What have I got to Lose?

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Athene Donald

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’ sang Janis Joplin, and working out what – if anything – there is to lose in general is frequently a good strategy. This was brought home to me recently in discussing a young researcher’s plans. Having attended a confidence-building workshop she had returned to her office and decided to chase up on a speculative application for a postdoc she had made previously and about which she had heard nothing. She wasn’t quite sure there was a connection between the workshop and her decision but she suspected there might have been! And, as she said to me, what did she have to lose by checking whether the professor had any interest in taking her on. The upshot was, the timing was right and she will now be heading off to the US to join a new group.

‘What had I got to lose?’ was also the phrase that went through my head many years ago when I made the switch – that in essence made my career – from working on metals to polymers. It felt like a radical thing to do, but given that I was going nowhere, was bored with the field of research I had been in for the last 5 years, I couldn’t see a downside in switching to something new for which I held a postdoc offer. I couldn’t have foreseen how it would turn my life around, but I did believe it couldn’t make things worse.

So, if faced with a fork in the road or a decision you’re inclined to take but think might be risky, it’s worth asking yourself what in reality you are putting on the line. If it’s no worse than private embarrassment or a slightly bruised ego, then you might like to calculate that really that isn’t much to suffer compared with the potential gain – perhaps as much as a new job as in the example of the young researcher I mention above. Even if it is less significant or lasting, perhaps just the experience of making a poster presentation at a conference or joining a committee, if it feels daunting it is still worth trying to do this calculation. Not just to think of what embarrassment might ensue if you mess up, but what gains to your career trajectory might be won if you do an OK job, let alone an outstanding one.

We’ve all turned down opportunities we later regret. In my case one outstanding case in point occurred when I was about 16 and turned down an opportunity to go water-skiing when on holiday in Austria. Being a bit of a coward and not a good swimmer I declined. I was never offered another chance and there is a small part of me that still minds. But I can also think of a much more recent (albeit still more than 10 years ago) and work-related example. A new group was looking for a Chair. I was sure I could do the job but waited for someone to propose me rather than offer my services in public in case they were declined. This is a classic scenario. One which women seem particularly inclined to subject themselves to. In fact what happened was someone else put themselves forward and they were accepted. The upshot of this was that the group never got going at all in that manifestation because the person concerned never lifted a finger to do anything to get it off the ground.

Since everyone likes to know the end of stories, I can confirm that, from my point of view, this tale has a happy ending. Subsequently a different bunch of people, but also including myself, got together to consider once again doing something on this particular topic. This time it was agreed we should all go away and think about how to take the idea forward. I nobbled someone as I left the room to express my own interest in acting as chair and he duly passed this on. I ended up not being discomfited by putting myself publicly forward but achieving the end I wanted: two or more years after that first attempt we duly got things going and I took on the role of Chair. That taught me how dangerous reticence can be. I hadn’t at all worked out the cost of doing nothing, or asked myself what I personally might lose (I’m ignoring any impact on the wider community) if I didn’t speak up. It also highlights that sometimes you can achieve your goals indirectly, through the medium of another person, again as a way of minimising risk and personal exposure.

I hope this illustrates that many of us can be risk-averse at least some of the time, so ‘calculating the odds’ is a strategy well worth pursuing. Undoubtedly there are times when ‘no’ is the only sensible answer. These are usually the times when you are already overloaded. But saying no because you fear being shown up or rejected is all too often the wrong thing to do. When it comes to that moment of embarrassment, someone watching will probably have forgotten about it all within minutes, even if you personally feel uncomfortable about it for months afterwards. As for rejection, there are many situations when no one else may even know you’ve been rejected (if it was an action by email or private conversation, for instance) so the loss to your standing cannot be large. In the case of the researcher I mentioned at the start, her follow-up email could have been ignored – what would have been the fall out of that? Zilch, to anyone concerned.

So, if feeling full of trepidation, try a little calculation. I’m not suggesting you go the whole Bayesian-hog but I do think it is worth thinking whether the outcome really is so bad come what may or whether in fact there is in essence nothing to lose, particularly if your current situation means you cannot be in a worse place than you are now.

