How might the Athena Swan Process Emerge?

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Athene Donald

When groups of (comparative) strangers sit around a table, it is impossible to predict what will emerge in the way of new ideas. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to know that I think diversity – of background, skin colour, discipline and gender – may all lead to better decisions than a monoculture is liable to produce, but that list should probably also be extended (in academic circles at least) to cover type of institution and geographical base. I have been involved in various committees over the last year that have been of this form, a group of folk unfamiliar with each others’ points of view coming together to draw up some suggested actions.

One example is the REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel that I am chairing (although it’s not the only one on my mind currently), but as its conclusions are not yet confirmed I cannot write specifically about this. What I can say is that, working with the group has been a pleasure. Given a task that I thought would be immensely challenging the group has, I believe, come up with some constructive ways to ensure interdisciplinary research gets a fair hearing in the REF assessment and, just as importantly, ways that individuals and institutions can have confidence in that this is so. If we get this right than I hope we will see a larger number of submissions covering the wonderful interdisciplinary research that the UK produces submitted to the exercise than happened last time around. The proof of the pudding is of course still to come. Panels – and institutions – may turn out to hate what we propose!

Nevertheless, I am happy to suggest that I believe a group of people, many of whom had never met each other before and who came from a wide range of disciplines, geographies and institution types, were able to dream up ideas far more constructively and creatively than each of us individually would have been able to achieve. That process is what I think ‘emergence’ in this context is all about.  Described like that it is really a physicist’s idea, as expressed in this (non-technical) piece from a few years ago written in the Conversation by a pair of Australian physicists Andy Martin and Kristian Helmerson and summed up as:

“Emergence” describes the ability of individual components of a large system to work together to give rise to dramatic and diverse behaviour.

AdvanceHE, which is the new organisation into which the Equality Challenge Unit has recently been incorporated, will need to be conscious of this as it puts together its announced panel to review the way the scheme operates. Last week saw another account by a woman who had fallen out of love with the Athena Swan process and who had publicly resigned from her local committee, explaining why she had done so. I wrote about my own growing concerns earlier this year, worrying that it had assumed a too-rigid structure that was no longer fit for purpose. It had started out as such a force for good: encouraging departments and whole universities to reflect upon their practices. However, what is perhaps becoming clearer as more and more institutions submit their lengthy, detailed documents, is that culture change to embrace inclusion and diversity whole-heartedly needs far more than pages of graphs of changing numbers. Perhaps the easy wins have been won.

Changing the timing of seminars is great in small ways, but it doesn’t eradicate unconscious (let alone conscious) bias at every stage on the career ladder. Ensuring that there is a proper induction process for new starters and that there is a social once a month to which everyone is invited is not the same as ensuring that those women or other minorities who wish to progress are not knocked back by unsupportive management, with comments along the lines of ‘you’re too emotional’ or ‘it’s not your turn’ and other incredibly soul-destroying remarks. All too often these spill forth to the dismay of the recipient, as I and many another could testify. Perhaps we are moving on though.

Take letters of reference and the way these can be subtly – or not-so-subtly – gendered. I have written about these several times. Firstly, back in 2012, I wrote an opinion piece for the THE; subsequently (February 2016) I wrote a blog for the Guardian,  where I was more explicit about the sorts of comments I had seen. Neither of these articles got a great deal of traction. However my most recent offering on the subject (December 2016) has been very different. First appearing on these pages it got reprinted on the THE website where it got strongly picked up – including references in the national press. The THE continues to promote this article over Twitter, most recently in the last couple of days, and Twitter continues to spread the word about it. Perhaps in this case, 5-6 years on from my first commentary on the issue, the idea has really begun to bite and people are far more conscious of the dangers in their own writing as well as in other people’s. This is definitely an intangible, and one that is hard to imagine could ever be visible in an Athena Swan submission, however much the process is revised, but it is the kind of thing that really is likely to make a difference: if people stop applying, however unconsciously, different adjectives to men and women, appointments and promotions panels will find it easier to treat all candidates equally.

So what’s to be done? How should Athena Swan adapt in the face of criticism and its own awareness of present shortcomings? David Ruebain has written that there is to be a review of the Athena Swan processes to see how they can be adapted to be fit for purpose at the present time. If we are to change the academic landscape to something that is truly inclusive there is much work to be done. But perhaps there is a tension (not unlike how people perceive the REF) between what is measurable – the raw numbers themselves, changing numbers over the years, explicit actions – and the environment which is, after all, what really matters. Good policies are not enough but how do you assess the intangible atmosphere and, equally important, how do you assess whether there are toxic pockets of resistance?

