developed world, perhaps particularly in the developed world, does not mean their chances of progression are the same as for men. Last week I attended a meeting celebrating the launch of the special issue of The Lancet’s theme issue on advancing women in science, medicine, and global health. It was a day focussing on the barriers women still face and the consequences of this, not just in countries like the UK but around the world. Some of the articles make for grim reading. I will just focus on two points below.

But firstly a positive aside, some good news which broke on the day: the current Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, is to become the new Master of Trinity College Cambridge come October. The first woman to take on the role at Trinity, I for one will be welcoming her to Cambridge, welcoming her as a fellow woman heading a once-all-male college. Given all Sally has done in pushing the equalities agenda in her role as CMO, including making a silver Athena Swan award a condition of NIHR funding for clinical schools which shook up the academic world back in 2011 when the policy was announced, I am sure we can expect some action here in Cambridge once she has got settled in (and I expect I will be cheering her on).

Now to turn to the Lancet meeting and accompanying papers, let me first consider a study from Canada which indicates how women remain disadvantaged in peer review of grants if the focus is placed on the calibre of the investigator and not the specifics of the project. The evidence is accumulating how women are systematically less likely to be given first (or last) place in an author list, the places that ‘count’ most; that their papers are less cited; that they receive fewer invitations to give keynote talks and, as I mentioned in a recent post, that their papers tend to get greater scrutiny and higher rates of rejection than those by their male peers. And the evidence is building, in studies such as the Canadian one I’ve just cited, that this is not because they are less good at their work but because of systemic problems in our culture.

We need not only to introduce unconscious bias training for panels – necessary but very far from sufficient – but to think much harder both about any ‘figures of merit’ used in an assessment process, and to challenge the processes that lead to systemic disadvantage. Journal editors, what do you do to check that male and female submitting authors really receive equal treatment? Conference organisers, are you sure that your keynote speakers are representative of the best in their field or have you taken some easy shortcuts in choosing your alleged stars? We need to hold all these people to account

For my second point let me cite Sally Davies, sitting on one of the panels. She raised a point highly relevant to this discussion, what really is excellence, this much-vaunted thing we all talk about? Shouldn’t excellence really include a lot more than papers in fancy journals? Well, of course I agree with her, and have written about this before, but it is a point that needs repeating because most of our institutions have not yet gone far enough in changing their culture. Universities are starting to broaden promotion criteria to include other good practices such as mentoring, service to the community (and of course teaching), but it is usually couched in terms that still strike me as a bit limited.

For instance, the last promotions reference I wrote for another university lumped leadership and service together, giving three bullet points of which two referred to leadership – of units within the university or external committees – and only one talked about ‘a record of successful support for the careers of colleagues.’ Running a research group successfully should, perhaps, have been given a bit more weight in this ‘excellence’ spectrum. Women may not be offered leadership roles (due to habits of bias) and immediately their chances of promotion are downweighted however much they have done to support others. And, let us remember, the evidence is that women show all the same habits of bias as men when it comes to choosing between men and women for leadership.

The Lancet day focussed on women in medicine, and as such the horror stories tended to be focussed on particular medical specialities, with surgery coming in for special opprobrium, but in general the issues for women in medicine and global health are little different from those for women in academic science of any hue. As we celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science we all should be thinking hard about what more we individually and collectively can do. Our object must be to make this day redundant, but I’m not holding my breath that will happen any time soon.

 

 

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Zombies and Narratives

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Athene Donald


This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 400px-Lise_Meitner_%281878-1968%29%2C_lecturing_at_Catholic_University%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.%2C_1946.jpg

If you have never seen the ‘zombie Marie Curie’ xkcd cartoon I’d encourage you to take a look. In it Marie Curie says ‘I wish they’d get over me’ and enumerates a couple of other key women scientists who don’t get the same name recognition (specifically Lise Meitner, whose photograph is at the top, and Emmy Noether). Cartoon Marie also highlights that choosing her – or any female scientist – as a role model makes no sense if young girls think that trying to be like her is what it takes to become successful, as opposed to hard work and passion for their chosen field.

The idea of a simple narrative of a chosen life to exhort future generations receives much traction. Kids books, books for really young kids at that, now tell the stories of such hero(in)es. Marie Curie is one of the women featured in the Little People, Big Dreams: Women in Science series, a series which bizarrely also features aviator Amelia Earhart alongside Ada Lovelace. (I can think of other more convincing historical women in science who would sit more comfortably in place of Earhart, such as Mary Somerville, or Maria Goeppert Mayer; or indeed Lise Meitner or Emmy Noether.) It is clearly desirable to give young children the idea that scientists don’t have to be male and I guess this should start young.

