Drinking Habits of the Academic

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Athene Donald

Do we, poor misguided academics drink too much? I am sure many of us could do with drinking less but I was surprised to see the Guardian’s Academics Anonymous complaining that Russell group universities ply everyone with too much alcohol. In my experience – as a scientist so I cannot comment on whether other disciplines do the same – there is actually rather less alcohol available in the course of a working day than used to be the case. This is probably just a question of age since the writer (describing themselves as both PhD student and staff) is almost certainly considerably younger than me.

Many years ago I remember reading a JB Priestley novel and being struck by just how much the protagonists drank. Any time after about 11am. Instead of sitting down with a cup of coffee for a discussion, beer seemed to be the chosen fluid to consume. Of course, pubs didn’t serve much in the way of coffee until relatively recently and Costa and Starbucks were decades away when Priestley wrote. But, for men at least (goodness knows what women drank on such occasions. Babycham? Port and lemon? Or perhaps simply lemonade) beer was drunk almost as if one was worried the water was undrinkable . By 1930– the time he wrote Angel Pavement which was, I think, the book I was reading – this was unlikely to have been the case. I don’t think I know anyone who would toss off a pint of beer or two for elevenses now.

So much for pre-War drinking habits away from academia. Perhaps Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night gives us a glimpse into the academic customs of the 1930s, but since it is focussed around a woman’s college where drink was barely more than a medicinal sip, it isn’t particularly informative. I think it is clear a female SCR consumed a lot less than Priestley’s cast of characters.

When I set out as a young researcher what I do recall clearly, though, is the lunchtime tipple. When I went to MIT to give my very first research seminar I was offered a drink over the lunch before I spoke. I had no hesitation in saying no, but the professors I was with were willing to crack open a bottle. If I had been male I wonder how much offence I might have caused by declining, but certainly as a young woman it didn’t seem to raise eyebrows.

Once I moved to Cambridge and the Cavendish Laboratory a group of us – usually chauffeured to the village pub by Sir Sam Edwards – would take the seminar speaker out for lunch before the seminar itself. The group collectively tended to drink beer but I always stuck with orange juice. Again I could get away with this as a woman but I suspect people would have looked askance at the male lecturer who opted out. This was in the early 1980s and in the decades since then it is clear that drinking at lunch has become very much the exception not the rule. I have watched a steady decrease in take up of beer or anything else. Even if, at a formal lunch for a visiting dignitary, wine is provided very few academics take it up. Drink at lunchtime and a clear head to think in the afternoon just don’t mix. Sparkling water is a much better bet.

So why does the Anonymous Academic think we drink too much? I suspect it is because of the inducement some departments offer to get students to turn up to talks. My own departmental seminar, designed for the whole department not just sub-field specific, is (just in the last year or two) followed up with a reception where wine is on offer. As is juice and food! No one requires the students to guzzle large quantities of cheap Chardonnay but if its availability acts to encourage them to tear themselves away from their own focussed research and listen to something from a wider field then it is thought to be a good thing. I don’t believe it is provided to bolster the courage of the young so that they dare to approach the visiting prof, I believe it is there to act as an almost literal lubricant to encourage social cohesion in the department.

The Cavendish Laboratory is a huge enterprise, with about 60-70 PhD students starting each year. They come from all parts of the world and carry out research in wildly different topics. Spread across a number of buildings they may never see each other unless they come to such departmental events. Gone are the days when we all congregated in the canteen at narrowly set times for tea and coffee. That habit too served effectively to permit casual interactions. By now most groups run to their own Nespresso machine – or at least a kettle – thereby keeping research groups to themselves. So, the small inducement of tepid alcohol, plus the excitement of a sausage roll or a slice of green pepper and dip seems a small price to pay to facilitate knowledge exchange and social integration. If you are from a remote part of the globe it may be encouraging to find that there are others who are likewise suffering from culture shock. For minorities of all kinds knowing you are not alone can be valuable in confidence building.

