Cultural Values in a Time Warp

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Athene Donald

At the start of the year I wrote about my frustrations with the slow pace of change, specifically with regard to the situation for women in science in academia but also more broadly. This week I am forcibly reminded again how slowly our society changes and this time it’s the case of how it impacts on young children. Impact on them means impact on their choices and what they become as adults.  It is depressing.

The first story arose from a study which shows that girls as young as six decide that girls aren’t ‘really, really smart’ whereas boys are. It got a lot of media coverage. It is a study based on not a very large number of children, of fairly middle class origin based in the US, so you can quibble over whether or not it is representative, but it nevertheless is fairly shocking as well as being useful concrete evidence about how our society evolves, or more accurately doesn’t. I got to voice my views on Radio5 on Friday  with Emma Barnett (21.42 minutes in), who clearly had got a very informed idea of the paper and its implications so that her questions were a pleasure to answer. Too often this is not the case in radio interviews where sensationalism rather than fact is sought! It is interesting that many of the reactions I have heard to the story – anecdote of course, not evidence – go along the lines of parents reflecting how early they have noticed their own children forming views of what men and women can and cannot do from the toddler stage on, generally in standardly and boringly stereotyped ways. Parents can do their best to fight society’s ‘values’, but the messages bombard children from TV, books, relatives, playgroup and (nursery) school. As further evidence I cite below shows, even those who try hard seem doomed to get it horribly wrong.

Why does it matter if six year old girls no longer believe they are likely to be ‘really, really smart’? (Interestingly, the change from when boys and girls are considered equivalent to this viewpoint seemed to happen between 5 and 6.) Just think what options this can close off to them. Apparently becoming a physicist is likely to be one of them, since popular wisdom decrees that physics is difficult and can only be done by the intellectual whizzkids. It doesn’t matter if that belief is true, if it is a message swallowed whole by the kids it is likely to close off paths very swiftly. Close them off not because of aptitude or interest, but because of self-belief or rather lack thereof. Since too many interventions, about physics, maths or any other subject, tend only to come at secondary school, perhaps not till GCSE years, it is clear that these will be at least six years too late to be effective. That conclusion is a clear message that our educators and policy-makers need to grasp if we are to crack the issue of girls not opting for the physical sciences, maths, computing and engineering.

So what about the interest angle amongst girls? Can toy manufacturers help to encourage an interest, let’s say in engineering. Here enters the second story this time about a Barbie spin-off. I heard about this story initially because clearly if a journalist types in pink, Barbie and science my name gets thrown up by Google as a result of my throwaway comments in my BSA Presidential Address  (even though I’m no longer the BSA President by now). Consequently a Telegraph journalist, Katie Morley contacted me for my views after she’d attended a toy convention. Here a Barbie being created by toy company Thames and Kosmos  was deemed to be ‘engineering Barbie’. She came equipped with things she could build: a washing machine, a dress, a movable clothes hanger…. In other words the manufacturers couldn’t get beyond the idea that girls – even if being generously permitted to build things – should stick with the domestic sphere. The shortsightedness, the inappropriateness of the stereotyping (did I mention the objects were, of course, all pink?) clearly had not impinged on the creators.

How many times do we have to revisit the idea that if talent is to flourish it mustn’t be restricted to outdated ideas of what is suitable? It isn’t sufficient for Thames and Kosmos to crawl forward to a position where Barbie is allowed to be an engineer; she has to be allowed to build things across the spectrum of what might be useful. There’s obviously nothing wrong with building washing machines, but the choice of rockets, or cars, or bridges or robots should also be on the menu. Laura Bates in the Guardian, as ever succinct and to the point, dissected this new failure neatly. She reminded readers of the classic case of getting things wrong of the EU’s Science it’s a Girl Thing video, pulled in about 24 hours after mass objections so you can only find snippets remaining on the web. If you can bear to watch this you will see the video not only involved pinkification, but lipstick and high heels to compound the error. Other attempts have similarly floundered on stereotypes of the worst kind: EDF called its campaign ‘Pretty Curious’  to some derision, although the content isn’t all bad and this is probably the best of a bad lot; IBM came up  with #hackahairdryer therefore also condemning the girls to domesticity. Lego has similarly pinkified those sets designed specifically for girls, an error I targeted on this blog five years ago.