Narratives are a convenience but can be dreadfully misleading. At Churchill College this past week, as we celebrated the life of Lise Meitner with an all-day symposium, we finished the day off with the performance of a play about the lives of Marie Curie, Lise Meitner and Hedy Lamarr (yes, Hedy Lamarr the film-star described as the most beautiful woman in the world but who also had a role to play in Bluetooth technology, even if she never made a penny out of her invention). The one-woman play, written and directed by Sandra Schüddekopf and acted by Anita Zieher, began with Marie Curie bemoaning the way her life had become such a cliché, how a simplistic rags-to-Nobel Prizes narrative hid reality and misled, a story-line that in essence expands on the xkcd Zombie Marie Curie cartoon.

Lise Meitner’s life will not be such a familiar tale as Curie’s, but has its own compelling twists. A female physicist growing up in Vienna when it was practically impossible for her to get an education, who moved to Berlin where state law initially made it impossible for her to get paid employment in a university or to teach, and a Jew by birth who only just fled Nazi Germany in time and subsequently had to forego serious experimental work in her exile in Sweden, it is a tale to move and to marvel at. She accomplished so much despite it all. But, there again, to try to compress her life into a sentence or two is to mislead. She had many supporters of great eminence, and rightly so, but was ultimately shafted by one of them (Otto Hahn) who had been a close friend and colleague for many years. She, like several other women, is perhaps best known for not getting a Nobel Prize when Hahn did, but what sort of testament is that? She should be remembered for what she did (explain nuclear fission for one thing, not a mere bagatelle), not what she wasn’t offered.

Narratives are a convenient shorthand, but as devices to inspire the next generation? I’m not so sure. Narratives of the great and good may only serve to make a career in science seem unobtainable. Who wants to spend their life in a cold shed sifting through pitchblende? Or be driven out of one’s job because of the Nazis? Historians of science rightly deplore the ‘grand man of science’ approach – be it Newton or Einstein – and I think we should equally shun the grand woman of science. But, without the shorthand of the narrative how can we inspire future generations?

I suspect there are two different strands conflated here. There is the ‘let’s inspire with the great and good’ theme and the ‘let’s normalise the idea of women in science’ one. Both, I suspect, could be better served – particularly for very young children – by simply making it possible for ‘people’ to do ‘stuff’. I was brought up on the generation of books in which Peter climbed a tree and Jane stood at the bottom looking impressed; where Jane made the tea and Peter talked to the nice policeman about the naughty robber he had caught. We maybe have moved on a little (look, we now have a female Dr Who: progress!) but research shows that even in kids’ books about animals the male of the species dominates. That embedded cultural unconscious bias is then imbibed by the children; action men (or animals) are, well, male.

Maybe my great grandchildren – it hasn’t happened in time for my grandchildren – will be brought up on a diet of books where gender (including non-binary) is no longer linked to specific roles but we are as likely to find a male nurse as a female astronomer in books. That books about Lise Meitner or Marie Curie inform us about amazing scientists whose personal lives presented challenges and yet they managed to rise above these, but in which we are not constantly told to think ‘they were women’. Reading biographies is always interesting, not least for reminding us how fashions and customs have changed. But we should recall the cartoon’s ‘I wish they’d get over me’ meme and simply expose the young to stories about people, with scientists, nurses, monsters and indeed stay-at-home parents evenly distributed between the genders, so that a 5 year old does not already think nurse equates with female and scientist (or monster) with male.

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Feeling Exhausted

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Athene Donald


This week I came across an article highlighting the accumulated evidence from multiple studies of the disadvantage women in science suffer, with specific reference to the fields of anthropology, ecology and evolution, the field the author – Kathleen Grogan – had most familiarity with. My own experience would suggest there is nothing unique about those fields. She identified all the reasons women fall out of the scientific pipeline (yes I know, not everyone likes that analogy, but I am simply quoting her) or suffer detriment during their careers plus some simple actions male colleagues could take to improve the situation.

It is, as is appropriate for an article appearing in one of the Nature’s stable of journals, evidence-driven and scholarly. Judging by the number of people who retweeted my original tweet about it, it nevertheless struck a chord with many readers. Although it does not spend time hand-wringing over the women whose lives were damaged, even those who ‘survived’ the system, we should not forget the huge waste of potential, knowledge and innovation implied by the aggregated loss of female time, energy and talent. Women get tired battling against the odds; I know I do.

Let me give you a concrete example. Suppose you are an up-and-coming researcher with some innovative ideas that challenge the mainstream. This doesn’t have to be anything as major as a Kuhn-style paradigm shift – even men have trouble getting such radical ideas accepted – but something which provides a different way of looking at things or a new factor that had been overlooked perhaps. Does Mary Smith find it easy to get her paper accepted if she is the corresponding author? Significantly less so than Mark Smith, according to the studies.

