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International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2025

Posted on 11 February 2025 by Athene Donald

It is ten years since UNESCO declared today, February 11th, as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Less well-known, I suspect, than International Women’s Day, it has a more specific focus. Sadly, in its ten years of existence, progress against its goals has not been particularly marked, despite the importance of women and girls entering the world of science to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, one could hazard a guess that in some places (notably Afghanistan) things will have gone backwards, with girls denied education of any sort at secondary level, never mind in the sciences.

The UNESCO call for action focusses on three areas, calling for urgent multistakeholder collaborative actions to: dismantle gender stereotypes and biases in science; open educational pathways for girls in science; and create empowering workplace environments. The UK could look at its own culture and consider how well it is doing across these objectives. Better than Afghanistan obviously, but we’ve a long way to go to eradicate gender differences in terms of pathways and stereotypes. In the run-up to last year’s Day, Teach First carried out a survey of children’s attitudes to science and maths (for children between the ages of 11 and 16). They found that more than half of girls (54.3%) don’t feel confident learning maths, compared to two-fifths (41.2%) of boys, with the gap even wider for science, with more than four in ten girls (43%) not confident, compared with a quarter of boys (26%). What is it in our society and our teaching that leads to this substantial difference, and why are teachers unable to overcome the issues?

Note, this is a problem of confidence not ability. When it comes to GCSEs, girls outperform boys, but the lack of confidence continues to manifest itself in that fewer girls than boys progress to A Levels in the STEM subjects, with particular shortfalls in the ‘hard’ sciences such as Physics and Computing, as well as Further Maths. Of course, these numbers then translate into lower numbers entering university to study those subjects as well as Engineering. And yet, report after report highlights how diversity in a company’s workforce leads to better outcomes, be it in a company’s profits or innovation.

By celebrating both girls and women in science, February 11th specifically highlights the pipeline. If girls get deterred from any interest they may have in science early on, they are unlikely to enter the STEM professions later. Schools and teachers have a key role to play here, in identifying what it is in their school ethos that may be holding girls back. The IOP’s (now quite old) data showing how single sex schools are more likely to see girls progress to A Level than coeducational establishments, must tell us something about the school environment in general.  I’m not convinced that things have improved since that 2012 report.

A small-scale study from the USA highlighted that children (both boys and girls) as young as 6 or 7 already see boys as inherently ‘smarter’ than girls. This is something that our society should be capable of eradicating if it put its mind to it. The belief that you have to be especially clever in order to be able to do Physics (particularly if you are a girl) is, again, borne out by many studies. The ASPIRES2 cohort study, led by Louise Archer, surveyed many children between the ages of 14 and 19. It showed that girls who do physics are regarded as exceptional, possessing high levels of cultural, social and science capital. They are presumed not to be typically ‘girly’. Girls may not identify with this description, indeed they may not want to identify with it. Furthermore, Physics is represented – in textbooks and overall narrative – as a subject for men. A lack of explicit representation of women in physics can lead to the assumption that women are unable to work in physics, or are unsuited to it. Once again it is not necessarily ability that is in question here, so much as a feeling of belonging or wanting to belong to the exclusive sect that appears not to be for them. Similar attitudes can be seen in those whose cultural capital or socioeconomic background leads them to feel unwanted in the subject.

More needs to be done to analyse, not just what deters girls from entering Physics (and, by extension,  Engineering and probably Computing), quite a lot is known about this. Now we also need to know what interventions would make a difference and, crucially, at what age. How is that girls imbibe the notion so early that they are less smart than boys? What would make a difference? Is it in how teachers interact in the classroom? Or is it in the messages they receive through the various media (social and otherwise) and their homes? Could teachers, if innocent of conveying the message themselves, do a better job of actively counteracting society’s messages throughout school years? Would more stories of modern women (and not just Marie Curie and, slightly more recently, Katherine Johnson) have a visible impact on the enthusiasm girls evince for the STEM subjects?