So, this review panel will have its work cut out to come up with a refreshed scheme that can address the concerns that are being increasingly expressed. Let us hope that the group of individuals overseeing this process (of which, I will admit, I am one although I have no knowledge as yet who else is involved) can demonstrate ‘emergent properties’, and approach the problem from multiple viewpoints to come up with constructive solutions. Athena Swan, as a scheme, evolved from a very informal beginning, initiated within the Athena Project; its early history can be found here . Self-assessment and not lots of forms was the name of the game back then. It is easy to see why such an informal process is no longer fit for purpose. But nor do I believe the doorstep amount of paperwork required, not always with full support from the leadership, is the right way to proceed.

Time will tell whether in this case a good and operative solution really does emerge from a panel of disparate ‘experts’ getting their heads together, but it is crucial that it does.

 

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The Meeting of the Ways

Posted on April 26, 2018 by Athene Donald

There are many reasons why people believe – as I do – that interdisciplinarity has to sit at the heart of any research agenda. It does not require that two disciplines bring cutting edge tools and ideas together to create something that is yet more cutting edge. In my experience it rarely works like that. It can sometimes mean that techniques familiar and routine in one field freshly applied to some totally different area provide new insight, or it can be that two approaches come together to yield the unexpected. Or…..there are so many ways that interdisciplinarity can open up new directions. As Chair of the REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel I hope we have been able to come up with criteria that can be applied wherever it is appropriate and that it will encourage the community to submit a wide range of outputs to the process. Time will tell.

For me in my research, one of the things that most fires me up is seeing connections between disparate topics (whether they cross disciplines or not), joining the dots in novel ways and drawing out insight by asking an old question in a new situation. This, I suppose, is the way my curiosity manifests itself. Last week I noted some striking examples of parallels from ostensibly different areas of research when I attended the launch of the new Bennett Institute for Public Policy. (Indeed, strictly I hosted this event at Churchill College). The day consisted of a series of panel discussions considering important current policy problems from different perspectives.

Listening to Princeton’s Eldar Shafir talk about poverty and inequality I was struck by his remarks about the importance of context on people’s cognitive ‘bandwidth’: when people were overwhelmed by financial stress their ability to perform on other tasks was reduced.  He had demonstrated this via a series of experiments, including inducing thoughts about the state of the individual’s finances prior to carrying out cognitive tests. The results showed anxiety led to an impaired response.  As a consequence, poor people may end up being assessed as stupid, because this cognitive impairment means their performance falls below what it might be in more favourable situations. His interpretation was further supported by tests on Indian farmers carried out throughout the year, who scored more highly in tests after the harvest was in, when they were less concerned about their monetary situation, than earlier in the crop cycle.

Listening to this, it seems to relate closely in its manifestation to what, in a very different context, would be called stereotype threat. Remind test candidates that they are female before a maths test and they will do less well than in a less stereotypically-challenged situation; or tell white athletes about to run a sprint that they are white – and blacks are the good sprinters  – and their times increase; or remind black students of their ethnicity and they underperform in academic tests. I wrote about these examples before and they are thoroughly covered in the book Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, the originator of the concept of stereotype threat. The parallel with introducing the fear of poverty into the mind of a subsistence farmer before testing his skill levels seems evident, but that parallel did not feature in Shafir’s talk. He was approaching a completely different type of social injustice, but cluttering up the brain with fears would appear to be the common thread:  the same underlying mental feature must be manifest. Shafir’s conclusion in this context – and it applies to gender and ethnicity just as much – is that the additional disadvantage needs to be acknowledged by those seeking to devise strategies to tackle them,  rather than simply saying group A are more stupid than group B!

A second parallel between Shafir’s talk on poverty and inequality with the inequalities of gender lay in the idea of affirmation. In this case his field work was carried out on attendees at inner city soup kitchens. Those who were asked to describe (‘affirm’) situations or actions that made them feel proud did better in tests than those who didn’t make any such statement.  Compare that with a strategy that one study showed reduced the attainment gap in introductory physics classes in the US between men and women, that of ‘values affirmation’. In a double blind test some of the students were asked  to write about their values at the start of the course. Most particularly for women who seemed to believe that men innately will do better in physics than women, this affirmation exercise lead to a grade point benefit. Similarly a Stanford study used values affirmation to benefit black minority students.