So, I for one am not going to knock the availability – and that is all it is, certainly not a compulsion – of a little alcohol at the end of the day. It has to be at the end of the day, of course, or students might be prone to breach health and safety regulations by ‘driving’ delicate machinery after consumption. I haven’t spotted much peer pressure if a student (or staff member) opts for the soft drink option. This is certainly far preferable to the availability of beer at lunchtime, let alone elevenses, and might just bring about some fertile new collaboration or at least some broadening of horizons.

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On Being Biased

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Athene Donald

The subject of unconscious bias training has risen swiftly up the agenda at many organisations with the recognition that we are, almost without exception, guilty of it. (If you think you’re exempt, try the Project Implicit tests.) Be it that we fail to assume women are as competent at science or leadership as men – the manifestation in which I am most likely to discuss it on this blog – or that we jump to conclusions about ethnic minorities’ abilities (or indeed any other minority, context dependent), we make dangerous default assumptions. That default position seems collectively to be that we are always prone to assume a white male is best. The Royal Society has produced an animation to remind us all of our failings  and Research Councils UK are introducing training for their panel members, thereby ensuring a substantial number of mid-career and senior UK researchers are likely to be exposed to training in the very near future.

Perhaps inevitably there is a backlash. Why, I heard a committee chair ask in exasperation, did he need this? It’s just condescending seemed to be his view: he knew he wasn’t biased. If I had had access at the time to this excellent checklist from the AAS Women in Astronomy blog I obviously should have pointed him to it. Or indeed to my own list of #just1action4WIS to see how many he had actually carried out . Unfortunately being gobsmacked, my response was much too slow. Riposte à l’escalier applies far too often. So here are some vignettes of the kind of person – male or female – who does indeed ‘know’, quite wrongly, that they are not biased and the situations in which things can go wrong.

1 Patron of the Young

I know senior professors who are immensely supportive of the young female researchers in their group. They encourage them, make it clear that they understand that as a woman there may be particular challenges for them, talk them up and send them off to conferences with their blessing. Then one of these young women becomes successful and gains confidence and starts challenging her mentor. This suddenly changes the dynamics. The professor likes patronising young women; he (and in this case it probably but not invariably is a ‘he’) does not like a woman who answers him back. That isn’t what a woman is meant to do in his book. The support evaporates, the professor turns his back and starts to badmouth this ‘feisty’ (how I hate that word) woman who is no longer playing the part he ascribed to her. For goodness sake, she was meant to be grateful and hang on his every word, not tell him his words don’t make sense. It is very hard for women who suddenly discover that their mentor has become their enemy, although it may take them a while to recognize that this is what is happening.

2 Women can be very smart but….

This description applies to the person who is immensely supportive of women in the abstract. However, strange to say, every time they sit on a panel judging a woman – promotions, appointment or grant-giving committee doesn’t really make much odds – they find some reason, only in this particular case of course, to talk the woman down. How do we know she won’t take time out to have a child as soon as we appoint her? Given how spectacularly successful she has been in winning grants, the committee surely doesn’t want to overload her by awarding her another one. It wouldn’t be kind so we should turn her down despite the brilliance of her work and the originality of the grant application. (While I can’t say that a particular grant application of mine was described in those terms, I do know that that was an excuse I once had levelled against me and a grant application rejected on the grounds I was spread too thin. Have any men been so ‘protected’ for their own good?)

3 Potential and Independence, the Default Position of Male

I have sat through too many committees where the standards applied to women are different from those applied to men. This is something that is not applicable only in the academic world. Men are judged on potential, women on completion. A woman has to have accomplished far more to be judged in the same way. These words by a senior female manager at Unilever neatly sum up this position:

“For example, a male manager looking to promote a man may say: ‘Chuck him in at the deep end and let’s see if he sinks or swims.’ The same manager may say of a female candidate: ‘Is she ready yet? We don’t want to set her up to fail.’ Words said with the best of intentions, without any malevolence – and, arguably, stated by a well-mannered man – but the impact on the progression of the two careers is clear.”

