Just Say No (but How?)

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Athene Donald

One of those persistent stereotypes-by-gender is that women are less good at saying no than men. Whether or not you believe that to be true, there is no doubt that many of us – myself included – are less than perfect at saying exactly what we mean. It is too easy to try to soften a rejection to the point that the listener, who may after all have an ulterior motive in not hearing ‘no’, doesn’t appreciate that your refusal is exactly that. This is not confined to Early Career Researchers, a topic recently addressed here. We can all struggle unless incredibly resolute and clear.

I probably first appreciated this lesson when a PhD student and found I had been assigned to help out in an undergraduate Electronics Lab. I could not imagine how this had happened, given I knew absolutely nothing about the subject (and to be honest didn’t care overmuch). As it was my PhD supervisor who had had the job of assigning the task I asked him why he’d done it. I thought it was some personal joke against me but no, he claimed to believe I’d wanted to take the role on. I decided I must have said something along the lines of ‘Well I know nothing about the subject and maybe it would be good if I did’, which had been translated as ‘It would be wonderful to have to learn these skills so please put me in a position where I have to’. I’d like to think I had learned something from this, but I’m sure I am still perfectly capable of weasel wording ‘no’ into something that can be translated as ‘yes’.

Undoubtedly, very often not being clear is a mistake. It is true that sometimes one wants to be persuaded into some role. A response of ‘Oh not me, surely you don’t think I could do XXX’ might indeed be modesty, false or otherwise, and the speaker really does mean ‘Please persuade me because it sounds awfully exciting but I feel nervous about it’. However, probably just as often, it may simply mean ‘not me’, but our inability to say something as bald as that may find us doing something that we neither want nor that it is in our interest to do. So, finding words with which we are comfortable to say no really matters.

What those precise words should be will of course depend on context. I find people now write to me inviting me to speak at events in the tone of ‘num’ not ‘nonne’. For those who weren’t exposed to years of Latin I should spell out that this means they write expecting a negative response rather than a positive one, using phrases implying they’re sure I get lots of invitations and my diary is a nightmare (both true). Undoubtedly this makes it easier to say ‘Sorry but no’, since I am merely confirming their expectations. However this is a recent development and it doesn’t stop me feeling bad, even guilty, that I simply can’t do everything. After all, I know some (but by no means all) of the things I turn down would be fascinating and valuable. But, whether or not people expect a ‘no’ answer, one has to bear in mind the opportunity cost of agreeing.

So, here are some common situations you may want to consider.

  • Being asked to serve on a new committee:
    If this is a committee that interests you and your diary is bare of commitments you probably should say yes. Far too often, though, one is asked for all the wrong reasons, such as they know you’ll turn up helping to make the meeting quorate and that you will take it seriously – but they don’t actually want to listen to your views. You may already be overburdened anyhow. Useful, clear responses such as ‘I think the workload model already shows I am contributing far more hours than the departmental mean so I won’t accept at this time’ or ‘If the department wants to see my research progress this is not the right time for me to take this on’ are called for.
  • Being asked to take on some other task such as admissions or pastoral care:
    Either of the responses above may suffice. Do not be seduced by comments such as (if appropriate) ‘you’d be so good at it – and we need a (wo)man in that role.’ You might also want to look, not just at the number of hours your colleagues work, but at the nature of the roles they are asked to do – and how they relate to promotion criteria. If you are dubious on this last point you may want to stress a variant of the second response reminding the supplicant of it, rather than simply reply on a total hours worked basis. You may ultimately need to state flatly ‘ This is an unreasonable request.’ but that can feel very awkward.
  • Being asked to work with a colleague with whom you know there will be friction.
    This can sometimes happens within research groups where several students may be expected to contribute to a common project, or when equipment needs to be shared. This is much harder to reject without strong evidence. Simply saying that you don’t like X is hardly a good strategy. It may take several efforts to put across why sharing equipment with X isn’t going to be productive for anyone because they will simply be a dog-in-the-manger and the project won’t progress (at least from your perspective). Starting from a base of ‘I have not always found X works collegially’ you may ultimately need to escalate to ‘I am not prepared to work with X’ – and then defend that position. If X is the supervisor’s pet, this may of course require you to find a new supervisor in due course.
  • Being asked to do outreach.
    Many of us want to do outreach; it’s important and enjoyable to get into schools and enthuse the next generation of budding scientists and engineers. However, if you’re good at it there is the danger it can take over your life and that people will expect you always to be willing to visit yet another school. I have devised my own strategy to cope. I have identified a radius beyond which I won’t usually travel and if I turn down an invitation I will try to come up with an appropriate, but more local, name to offer. It may also make sense to decide in advance upon a total number of talks that you won’t exceed in a year. Then it is easier to say ‘I’m sorry, I have already done N talks this year and that’s my limit’ – and stick to it.