So, if these techniques – and explanations – apply across the board, why aren’t they used more? I do wonder, particularly about the self-affirmation approach, whether it might be used routinely to help minorities. The gender and BME (black and minority ethnic) attainment gaps at universities are getting increasing attention. The roots are no doubt myriad and the solutions will likewise be diverse. But if values affirmation works, even if only to a limited extent, there seems little reason not to try it out since it is hard to see what the downside is; the time required is not great. Personally I find it remarkable that something so simple can have a lasting effect, but the evidence seems to be there.

That particular talk by Shafir stood out for me because the parallels with studies I am familiar with from my time as gender equality champion seemed so resonant despite the very different context. But, the whole day of the Bennett Institute launch was fascinating. I look forward to working with the Institute, most particularly in the area of science and policy. Churchill College, along with CSaP and the Institute are starting up an initiative on science and democracy. In part I hope this will help to provide insight for early career researchers about the importance of science in and for policy, but also to explore more widely innovative ways of promoting an understanding of policy questions among scientists.

Bringing different ideas and people together in new ways can lead to wonderful new perspectives. Here’s to interdisciplinarity being seen as just one strand of the researcher’s repertoire and not as some rare beast that needs special REF criteria (although for now it most certainly does); here’s to a future where social scientists and ‘hard’ scientists getting together is totally accepted and not seen, for instance by my physics’ colleagues, as selling out on the real science. And good luck to the Bennett Institute and its future work!

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Will Biography be a Lost Art?

Posted on April 15, 2018 by Athene Donald

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As a young postdoc I arrived, fairly literally penniless in the USA in October 1977. I had flown with the forerunner of today’s low-cost airlines, Freddie Laker, on his new invention of ‘standby’ fares. You turned up on the day and took the chance of there being a spare seat. So it was that, very early in the morning I went to somewhere near Victoria Station and paid, if my memory serves me right, £60 to fly to New York that day. I then went to the railway station to buy a cup of tea since the flight was a long time away and managed to leave my wallet there. So my last phone call to my mother for about a year consisted of urging her to ring the police to report the loss so I could get a crime number to allow me to claim on my insurance. That was why I got to New York without any cash on me, only travellers cheques (a medium of cash that is pretty well obsolete now). Somehow – I forget how – I negotiated an onward flight to Ithaca, where I spent the next four years working at Cornell University

As I flew into JFK last week, approaching over the suburbs of New York, I was reminded of my first sight of the USA way back then. The fact that every house had its own plot, separated from its neighbours by an alley with no terraced houses in sight struck me as an indicator of the space in America that hits me afresh every time I return.  I was also amazed by the blue squares of personal swimming pools, such a rarity in the UK that it took me a while to work out what I was seeing. However, I certainly was feeling very uncertain about life, arriving with no cash in hand and that feeling of scale and space did nothing to make me feel at home.

Laker is no more. I don’t think standby tickets are a ’thing’ any longer. And if I had turned up last week with a viola in hand – as I did then – as well as the rest of my luggage I suspect I would have been told it was outsize luggage and had to go in the hold; or that I had to buy another seat. Times have changed. Furthermore, the idea of only phoning parents once a year (because of the huge cost; the technology did exist) must be an alien idea to today’s postdocs with their ever present smartphones, at least if they have good parental relationships.  The absence of easy access to the internet when crossing the Atlantic (or the American continent itself) can feel like real deprivation to some travellers, as is immediately apparently from the sound of all the phones pinging on as soon as the ‘fasten seat belts’ sign is turned off upon landing. People can’t wait to find out what their Twitter feed or email is telling them (although, sometimes, one would probably rather not know).

But with all this electronic messaging what will future biographers do? When I landed in the USA and had finally managed to make my way to Ithaca and locate my husband (all complicated by the absence of ready cash; travellers’ cheques don’t work well for a phone requiring a mere dime; I had no credit card usuable in the USA, and my husband had no idea of which day I’d arrive since I’d flown standby) I settled down to write to my mother with my experiences. During the four years I was in the States I probably wrote to her a couple of times a week, proper hand-written letters. I likewise received letters back from my UK-based family. Sometimes the writing was more legible than others, sometimes the news – about progress or otherwise in electron microscopy and the state of my interactions with colleagues unknown to her – must have bored my non-scientist mother senseless, but it was the act of putting pen to paper and the contact when no other method was available that counted.

