{"id":2321,"date":"2012-05-16T16:31:58","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T16:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=2321"},"modified":"2013-01-05T08:35:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T08:35:00","slug":"celebrating-success-even-if-progress-is-slow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2012\/05\/16\/celebrating-success-even-if-progress-is-slow\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Success (Even if Progress is Slow)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week (the lack of) women in science actually made it onto BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme, when Lesley Yellowlees<\/a> \u2013 President-elect of the Royal Society of Chemistry \u2013 spoke out about the lack of women in her own and other scientific disciplines. She got much coverage in the media in general that day, in advance of her keynote speech at Science Scotland (currently she is Vice Principal and Head of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh). Her headline message (or at least what was picked out as the headline; one can only assume she did actually say it) was<\/p>\n

It’s clear that the UK is half-a-century behind when it comes to advancing the cause of women scientists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was the line that stuck in people\u2019s minds, and was picked up by Angela Saini<\/a> in her Guardian blog<\/a>. I had dinner with Lesley earlier this spring when I was in Edinburgh, and I appreciate her concern and that this is a matter close to her heart, but I think this statement, catchy though it may be, is neither really accurate nor helpful. Undoubtedly if you make, as she seems to have done, a direct comparison of the numbers of women elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year (24 out of 84) and compare it with the equivalent elections to the UK\u2019s Royal Society (2 out of 44, as I discussed in a recent post<\/a>), things look spectacularly bad. If those numbers held up year on year it might be an admissible failing on the UK\u2019s part, but I haven’t seen the evidence to suggest that over time the discrepancy is as bad as that. It may be, I just don\u2019t know. Even so, numbers are not the only part that matters. Firstly, the US has \u2013 at least at times \u2013 operated a policy of affirmative action which enables people to point a finger at female hires hinting that they were appointed only<\/span> because they were women. As the relatively recent 2010 MIT report <\/a>stated, there is a<\/p>\n

perception that standards for hiring and promotion of women faculty are lower than for male faculty demonstrated,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This leaves women feeling anxious and insecure in unhelpful ways even if the numbers look superficially encouraging. Secondly, as I discussed recently<\/a>,\u00a0 there is the USA\u2019s unhelpful attitude towards maternity leave and how this complicates work-life balance and academic progression. Finally, there is the question of how good the quality of the academic working environmentactually is, something that matters hugely too; the book I reviewed recently<\/a> suggests things aren\u2019t really very good on that front either in US Laboratories. I have found it telling that when I have written blogposts about the Athena Swan awards<\/a>, commenters from the US have sighed \u2018why don\u2019t we have such a scheme here\u2019. So, poor as the UK\u2019s statistics may be, I simply don\u2019t believe we are half a century behind the US. After all, I was a postdoc in the US around 1980 and at that point I was the first female postdoc in my engineering department at Cornell, and the University used affirmative action to create their first faculty position held by a woman anywhere in the Engineering School. No, we\u2019re way ahead of that here and that was only just over 30 years ago; Lesley\u2019s \u2018half a century\u2019 is undoubtedly an exaggeration.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Athena Swan awards go from strength to strength over here. More and more universities and departments are achieving their benchmarks, and the recent tranche of winners expanded those numbers further. Last week I went to Leeds to speak at their WISET event<\/a> celebrating both two departmental awards and also a photographic exhibition of portraits of some of their most successful women, from PhD students to professors. It was a joyful evening to congratulate themselves on how far they have got, whilst still remembering how much further there is to go. For my talk, I was asked, amongst other things, to talk about what \u2018Utopia\u2019 would look like, once all departments had achieved Athena awards and there was no longer an issue for women in science. Hard though it is to imagine such a world, where there is no gender pay gap, promotion rates for men and women are identical and there are so many excellent female role models the term has disappeared as outdated and unnecessary, I think the key thing would be when everyone appreciated that all individuals are different, not that men and women are different.<\/p>\n

One key factor that was very evident at this enjoyable and successful evening (aside from the fact that the Leeds University catering is excellent), was the explicit buy-in from the university\u2019s leadership. Michael Arthur<\/a>, their VC, was there to make the welcoming speech but stayed not only through the formal part of the evening, but through all the informal part afterwards when people mingled, admired the photographs – and \u00a0of course the food. He said to me how valuable it was for him to get opportunities like this to meet some of the junior staff. I know lecturer Sarah Staniland<\/a> \u2013 a nanotechnologist making headlines with her science on magnetic bacteria<\/a> and who had been a key player in driving the event as a member of the WISET Steering Committee and the originator of my own invitation – had a long chat with him. I think there was even an opportunity for her to pin him down to committing money towards the future of their work; indeed the VC\u2019s parting shot to me was that the evening had cost him \u00a3300,000, presumably (if this follows through and was not just an offhand nicety on which to end the evening) to cover resourcing of post(s) to facilitate future departmental awards in the years ahead. Also there, speaking up and pushing things forward, was Dawn Freshwater<\/a> Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Staff and Organisational Effectiveness, whose responsibility the diversity agenda is. Relatively recently appointed to this post, she has plenty of time ahead in her term of office to drive through major cultural changes \u2013 and is clearly determined to do so. This buy in from senior leadership is vital for universities for progress to be made, a subject I have discussed before<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, good luck to Leeds! But there a few caveats I want to make about those putting applications in for Athena Swan awards based on conversations I have had with various people in various universities.<\/p>\n

1 Do not just expect a junior woman to take the lead, because she is a woman. I came across a case recently where a newly appointed lecturer, in post for less than a year, was being asked to spearhead the departmental bid. This is undoubtedly a case of a woman being asked to take on this task with no thought of her as an individual. A new lecturer \u2013 male or female \u2013 should have establishing their research and teaching as their top priorities. Putting an Athena Swan submission together is time-consuming and requires knowing your way around departmental and university resources and politics. So, to my mind, an ideal person to do this is a senior male \u2013 if it is a male doing it, it strengthens the case by signifying the department sees this as a departmental problem, not simply the women\u2019s problem.<\/p>\n

2 Even if a department has received an award \u2013 of whatever colour \u2013 they should continue to consider whether they are doing things as well as they could. Not so long ago I heard of a department with a Silver award, where they still insisted on holding departmental seminars at 5pm, a time inconvenient for many parents (of either gender). A young mother was being taken to task for never attending in ways that made her both uncomfortable and angry.<\/p>\n

3 When universities have a few departments with awards, they can \u2013 and should \u2013 undoubtedly share what they believe is their own best practice. But every department has to work out what their own issues are and a single template cannot fit all; shortcuts of cutting and pasting someone else\u2019s submission cannot be a solution.<\/p>\n

So, congratulations to Leeds and other recent Athena Swan award winners. We should celebrate their success, whilst recognizing we have a long way to go even if we are not a full half century behind the UK.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week (the lack of) women in science actually made it onto BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme, when Lesley Yellowlees \u2013 President-elect of the Royal Society of Chemistry \u2013 spoke out about the lack of women in her own and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,27],"tags":[502,501,188],"class_list":["post-2321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equality","category-science-culture","category-women-in-science","tag-athena-swan-awards-leeds-university","tag-lesley-yellowlees","tag-royal-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}