We all get asked to do too many things. Deciding which ones to accept is likewise always a challenge. How do you know, however interesting a new task or role is, another one – even more interesting – may not land in your lap tomorrow? Nevertheless, it is crucial for one’s career and sanity to set limits on what one accepts and to say no in completely unambiguous ways. Otherwise, there are many elephant traps to capture the unwary and unprepared.

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Light Touch Metrics?

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Athene Donald

In the summer metrics looked like they had been substantially laid to rest for the Higher Education sector: The Metric Tide report, written at the behest of the (probably the about-to-be-late-lamented) HEFCE took many pages to point out that metrics alone would never be a good way of assessing excellence in our universities. Whether you care to use h indices, citations, Journal Impact Factors, or pounds per anything, metrics have their limitations. Indeed, having read the report it is hard not to think that the misery of the REF can’t have been entirely bad because there was at least some sense of people making judgements based on their professional expertise, not slavishly following one number or another (with all the perverse incentives such figures can induce).

However, the government still wants to measure us, still wants to be sure their money is not ‘wasted’ and that students as consumers are not being short-changed. So assessment by metric continues to be very much in the air, whether in the context of teaching or research. I find this deeply dispiriting. If the government thinks they’re going to do things in a ‘light touch’ way as regards teaching, that is bound to mean some sort of metrics. However, if universities are going to be scored across all their courses with a single figure, what on earth is anyone going to learn from this? How will a physics course with a heavy load of laboratory work involved be turned into any sort of equivalence with a course in languages with a year abroad? If my department happens to irritate all of its students for some reason, how will that be factored into a score for the whole university? Are a lot of mediocrely OK courses across an entire university to be rated better than a university which offers a mixed bunch of high and low scores? I can see no way in which an aggregated figure can be meaningful to a student – but then it’s really designed to serve a government bean-counter deciding whether or not the tuition cap can be raised. (Which means that’s a rather important government bean-counter.)

As a Cambridge academic I have a more specific worry about how the supervision system will be factored in. This small group teaching (typically 2-3 students with a teacher) is very effective at ensuring all students get to try out their ideas and get personal feedback on whether these were right or wrong. It is very difficult for any student to sit quietly for an hour and never utter, as only too often can happen in larger groups. However, such teaching is frequently arranged through a College not the University; some of the teaching will be by professors, some by PhD students. The quality, inevitably, will be variable – and quite likely to be uncorrelated with seniority or any other obvious metric. So, how would any department ‘score’ such teaching when they have no direct control over it? And how would this then be added in to the entire University figure, given that we are a Collegiate university?

Of course one could avoid all such nasty reality by simply using the National Student Survey. As many voices have pointed out, a satisfied student is not the same thing as a well-educated student. Referring once again to the burden of laboratory work, we know it’s not loved by many students but, if they never get familiar with basic skills and equipment, how can they do more interesting stuff like research? So, a well-educated student may indeed be a somewhat unhappy student who can’t yet appreciate why they were taught some specifics. A satisfied student may be the one who gets access to all the overheads and never has to turn up to a 9am lecture at all. So, I hope the survey scores will not trump any other way of determining whether teaching is ‘good’.

Aside from government bean-counters, the other people who really care about the scores are those who devise – and utilise – league tables. Most universities, including the University of Poppleton, can find some appropriate measure by which they are in the top 10. Such league tables have proliferated. Many of them lack transparency or their figures-of-merit are not particularly helpful. By relying heavily on these we are in danger of distorting what we do and how universities present themselves.

Should universities fight against the use of numbers which do not ultimately tell us – or students or the taxpayer – about quality in any robust way? I think the answer must be yes but, as with the whole idea of successive RAE/REF assessments I fear it is a losing battle. Those individuals and institutions which have signed up to DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) should be sure to push that its recommendations are implemented at least internally. No more h index comparisons at promotion panels, or decisions to exclude individuals from a shortlist because of the journal impact factors of their publications. In practice, I have seen the former half-heartedly operate and I guess we should be doing more. My own field, with its wildly different publishing strategies – potentially ranging from hundreds of authors in high energy physics to the lone author theorist – demonstrates clearly the importance of avoiding crude criteria. (And if you look at the list of universities signed up to DORA and don’t spot Cambridge, I am assured we are signed up through our membership of LERU which is a signatory. I do worry how many of my colleagues are aware of this. For the record, I specifically enquired about this but I am also an individual signatory.)

