Armchair Travel

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Athene Donald

One of the best things about the Christmas break is the ability to immerse oneself in books without the endless distracting ping of arriving emails or the intervention of interminable committee meetings (and accompanying papers to wade through). This year I seem to have indulged myself in a feast of books on travel (loosely defined), from the largescale to the small. I will not comment here on Andrea Wulf’s new biography of Humboldt (maybe another time), but instead – in the words of that familiar old chestnut of an exam question – compare and contrast two very different books: one written by an American woman looking back at a lifetime of travel around the US, the other by a British poet contemplating 3 weeks hard slog by foot. One a vast array of stories and people, the other a microcosm. Reading both books simultaneously (a bad habit I know) I quickly realised which suited my temperament better.

The first book was Gloria Steinem’s On the Road. Although famous as a ‘feminist icon’ I don’t believe I have ever read any of her writings before. A familiar name but I had nothing to flesh the name out with content. Having read the book, which describes a lifetime of travel and campaigning on many fronts, I felt in deep awe at her spirit and determination. Starting at a time when women’s issues hadn’t hit the headlines she managed to inspire and provoke many people of different genders and races. I learned a lot about the issue of intersectionality and how the problems for women from different minority groups (native Indians as well as Hispanics and blacks) are magnified many times compared with the problems the white American majority face.

Of course, not all the problems she saw at the start of her campaigning life have vanished, although some issues are less troubling than they were. Nevertheless her 1971 speech to to Harvard Law School might still resonate in their hallowed halls:

‘With this humanist vision in mind, you can imagine how a female human being suffers at Harvard Law School. She spends much of her time feeling lonely, since male classmates often regard her as a freak. She spends the rest of it feeling mad as hell.’

Think Legally Blonde 30 years later. Is it completely different now? How many students in physics departments around the world would still recognize similar sentiments? However, whether or not you believe the world has radically changed, reading this book left me in no doubt Steinem has contributed to such improvement as has occurred in attitudes and awareness. It was a raw, honest book full of larger than life people with whom she shared the ‘campaign trail’.

The second book (Walking Away) was an account by the poet Simon Armitage of a three week trek along the West Country’s coastal path. Three weeks of living off other people’s kindness repaid by poetry readings each evening in venues of assorted kinds. Almost a diary of his trudging, with boots disintegrating and hips seizing up, it left me rather cold. At times his language was gorgeous in metaphor and simile and his alliteration alluring. Most of the time the cast of characters who wandered in and out of his narrative seemed one-dimensional verging on boring, the descriptions of the countryside laboured and flat. I know little about Armitage’s poetry (beyond the ‘catalytic poem  that hangs on the side of a building in Sheffield University on the subject of air) but this book does not encourage me to learn more. I am relieved, having reached this conclusion, to find a review in the Guardian by a self-professed lover of his writing nevertheless arriving at very much the same conclusion regarding this particular book.

So why does the sweeping narrative appeal while the miniature leave me unmoved? It wasn’t the words themselves, since undoubtedly Steinem wrote factually and with passion rather than thinking up neat comparisons or choosing words of distinction. I think it is because I learned something from Steinem; I felt her determination and enthusiasm. Armitage on the other hand seemed to be writing because he’d promised his agent that he would (and no doubt it helped to pay the costs of the trip). He was writing because that’s what he does rather than because he was moved to put pen to this particular piece of paper. Perhaps because it was obviously a tough walk for him, the people he met did not provoke apparent interest for him so much as being necessary hosts; they came and went with great rapidity, to the extent that Armitage conveyed he often didn’t know their names (or even, probably, cared overmuch) let alone wanted to delve into their life stories.

In thinking about the comparison between these texts, I also realised I should contemplate my own writing style. Other recent conversations have provoked me to consider metaphor in my writing and the way I tackle my science. Whilst my first reaction was I never use metaphor in how I think about experiments, or how I write up my conclusions, I have realised this is false and ignorant. A recent post by Brigitte Nerlich highlights how much modern biology is steeped in metaphor to the extent one doesn’t even consciously notice what is happening. Physics, perhaps less so but it is still lurking in the way I mentally think about polymer chains moving; indeed the very word to describe this – reptation – has the explicit connotation of snake-like motion.