When my mother died I found she had kept some – but only some – of these letters: there is a hefty bunch from 1980 when I was still at Cornell, plus some from considerably earlier around the time I went to university as an undergraduate, but the first letters I wrote upon arrival in the USA are gone. Hence I cannot quote from them to tell you accurately how acute the culture shock was, but I remember feeling it all too vividly. I certainly thought of it as ‘two nations divided by a common language’, words usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw.

I have been told, by a well-known biographer of scientists, that there is a ‘dark period’ when neither letters nor emails exist that will challenge future biographers. The dates for this will be the 10-15 years around the turn of the century. Email existed, so letters drifted out of meaningful existence for a subsequent biographer’s fact-finding, but email correspondence was not archived. Those years will have no tangible record to tell us about the individual’s state of mind, their response either to big world events (9/11 perhaps) or to the trifling consequences of moving house or finding their feet in a new role or country. I suspect this may be less a problem for the political figures whose ‘papers’ Churchill College Archives tend to house, than of the currently un-noted scientists who become the Nobel prize-winners of the future whose records we might want to acquire. Nevertheless for the College Archivist I know the question of how best to preserve email records (those of more recent vintage that do still exist) is a vexed one. What will be available to future writers who want to tell the personal or professional narrative of the men and women of science, or those folk who lurk in Whitehall corridors, for future generations to contemplate?

Because the past was so rich in tangible material, in the Archives we have many amazing artefacts from the life of Winston Churchill, such as his annotated speeches (including markings where to pause for maximum effect, or highlighting his changes as his rhetoric developed e.g. see here for a ready example; many of the papers can be studied on line in the Churchill online Archive).  Or, for a different sort of politician, one can study Maggie Thatcher’s papers, also available online through the Thatcher Foundation. (The College even possesses some of her handbags. As the first female Master of the College I thought it only appropriate that I should have a look at one of these, but unfortunately – archivists being what they are – as is apparent in the photo at the top I wasn’t actually allowed to touch the still-boxed- up gift to her brought out for my delectation.) But, handbags aside, what ‘artefacts’ will we still have in the future? I am sure there are strict rules about maintaining the records of a member of the Cabinet, but for scientists who do everything at speed and by email, possibly influenced also in the future by the new  GDPR legislation, what kind of illuminating insights will remain for the biographers of the future?

The reality is the concreteness of hand-writing letters meant that the content was very different from the tossed off emails. I may have sent an email back to my family daily throughout my recent trip, but they were very different beasts from the letters I’d written to my mother. They merely recorded where I was and perhaps an outline of what I’d done and who I’d met. They did not discuss anything in detail of my thoughts on what I’d been getting up to.  Email is such a different medium to a letter and we have lost the art.

In my talks to alumni during my travels I was able to quote a few of Sir Winston’s thoughts on first visiting the USA in 1895, such as this wonderfully snobbish and snotty view of the press:

But the essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth. Their best papers write for a class of snotty housemaids and footmen ….I think mind you that vulgarity is a sign of strength. A great, crude, strong young people are the Americans – like a boisterous healthy boy among enervated but well bred ladies and gentlemen.

(These were captured in a letter to his brother.)  What will be left for tomorrow’s biographers of our leaders to digest?

 

 

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Are Women Underpaid?

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Athene Donald

The deadline is past for companies in the UK employing more than 250 employees to report their gender pay gap. The numbers are not pretty and the University sector is no different from other types of employers in manifesting an average or median hourly difference of around 20%.  (Wonkhe have published the data for universities, and there is also an account of all the Oxford Colleges data here, although I haven’t yet seen an equivalent for Cambridge. My own college, Churchill, is pretty typical I fear.) However I think it is very important to unravel what this really means. It looks bad, it is bad, but what exactly is it telling us?

Firstly, it does not tell us whether men and women are being paid a 20% discrepancy for the same work. Of course, I hear you say, it is illegal to pay men and women differently for doing the same role, but despite this being enshrined in law it is clear – for instance from the latest stories from the BBC – that the law is not always applied. Personally, I would have liked the new Government reporting requirements to have been put into a form where this sort of unequal behaviour had to be made explicit. That is not what we have. Nor do the requirements actually force greater transparency. Again, to single out the BBC (not because they are clearly the worst offenders, but simply because they have been extensively analysed so there is more information about their weaknesses than for most other organisations) it is obvious just how much the lack of transparency makes it easy to obscure what is going on, thereby making it hard for legal challenges to be made.