With such a long list of prior stereotyping disasters, how is it possible for another company to enter the fray and get it so badly wrong? Why is it so difficult for manufacturers to grasp the fact that girls are not only (and possibly not at all) interested in fashion and domesticity. Conversely boys may not all be gung-ho for pirates, rockets, dinosaurs and violence. Why can’t children be children just as much as toys be toys? Instead the company has another PR disaster on its hands, even if Barbie engineer is purchased in significant numbers. Culturally we are simply and unbelievably still stuck in a stereotyped time warp. My frustration mounts…..2017 is not going to be a good year if the first few weeks are the indicator, not good on so many fronts of which pinkification and stereotyping are just one tiny corner. (I am only too aware that in comparison with some of the disgusting things currently happening around the world, to which this title might also apply, they could be regarded as but mere irrelevant hiccoughs.)

Posted in Education, Equality | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The ABC of panel scoring: Anchoring, Bias and Committee Procedures

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Athene Donald

Academic life is particularly full of rank ordered lists, even if they are frequently not transparently available. From undergraduate examinations to professorial promotions, from REF (and in future TEF) marks to grant-awarding panels, the scores matter. Anyone who has ever been ‘scored’ will worry about the accuracy of the scores given; anyone who has been involved in decision-making will have their own views about the process, its validity and whether their own part left them satisfied. Peer review may be the best process we have for making these judgements – which in essence all of them rely on – but no one ever claimed peer review was faultless. If you have never sat on any comparable committee you may well be interested in, as well as deeply suspicious of, what actually goes on. If so, you may find illuminating this scholarly article from the social sciences. In this, the author gives much qualitative insight into the goings on in a series of Swedish Research Council meetings, as he explores a particular  phenomenon known as the ‘anchoring effect’, on which more later.

In all of the committees I have been involved with I have only once sat on (and never had the misfortune to chair) a panel where I felt there was something slightly dodgy going on, in the sense there was a sub-group behaving as a cartel. I hasten to add this behaviour was spotted and neutralised by an oversight panel. In general people try really hard to be objective but, as the article demonstrates, this is not as easy as you might think. Consider the following issues as demonstrating the challenges that implicitly or explicitly may arise:

  1. If asked to score between 1 and 10 against some criterion, some people will use the full range, but others will probably cluster scores between 4 and 8 believing nothing is perfection and nothing is completely worthless. Averaging such scores to produce a crude rank-ordered list (even if subsequently modified by discussion, as such raw lists essentially always are) may not be the optimum way to proceed, but is likely to be what happens.
  2. In the case of a grant proposal, a very convincing case may be made which only the specialist is able to pick up contains a fundamentally flawed assumption; or equivalently in promotions, only the person closest to an application may spot that there is unjustified hyperbole in some of the claims. Rightly, these judgements should have more weight than those of a less expert panel member, but it will be random in each case whether such immediately relevant expertise is represented on the panel.
  3. Absolutely ‘solid’ metrics (e.g the h index) may be used improperly e.g. to compare candidates from very different disciplines. If you try to compare a pure mathematician (think Andrew Wiles of Fermat’s Last Theorem fame) with a synthetic chemist, their h indices may vary by a factor of 10. It says nothing about their relative excellence. That much is pretty obvious, but even if you compare a synthetic chemist with a physical chemist, the differences may be substantial. Sub-disciplines as well as larger groupings matter in these things. Similarly with prizes: focussing on the UK, the Royal Society of Chemistry just happens to have a much larger and more varied collection of prizes than the Institute of Physics so a solidly good but not-necessarily-stellar chemist is far more likely to be able to list a prize or two than a comparable physicist. You need to be very aware of these differences to be able to tension these solid facts appropriately.
  4. The committee procedures may significantly affect the way different panel members participate. I once sat on a research council panel which was dealing with four very different sub-fields. Initially the modus operandi was for each of the four to be taken in turn. This meant it was all too easy for panel members only to focus on the area they were closest to, essentially dozing off (or at least being very bored and not concentrating) during the rest of the presentations. As a result, when the final scores were decided most of the committee had little to say about most of the applications. During the time I served on the panel (and this must be at least 15 years ago) it became obvious just what a bad way of proceeding this was, and eventually meetings took place considering applications simply in alphabetical order. I am sure this led to better decisions as everyone concentrated throughout the discussions.
  5. Without needing to invoke either a conspiracy or genuine conflict of interest, if there is someone who has a prior high opinion of one particular applicant, this may shine through regardless of the case on the table. If this person happens to talk first and is (as a recent committee member described themselves to me) a dogmatic character, a strongly positive message can be conveyed which later speakers find hard or are unwilling to challenge. Randomness in order of speaking may have a significant effect on what is ultimately a collective decision. Chairs can do what they can to overcome dogmatic speakers, but are unlikely to know in advance how best to order speakers so that no unreasonable advantage can be accrued by any particular candidate.