This is another form of protection – don’t offer women opportunities in case they can’t cope or perhaps because it is simply assumed they won’t be able to. Specifically within the domain of research this often manifests itself as a question of independence. Men are assumed to be independent unless proven otherwise. Women – particularly if they are still working in the same institution in which they did their PhD – are assumed not to be independent unless evidence is provided to the nth degree to prove that yes they really are.

Do people know what assumptions they are making in these various instances? I suspect not. To concentrate on this last point about independence, it is very hard to spot since so often it is implicit. In this context the experiences of transgender researchers who see people’s responses from both sides at different times is illuminating (and horrifying). People don’t necessarily parse ‘this male researcher is independent; this female researcher is not’ when their CVs are identical. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking like that. To illustrate this point take this reference for a female researcher:

“a consistent output of more than a dozen papers per year, despite a period of maternity leave and currently working less than full time; more than £2M of current research funding held as PI….however she is still at a relatively early stage of her career and this makes me uncomfortable about recommending her….”

What would it have taken to convince this referee (nominated in this actual case by the candidate, poor misguided woman) that this was a brilliant woman who was powering ahead?

So, let us not pay heed to men and women who think they don’t need to be reminded of their implicit biases. We all have stereotypes in our heads that need to be identified and then trampled on. Only then can we start forming opinions about people as they really are, not as we imagine.

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The Environmental Sisterhood

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Athene Donald

The admissions process to Cambridge can raise strong opinions. I’ve written about dispelling the myths behind the process and more recently about widening participation issues. But now I’m provoked to write about my own experience of applying to the university, an embarrassingly long time ago, by a book I’m reading. The book is Rachel Carson and her Sisters by Robert Musil. It discusses the birth of the American environmental movement and the many women involved in it (Carson’s foremothers as Musil puts it, as well as her scientific colleagues and children).

What has that to do with Cambridge admissions, I hear you asking. Well, back then (and also from the 2017 admission round, although in a very different format) one had to sit an entrance paper. I don’t know how it worked for the mens’ colleges but for the 3 women’s colleges, if I remember correctly one had the choice of doing either a combined Girton/Newnham set of exams or a very differently structured one for New Hall (now Murray Edwards) – or indeed one could do both. The former was very technical, building on A level course work but designed to stretch the average student way beyond. My memory of it was that it was a nightmare. There was also a general paper when essays were required. I think New Hall was aiming to identify a rather different cohort of students, perhaps those with a freer spirit whose technical competence in their chosen subject was less important than their all-round ability to think. Or at least that is how I recall things at this distance in time. (I know I also carefully considered my clothing for the ensuing interviews, choosing a decidedly more hippy look for New Hall than for Girton, but that is another story.)

Being the sort of nerd who thought hard about exams, being the sad kind of girl who had decided at age 7 (allegedly) I wanted to go to Cambridge, I mentally ran through what might maximise my chances of getting in given that, due to a combination of reasons including ill health my preparation had been less than ideal. It was 1970. The fear of pollution was then on everyone’s lips and in the newspapers. Environmentalism was getting to be a ‘thing’ – though I don’t think it was yet the word being tossed around. Consequently, when thinking about how to survive an essay paper I decided to plan on an essay around this theme. I thought about Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring which I must have read in the months previously, and I thought it would be smart to preface my essay with the relevant quote from Keats (‘The sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing’) to demonstrate my apparent erudition – for a scientist. So, when I sat down to the paper I was well-placed because, guess what, one of the essay titles was ‘Pollution’. (Bizarrely, possibly evenly presciently I see from my diary that the other essay I wrote was on ‘Excellence versus equality in educational policy’ – still a hot topic of course. The other essay titles I described as ‘awful’; what I wrote on this second topic I identified as an ‘abstract load of rot’.)