Nevertheless, posts on this blog do not abound with metaphor. Like Steinem I am more concerned with making my case, putting an argument across with clarity (I hope) rather than seeking out evocative phrases to illustrate a point, or wishing to use linguistic devices to embroider my analysis. Maybe I should spend more time worrying about the elegance of my language rather than the conclusion I wish my reader to draw. Or maybe not.

Reading Armitage’s prose, feeling it was duty done though with the odd flash of the literary brilliance he obviously possesses, I feel I fit into the Steinem camp. Not in the sense of being a life-time campaigner, but as someone who cares about what she does and the messages she gives; for whom the goal is what matters not simply the language chosen to reach that goal. Although I have always been rather allergic to being described as ‘passionate’, forced to make a choice I would rather be described as passionate than dispassionate – at least in most contexts – or worse, (again to quote the Guardian review of Armitage’s book) ‘prosaic’.

And, at the end of the two books, I have learned far more from Steinem – about intersectionality, as I say, about the world of women in the 1950s and 1960s as she encountered it at a time when I was still barely out of nappies. Armitage’s book did not even encourage me to think about trying the Cornish Coastal Path. Travel comes in many forms, as does travel-writing. Not all of it is good.

Posted in Book Review, Equality | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Season of Presents

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Athene Donald

I have written before of my desire to get my hands on a Pensieve, that wonderful, fantastical creation of JK Rowling characterised as the receptacle described here:

One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure.

I would also find a Timeturner rather useful too, another invention of hers and one which would handily permit me to be in two places at once. Regrettably, neither of these handy items turned up for me under the Christmas tree this year.

However a few days before Christmas I got, out of the blue, an email from a German student who had worked briefly with me on her Master’s thesis nearly 10 years ago. She wrote to tell me what she had been getting up to since (at the time I had hoped she would have been able to stay to do a PhD with me, but funding did not permit) and her career was blossoming. And she also wrote to thank me for my input during the year she was in Cambridge and how that year had formed

‘the starting point of my passion for Biophysics and the knowledge acquired has been a solid foundation for the 4 major scientific projects I have been working on’.

As a Christmas present this was pretty nice. Even jaded old professors appreciate being appreciated. It is also a real boost to know that one’s actions have had lasting beneficial impact. But it is also nice that one is appreciated for more than simply one’s professional scientific activities. The email went on to say

‘I also highly appreciate your efforts to raise the visibility of women in science (and in particular in physics)– we definitely should step up and sell ourselves better. I remember that during the time I was writing the master thesis you had two kids at home. Today, I know several female PIs with two or more kids. All of you are making an extra effort to succeed in both, private life and science, and you are indeed role models for us junior researchers who aim to have a family while being recognized for our scientific achievements.’

The day I received this email I had been busy writing a talk, a quite emotional talk for me, for the conference I am going to in California next week to commemorate and celebrate the life of one of my key mentors, Ed Kramer. He died exactly a year ago (December 28th 2014). He meant a huge amount to me, as I wrote about at the time, and I have been thinking about how to put this across in a talk to show something about, not just the science I’ve done in the decades since I left his group, but the long-lasting impact his presence in my life had made. And the phrase that came to mind was he ‘treated people as people’. He took you as he found you and he worked with you to bring out the best in you. That is certainly what it felt like to me then and still does in retrospect. As I wrote to his family in the immediate aftermath of his death

‘He was a truly wonderful man who made me who I am by believing in me at a time when I didn’t believe in myself’.

One way of characterizing what I mean by ‘treating people as people’ is that he was simply interested in the science, in making sure that everyone did as well as they could without thoughts of scoring points or showing himself off to best advantage. What he wanted to come out of one’s research were the results, which excited him, and not any consequent glory; if impact factors had been invented in 1980 I’m not sure he would have worried over much about them when it came to publishing, although I may be wrong. In my case he fired me up to work as hard as he himself did (there was no doubt he was a workaholic) and it led to an impressive turn around in my publication rate, from a mere three or so papers over the first two years of postdoc-ing at Cornell under a different professor, to 16 papers over the next two. I have never got such a buzz from my research as I did during those two years, always sparked by the regular conversations we had, day in day out. (For early career researchers, do not believe one’s professor has to resemble that crusty, cynical and unsupportive professor beloved of PhD Comics.)