As the dust of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement settles, as BIS escapes comparatively unscathed despite the bullish noises for cuts emanating from Sajiv Javid in advance of the Statement, we still have to worry as a sector what the price we will have to pay may be in terms of metrics since they look like such a convenient and cheap strategy to implement. I hope the original committee, chaired by James Wilsdon, that carefully looked at the evidence and spelled out the limitations of any metric-based measure, will stand by its conclusions.

 

 

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Chairing: Not as Easy as it Looks

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Athene Donald

If you are setting out on your career, how do you acquire leadership skills? If you think you’re a born leader how can you check it out or improve? As part of the commemorations around the 50th anniversary death of Sir Winston Churchill (Churchill2015) various organisations have been considering different aspects of leadership. The Moller Centre at Churchill College has developed a course for new generation leaders (described here in the Financial Times with accompanying video) to help those setting out gain the necessary skills. One aspect of leadership is of course the ability to chair meetings and keep committees working effectively.

Having recently taken on a new chairing responsibility, in a new sphere, I am mindful of the challenges such a role entails. Every committee is different and young leaders have to learn that the way one approaches the task has to suit the specific group of people sitting round the table, whilst keeping one’s goals clearly in mind. New committees bring new dynamics. Get it wrong at the beginning and it may be much harder to be effective in the long run: the chair bears a special responsibility from the start of the very first meeting to get the committee to ‘gel’. Any subsequent change of membership may perturb – for good or ill – the complex web of interactions between those round the table. Even with the best of care and attention things can go pear-shaped at any point (and of course one should not forget the adage that if things can go wrong they will).

I have two cardinal rules for chairing, regardless of the committee: make sure appropriate introductions are made at the start of meetings and allow time for comfort breaks. I know plenty of other chairs who dispense with such niceties. I have sat through meeting after meeting of some committees still in a fog about who some members are, even why they’re there if they never open their mouths. This cannot make for the most useful debate. But in particular, when a new committee meets for the first time, surely it only makes sense to take a few minutes to allow for introductions. This is even more important for committees external to any particular institution, where people may be brought together from many different organisations.

When I first took on chairing a major committee I took advice from a more experienced chair to help me acquire some basics. She gave me some very valuable hints. First, do a quick sketch of who is sitting where so you don’t forget people’s names. A useful tactic, particularly if dealing with a group who meet only rarely and there are no name tags of any sort in use; the more people in the room the more important it is. Nevertheless there is one accompanying pitfall into which I have fallen with great embarrassment. It’s to do with people whose first and second names could both be first names (e.g. James Francis or Leslie Thomas – I’m not sure it’s so likely to happen with women’s names). In a flurry at the start of a meeting I once miscalled someone by their second name not their first. As I hate the fact that people are sometimes startled to find me a woman whose second name is Donald not a man whose second name is Athene I should be very sensitive to this, but I still fell into the trap when swiftly glancing down at my list of names and pulling out the wrong half. Very red-faced I was.

The second piece of advice I was given was about how a chair should act: listen to all the arguments and be alert to when it is time to draw them together and come to a conclusion. This isn’t equivalent to knowing what you want to get out of a meeting and then making sure others reach the same conclusion, a piece of advice that some might also think was useful. As far as I know I’ve rarely used that as a tactic, not least because it really doesn’t apply if chairing something like a grant-giving body: one could never go into such a meeting knowing exactly which grants you wanted to succeed – and make that happen. Even if you could do that you shouldn’t!

However, the advice is more subtle than you might think. It means both that you shouldn’t cut people off before they’ve all had their opportunity to speak and also that you shouldn’t let the usual suspects rabbit on too long simply repeating themselves. The art is to step in once the circle has been completed once and not wait for multiple circuits. A bad chair can fail to interrupt that repeated circular path and progress will never be made. Equally, a bad chair can stop debate before any sort of consensus has been reached, in which case some committee members will simply feel a decision has been imposed, leaving lasting resentment.

If a chair allows a discussion to go on… and on….and on…the meeting will overrun. People will get cross and indubitably a good decision will not be made. Indeed, often in that situation people start leaving before any conclusion/vote has been reached and so it is those who are prepared to stick it out who get the last word.