I don’t know the answers to questions like these but I think collectively we need to find them. I do worry, however, that a headteacher who is frequently lauded (at least by the last government) as leading such an outstanding school as Michaela, and yet who is unaware – or at least unconcerned – that her school has a below-average percentage of girls studying Physics at A Level, is the tip of the iceberg in the teaching profession. If diversity is only considered in terms of behaviour in the classroom in their training, how are teachers – particularly non-science-specialist teachers – to recognize and deal with the problem? And do they have the bandwidth to do something about this when their lives are so full and stressed already?

Posted in ASPIRES2, education, Michaela, natural history, People, pipeline, schoolteachers, Women in science | Comments Off on International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2025

The Need to Join the Dots

Posted on 2 February 2025 by Athene Donald

Last week, I attended an event organised by The Productivity Institute and, more locally, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, as part of National Productivity Week. The meeting’s theme was Innovation and Infrastructure in the East. Note, despite the recent announcement by the Chancellor of the plans for the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor (which used, under the previous government, to be known as the Ox-Cam Arc and was first supported and then cancelled; it covers a swathe of country between Oxford and Cambridge, including the cities themselves) this meeting was about the east: Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. This part of the country is unusual in that it consists of a number of old market towns and many villages, not a large if sprawling urban conurbation of the likes of London, Birmingham or Manchester. Skills was mentioned a lot and with concern.

If you live in a fenland village, the chances are the buses are rare to non-existent, and travel to a college may therefore be a grave challenge.  Your social capital may not be great and the careers advice you’ve been able to access sparse and unhelpful. Your local college may or may not provide the courses you seek, or which would provide you with a good route to progression, for instance as a lab technician or plumber. Of course, if you come from a family with good social and cultural capital this may not matter, and you may simply be planning the linear route through A Levels and on to university somewhere far from home. Let us recall, around 50% of the 16 year-old population will not be going that way, though, many may not want to go far from their home and far too many will end up as NEETs (not in education, employment or training). Yet we need this 50% to be productive in our economy. The fancy labs of the Ox-Cam corridor will rely on technicians; the building of hundreds of thousands of houses in the region won’t happen without plumbers – and electricians, bricklayers, plasterers and so on. Growth will not happen, nor opportunity for all as the Government mission has it, if we ignore the needs of those for whom college and apprentices are the right route.

In this vein, the Commons Education Committee has just announced an enquiry into Further Education and Skills, which may cover some of this important ground. It should also be noted that the Industrial Strategy Green paper, published last autumn, put skills at the top of its list of potential barriers to investment (although saying surprisingly little explicitly about the issue in the bulk of the document). Skills has to sit at the heart of growth, alongside investment. It needs to be thought about in depth, and not just mentioned as something to be sorted without detailed planning.  How is this to happen?

The concern about training/education and how it joins up with what the country needs in its future workforce was also made quite plain last week in a different context. The CSA at DSIT (the Department of Science Innovation and Technology), Chris Thompson, was speaking to the Science and Technology Committee chaired by Chi Onwurah, along with other departmental CSAs. Asked about his concerns, he had this to say:

The concern I have is that, with limited resources, how do we look to the next generation of scientists and engineers and make sure we have sufficient capability that is, at least in some approximation, of where we want to be in 5 or 10 years. And if we leave it to pure chance or the choices of the students, bluntly that may not align with where we need to be. How we can manage a national dialogue I think is the appropriate way forward…We need to be more upfront about the skillset we need going forward.

In that, he encapsulates many of the problems we are facing: limited money and a pipeline of talent in STEM that may not best fit the UK’s needs, whether it wants to be a ‘science superpower’ or a nation leading in AI, or prepared for cyberattacks and pandemics. How is that national dialogue going to be initiated? By whom and involving whom? Skills England is in the process of being set up and would seem to be one potential location. But it has been a long time in gestation so it is still hard to know how it may operate. This might be where the dialogue Chris Thomson wants might happen, but if it is solely an internal dialogue amongst its yet-to-be-announced members, it is unlikely to satisfy everyone. Furthermore, is it going to put its focus on those who do or don’t go to university? Focus on both is needed.