Thinking about how he worked, how he encouraged his research group (and drove on by example), I recall this comment from Jane Clarke, a professor in Chemistry in my university, in her interview in the university’s book ‘The Meaning of Success’ about how she felt about her own success:

‘I’ve done it in such a way that I can hold my head up and say that I never trampled on anybody’.

And that

‘I judge people based on how they behave and what they achieve scientifically – not the trappings of importance, like the size of their office’.

These remarks resonate with how Ed lived, and how I would hope that I too live. That a student who spent only a few weeks working with me ten years ago feels moved to write to tell me of her life and why her time in Cambridge made a difference to her future trajectory is a great encouragement to continue trying to follow my own mentor’s example.

 

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The Metrics of Reaching Out

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Athene Donald

In my College we are pleased to see that we are doing well against a specific set of metrics associated with social mobility at admissions. This hasn’t happened by accident, but is down to years of hard work and careful thought regarding our widening participation efforts. The recently published annual report of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission identifies Churchill as the highest performing College in terms of state sector admissions across both Oxford and Cambridge. It is doubly pleasing to see this given that we had our best ever undergraduate performance in exams last summer. Nevertheless, our pleasure is tempered by many different factors and we do not necessarily agree with all the analysis presented.

I am not going to attempt a deconstruction of the report but highlight, yet again albeit in a different context from my previous areas of concern (here and here), the problems with metrics. I will get personal here. I can describe myself as a state school entrant to Oxbridge, a product of a single parent family and living in what was then a socially deprived area (although the London neighbourhood I was brought up in is anything but that now). If you had a set of tickboxes to check I would look like an ideal candidate for widening participation. The reality is, though, that ask a different set of questions and I would come across very differently: I was not, for instance, the first member of my family to go to University, although neither of my parents did. Indeed, there are two examples of women from my family who went to university around 100 years ago at a time when that was very rare indeed (and they came from different sides of the family too).

They happened both to be regular visitors to the household and maybe they contributed to my aspirations being raised, I’ve no idea. One – some distant cousin whose exact degree of relationship I could not tell you – had gone to Bedford College to read maths and was a maths teacher all her life.  As she was deadly boring to a small child I’m not sure I was particularly inspired by her path. The other, my mother’s godmother (though a confirmed atheist) had gone to Oxford although I’m not sure she could have been described as having a subsequent career. She was certainly immensely intelligent. So, at first sight I look as if I would have counted as ‘widening participation’, although that language was not used in the 1970s to my knowledge, and it would have been decidedly misleading.

One can think of many similar examples to confound the metrics including the kid from a sink school who gets a scholarship to an independent school – they would not count in crude terms, whatever their personal background. And yet the solidly middle class child with impeccable educational parental background who switches to a state school for sixth form education could be counted as a state school admission. In the city of Cambridge we see this happening, because the sixth form colleges are so excellent and some parents believe it will help their children’s university admissions. This latter example strongly suggests the system is being gamed. But set a target and at least some people will game it. This is as true here as of the REF or as of hospital waiting times. Smart people can find ways around just about any target however well-intentioned.

One has to ask what would make a difference in widening participation.Cambridge colleges have been trying to improve things on this front for many years. Indeed we have seen considerable incremental gains on this score in the last decade. But what would have the greatest impact? I would say the first thing that would make a massive difference is to start early with interventions, although such interventions would not and could not be done by colleges. Educational disadvantaging starts essentially from birth. It has been well documented that by the time a child starts at primary school there can already be about a year’s difference in vocabulary between those from families where parents talk a lot to their kids using a rich vocabulary and reading them bedtime stories, and those where, for whatever reason these things do not happen regularly. The Sure Start programme attempts to redress some of this imbalance.