The issue of ‘anchoring’ I referred to at the beginning relates most closely to this last point of a preliminary score influencing later results. First identified I believe by Daniel Kahneman, it is the phenomenon by which the introduction of an initial figure may have subsequent impact on how people score/react or choose to proceed. Given some figure – it could be for scoring a grant or equally for what they are prepared to pay for some product, which was the context Kahneman considered – people use that as a baseline and tweak what they believe is appropriate around it rather than starting afresh themselves with an objective view. So, in the context of scoring a collection of grants, if the scores submitted in advance by panel members are averaged and presented to the panel before detailed discussion starts, it might influence how the subsequent debate unwinds and hence the final scores which are awarded.

This is the situation which forms the basis of the paper I referred to above by Swedish researcher Lambros Roumbanis as he analyses panel meetings of the Swedish Research Council. But his paper describes a much broader range of behaviours than just this particular facet, which is why it is so generally informative for those curious about what goes on in such meetings. Of course every panel is different and so the observations must be treated as examplars rather than necessarily typical. In my experience people are probably less reflective in their lunch breaks than he apparently discovered, probably because his very presence influenced behaviour. Nevertheless people do agonise over their actions – committee members are not, in my experience, blasé or careless. That does not stop them having internal biases, prejudices and baggage from previous meetings, all of which may impact on how they interact with other panel members and the paperwork in front of them. However, let me stress, few if any panel members approach the task with anything but the best of intentions; nor do they tend to set out to game the system for some nefarious purpose. Gross biases tend to be picked up and challenged. Despite all that there is absolutely no doubt that peer review does not always end up with the right answers, be it down to anchoring, ignorance or incompetence. Alternative methodologies are not likely to be any better. Lottery anyone?

Posted in Research, Science Funding | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Mentoring Matters, but for Whom?

Posted on January 15, 2017 by Athene Donald

In response to my recent post on New Year Frustrations, I received a tweet complaining that in this particular person’s university female postdocs contractually could not receive mentoring. That statement can be read in two ways: either that female postdocs are being actively disadvantaged in comparison with their male counterparts (which would be truly shocking) or that no postdocs, regardless of gender, were provided with mentoring, which is merely depressing. When pressed, my correspondent agreed it was the latter statement they had intended. So, this university (and I don’t remember which university was concerned and I’m not trying to point fingers anywhere in particular) went out of its way to state, in their contracts, that postdocs would not be offered the practical support that mentoring can provide.

In my University all newly appointed members of academic staff are assigned a mentor, at least in principle. I know a few years ago when I asked some random questions I discovered that in practice this didn’t always happen, but the intention was at least there (I haven’t checked recently whether it has become more robust as a scheme). In other universities I suspect something similar occurs, and the existence of such mentoring is probably highlighted in Athena Swan applications, but no doubt quite often the reality departs from the aspiration elsewhere too.  For postdocs, Cambridge is still only at a pilot stage  of offering mentoring across the University at the institutional level (although locally there is more going on). However our very active Office of Postdoctoral Affairs is at least on the case and it does no harm to trial what works and what doesn’t for this particular group of researchers before rolling out a scheme to apply to all the thousands (literally) of postdocs employed in Cambridge.

I think the idea of a university sitting down and deciding explicitly to rule out mentoring for any cohort – as my tweeting colleague highlighted – is deplorable. Not everyone wants mentoring, not everyone will necessarily benefit from an assigned mentor if the chemistry isn’t right between the pair, but in essence to forbid such a relationship contractually seems bizarre. I am not convinced formal mentoring schemes always work and ‘accidental’ mentoring of a junior member of a department by someone more experienced is just as good if not better, because in that case it will have come to pass because both parties wish it to. But by the very fact it is accidental it is also unreliable. The right senior member may not notice some early career researcher who is in significant need of advice, a steer or just encouragement; or alternatively it may be that someone who fits into a given team really well gets all the support and another member, just as talented but less obviously a good team fit gets overlooked and so gets locked into a vicious circle of disadvantage. Those situations can occur only too easily but can to some extent be counteracted by a formal mentoring scheme because the overlooking won’t happen.