Mission-led government should help bring the different strands and arguments together, in this case skills will sit in part under the Opportunity Mission (led by the Department for Education), but – as with the Industrial Strategy – the Growth Mission will also need to be paying much attention to the issue. As Thomson said, we may not be heading in the right direction in terms of alignment of skilled workers (researchers and many other STEM trained workers) with the country’s needs if its economy is to grow. Locally, we need to be having this dialogue too – as the conversation at TPI’s meeting showed – recognizing that a solution to Manchester’s issues may differ greatly from what is appropriate in a transport-poor region of small towns and villages. Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich may be thriving, but if they are inaccessible to large numbers of potential students that will not help them or the economy.

Posted in academia, appraisal, ASSET 2010, Athena Forum, Austrian science, book review, careers, education, Equality, Evelyn Fox Keller, Further Education, gender, growth, natural history, NEETs, Opportunity Mission, Oxford-Cambridge Corridor, People, professional training, promotion, Women's Issues | Comments Off on The Need to Join the Dots

What I Read In January

Posted on 29 January 2025 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2025-01-01 at 12.28.31Max Adams: Aelfred’s Britain Max Adams is an archaeologist and writer specialising in Early Medieval Britain (that is, between the departure of Rome in 410, to the Norman Conquest) . His other books include The First Kingdom (on the early English Settlements); The King in the North (on the life and times of Oswald of Northumbria) and In The Land of Giants (a travel journey through the early Medieval  landscapes of Britain. Aelfred’s Britain deals with the Viking Age, between the very end of the eighth century and the middle of the tenth, when the very beginnings of what we might recognise as English, Scots and Welsh identities were forged in response to the depredations of the Danes and the Norse. He tells a compelling story from archaeology and written sources — the often partial accounts of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and others — to draw a picture of how a countryside of scattered farmsteads slowly evolved into villages and small towns; how early medieval ideas of rule and kingship were rather different from what later nationalist ideas of history would paint; and most of all how the politics, wars and economics of early Medieval Britain were shaped by the landscape, of navigable rivers criss-crossed by the network of Roman roads and earlier cross-country routes. This is important, given that the modern world, with its concentration on cities and fast routes by road, rail and air, ignores the landscape altogether. There is one telling passage in which Adams reveals that an archaeological site of interest is now obscured by a modern motorway interchange. An ancient sense of place has been destroyed by the needs of people to go somewhere else.  The lives of people in what we used to call the ‘dark ages’ were indeed dark, forever scarred by endemic violence and disease. Yet, at the same time, one can’t help but feel a little nostalgic.

UntitledBarbara Davis: The Echo of Old Books Ashlyn Greer, child of uncaring parents, divorced from a philandering husband, sees herself as a victim of circumstances. She does, however, have a gift — she can tune in to the emotional states of the owners of books that come into her rare book store. Over the course of a couple of weeks, two books come in that vibrate her antennae off the scale — books without authors, publishers or any bibliographical details whatsoever. It turns out that each book tells one side of a doomed love affair in wartime America. The novel tells the story of how she tracks down the mysterious authors. It was a good enough listen, though I found the voice of the actor who played the female protagonist, Belle, rather prissy. But I feel that I was sold this under false pretences. I was expecting more of Ashlyn’s preternatural abilities, when these were really an excuse to get into a stock romantic melodrama. I can see that lots of people will love this, but I expect I am not the target audience. Apart from one thing — the book hits hard at the antisemitism of Ford, Lindbergh and their circle in 1940s America, and ends with a Hannukah party, something that is mainstream in America but probably wouldn’t have much traction in contemporary Britain, where the attitude to Jews among the literati is, it’s fair to say, ambivalent.