Encouraging children to be aspirational is another strand. If there is no family member who has been to university then there is no role model or indeed anyone to talk about the issues.  IntoUniversity is a programme that attempts to fix this by providing information and access to volunteers who can talk and inspire the next generation to think beyond their family’s parameters. Such a programme will only work if backed up by teachers’ aspirations for the children they teach and by parental support to encourage their children to aim higher than they did (or were able to achieve due to circumstances) themselves. Such parental support may itself be culturally affected, with some communities and ethnicities having very different views from others. So, if one starts to consider the ethnicity of university admissions then there is a whole set of new confounding variables: the usual term BAME (black and minority ethnic) does not represent a monolithic group, but is often lumped together as such.

It isn’t helpful when the media talks about how difficult it is for children from non-traditional backgrounds to fit into an Oxbridge college, as they seem keen to do. One of my very early blogposts was in response to David Lammy weighing in to Oxbridge’s apparent failings on the admission of black students. I’m not saying we don’t have an issue here but crude complaints implying we are making life difficult or that we are inevitably biased are simply likely to deter the pool of BAME candidates we would really like to attract. Anybody facing racism is one person too many but nevertheless one such example is not sufficient to demonstrate it is widely prevalent. The same is true about peddling the ‘elite toff brat’ angle, as was recently pointed out here .

Colleges such as mine strive really hard to go out into schools and spread the word that if you have the talent you are welcome in Cambridge whatever your background, colour of skin etc. However, sometimes schools themselves don’t reinforce that message; sometimes they try to game the system by putting forward kids who they think come across well and so will do them credit at interview, although these may not be the most talented. And some children never get off the bottom rungs of the ladder because of the disadvantages they face from birth.

However hard colleges work there are many problems which are completely beyond their capacity to solve. It won’t stop some folk blaming us all the same. Nevertheless Churchill College will continue working as hard as it can to reach out to bright sixth formers, wherever they may be and whatever their antecedents.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what Churchill College has to offer, details of our open days in 2016 can be found here.

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What’s Changed? Anything? (#Just1action4WIS)

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Athene Donald

This was the year, amongst other things, of the #distractinglysexy hashtag, as discussed recently on BBC Radio4 here. This hashtag was itself part of the fallout of #Huntgate, the undeserved fall from grace of a Nobel prize winner on the back of an ill-judged joke in Seoul around which a whole mythology seems to have grown up.

As someone who knew Tim Hunt reasonably well through committee work (but hardly on terms of close friendship, both facts I have always disclosed) and so knew perfectly well the nature of his sense of humour as well as his active support of women, right from when his remarks were first brought to my attention I was convinced this was a joke that had gone horribly wrong. My reaction was that the stories that were abounding were unlikely to be an accurate representation of what had actually happened. Yet as a supporter of the cause of women in science it is clear that I was ‘expected’ to want to shoot the man. That, on the contrary – and like many women who knew and admired Tim – I wanted to express my support meant I became the target of those who thought I had ‘let down the sisterhood’ and that my views would apparently ever more be suspect. Indeed I became the target of some vitriol that certainly caused me to lose sleep (mild by comparison with many; there has been some truly horrendous abuse tossed around, none of which I condone).

What I did not foresee was the way the story would run, and run, and run: 6+ months on it is still rumbling on. It has long since ceased to be about Tim himself. People continue to try to get at the ‘truth’ and indeed new facts are still emerging, although also new red herrings. As lawyers know only too well, asking witnesses six months on what happened and how they felt is not likely to provide particularly reliable information. Yet there are those who attempt to base their case on such witness statements (which collectively seem to be about as contradictory as one might expect, sometimes internally self-contradictory too)*.

Tim’s apparent silence in the face of questions at a Sexism in Science session in Seoul, which fuelled much of the anger in some quarters, has been shown to be down to a case of misidentification. Tim has demonstrably been shown to be elsewhere – actually lending support at the talks of two women scientists. The person being questioned didn’t answer because they had nothing to do with the case. Even some of those most visible on the ‘anti’ side of the fence have accepted this misidentification. Yet that doesn’t seem to have caused the anger to abate as one would have hoped given this fresh concrete evidence and not all those who initiated that particular part of the story seem to have had the grace publicly to correct or retract what they said and wrote. Other people were made angry due to the initial misattribution of a quote about thanking ‘the ladies who had made lunch’, a remark actually made by a Korean female politician. Again, the clarification of who made this inane remark does not seem to have caused everyone to reconsider whether their anger at Tim was justified.