Anyhow in due course Girton admitted me. An essay on pollution obviously did something to offset my inability to answer classical physics questions. My excuse, I think a good one, was that my pilot Nuffield A level syllabus simply did not cover the material the overwhelming majority of students would have studied so the questions by and large remained totally unknown territory to me. (I believe only 7 schools were trialling this new exam.) But it wasn’t just a passing whim to waffle about pollution, I was seriously interested. Rachel Carson, DDT and pesticides all mattered to me and my family as committed bird-watchers. We were aware of the fragility of the eggs of birds of prey due to the high levels of pesticides at the top of the food chain leading to their failure in breeding. I was even something of an armchair activist. I got involved with a petition against ICI’s expansionists plans in Upper Teeside which threatened some rare gentian, an activity ironic in retrospect given my long research collaboration with ICI on polymer physics (before the former blue chip company got consumed by Akzo Nobel and other companies).

All these recollections from my past have come flooding back reading this book about the environmental movement and the women who have contributed so much from the 19th century on. It is an impressive roll call of Americans who bucked the trend of being docile housewives and took on important roles talking up the importance of studying birds alive in their natural habitats as opposed to anatomically when dead. Women who fought against the millinery trade’s slaughter of birds for their plumes (in the UK the equivalent bunch of women were hugely instrumental in forming the RSPB). And women who, in due course, drew connections between toxic elements and compounds and occupational health hazards. These stories precede what has happened in Flint by many decades, but there are parallels.

I may not have time to be an environmental activist (armchair or otherwise) these days, but it is salutary to read this book about issues that historically have been so important and which still haunt us today. At a personal level I am glad to have happened across this book for conferring a sense of nostalgia and identity, even though it suffers from a lack of adequate editing making it a slightly irritating read. If you want to be reminded both that women have been playing a key role for more than a century in scientific endeavour, despite often being neglected and overlooked, and also that pollution and environmental health matter today as much as ever, you might want to read this book. If you were looking for a heroine to name on last Thursday’s 1st UNESCO International day of Women and Girls in Science, Carson would have been a good candidate to choose. Many did just that. That locally in 2016 I can see peregrine falcons nesting once more in the city centre , buzzards and red kites not far outside would have been unimaginable back when I was a student. We owe Carson a lot.

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Permission Given

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Athene Donald

This is a post about professional anxiety and what might be done to alleviate it. Consider who asks questions after departmental seminars or conference talks: too often it is the usual suspects (although my impression is that this is getting less common). Years ago I can remember conferences where it was always the same half dozen senior professors, who sat right towards the front, who would jump in, implying as they did so that it was the continuation of an ongoing ‘in’ debate. Of course this discouraged anyone else from contributing. Conferences are always the better for diverse questioners (as well as diverse speakers). And questions need to be about the talk itself, not about scoring points or self-aggrandisement, an argument nicely made here.

But what of those who hesitate to ask questions? Even if a wide range of people are prepared to ask questions, are you? I know that this particular skill is not my forte. I don’t enjoy it and rarely open my mouth – at conference or seminar – however senior I may have become. This is an admission I have made before in the wake of exhortations from others, notably Dorothy Bishop. Is this a gender thing? Do women ask fewer questions? Or perhaps their hands are more prone to be overlooked by chairs who home in on senior, white males in preference to any other category of speaker? It is perfectly possible that both questions may be answered in the affirmative; it is equally possible that the latter feeds the former.

If you are one of the nervous, fearful kind – be you male or female – it is worth contemplating if there is anything you can do that might help. I came across a situation recently that made sense to me as creating a possible mental intervention. Acting as host for a speaker, chairing the seminar, I knew it was my responsibility to step in to ask a question if the audience was silent. It was my job to do this and so I did it with absolutely no qualms, unlike my usual reluctance at question time. That incident made me wonder whether this isn’t a more generally useful strategy. On this occasion I’d been given ‘permission’, indeed more than that it was my duty to pose a question. So I did it. Would that work in other situations?