So, some personal advice for anyone about to take on chairing for the first time:

  • Do your homework, read the paperwork and think about where the sticking points are likely to arise;
  • If necessary and appropriate (and it often may not be) talk to people in advance if you know that they hold strong but opposing views;
  • Know who everyone is and what their backgrounds are; remember names;
  • Concentrate so that you know when to wind up a particular discussion point;
  • Take the time necessary to reach a consensus, or at least let those whose views are being over-ridden feel that they have been heard;
  • Try to ensure anyone who wants to speak gets their chance – in particular do not let a couple of vociferous and possibly arrogant people dominate. It is the chair’s job to see this does not happen and that the timid get their moment;
  • Do not let tempers flare and use humour if you can to keep the meeting light (self-deprecating humour is fine and is often described as typically British);
  • Use breaks as time-outs if necessary, but also to allow legs to stretch, comfort to be restored and caffeine and sugar levels to be banked up as desired.

Other points may depend on the nature of the committee. I know I have tended to avoid votes – they can seem like an admission of defeat although sometimes good governance absolutely requires them. But I once went so far, in a fellowship committee, to have a straw poll when we were down to the last position to give out. Although the debate had seemed even-handed between three candidates, when asked to give their first choice there was a near-unanimous decision which the debate (undoubtedly a case of going round in circles) had masked as everyone was being so scrupulously fair to all. Nevertheless, when push came to shove and they had to name their top candidate, the answer for everyone was essentially obvious.

My final piece of advice for a happy committee: keep to the allotted time – never overrun!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What Does Equality Mean?

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Athene Donald

­­As the additions to my last post indicate, the University of York has backtracked on celebrating International Men’s Day – a celebration that would have taken place today. So now one part of the university is annoyed that anyone ever considered celebrating the day and, by virtue of what was written in the original statement, apparently trivialising the problems women face; another part are equally annoyed that the day is no longer being celebrated claiming that this implies the university doesn’t consider men’s rights are important. This is turning into a hopelessly polarised debate which won’t do anyone any good and certainly won’t make gender equality any nearer. It is all really rather tragic.

I was surprised to see the sentence in the original statement that read

‘In academic staff appointments, the data suggests that female candidates have a higher chance of being appointed than men.’

However, the University of York pointed me to their own data for 2008-11 which shows this statement to be true. However, I do not think those data are enough to convince me that York has solved the prevalent problems of bias against women and have reached a state where now men are being discriminated against, which is of course how the sentence above can be, and has been, read. One has to be very careful about interpretation of aggregated statistics and in my own experience when faced with such data I usually end up wanting to ask more and more questions in order to drill down beneath grand totals to work out what’s really going on.

So, what are the issues that are likely to make the situation complex and hard to unravel? Firstly, aggregating statistics from all grades within a classification (academic, research, support and teaching are the 4 groups that York consider) can mask all kinds of issues. To give a specific example: if, in support staff, the women are clustered in the lower grade positions – such as would have been called clerical in days gone by – there will be many such positions and few men are likely to apply for secretarial posts (why that should be of course could be another debate). So it is likely that many women will be appointed and the success rate may be expected to be quite high. At the upper end of the group, the senior management posts, there are far fewer posts and so, by weight of numbers their contribution to the statistics will be small. I suspect there will also be more people chasing the few posts and I would hazard a guess that there is a preponderance of men applying for those grades – but of course I don’t know that for sure. If these suppositions are correct, the net effect will be women are more successful than men overall. But we can’t actually deduce any of that with certainty from the gross statistics. And attempting to disaggregate them will cause its own problems whenever numbers are small, due to the effect of fluctuations. ‘Under-representation of men’ may be a literally true statement in support posts, as the York website initially declared, but what does it really mean? I suspect it means gender segregation by grade not unfairness in the way it is presented.

There may be similar arguments about each grouping. You can ask further questions too. If women are being appointed to academic positions with a higher success rate than men, does this reflect bias against men? It is easy to start with the null hypothesis that the merits of men and women are equally distributed so that success rates should be identical. But if in fact, as I have heard Ottoline Leyser put it, men are afraid of getting out of academia and women afraid of staying in (her words written up in slightly less stark terms here) then that strong selection process could mean that men and women applying for permanent academic posts may not in fact be statistically equivalent: the women who stick it out may indeed be ‘better’. So, if you decide equal success rates are a sine qua non for appointments panels you will actually be discriminating against women. Again, I don’t know that this applies. A presumption of superiority but in reverse is of course what has been going on for decades and what so many actions are trying to reverse.