That in July I used Louise Mensch’s reports to support the ‘pro-Tim case’ seems also to have caused people to become angry specifically with me. I was surprised by the remarks I received privately and publicly from people I respect, taking this line. As far as I’m concerned when hard evidence is produced I regard it as evidence regardless of its source. It does not make me one of her ‘minions’, as some of her allies have been described, it does not mean I have ‘collaborated’ with her as others charged. Nor does it mean I have always approved of the tone of her writing and tweets; I haven’t. It does mean that where I knew facts that were not already in the public domain (from the ERC’s perspective in particular with regard to an earlier post of hers) I could see her investigations bore fruit.

Her latest analysis of when the outrage began building into the visible Twitterstorm that led to the media hounding of Tim does provide new, hard evidence demonstrating that the Twitter fury essentially occurred only after the misidentification of Tim at the Sexism in Science affair and not in the immediate aftermath of his ill-fated toast. I think that fact suggests that the outrage was not simply sparked by what he said, as has usually been implied.  (Indeed it seems that the journalists who have described their horror at his initial words did not themselves attempt to talk to him in the hours after his toast – privately to call him out – despite there being opportunities to do so.) My own attempt at an interpretation is that the understandable undercurrent of ill-feeling around the wider issues of sexism exploded into an ad hominem attack on Tim as an obvious high profile target (with subsequently many others caught up in it) in the face of ‘his’ apparent refusal to answer questions at the Sexism in Science session in Korea.

There is of course a huge problem about sexism in science, of which many women will have personal and painful experience. Everyday sexism abounds, in the lab as elsewhere; most certainly it gets hurled around on Twitter. But this big problem in day to day science is what we should be exerting our collective energies towards addressing and it does not seem to be.

Surely it is time for people to accept that mistakes were made by many on a variety of fronts in this sorry story. Tim may have been idiotic in making his self-confessed ironic comments (as he himself would admit) but others have got hold of misinformation and refused to let it go or accept its inaccuracy. Many folk have sought to build a case to hang the man, acting as judge and jury, based on very little hard evidence.

People seem determined to point fingers and to go on doing so – something I, for one, early on entreated we stopped doing. It is as if some people enjoy throwing mud more than moving the world forward. If everyone is so concerned about sexism in science, could we not just concentrate on that challenge and do something useful instead of expending energy attacking others who ultimately share the same goals? I said in July in the closing comment on my own post that I felt this sad saga resembled the story of the suffragettes versus the suffragists and nothing has made me change my mind.

There was a brief surge of enthusiasm for my call in June for #just1action4WIS (Just one action for Women in Science), but I do not see it has had any lasting impact. (Nor, as the recent BBC Radio4 broadcast spelled out, has #distractinglysexy succeeded in doing any better despite the huge number of tweets with that hashtag.) So let me remind you of my list of actions that all of us can and should bear in mind as we go about our daily lives.

  • Call out bad behaviour whenever and wherever you see it – in committees or in the street. Don’t leave women to be victimised;
  • Encourage women to dare, to take risks;
  • Act as a sponsor or mentor;
  • Don’t let team members get away with demeaning behaviour, objectifying women or acting to exclude anyone;
  • Seek out and remove microinequities wherever you spot them;
  • Refuse to serve on single sex panels or at conferences without an appropriate level of female invited speakers;
  • Consider the imagery in your department and ensure it represents a diverse group of individuals;
  • Consider the daily working environment to see if anything inappropriate is lurking. If so, do something about it.
  • Demand/require mandatory unconscious bias training, in particular for appointment and promotion panels;
  • Call out teachers who tell girls they can’t/shouldn’t do maths, physics etc;
  • Don’t let the bold (male or female) monopolise the conversation in the classroom or the apparatus in the laboratory, at the expense of the timid (female or male);
  • Ask schools about their progression rates for girls into the traditionally male subjects at A level (or indeed, the traditionally female subjects for boys);
  • Nominate women for prizes, fellowships etc;
  • Tap women on the shoulder to encourage them to apply for opportunities they otherwise would be unaware of or feel they were not qualified for;
  • Move the dialogue on from part-time working equates to ‘isn’t serious’ to part-time working means balancing different demands;
  • Recognize the importance of family (and even love) for men and women;
  • Be prepared to be a visible role model;
  • Gather evidence, data and anecdote, to provide ammunition for management to change;
  • Listen and act if a woman starts hinting there are problems, don’t be dismissive because it makes you uncomfortable;
  • Think broadly when asked to make suggestions of names for any position or role.