Untitled(various authors): The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights There’s nothing like an anthology of short stories to introduce you to new authors and get you out of a reading rut. This was a festive gift from Mrs Gee and what a treat it was. It contains one creepy spiderwebb’d tale each from twelve authors. Each tale is an absolute gem and just wonderful for reading next to a fireplace when the weather grows dark and chill beyond the window-pane, and when you know you’ll have to fumble up creaking, darkened stairs to bed, chased by shadows, accompanied by your own dread thoughts, and a candle. I must have been sleeping under a rock for years, or reading different things, for none of the authors was known to me, yet the biographical notes show that all are more or less buried under the weight of awards, plaudits and laurels of all kinds. My favourites (it seems invidious to single any of them out, they were all so good) were The Gargoyle by Bridget Collins; Ada Lark by Jess Kidd; and Carol of the Bells and Chains by Laura Purcell. Each one was suitably wintry and Gothick. I’ll be looking up the oeuvres of all these authors separately, as well as all the others I haven’t mentioned. But the standout (for me) was The Salt Miracles by Natasha Pulley, about mysterious happenings among contemporary pilgrims to a remote Hebridean island sacred to an ancient saint, That wasn’t Gothick at all, but like all good weird tales, it sticks in the mind. The biggest mystery, for me, is that the anthologists of this wonderful collection have remained anonymous…

UntitledMatt Haig: The Life Impossible The world has completely closed in around lonely, retired, twice-bereaved maths teacher Grace. Straitened by routine, sadness and crushing self-doubt, her world is turned upside down when she receives a letter from a lawyer saying she’s been remembered in the will of a fellow teacher with whom she’d worked many years before. The bequest is a small house in Ibiza. Arriving at the house, she finds it sad and neglected. But somehow, she’s expected. There is a reason why she was chosen to inherit this house, and come to Ibiza, for in her lies the ability to save Ibiza from the clutches of profit-hungry developers keen on despoiling the natural beauty of the island. The abilities include such things as – I am not joking – precognition, telekineses, and communion with an alien intelligence. Now, I love Matt Haig, who adds a spice of magic to what would otherwise be tales of the everyday. But this one was, I think, a little over-egged. Think of Shirley Valentine with extra Woo.

UntitledNatasha Pulley: The Mars House Natasha Pulley wrote one of my favourite stories from The Winter Spirits (see above) so I pulled this one down off Audible for a listen. She’s written many books — her first novel was The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a Victorian steampunk fantasy, more on which later. The Mars House, is, perhaps surprisingly, SF. And it’s really rather good. January is the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in London. London is flooded, a consequence of climate change, but Londoners are enjoying their new Venice. Until, that is, the floods eventually drive January out and he flees to the colony of Tharsis, on Mars, as a refugee. But refugees from Earth, having three times the strength of a naturalised Martian, have to be confined in body-cages that ramp down their strength so they won’t injure Martians by accident, and have to work in dirty, heavy jobs. January is a labourer in Tharsis’ water factory. By chance he meets Senator Aubrey Gale, a politician on the make, and — one thing leading to another — he ends up as their official consort. After that he gets sucked in to a grand political intrigue. Tharsis is sponsored by China, but is growing apart from it. Tharsese is a strange mixture of Mandarin with Russian and English (there is a lot of interesting exposition on language). The tensions between Mars and Earth throw Aubrey and January into a deadly Great Game. I enjoyed it hugely. The science is more-or-less okay, but what’s key here is the the social mores of Mars. Martians have abolished gender, so they are all ‘they’ (which I found confusing, because I had to keep checking that the author wasn’t referring to more than one person), and androgynous. Separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ genders are only for animals. What stands out is Pulley’s style, which is gentle, bright, breezy, witty, affectionate and very funny. I suppose that her humour is British (as are some of her cultural referents) and this might be off-putting to some, or even misconstrued. I was amazed, for example, to see that she’s attracted the fury of social-justice warriors (SJWs) on Goodreads. She’s a misogynist! (There is only one overtly female character, and she appears near the end). She is guilty of cultural misappropriation! (A white Englishwoman discussing Chinese language and history). She is even — gasp — a Zionist! (Because there’s an AI that has an Israeli accent). Oh, how dismal. I expect that SJWs will prefer Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang (reviewed here) in which social justice warfare comes to the fore and (in my opinion) spoils the story.

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How Much Does the Scientific Ecosystem Change over Time?