I wish institutions were required to report by grade (or role), so that intrinsic differences in how men and women are paid for equivalent roles became clear. The University of Cambridge does report like this – has done so for around a decade – and, back when I chaired the relevant group, we tried to understand why, for instance, it seemed that new male appointments were typically made at higher points within one particular grade than women. We got some answers – since grades actually cover a variety of roles which have different typical starting pay – but I’m not sure it was satisfactory enough and I hope in the years since I stepped down from the role such investigations continue.

However, what the government has chosen to make mandatory for reporting is simply the averages across all grades. These figures raise an entirely different set of issues and problems which may be much harder to resolve. Which is why I wish we had answers to the first set for which it should be much easier to effect a cure. What averages over all grades show is what was anyhow already obvious to everyone in the sector: that there are more male professors at the top and more (frequently part-time) female cleaners at the bottom. This grade segregation has its roots in part in our society and its values and in part – but only in part – in university practices. The trouble is that the first set of issues are essentially outwith any particular university’s control so that they alone cannot remove all the discrepancies.

For instance, in Cambridge, my memory is that the highest paid professors tend to be in the sciences and engineering schools, not the arts, humanities and social sciences. But where are there more women? Of course in the latter group not the former. That there are a low proportion of female professors in Physics or Engineering is not, I believe, down to inherent bias (even if that may play some small part, although I have no evidence it does even that) but has its roots in the low numbers of girls ever starting to study these subjects due to problems pre-18 in our schools and in our societal expectations and norms.   There are proportionally more female professors in English but, on average, all the professors in English are paid less than in sciences. Even if we only looked at professorial salaries, then, we would find a marked gender pay gap, but from that it couldn’t simply be concluded the University might be misbehaving.

That is not to make any excuse for the ca 20% overall gender pay gap that the University is showing. There will undoubtedly be work that can and must be done to facilitate progression for women to the higher grades. We should also be doing all we can to make it easier for men to opt into part-time working associated with childcare responsibilities. Only if a working world, where equality of choice for men and women regarding caring responsibilities is facilitated, can we hope to see a world where the domestic onus is not simply seen as the ‘woman’s problem’. To my mind, removing the stigma – which appears to surround men taking six months of parental leave, even where an employer makes it financially viable – is a key part in making it easier for women to progress. I suspect that too often the only focus of attention is on ‘fixing the women’, but fixing the system is much more broad-ranging.

Of course every university should be scrutinising the wording of advertisements for implicit messaging that may deter one gender or the other; they should be considering whether an appropriately diverse range of candidates apply for any job – and if not why not; if the pool turns out to be badly out of kilter with the pool from which they should be drawing they need to start again; they should be sure panels are well-versed in the dangers of unconscious bias and that they know how to decode any symptoms of gendered wording in letters of reference; they need to check whether shortlists are balanced; and they need to be wary if selection panels always rank the brilliant woman just behind the also brilliant man when making appointments. And those are just the issues relating to academic appointments. An equivalent list could be drawn up for appointments to every kind of job in the organisation and equally for issues around promotion and progression.

Finally, what the Government reporting does require is an analysis of bonuses by gender. Bonuses are often awarded for recruitment and retention purposes. Particularly in the latter case this means that people essentially ask for them: up my pay or I’ll leave to go to Harvard being the typical line of argument. As things stand (often related to the issue of childcare I allude to above) men are more likely to be mobile and therefore willing to contemplate a Harvard approach, hence men – at the top of the tree – are more likely to be the ones getting the bonuses. Instantly one has moved away from equal pay for equal work. I think this whole system of academic bonuses needs to be scrutinised because it introduces great inequalities unrelated to academic worth. I don’t know what the answer is. but I think too often the mantra of ‘ask and it shall be given’ applies in a not very considered way that introduces unfairnesses across the board.

I guess there is a presumption that those employers in any sector which have come up with a massive gender pay gap will be shamed into doing better. How long it will take to root out some of the systemic problems I would not like to predict, but until society reconsiders many issues about how we perceive men and women, that gap is likely to remain.