Which of these can you personally, hand on heart, say you have acted upon during this six month period? Have you actually done anything actively to further some young woman’s career, or advised or mentored someone just a year or two behind you in the hierarchy? Have you pushed at your institution’s systems to see if they contain hidden bias? Or have you merely thought outrage over one man’s foolish remarks covers your contribution to women in science issues for the year and you can rest on such laurels? Please, as I have said privately but bluntly to key players on both sides of this wretched affair, please can we move on without flinging more insults, find some closure, accept that just about no one is without fault or comes out of the affair with particular credit. But can we instead concentrate on the important issue of making sure that genuine sexism is eradicated, in science as elsewhere in our society. That means identifying those who actively hold women back or promulgate structures which contain bias, not those whose taste in jokes is not the same as yours.

Whether you agree with my take on #Huntgate is irrelevant; we need to be working together to move the world on. Let us all start 2016 with a clean slate as regards vitriol and finger-pointing, but with a detailed checklist on the other side of that slate as to what each and every one of us can and will do to make sure those girls and women setting out now have a better time of it than those already on the scientific ladder.

*Added March 18th 2016

Reluctant that I am to do anything to reopen this topic, I have been asked by Dan Waddell to correct the impression he believes I give in what I’ve written in this post that he published witness reports after 6 months (although that isn’t quite how I expressed myself). I am happy to correct at a factual level: the report he published that I cited appeared 22 weeks after the toast by Tim Hunt. He wishes me to say that the witness reports were collected ‘over a period of nearly five months, but mainly between late June and early October‘.

I hope he will likewise correct some inaccuracies in his own report, such as that the ERC Korean National Contact Point – NCP – is a ‘representative’ of the ERC. As the ERC website makes explicitly clear, and as has been spelled out to Mr Waddell also explicitly, ‘NCP’s do not represent the ERC’. It is interesting to note that Mr Waddell is continuing to try to keep this story alive behind the scenes in various ways despite what he writes in his comment of December 18th 2015 (comment below) including that ‘I welcome any cessation of these hostilities’ and ‘I will still cleave to the idea this should never have run for so long’. He is continuing to cause distress to some by his ongoing actions.

It is only because Mr Waddell has been putting email pressure on me, containing what it is hard not to assume is meant to be a veiled threat (‘I don’t want to have to take the matter further.’ to quote his most recent email) that I am prepared to touch this blog again when I feel we all should long since have moved on. Our energies should be put in to improving the situation for women in science in general not rehashing old news, as I have repeatedly said. I agree wholeheartedly with what he wrote previously that this story should never have run so long and I sincerely hope he will now return to what he himself called the ‘real world’ and leave this sorry tale and everyone involved in it alone.

 

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Men Talking (and Needing to)

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Athene Donald

In the wake of the recent fracas over whether a university should celebrate International Men’s Day or not, I was struck by the following sentence in a book I was reading

‘I learned how much everyone needs to talk about their own past, the forces and experiences that shaped them and how rarely this constant need is satisfied in the competitive, pressurised world, except in moments of emotional crisis.’

Let me explain the how and why of the connection I perceive.