Posted on 26 January 2025 by Athene Donald

Desmond Bernal was an outstanding crystallographer. Not himself a Nobel Prize winner, he set the likes of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz on their own successful paths to that accolade. A Communist, he fell from grace during the 50’s and 60’s due to his unwavering commitment to the Russian regime and the (discredited) theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko. However, before and during the second world war he was one of the giants of British science, heavily involved with providing scientific advice to government during the war and appreciated as a polymath with a grasp of many subjects beyond his own field, and beyond science itself. He easily slipped from the analysis of X-ray patterns before the war into modelling bomb blasts and the statistics of the way they damaged life and property during the Blitz.

I have been rereading his biography (J.D.Bernal The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown) and that has pointed me to his massive and influential 1939 work The Social Function of Science. Inevitably, parts of this will have dated very badly, but there are an uncanny number of comments about the state of science in society then which still ring horribly true. People often talk about how the satirical 1908 description of Cambridge life from Francis Cornford (Microcosmographia: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician) echoes across the years, with its downbeat assessment of how business is done – or not – within the University and how to be influential, for instance. I think this ringing true equally applies to much of Bernal’s text, only now applicable across the country’s research ecosystem. It, however, was not at all satirical but deadly serious, intended as a call to action for society.

Most people practicing science in our universities would sympathise with the statement ‘Nor are the actual emoluments of the young research worker really adequate’ for instance. The 1930’s may not have had to endure the REF, but the publish or perish culture was clearly alive and well:

One more peculiarly damaging to science is the necessity incumbent upon all research workers to produce results and to see that they are published.…for it is on his published results by number and bulk as much as by excellence that his future depends…Another result is to burden scientific literature with masses of useless papers.

One should remember back then papers were not online. Wading through the Science Citation Index – a very substantial collection of tomes which was the necessary route for me and generations before (and after) to try to track down who had cited which paper/ whose papers had been cited – was hard work in a library, not something one could skim through at one’s desk, and useless papers just take up unnecessary space. Such papers are probably even more prevalent now, with predatory journals cluttering up reading matter with papers of dubious quality. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff as a young researcher, especially if you obey the DORA mantra and don’t look at citation indices?

Bernal was a friend of CP Snow’s, whose PhD thesis on The Structure of Single Molecules at one point passed through my hands when the Cambridge Colloid Group and its library were disbanded. Indeed Bernal ‘appeared’ as Constantine, a brilliant polymath scientist in Snow’s first novel The Search. It is therefore interesting to wonder what his influence was on Snow’s fury about the two cultures, exposed in the 1959 Rede Lecture of that name in Cambridge. Bernal writes, twenty years before, that ‘Among people of literary culture there is almost an affectation of knowing nothing about science.’ The worry is that may still persist, although my concern would be not that this impacts on literary culture so much as those who studied literature may then go on to control policy decisions involving science. Bernal worried about that too:

The lack of proper appreciation of science is not confined to the public at large; it is particularly powerful and dangerous in the fields of administration and politics.

It is not for nothing that Angela Maclean, as GCSA, has aspirations (seemingly met) of getting 50% of the civil servants entering through the Fast Stream route to come from a scientific discipline.

However, clearly Bernal has encountered some who have access to policy decisions when he makes the statement

Somebody who knows the Prime Minister suggests that something might be done for a particular branch of research, and in that typically English way scientific research carries on.

Whether it is somebody knowing the Prime Minister personally or some other Cabinet member, as they come and go, there may still be too much truth in that about what areas of research get moved up the funding agenda.

My motivation in turning to The Social Function of Science was to consider Bernal’s views on education. In the Brown biography these are given as (taken from another 1939 publication Science Teaching in General Education)

  1. To provide enough understanding of the place of science in society to enable the great majority that will not be actively engaged in scientific pursuits to collaborate intelligently with those who are, and to be able to cricise or appreciate the effect of science on society.
  2. To give a practical understanding of scientific method, sufficient to be applicable to the problems which the citizen has to face in his individual and social life.