As I wrote several years ago:

So, we should be asking ourselves, not only ‘are we nearly there?’, but where is the ‘there’ we are trying to reach. Is the ideal a 50:50 split between the genders at all levels and for all subjects, or do we believe that this is a) impossible or b) undesirable – or even c) irrelevant as a metric.

This whole area is unbelievably complex, even if one only considers appointments. If one looks at progression we need a different set of statistics: are men and women equally likely to be promoted and, if so, are they equally likely to be promoted at comparable career points? If not, why not? I recall looking at Cambridge data about academic promotion some years ago and all I could do was point out how raw numbers cannot tell anything like the complete story. We needed to know for each applicant how often they had applied previously, what were the gaps between successive applications, had individuals had career breaks….and so on. Of course we didn’t have that data. So, any university making statements about men and women’s careers, success rates and – by extrapolation – need for support, needs to be incredibly careful about nuance and detail. Otherwise their statements will be misinterpreted and used against them.

However, to come back to what I imagine York really wanted to do, whether men or women are more disadvantaged should not be the question. Undoubtedly men need support. They need to be encouraged to speak about their feelings before they are overwhelmed. A world in which so many young men choose to commit suicide rather than admit to depression or feelings of inadequacy in case it’s perceived as a sign of weakness, is a world which has much work to do. I believe this should have been at least part of the goal of the University of York’s intended celebrations for International Men’s Day. Making it permissible for men not to fit an alpha male stereotype is a hugely important objective; not just in the context of mental health, but about career aspirations (it’s OK not to want to run the biggest empire in the universe), parenting and work-life balance more generally. That last phrase needs to be as accessible to men as to women and it should not be regarded as equivalent to ‘not being serious about your career’ for either. Equality and diversity is about valuing difference and making sure the workplace is comfortable for all and with equality of opportunity for all. Equality of outcome is a different matter but the easiest metric to measure. As in so much of academia, we need to be careful about being lazy in our use of metrics.

Above all, we should not see men as in opposition to women. We can celebrate both. We can – and must – value both. The University of York now has a major task in healing the wounds careless words caused. But, and as I said before, they have been trailblazers on the Athena Swan front and I hope they will soon be trailblazing again on gender equality after this unfortunate fall from grace. But please, let us not end up polarised into hating, and explicitly expressing that hate, those who are different.

 

Posted in Equality | Tagged | 1 Comment

Supporting Men, Supporting Women: We Need to do Both

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Athene Donald

I am not infrequently challenged about why I worry so much about women in academia when young men are being disadvantaged. This is seen to be particularly true in school exam results but also if one looks at the numbers of men entering certain university courses (Veterinary Sciences, Psychology, English…). Woman’s Hour ran a story on this very issue just last week. All is not perfect for boys and men, I have no doubt of that, Nevertheless for many of those women who do try to climb the academic ladder pernicious issues remain, all too often buried beneath the surface. This means the playing field frequently remains tilted very much against them. Think Geoff Marcy, who seems to have got away with harassment for far too long, as an extreme example: just because some boys/men are disadvantaged does not mean women are always getting more than their fair share or even being treated in a halfway decent fashion.

Despite this, I am firmly of the belief that we will not get true equality by thinking only about the issues facing women. Men who want to do their full share of parenting, who don’t want to globetrot simply to tick off conference invitations to put on their CVs or who prefer an understated way of running their research teams rather than bragging about them, need support just as much as the women. For that reason it makes sense to celebrate International Men’s Day (November 19th) in academia as elsewhere. Changing our society cannot be done by one part simply slagging off the other. We are definitely all in this together.

However…however, I do not believe that it is particularly helpful to see on a university’s Equality and Diversity site  a statement for International Men’s Day saying

‘In academic staff appointments, the data suggests that female candidates have a higher chance of being appointed than men.’

Is this data from their own university? Or what is that statement based on, which most academics I suspect would have a hard time reconciling with their own local experience? We know that the proportion of women in academic positions remains, overall, a rather small proportion of the total: at professorial level it is still less than a quarter. Has the University of York, the university in question, somehow managed to turn things around at appointment level so radically that women really do have an easier time of it? Or is, as I suspect, that statement simply based on the misreporting of the recent Ceci and Williams study which was interpreted by some as saying women were twice as likely to be appointed as men. There were many articles written debunking the study and the way it was presented in the mainstream media (see my own write up here). Sure, many people would like to believe that the particular nut that is bias in faculty appointment has been cracked, but the study was not based on real examples (fictitious CVs were used) and I am not aware of any institution which actually has reached such a point.