Any individual Mary may feel that she hasn’t argued it well enough or that the referees are right when they pick up on some detail (which may incidentally demonstrate that they haven’t even read the paper thoroughly). If she is brave enough, she may even try to get into correspondence with the editor. But this same Mary may find that two years down the line she has still not published this paper, wasting her time in endless rewrites and resubmissions, while her colleague Mark who (she secretly believes) is coming up with ideas of much less significance easily gets his papers accepted. Then she starts to think it isn’t her, so much as her name.

It is worth considering that full names are now very much the standard style so that it is not so easy to hide behind initials as in years past. (Although, thinking back to my ECR days, some journals expected women to give their names in full but men only their initials, thereby highlighting the difference. Male by default.) I am all in favour of uniformity but if we’re not going down the path of double blind refereeing maybe we should remove the subliminal message conveyed by ‘Mary’ as the corresponding author and leave it at ‘M’. (And let us remember that women may be just as unconsciously prejudiced against women as men.)

I could make the same arguments about grant applications, or promotions or salaries or job offers. I won’t because you can find these examples plus the evidence supporting them made expertly in Grogan’s article. Anyhow you get the message. If you happen to be called Mary you may start to feel after a while that the odds seem stacked against you in ways you had not expected. But what do you do then? Persistence and determination, resilience and courage are all very well, but it is undermining to confidence if your career is faltering for reasons that aren’t, as you first assumed, down to some internal flaw but instead arises from something external and systematic/systemic.

I first realised stutters in my own career might not be because I was incompetent when I read the 1999 MIT report on the Status of Women. Up till that point I felt the fact I never seemed to win an argument in my department about space or other resources was because I was useless at arguing. After reading the report I began to wonder. I can’t say the recognition that it might not be my incompetence causing the problem cheered me up.

Anger entered my lexicon then, although I hope not too visibly. I am not sure it has ever fully departed, however rosy my life may look. But I hope I have harnessed that anger to argue much more broadly for women’ status, position, rights (whatever word you like to use) collectively through taking on championing the issues. But anger can still surface when I see things go awry. And it isn’t always easy to use that constructively or even know when and whether to deploy it.

So, another emotional topic that Grogan does not touch on, is how to handle the male colleague – at whatever level – who is, intentionally or not, obnoxious. I don’t mean the predator or the openly aggressive, but the master of the smaller put-down. It is a troubling scenario. Do you make a fuss in public and hope others will join in? Perhaps even wait to see if they would leap in to defend you before you have to do it for yourself.

You know the kind of comment: the one that implies you’re ditzy, ignorant, naïve or incompetent without actually being openly hostile. The ones that leaving you feeling bullied or harassed without being quite specific enough to lead to a formal complaint (and who wants to go down that route with its even greater cost?). The kind that leaves you thinking ‘did that guy really just say that?’ Do you write to him privately afterwards (as I described in one of my earliest blogposts) and hope he will see the error of his ways. It might just inflame the situation if you can’t find good allies. Do you avoid him like the plague in the future, so that you are the one who loses out on opportunities to do good stuff, look after your team, get more space or whatever it might be? The time penalty in even thinking how to handle such casual put-downs costs you whatever action (or inaction) you choose. And, of course, if it happens enough it may push you out of science.

I feel exhausted when such situations arise. And they still do – to me as to every woman (and every minority scientist I’m sure). Not as often as when I was younger but often enough that the memory of the accompanying hassle does not fade.  The soul-searching – did I deserve that?; the soul-searching, friend-asking, sleep-losing hassle of how do I stop this guy getting away with such behaviour to me,  my colleagues and the students he may teach. We have to keep up the good fight. Adducing scholarly evidence is necessary if the collective world is going to take note, but each woman who is impacted is reduced by that impact and the world loses out. We should never forget.

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Creativity Mustn’t be Allowed to be Hijacked

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Athene Donald


 ‘In 2019, the “two cultures” described by CP Snow in 1959 will have finally ceased to have meaning.’

So said Russell Foster in a recent article in Wired. Russell is clearly an optimist and I fear I do not share his optimism, despite all the evidence he adduces in his piece. The examples he cites – including statistics about visitors to the Science Museum – unfortunately only refer to certain segments of our population. Just like Russell is now, in the past I have been a Trustee of the Science Museum and have seen the data compiled by them on the views of their visitors; those surveyed or more than likely to be those already regarded as ‘engaged’ (to use the audience segmentation term adopted by museums, if my memory serves me right). Such visitors are likely to be scientifically engaged but also more widely; after a visit to South Kensington’s Science Museum they might pop across the road to the V+A to look at fine arts, jewellery or costumes. Not all parts of the population seem to think in the same way, including many very well-educated people who seem determined to claim ‘vive la différence’ when it comes to arts and sciences and write about this vociferously.