My original post which prompted the tweet referred to the feeling that progress on gender equality was dispiritingly slow. The issue of mentoring should not be about gender at all, but of course too often it is. Certainly in a male-dominated subject such as mine the person who appears to be the outsider and not fitting into a team of the kind I allude to above may be an outsider by virtue of their gender (or race or many other attributes too, but I’ll stick with the simplest example of gender here). They may be precisely the one who appears not to fit in simply because they are a woman and their confidence will be further dented if they see others in the team getting offered the conference presentations, the tap on the shoulder suggesting they apply for a fellowship or other signs of approval whilst they continue to be ignored. Official mentoring may enable them to ask for what others seem to be given as if by right plus give them the necessary encouragement that they know what the next steps they need to take are and how to set about achieving them.

One of my very early posts looked at the analysis of the 2010 ASSET survey across UK science departments. One of the things that struck me at the time as extraordinary from the results published was that it was the professors who were most likely to be appraised, not the junior staff. I believe advice – be it through appraisal (or staff review and development if you prefer that title) or mentoring – is most important for those setting out at the early stages of their career. At professorial level you should know what you’re doing, what you ought to be doing (even if you’re not doing it) and how to set about achieving your next professional goal. During your first postdoc all challenges may seem equally impossible but it may not be obvious which are the key skills to master or the crucial boxes to be able to tick on your CV. It is too easy to expend effort on tasks which are neither enjoyable nor productive if you can’t see the wood for the trees; even more so if you’ve never been encouraged to say no to whatever is tossed in your direction.

So, with the usual caveats about the dangers of stereotyping, I would suggest the people who are most in need of a formal mentoring scheme are those at the earliest stage of their careers and particularly if they form any sort of minority within a discipline. Having said that, when my own department introduced a voluntary scheme for postdocs, it was not well taken up by them. Perhaps the very fact that it was voluntary acted as a deterrent; perhaps people thought that admitting they wanted a mentor might be interpreted as a sign of weakness so they had better not put up their hand. Be that as it may, a more formal system of mentoring is now required within research groups at the Cavendish, which is to be hoped is working well (I have as yet seen no analysis so I cannot comment). Furthermore we have a formally constituted Research Staff Committee of 8 postdocs who serve to highlight training and mentoring opportunities and to disseminate information.

Mentoring can always help at any stage, but providing guidance for those whose careers are not established should be a priority. Departments know this is true for their newly recruited staff, and vested interest means they are inclined to try to help them. Of course, there is less obvious payback for a department in supporting postdocs in the same way. It is, nevertheless, undoubtedly the right thing for them to do.

Posted in Research, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Synaptic Transfer and Interdisciplinarity

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Athene Donald

I spent much of the Christmas break admiring my new granddaughter’s constantly changing and newly acquired skills as she progressed from 8 weeks old to 10; the sense of new synaptic connections being made was very strong as her hand-eye coordination improved and she began to get some sense of one limb being distinct from another. So, reading Brigitte Nerlich’s recent post about synaptic connections, interdisciplinarity and metaphor really resonated. She in turn pointed me to the article by David Rowan who, in this year’s issue of The Edge answered the question ‘What scientific term or concept should be more widely known?’ with the answer Synaptic Transfer saying:

‘We need to celebrate the synapse for its vital role in making connections, and indeed to extend the metaphor to the wider worlds of business, media and politics. In an ever-more atomized culture, it’s the connectors of silos, the bridgers of worlds, that accrue the greatest value. And so we need to promote the intellectual synapses, the journalistic synapses, the political synapses—the rare individuals who pull down walls, who connect.’

In a world of global societal challenges, misinformation (and downright lies) and a transforming world-view amongst many nations, we need such people more than ever. We need people who can take evidence, from wherever it may be found, and translate it into a message that politicians have to hear; we need people who can join the dots in unexpected ways, taking fundamental ideas from physics and translating them into ecology or epidemiology, for instance; we need people who understand why scientists can’t simply work in a vacuum but need to work in tandem with social scientists and humanities scholars. We need to stop reinventing wheels because people didn’t notice them first time around and we need to continue to fight against those who propagate untruths which fly in the face of nature because they make people feel better.