I understand that a number of academics at York have been upset by this bald statement appearing under the banner of Equality and Diversity on their university website. I am not surprised. York has been seen by many as a trailblazer in gender issues, ever since their Chemistry Department was awarded the first ever Athena Swan Gold award under the leadership of then head of department Paul Walton, a man who has gone on to talk tirelessly about the issues and what can be done to move towards gender equality. To put up a statement that looks unsupported and which appears to trivialise the problems many women continue to face does not seem helpful.

Other parts of York’s statements around International Men’s Day refer to the imbalance in the undergraduate population and the fact that some categories of staff (professional support services and departmental support staff are mentioned) have a significant under-representation of men. I know that this latter concern has been expressed to me by a (male) member of my own university – although here it is clear that at the highest grade men still significantly outnumber women in academic-related posts. Nevertheless, it is possible there is a cause for concern at the lower grades and I hope it is being investigated. I have not seen figures detailing average success rates for men and women in these grades. It is appointment (and promotion) success rates that matter now, since historical imbalances will take a while to work through the system.

There is of course a deeper philosophical question about what the numbers ‘should’ be. Just as I get taken to task when people assume I’m advocating that undergraduate physics classes should be exactly 50:50 men and women – something I’ve never said – so we probably should query what does under-representation of men in professional services mean. There could be all kinds of reason why men apply in lower numbers than women. However, if success rates are significantly different between the genders then I am more worried that we have a problem; I simply don’t know whether that is so or not. Someone, somewhere, Must have that data (and not just the percentages in the different grades which is all I am familiar with).

There is no doubt that we are in an era when we are still working out the right questions to ask, a vital step if we are to find sensible solutions to gender equality. But I am uncomfortable with any E+D group that paints too rosy a picture when women on the ground know that so many problems remain. Let’s see the evidence for York to reassure women (and men) that the statement on their website is accurate for their own university, or let’s see that statement removed and replaced with something more accurately reflecting the academic world today. By all means let us consider what steps can be taken to improve the lot of working men and identify where they are disadvantaged by virtue of their gender. But this should not be done at the expense of women. This should not be seen as a zero sum game but a process by which everyone’s working environment can be improved and by which you are appointed on merit, not because of your chromosomes.

The statements on the University of York website were brought to my attention by Jenny Saul who has written about her own thoughts on the matter here.

Update 16-11-15 0815 I understand that the statement does indeed refer to the University of York’s own aggregated data which can be found here.  I also understand that further thought is being given to the statement which may be modified (or possibly even removed). Certainly I believe that the wording made the fact that there was evidence from their own institution to support their statement completely unclear. The fact that many people read it as essentially trivialising the challenges women face without even realising the basis for the remark, shows that the wording was, at the very least, unfortunate. If I hear more I will continue to update this post.

Finally, I have not had time to examine the statistics provided but I am sure they will provide food for thought. Another commenter drew my attention to some US data which is also relevant. Considered thoughts will have to wait for a further post. I think it reinforces my closing statement that we are still working out what the right questions to ask are.

Update 16-11-1130 The statement on the E+D website has now been removed and replaced with the following:

‘The following is a response to an open letter sent to the University regarding an article published advising of our intention to mark International Men’s Day (19 November).

We are sorry that this has caused unhappiness for some members of the University community who felt that the statement was inappropriate and should never have been issued.  The intention was to draw attention to some of the issues men tell us they encounter and to follow this up by highlighting in particular the availability of mental health and welfare support which we know men are sometimes reluctant to access.

The Equality and Diversity Committee is clear that the main focus of gender equality work should continue to be on the inequalities faced by women, and in particular the under-representation of women in the professoriate and senior management.  We believe that we can make meaningful progress in addressing these issues, while at the same time addressing other aspects of the equality and diversity agenda.  To this end, we are putting in place new structures to extend and strengthen our approach to the Athena Swan awards, which provide a framework for our work on gender equality.

We will certainly reflect on the views expressed in the open letter and think twice about marking future Men’s Days. In the meantime, the statement marking this year’s International Men’s Day has been withdrawn.’

I applaud the University for acting in the face of manifest unhappiness. This does not mean I feel that the issues men face should not be given attention.

 

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