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Heroines We Still Need

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Athene Donald

I have not been able to think much about blogging recently due to a variety of factors culminating in the wedding last weekend of my daughter. Not that I had much to do with the organisation of the wedding but families and family business, as one of my recent posts spelled out, should be (and are) central to academics and scientists just as much to workers in any other sphere. So, my brain has been elsewhere and not contemplating blogposts. Nevertheless, over the Easter break I did have time to do some reading and I came upon two interesting books to read – one for my Kindle, one in hard copy. It was only after I was well stuck into both I realised they were in fact by the same author: Mark Bostridge. And both books were about women who broke the mould in their own ways, but who had had to fight hard to achieve this, to overcome parental disapproval or mystification.

One should probably best be known as a statistician, although that is not how she is perceived or remembered in the public eye, the other had no claim to a scientific bent. The former studied the works of the French statistician Adolphe Quetelet and applied his ideas to the study of deaths in the army. The story of deaths from Prussian horse kicks, studied by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz and written up in his 1898 book The Law of Small Numbers validating the Poisson distribution is quite well known. Less well known is how Florence Nightingale applied statistics to demonstrate that military hospitals had many flaws and that deaths there were far commoner than elsewhere and not simply attributable to wounds sustained in battle. So, although the myth has it that Nightingale was ‘the lady with the lamp’, that was not really the most important part of her contribution. The Bostridge book (Florence Nightingale: the Woman and her Legend) makes all this very plain.

Indeed reading the book it wasn’t clear to me that Nightingale was in fact a good nurse at all, not the ministering angel of legend more a sharp administrator with the scientist’s determination to use evidence to influence decision-making. Cleanliness, good food and – almost above all, at least in her eyes – good ventilation were key to the transformation Nightingale was able to effect through her powerful coterie of political friends. Ventilation seemed of the utmost importance to her because she clung (at least through much of her life) to the miasmatic idea of infection.

Nightingale was well on in her 30’s before she managed to overcome her parents’ opposition to her doing anything other beyond being a docile, upper middle class lady who was expected to be content with social rounds and a little light visiting of ‘the poor man at his gate’ by an appropriately remote Lady Bountiful, as in the words of that Victorian hymn beloved of my primary school. Reading the descriptions of her early adult life, the misery of an intelligent woman being condemned to a life of pointless indolence, it is remarkable how much she was able to achieve once she kicked over the traces. It is hardly surprising middle class women in Victorian England were not able to accomplish much given the obstacles put in their way: they received little education or subsequent opportunity to use whatever intellect, great or small, they possessed. (As I wrote a while back, Mary Somerville – who knew and encouraged Nightingale herself – was to a large extent able to achieve as much as she did by disguising the hard work behind the social niceties of dinner parties and visiting.)

Vera Brittain was born more than 50 years later, by which time school education for girls was the norm, but doing much beyond that was still unusual. Her book, a Testament of Youth, apparently (according to Bostridge’s Vera Brittain and the First World War: The Story of Testament of Youth) gave a misleading picture of just how hard she had to battle parental opposition to going up to Oxford. Nevertheless it was still not common even in families such as hers, where the boys were naturally expected to go to either Oxford or Cambridge, for girls to attend university. I read Testament of Youth many years ago, probably not long after it was reissued after nearly a 50 year gap by Virago in 1978. It was a book that had tremendous impact when it was first released in 1933, a book that put the woman’s view of the first world war in front of the public to counter the better known war literature of Siegfried Sassoon or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I remember reading it on a train and the man across the table from me looking at it and saying ‘just wait till you get to page XXX, that’s really heartbreaking’. And he was absolutely right. I guess at that time it was so popular it wasn’t such an odd thing for a stranger to say.

In many ways reading both books simultaneously was helpful, because it helped to illustrate how progress has been made – both between their own two lifespans, but also the century since then. Women may still be kicking against the traces, but they aren’t the same ones our predecessors fought against. However, I obviously should have read Bostridge’s co-authored full biography of Brittain rather than this recent, shorter one which focusses rather too much for my taste on the recent film production rather than on her life. Nightingale’s biography is exhaustive whereas the Brittain text I read seems just to be a resume of the longer book updated with some recent information and ancedotes about the production of the 2014 film of Testament of Youth.