An interesting example in the mainstream media of a journalist/comedian who is not afraid to speak out is David Mitchell. This week’s Observer column sees him quoting a paper in PLOS Medicine on the benefits (or otherwise) of diet drinks in reducing obesity. He cannot quite bring himself to refer to this paper as a ‘scientific paper’, he ducks behind the word ‘thing’ for reasons probably of journalistic license. But as a scientist I can only applaud his conclusio:

‘If there’s even a whisper of falsehood appended to the real, important, dispiriting truth, it will give millions all the excuse they need to believe comforting lies.’

We must never forget this. Politicians get away with lies, but scientists’ work will always be challenged by vested interests (think climate change) who have the money to dig down and raise doubt over the least uncertainty or misapplication of method. I think it is brilliant to see the widely read Mitchell highlight and deconstruct why a scientific paper really matters, so his column enters my lexicon as an example of Rowan’s synaptic journalism.

More parochially within a purely academic sphere, I care about synaptic transfer between disciplines because of the importance of such transference between subject areas far apart, in other words in interdisciplinarity. Mindful of my new role for REF21, I have been reading around the subject. The recent LERU report on Interdisciplinarity and the 21st Century research intensive university highlights the need to change what we value within the University system if interdisciplinarity is to thrive, as it must. It identifies three strands we must get right, recognizing

‘1) university governance, 2) science policy, evaluation, and funding, and 3) publication and valorisation of interdisciplinary research as the main targets where actions need to be taken.’

We know that if the REF21 does not give due credit to interdisciplinary work, universities will internally give less weight to it and so the Panel I’m chairing has a significant responsibility on its shoulders. As researchers focus on the new source of funding that is encompassed under the Global Challenges Research Fund they must be under no illusions that interdisciplinarity has to be integral to solving many of these so-called Global Challenges. From sustainable energy to clean water, from local generation of and grid-free electricity to food security, the solutions will never be sitting in a single discipline. One could argue that the £1.5bn GCRF monies will transform behaviour very swiftly (although even £1.5bn does not go very far if every academic is chasing it.)

Finally in this potpourri of thoughts prompted by the phrase ‘synaptic transfer’ let me throw in something that has been at the back of my mind since the summer when I read David Kaiser’s chapter Thomas Kuhn and the Psychology of Scientific Revolutions in the collection of essays Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty. In this Kaiser reflects on the impact of Bruner and Postman’s classic study on incongruous playing cards – such as a red five of clubs or a black ten of hearts – on Kuhn. What struck me reading this was how Bruner and Postman, who showed that subjects in their study took longer to ‘identify’ a playing card that didn’t fit their expectations, related to the phenomenon of unconscious bias that is now well recognized in so many real-world contexts (as opposed to the psychologists’ experiment), including – and close to my heart – that of women in science. I had not previously come across the study, nor have I seen others link it to unconscious bias (though that doesn’t mean plenty of other people haven’t done so), but here sits a clear example of the reinvention of the wheel. The playing card study dates back to 1949, Virginia Valian’s 1999 book Why so Slow describes the idea of unconscious bias specifically in the context of academic women and she was (I believe) was one of the first people, if not the first, to do so. Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow  includes the topic from yet another viewpoint based in behavioural economics. (I have heard it cynically said, unconscious bias was really only fully appreciated when a man, and a Nobel Prize winner at that, spelled it out so carefully, and that the concept is frequently attributed to him rather than to the female Valian).

In  all these examples what matters is that connections are made across conventional boundaries, be it between academic fields or far further afield. As our world structures appear to get more complex, as physical and social connections across the globe matter more than ever, we need people who are adept at synaptic transfer as Rowan describes it. Now I ‘ve come across the concept I’m sure I will find it a useful hook to hang so many things on. No doubt ever reader will be able to come up with their own examples.