In case you missed it, the University of York intended to celebrate International Men’s Day last month, one of its motivations being to highlight the mental health challenges many men face. As the evidence shows, men are much more likely to commit suicide than women and this is attributed, at least in part, to the fact men seem unable to talk about their feelings as readily as women. That York ended up scrapping their plans I believe was a great shame since there clearly is a need to open up discussions on these difficult topics, but their attempt to publicise the event was sufficiently clumsily phrased that it offended many on campus and beyond, leading to a swift U turn. (See here and here for my discussion of the sorry saga.)

The sentence I quote above, written 30 years before all this unfolded is not intended to be about mental health issues in academia. Far from it. It describes the author’s reaction to the people he met in Paris in 1985 when he was a young biographer on the trail of an early French photographer known as Nadar. Hanging out in Parisian cafes the writer mixed with people who shared their own life stories freely, without regarding what he himself got up to as a biographical sleuth as in the least bit odd. The biographer was Richard Holmes, author of the wonderful ‘Age of Wonder’ describing the interface of literature with the developing sciences at the turn of the 19th century. (If you haven’t already read this book then I would encourage you to do so. It taught me a great deal about a period when science was rapidly expanding – think Banks, Herschel and Davy – and cultural and intellectual values were shifting.) The book the quote appears in is ‘Footsteps’ and is an account of the personal journey this particular biographer makes to get to grips with his subject. The motivation for my reading this book… no I’ll defer expanding on that as I wait to see if the ideas we’re discussing in College with Richard (a Churchill alumnus and Honorary Fellow) and others do or do not bear fruit.

This quote, however, struck a chord with me. We do all need to talk about the forces that shaped us, and the problems that beset us in past and present. In a café with a crowd of semi-strangers we may feel more comfortable spilling the beans than amongst our work colleagues. But, too often the work environment actively discourages admission or discussion of these problems: the supervisor who fails to offer support during the darker moments of thesis-writing; the departmental head who doesn’t want to know why your publication rate has slowed as your elderly parent’s health declines; or the teaching committee that assigns you a new course when you are still recovering from declared ME, to give a few specific examples. And if you are suffering depression you may feel – male or female – that you have to hide it from the powers-that-be or be stigmatised.

Academia does not facilitate chest-bearing. Society collectively does not encourage frank talking by men about their insecurities. We need to change this. We do need to talk about men’s mental health issues and we need to create arenas where those who are suffering feel able to talk. Recalling how men as well as women reacted to my two early posts about impostor syndrome (here  and here), where it was striking how men spoke up about the need to speak up – and the lack of places they felt offered them the security to do so – I went back and reread the comments. I pick out a few, all by men.

For instance, look at this:

My wife and I (both academics) have discussed our “impostor” feelings with each other, but neither of us would discuss this anywhere that colleagues might hear us (after all, if *we* don’t think we’re up to grade, our colleagues might just decide we’re right).

Or this

It’s not just women, men suffer from this as well, but it’s much rarer for us to discuss it amongst ourselves as I’ve seen women doing. If we do discuss it, it’s generally in the pub, and several beers into the evening.

And, specifically on the mental health issue:

Yes, men have it too. I am a postdoc and will talk about it more now- it definitely stalled my career and I did feel alone, even knowing several other scientists (men and women) who had similar feelings. It’s only recently, now that I’m coming out of my depression/anxiety that I am more willing to open up about it, even though it is uncomfortable. I think I can serve as a good example of what not to do. if given the chance, I would do it in public. It’s an awful feeling that I still wrestle with, but am learning to live with.

So the moral of this is that universities need to do a better job of airing and facilitating discussion of the issues, making sure that men and women have outlets to talk (and not just the pub). By highlighting ‘wellness’ as something of importance to the senior management, both for men and women, perhaps permission can be given to initiate and continue dialogue. Support groups are common for women. Support groups for men – or for people without regard to gender – are much rarer. Yet they are clearly needed too. One doesn’t need to act as if something supporting men is hindering women, or conversely. There are specific actions needed to support women in science (and unfortunately these are still necessary), but there should be space for all of us to be frail human beings facing challenges.

Now, time to stop writing. I want to finish the book by Richard Holmes, an intriguing narrative which makes me reconsider the biographies I have read and the interplay between author and subject….

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