We owe both women much, although not necessarily quite along the lines of popular opinion. We should not forget that Nightingale was far more than a lamp-carrier and that self-taught statistics formed a core part of her activity; Vera Brittain was ultimately an ardent pacifist and internationalist, who played her part in giving women – including her own daughter Shirley Williams – a voice. Time passes but we continue to need such heroes (or heroines if you prefer) who are prepared to fight to get their voices heard and to effect change.

 

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What Works: A Review

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Athene Donald

My review of What Works Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet can be found at Nature. This is a book that  is intended to be a guide to institutional action. I was somewhat underwhelmed, as my review makes plain. If you want a more positive take, you may also be interested in fellow Cantabrigian Victoria Bateman’s review in the Times Higher Education.

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Manifesto for Change

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Athene Donald

‘Science needs women’ proclaims the L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science awards tagline. For the last 18 years the pairing has been awarding five laureates to women from different geographical regions around the world each year to celebrate (and publicise) their success. With L’Oreal’s effective PR machine, they are able to reach mainstream media in a way that most ‘women in science’ organisations fail to do. I know this from first-hand experience having been one of the 2009 Laureates who speedily found herself propelled into newspaper and radio interviews. This year’s ceremony was on Thursday evening and, alongside the awards a so-called Manifesto For Women in Science has also been launched. They are seeking a broad response supporting their six bullet points, although so far the number of signatories is disappointingly small.

As a matter of process I suspect this time their publicity may have been less than perfect. Although I was called to do several interviews on the back of it (e.g. here on the BBC World Service where you can hear a couple of minutes of a rather longer interview done, inconveniently, at 11pm last week), as no doubt others were around the world, the Manifesto itself seemed to get lost. It is easy enough to talk about the issues facing women in science, but at the level of the World Service interview it struck me how generic the problems were. We can talk about the challenges ad nauseam, but structurally society does not seem to want to do anything to remove the basic obstacles.

I heard Charlotte Proudman talk recently about the challenges for women in law. The specifics may be different from science but the basic problems are the same. You can read parallel description of the issues for women in the media, finance, medicine or, I suspect, any profession. The problems are obvious but collectively society (and not just the men) don’t seem to be able to move beyond them. Here are just a few of them, all things I have read about in the mainstream press pretty recently:

I could go on and produce a much longer list, but there is little point. We  know –  men and women –  that there are problems. Yet the will (or ability)  to change our society collectively seems weak. Science is just one specific place where the problems are obvious. Different science disciplines have slightly different flavours of issues, and at a specific level these may also differ from law or journalism. There are undoubtedly many things to be done. I sometimes think the sciences are ahead of the curve because – certainly in a subject like mine – the disparity in numbers is so grotesque from undergraduate level on that there is no hiding the fact. In Law or Medicine where numbers start out equal or even with a preponderance of women it is probably easier to pretend the problem is simply choicism, that women opt out rather than that systematically structures make it harder for them.

Now the latest social sciences study I’ve come across tells me that things are even worse than I feared: that women (or other minorities) are actually penalised for promoting equality, whereas (white and only white) men are not. So, if this is correct, the ‘rational’ thing for women to do is to be as nasty as possible to their minority friends. I sincerely hope women will go on being irrational on this front! I am well aware that, speaking personally, I have long since passed that point in my career where this is an issue – indeed that people make a virtue out of my championing of women in science – but, that earlier in a career those around you may mark you down for speaking up is horrendous. However, as with unconscious bias more generally, that can only be the case if we don’t appreciate that is what we’re doing.

When asked, as I often am, how things have changed during my life, it is very obvious that we have moved a long way. There are no longer formal barriers (I can recall quotas of women for medical schools for instance when my peers at school were applying), but informal ones are even harder to address. We can’t tear down invisible walls so easily, merely constantly bump into them. Sexism it seems to me is even more rampant, perhaps because the old-fashioned and patronising idea of ‘respect for the ladies’ has long since gone out of the window. Whereas I may be glad to see the retreat of condescension, the dominance of explicit sexism is hardly progress. We have a veneer of equality that for far too many women simply doesn’t translate into the lived reality. And this veneer means it is all too easy for the male who wants to bury his head in the sand or, worse, feels threatened by genuine equality and inclusivity, to continue to deny opportunity and due progression to 50% of our population.