Let me quote from another recent article, this time in the Guardian just before Christmas. Here Natalie Brett (head of London College of Communication and pro vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts in London) sticks up for ‘soft’ skills in the modern world of work, but then appears to lay claim to these as being learned only on non-STEM courses. To quote her article about the skills such courses teach:

Google cites creativity, leadership potential and communication skills as top prerequisites for both potential and current employees.

As my last blogpost suggests, not all lab heads are exactly full of leadership potential, nor necessarily good at communication (but then who said a history graduate or a linguistics scholar was necessarily good at this either?) but the idea that scientists are not creative is a long-term bugbear of mine (see here for instance). In talks on the subject I like to cite Peter Medawar – always good with the finely-tuned, pithy sentence – who said, way back in 1968

All ideas of scientific understanding, at every level, begin with a speculative adventure, an imaginative preconception of what might be true – a preconception that always, and necessarily, goes a little way (sometimes a long way) beyond anything which we have logical or factual authority to believe in.

That’s what creativity is all about. Let us remember that the so-called ‘creative industries’ would not contribute as much to the UK economy as they do if it were not for all those allegedly tediously uncreative techie and STEM types who are capable of writing the code for video games, considering optimum ways to create ambience by appropriate lighting of the stage in the West End or finding innovative ways to record music. Why has creativity been appropriated by certain non-STEM folk as being theirs and theirs alone?

Natalie Brett does not stop with her criticisms of science and scientists with this bending of her thoughts to creativity. She goes on to say

To return to the Google example, many of the company’s top “characteristics of success” are soft skills: being a good coach, communicating and listening well, possessing insights into other points of view, being supportive of one’s colleagues, critical thinking and problem solving, and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Again this seems a curious misunderstanding of what scientists get up to. Surely seeing other points of view, critical thinking (which to my mind frequently seems to mean no more than being able to see through bogus arguments) and making connections across complex ideas sit at the heart of a scientist’s day job. As for problem solving…..isn’t that what we spend our lives doing from the first day of our undergraduate degree, albeit the problems may be slightly different from what she actually was thinking about? Nevertheless, she cannot pretend to be Humpty Dumpty deciding to choose exactly what the word ‘problem’ might mean regardless of other conventions.

It seems to me scientists are far more likely to want not to put boundaries between the disciplines than non-scientists. To my mind it is a great shame that anyone wants to erect such walls. What I think we should be distinguishing when we consider education is the act of knowing facts in one’s own speciality – thermodynamics, the topic CP Snow was so agitated about, or the Greek lexicon, or the life of Napoleon or whatever it might be ­ ­– from skills useful to getting on in life. Language does not help us here: calling these latter skills ‘soft’ strikes me as ridiculous. Let’s call them ubiquitous, or broad or non-specialised but we should all worry about mastering as many of them as we can.

Science communication is a ‘thing’. Some people are good at it – like Russell Foster, who amongst other roles is Chair of the Cheltenham Science Festival – some are most decidedly not, and should not be let loose on an audience of non-specialists at any price. Nevertheless that does not mean scientists, collectively, cannot communicate. Some scientists are brilliant leaders – Peter Medawar seems to have been in this category, much beloved as the Director of the Mill Hill Laboratory before his untimely death – others, as that last blogpost on jerks spells out only too painfully, are shocking at it. But that certainly does not mean that good leadership is the prerogative of those with an arts or humanities degree.

Furthermore I would hazard a guess – although I am more than happy to be proved wrong – that scientists are far more likely to read non-science books in their bath or bed than non-scientists are likely to pick up a science book, popular or otherwise. My current bath-time reading is actually Paul Warde’s The Invention of Sustainability, which has elements of science but even more of history and even philosophy within its covers. My current Kindle book is The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and other Ocean Voyagers by Adam Nicholson which (forgive me), the Mail apparently said was written ‘with a heart full of poetry and a head full of science’ according to the book’s Amazon website. I like books that can’t be neatly pigeon-holed. I like my life like that. I do not appreciate being accused by non-scientists of being unable to think creatively, or to join the dots between different ideas let alone that I am incapable of listening well or supporting my colleagues: all things that Brett seems convinced of.

So, I wish I could believe that Russell Foster was right when he said there was no longer any division between the cultures. I fear his optimism has overtaken the evidence.

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