I throw this out as a suggestion. If you are a nervous PhD student about to give your first platform presentation in front of an audience of strangers, will you feel better if you remember you are repaying the funder’s money by speaking out? Since you would not want to be considered to be wasting the tax-payers’ money, or the medical charity’s, then perhaps you might wish to recall you have a duty to spread the word of how that money has been spent. I don’t know if that might alleviate the nerves, because I can’t put myself back in an equivalent position, but it strikes me as a plausible route that might work for some people.

The same is true of speaking out at committee meetings. There will always be difficulties of group dynamics, the incompetent chair or overweening members, but nevertheless you will be there for a reason. Perhaps you are the representative of a department, a grouping or a gender. That group will be looking to you to act on their behalf, which being silent is unlikely to fulfil. So, once again, the scary task can be recast as a duty. And duties are incumbent upon you; not opening your mouth and saying what your community feels about the topic under discussion is failing in that duty. Therefore, it is not temerity to speak up: it is an obligation. You have tacit permission.

Fear can arise for many reasons, but the feeling that one doesn’t ‘deserve’ something and therefore it would be inappropriate, putting yourself unnaturally forward or showing off (however wide of the mark such sentiments might be) may all serve to hold you back. Rephrasing speaking up as a duty might overcome that mind set. However, the fear may also arise from a sense of incompetence, again however misplaced a feeling. Nevertheless, if you are representing a group you have to believe they have chosen you for a reason. If you are talking about your research it is because someone – supervisor or conference organiser – believes you have something of note to say that others would benefit from hearing. Indeed, as junior researchers it is far more likely the audience will benefit from listening because they will not have heard your dulcet tones and hot-off-the-bench results before, unlike some of the big names whose voice, several-year-old results and anecdotes may have been heard again and again and again.

So, whatever devils you are facing, try to recast that fear into something that is less about your internal feelings and more about what you can give out to others. It might just make it possible to raise your voice above a squeak and set out in meticulous detail all the ideas that you have been turning over in your brain for weeks, months or even years. None of that means that people will actually listen, hear or act upon your words however wise, but at least you will know you’ve given it your best shot. Give yourself permission.

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Cambridge University, Widening Participation and the Government

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Athene Donald

What follows first appeared on the Times Higher Education blog platform on February 2nd 2016 (this is the unedited version). At the bottom I add a footnote about further developments since I first drafted this piece mainly regarding Cambridge admissions tests.

Cambridge is not the Villain, Mr Cameron

David Cameron is concerned about the opportunities that are offered to Black and Minority Ethnics (BAMEs) in the UK. He is right to be concerned. For everything from police stop-and-search statistics to criminal sentencing there is evidence to suggest this section of our population gets a raw deal. But throwing out blanket accusations without looking at the evidence is unhelpful to say the least. Suggesting he is planning new requirements to force universities – with a particular stress on ‘elite’ universities such as Oxbridge – to reveal how many black applicants and students from poor backgrounds are accepted is rather wide of the mark given that both Oxford and my own university of Cambridge have published this data for some years. We are not trying to hide anything. His statement may correctly state that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be in a prison cell than studying at a top university, but, although he would like you to read that sentence as implying Cambridge is at fault, that is simply typical Government spin which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Cambridge University is also ahead of the game when it comes to monitoring the gender pay gap, another area where fingers are being pointed: for some years it was the only Russell Group University to publish its Equal Pay Review, although others may be playing catch-up now.

Cameron admits ‘if you’re black it seems you’re more likely to be sentenced to custody for a crime than if you’re white.’ That certainly has little to do with Oxbridge admissions policies and much more to do with the judiciary. It is good that David Lammy will look into this apparent discrimination in the courtroom. One has to wonder how much of the inconsistency in sentences is conscious and how much unconscious on the part of the judges. Either way, there is clearly work to be done.