There is no point getting angry, since this too often is simply misplaced energy and a waste. But there is every point in highlighting transgressions – small and large – whenever possible to emphasise the structural inequities that exist. The sad fact is, however, that too often circumstances mean that speaking out can backfire. Every genuine supporter of equality has to walk that tightrope. In the meantime, signing the L’Oreal Manifesto is one small action to spell out that enough is enough. We need to shout about the deep-seated societal problems and we need to do it loudly and persistently.

 

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Who Do You Care For?

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Athene Donald

The challenges associated with parental responsibilities are obvious and much-discussed. For many scientists they can seem overwhelming, limiting and sometimes ultimately career-destroying. The recent booklet published by the Royal Society (Parent Carer Scientist) that I wrote about before, attempts to bust some of the myths and show the many different ways individuals and families have found to cope. However, carer can convey a different set of responsibilities: caring for an older family member such as a parent, or even a sibling. The challenge of coping with these is every bit as taxing as caring for young children, albeit the manifestation can be rather different.

For my generation, caring for elderly relatives is likely to be the dominant responsibility but it can start much younger. I have had students who have suddenly found themselves thrust into situations where parental health becomes a big issue, disrupting their PhD studies, requiring frequent absences from the lab bench and draining their energies with anxieties for the future. Ill health, even death of a close relative, can hit anyone at any point and scientists are as susceptible as anyone to being thrown off balance by this.

Caring must be seen to encompass this much broader and, in general, less happy set of demands. If one is a parent of small children as well it is obviously going to be particularly distressing as limited energy and resources get pulled in too many directions simultaneously. For others it seems one has hardly seen the children leave their schooldays behind when a parent suddenly regresses from adulthood to childhood or at least dependency. Where is that happy moment when one is free of responsibilities, in this case?

What makes the situation liable to be particularly fraught is the lack of predictability. The father who is happily living independently but suddenly has a fall and needs nursing back to full mobility; the mother who may already be living with you as dementia takes hold but then starts wandering off and getting lost requiring multiple police interventions. An infection (and its treatment) that might be mild in a healthy adult can interfere with regular medication in the elderly and lead to all kinds of unanticipated consequences ranging from chronic anaemia to miserable confusion. There is no planning for these eventualities which always seem to blow up so as to coincide with a long-planned trip to the Far East , exam-marking or some other already pressured and difficult moment. In my case it was sitting on jury service as my mother underwent a knee replacement operation.  The care may need to be offered hundreds of miles away. How should a scientist (or any other professional) cope? How flexible can and should institutions be? My department was wonderfully accommodating when, more than a decade ago I went to spend a week in a hospice supporting a relative – but then I had no teaching duties at that precise point: it occurred outside term so that was easy. But no one questioned me about the time away nor tried to deduct pay. I was (and am) very grateful for their support.

We don’t talk about these issues. We should. These are not simply issues for women since they are just as likely to impact on adult sons as daughters. Our modern society does not provide a ready network of neighbours who can step in to plug a gap in caring or a handful of spinster relatives who can be summoned at will. Why not daycare for the elderly, I heard one fraught woman ask as she had to rush back home, again, to try to find her wandering and confused father whom she thought she had left safely in her home?

I have no solutions to offer. But we need to recognize that life will throw up obstacles of unexpected kinds and find ways to cope flexibly. Instead these topics seem somehow to be off limits. It was Sylvia Ann Hewlett who introduced me to the phrase ‘elder care’ in her book Off Ramps and On Ramps. She explores what holds professional women back, and what might be done so as not to lose so many talented women to the workforce, but elder care is actually a unisex issue. Just as with the Royal Society’s book of life stories, we should be willing to explore how to cope with the unexpected at whatever stage of your career life throws this curved ball at you.

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