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

New Year Frustrations

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Athene Donald

I spent some of my time off around New Year attempting to start as I mean to go on by tidying my ‘home office’. In the run-up to Christmas, as exhaustion took over and time ran out, I had increasingly just been dumping piles of paper precariously on the edge of my desk as I rushed in from meetings. No sorting; no tidying; no order. So January 1st seemed a good moment to start to sort through stuff, and I went further and tidied some of the shelves and nooks and crannies where I stuff bits of paper. I do not, and I doubt I ever will, run a paper-free office. From post-it notes to print outs of papers and reports, from committee work (I always want hard copies of papers for committees I chair, if not for those of which I am simply a member) to letters from strangers who heard me on the radio or read something I’d written in a newspaper and felt an urge to react, all needed filing.

So, my office is now significantly tidier and the recycling bin overflowing. What I found depressing, amongst all those papers, were the blogposts, reports and other publications I’d hoarded over the past years of issues around gender in case I got around to blogging about them. Most particularly, but not exclusively, these were about issues facing female scientists in academia. The totality of these made me feel deeply, deeply frustrated. The issues are not exactly hidden and yet progress is so glacially slow. There is progress, but for all the increasing awareness and more widespread  D(and often mandatory) training around equality issues, the change in our wider society as well as in our local academic environments has not yet transformed how women are perceived and expected to behave. Or how we are collectively treated. Maybe at some time in the future we will reach a tipping point when all the small steps forward suddenly amount to a deep change in our collective minds that means male (and a particular version of male at that) by default as the appropriate model is no longer regarded as adequate. Maybe my children will live to see this, but I no longer expect it will be during my working life.

To illustrate my point, let me list some of the articles I found stuffed in a folder as material I might have been going to blog about:

I could go on, but the message is clear. The problems have been identified, they have been reported on in the scholarly press as well as in more mainstream media, yet they don’t go away. Laura Bates gave her summary of how women have been treated over the past year in her end of year round-up in the Guardian: more sober reading within a much broader context. American society was treated to the unedifying tape of Donald Trump boasting about how he could assault women with impunity and get away with it – and get away with getting away with it, as millions of American men and women didn’t think such behaviour immediately disqualified him from about the most powerful position on earth. We are not, collectively, making great strides forward are we? We know harassment is present in our hallowed halls of academe but haven’t found a way to handle, let alone eradicate it effectively.

All one can do is keep on pressing on. Being discouraged is futile (although perhaps inevitable) and there is no doubt we have moved from the ‘there isn’t a problem anymore is there?’ thoughts of a decade ago, to a realisation that yes there really is still a substantial problem. The challenge in academia is that the problems are not rooted there; the problems are similar in the media, the legal profession, indeed everywhere one looks. Industry seems to take the issues seriously at the lower ranks yet Boards are still overwhelmingly composed of straight white males, even if less overwhelmingly than in the past.

Many of the problems start at birth. The baby girl who is greeted as a delicate princess and over the years supplied with dolls (and little else) and pink dresses; the toddler and young schoolgirl encouraged to sit still and not explore the world, take things to pieces or take risks. The female student around GCSE time who receives subtle and not-so-subtle messages that engineering is not a suitable career aspiration and that doing maths, computing or physics A level might be a little ‘odd’ – why doesn’t she do psychology or English instead? And the student who ignores this advice and goes to university still wanting to pursue engineering who then feels isolated and dismayed by being surrounded by an overwhelmingly male cohort. All these factor into the ongoing paucity of role models and the lack of women entering the STEM workforce in academia and much more widely.

What we can do in academia is continue to push for change in areas that are within our control such as promotion criteria, the way appointments are made, support for parents (including enhanced parental pay and childcare support costs on conference and fieldwork trips) and non-standard hours of work. Some of these are cultural rather than procedural. Why shouldn’t a part-time academic be promoted? They can be (and have been) in Cambridge but as I travel I frequently hear an implicit message that part-timers aren’t taken seriously so what’s the point of applying. If you want an argument against a so-called motherhood penalty, take a look at this article which indicates averaged over the years parents are more not less productive. The presumption in academia is that the ideal professor is someone who is simply never ‘off’, who works ridiculous hours, travels extensively and for whom research is the only thing that matters has to be challenged explicitly. It doesn’t do any favours to many men as well as most women. Furthermore I believe it is a presumption and I’m not aware of evidence supporting the view that people like this are best for the institution taken in the round.

So in 2017 these are arguments I will continue to press. I hope readers will do the same in their own organisations. Don’t forget #Just1Action4WIS.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 2 Comments