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Guilty of Rambling On

Posted on March 29, 2018 by Athene Donald

As a PhD student it is an exciting moment when you know you’re off to your first international conference. Whether or not you get to present (either orally or via a poster), there is still a thrill in just being part of the larger scientific family. I can still remember the stand-out paper from the very first conference I ever attended – the Electron Microscopy and Analysis’ Group of the Institute of Physics meeting in Bristol in 1975, at the end of the first year of my PhD. The paper (formally written up here) was on the structure of purple membrane and was delivered by Nigel Unwin, with Richard Henderson as the co-author. This was an early paper in the steady stream of electron microscopy developments that led to Richard Henderson being awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The paper was much talked about during the conference I attended because it so clearly represented a very significant step forward in methodology.

I can’t imagine I knew this paper was coming or would necessarily have appreciated beforehand just how significant the work was. At the time Nigel Unwin himself, I suspect (but it’s a long time ago) would not yet have been seen as a leading light.  Other students may be better clued up and/or feel eager anticipation at the thought of listening to some founding father of their field give a keynote. It may feel like a fantastic opportunity to worship at an idol’s feet, perhaps. However….too often there is a ‘however’. Some such speakers may have passed their sell-by date or be bored stiff by delivering the same keynote at yet another mega-conference in some soulless conference centre through which they are briefly flitting. Their boredom may ooze from every pore. Some grand old men (and statistically it is still likely to be a man) like this are actually not the best speakers. I remember listening to Bristol polymer physicist Andrew Keller give a much-built-up talk, in which he struggled with the overhead projector and dropped his acetates on the floor in his confusion. He ended up talking for far too long in a rather unfocussed way.  It was a dispiriting experience. Or Sir Charles Frank, also as it happens a physicist from Bristol, who laced his talk with much vitriol directed at other speakers at the conference. It wasn’t the same conference as Keller’s talk, but these sharp comments – if my memory serves me right – included a reference to the said Andrew Keller. Frank was 14 years his senior (although at the time both were probably retired) but he trivialised Keller’s work, calling him a ‘young man’ in a tone of contempt. This was not edifying.

So perhaps it is with those memories and in that spirit that I read a recent paper considering the extent to which speakers at different career stages were prone to over-run in conference speaking slots. As a session chair it is always difficult to know just when to intervene when someone shows no sign of winding up their presentation as the clock ticks on. I tend to be quite a fierce chair, but different conferences have different attitudes to the issue. Undoubtedly, if the first session significantly over-runs it sets the tone and makes it much harder for later chairs to step in and halt a late-running speaker. Often, though, the audience is very grateful if one does. After all it allows time to drink some coffee, network and get a comfort break or even lunch.  Curiously, the paper I refer to by Edlund et al, found that a female chair seemed to provoke better behaviour of both male and female speakers, with fewer over-running talks, than when there was either a male chair or a male/female pairing.

So who are the worst offenders at conferences? It will probably come as no surprise that the most junior speakers are the most law-abiding and the senior folk the guiltiest of exceeding their time limit. Only just over a quarter of PhD students exceeded their allocated time; approaching 50% of postdocs and PIs who over-ran. I am perhaps not surprised to learn that women were less likely to talk too much than men, but that may be thought of as tending to stereotyping. The least prone to offend were female PhD students.

But perhaps the result that surprised me least was what happened at big (audiences greater than 150) conferences. These are the ones where there are big name keynote speakers. These are the ones where people who are used to being lauded typically choose to speak. I am sure they envisage eager young students hanging on their every word and therefore they probably assume you can’t have too much of a good thing so they can talk as long as they want. They probably don’t expect to be cut off by the chair – male or female – when they are in full flow. So the worst offenders are male speakers at big conferences, of whom a whopping 60% over-ran. We don’t get told by how much, but I have too often seen such people talk for 10 minutes too long in a 30 or 40 minute talk.

What annoys me about such speakers is that it implies a complete lack of interest in those ‘lesser’ people who come thereafter. Programmes can get hideously derailed by over-running talks, particularly if one follows hot on the tail of another. Ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and the contributed papers (typically where the PhD students or junior postdocs will be found) get squeezed and squeezed so that, either people walk out (because they want their dinner) or the question time gets obliterated.

Many senior scientists give wonderful talks but, part of giving a good talk is sticking to time. It is also part of good  mentoring of the entire community. I hope some of the guilty speakers will read the data in the paper by Edlund et al and blush.

 

Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 4 Comments