Are ‘elite’ universities really sitting on their hands doing nothing? In fact they’re rather hard at work to improve the situation and to encourage the widest possible selection of candidates to apply. In Cambridge, there is a long-running initiative and a specific programme designed to reach out to BAME children in Year 9 to get them thinking about university and, by bringing them here, demystifying the place. Starting way before a UCAS form is waved in front of their faces is crucial.

In another bleak statistic out this week in a report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, it was shown that the poorest children in Cambridge’s local schools performed less well than those in London’s most deprived areas. Active discrimination? Unlikely. In fact for many years, Cambridgeshire schools have been underfunded compared with neighbouring counties. This was the legacy of a 1980s Conservative county council who slashed local education spending. Back then, the primary school my children were attending had to shed the assistants who helped the sizeable group of Bangladeshi children who did not speak English at home to master the language they were being taught in. The funding has never caught up. In 2013, the then MP Julian Huppert said ‘We receive £600 less per pupil than the English average for schools block funding…. Cambridgeshire kids deserve what everyone else gets”. During the last year, this shortfall has finally been made up largely as a result of Huppert’s actions but it will take time for this to increase numbers from the poorest families entering Cambridge. Don’t blame Cambridge for the failure. Look to who controls the purse strings that directly impact on children’s opportunities.

So, despite what the press may say and how they may interpret Cameron’s remarks, Cambridge University (and Cambridge schools) are not the bad guys in these stories. By publishing statistics on admission success rates by ethnicity of applicants and on its gender pay gap, we are ahead of where Cameron wants us to be without any legal enforcement. Monitoring is the first step towards devising strategies to improve. The figures may not yet be pretty, but people can only know that because they’re public. Other universities need to be more transparent. Indeed, when it comes to widening participation, Cambridge is also clear that another headline Government policy would be liable to cause yet more problems, as their response to the HE Green paper makes very clear: ‘…we do not support the linkage between TEF and fees: it is bound to affect student decision-making adversely, and in particular it may deter students from low income families from applying to the best universities.’

Cambridge University is far too easily caricatured as an out of date collection of toffs, but this Government claims to be interested in evidence-based policy. Perhaps it and the associated press reporting, might like to focus on evidence-based statements and analysis too to provide a little more accuracy in their stories.

Footnote added on February 3rd

On February 2nd the details of the new admissions tests that the University is introducing from 2017 were announced. This is not a decision the University has taken lightly. Certainly my own College has up till now relied very heavily on the objective marks obtained in AS levels which will no longer be (necessarily) available to us. So, some other objective measure is sought and admissions tests seem to be the least bad answer. As the the University’s director of admissions Dr Sam Lucy wrote in a letter to schools and colleges that the tests would provide

“valuable additional evidence of our applicants’ academic abilities, knowledge base and potential to succeed in the Cambridge course for which they have applied. This move is a result of responding to teacher and student feedback, a desire to harmonise and simplify our existing use of written assessments and a need to develop new ways to maintain the effectiveness and fairness of our admissions system during ongoing qualification reform”.

Once again the University has had to adopt a position (because of Government action in removing AS as part of A levels) that was not our first choice. However as usual politicians, this time from Labour, are swift to imply the University is doing something that will harm widening participation.

Alan Milburn is quoted in the Guardian as saying

“But looked at through the social mobility lens, it clearly has the potential to raise a further barrier to equal access. Bright students from less advantaged backgrounds tend to miss out on the intensive tutoring their better-off peers receive.”

I cannot believe he thinks that interview candidates at select schools are less likely to cause these sorts of problems so, given the numbers of excellent candidates applying, Colleges such as mine try to focus on hard figures which can be objectively compared. On this occasion, they have been removed. The evidence from the consultation period is that state schools are supportive and understand the logic of the move to tests.

Finally, to return to Cameron’s complaints about BAME admissions, it was heartening to see state school headteachers defending the University because of all the hard work we put into widening participation activities. Schools are very aware of this even if the Government has failed to check up.

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