Those aspirations seem valid today as much as 80+ years ago. However, Bernal obviously felt back then that what actually happens in schools falls far short of this, and the words he wrote may currently be of relevance to the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review. Bernal writes somewhat sardonically

Actually for the convenience of teachers and the requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe on the authority of their masters or text-books exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not…the only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience….It is unfortunate that the easiest modes of testing knowledge and those which on the average will give the fairest results are precisely those that are the least valuable from the point of view of acquisition of scientific knowledge.

The phrase ‘teach to the test’ was clearly as appropriate then as now. Bernal, as an FRS, was no doubt very aware of the Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in Verba’, clearly at odds with the sentiment in that first sentence above.

Finally (in as far as I’ve just picked out a few sentences from the entire book) what about the stereotypes that schoolchildren may get exposed to? This is a topic on which I have previously said much, because I believe it is discouraging for many children when they cannot see examples of people like them. Bernal had thought about this ; his description here is also probably tending to the satirical when he writes

This does not usually take the form so often imagined, of the scientist as an other-worldly person who can only just manage to keep alive through the assistance of female relations.

I don’t believe that was a sexist comment in the modern meaning of the word. Bernal supported many female researchers, including Hodgkin as I’ve already mentioned. He was merely reflecting the inevitable norm of the day, of the male scientist with a stay-at-home wife (a domestic scene somewhat at odds with his own chaotic life, where he had many lovers including Hodgkin, and children by two of them. One of those I was at school with, perhaps reflected in my own interest in the man.)

Bernal is no longer revered in the way he was. He turned up in my undergraduate lectures as the man who tried to unravel the structure of liquids using plasticine spheres in a sack, to come up with the model of random close packing. I taught that too, when I lectured on Materials to undergraduate physicists. But his work on crystallography is so fundamental it is probably now invisible to many. As the biography – and his own writings – show, he was a man of many interesting parts.

Posted in CP Snow, deficit model, Desmond Bernal, Interdisciplinary Science, Londa Schiebinger, macho, Project Implicit, Sage, Science Culture, Science Funding, social media, The Social Function of Science, Unconscious bias, Universities | Comments Off on How Much Does the Scientific Ecosystem Change over Time?

Trump, DEI and the REF – what is the vibe shift?

Posted on 20 January 2025 by Stephen

Trump-official-photo

There is an air of defeatism in progressive circles today, the day Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term as President of the United States of America. Some of the reasons behind this sense of frustration and disappointment are captured in Ian Leslie’s latest Substack post, Notes on the Great Vibe Shift, which sees Trump’s election victory as a “far-reaching cultural reset”.

The principal components of this reset are the abandonment since the US election of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes by Meta, Amazon, McDonalds and others (including some universities after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on admissions in 2023), and the political changes within the G7 which mean, according to Leslie, that Western leaders, rather than resisting Trump are “keen to be his friend”.

There’s some truth in this analysis – the DEI agenda is more on the back foot that just a few years ago and the mood music within the G7 leadership has changed.  But to me it’s undercooked and, while the day may seem dark, there are glimmers of progressive light poking through the gaps in Leslie’s thesis.

I won’t dwell on the political analysis since it’s not my forte. I will only pause long enough to suggest, for example, that Leslie’s assertion that the Obama presidency represented a significant political victory but not “a social or cultural watershed”, and claims that he was unable to diminish the country’s divisions are at the very least contestable. The overlooks the fact that Obama handily won a second term and place on him an expectation that is historically unreasonable. Who, I might ask, was the last president to succeed in reducing political divisions in the USA?

I am more interested in Leslie’s argument that the abandonment of DEI commitments by American CEO’s marks an irreversible step that will find its way across the Atlantic. Here’s what he writes:

“Whatever the initial motivation, there is no danger of them changing their minds back, since the new positions feel closer to what most leaders instinctively believe – that you should hire and promote people on individual merit; avoid internal divisions wherever possible; treat people the same regardless of race or gender; do the work in front of you rather than debate politics; show up every day and work hard unless you absolutely can’t. These are common sense principles of successful and thriving organisations and it’s the privilege of those who aren’t in charge to believe anything else.”

This is all very sensible – who could disagree? And yes, there is no shortage of DEI advocates parading the wilder claims of identity politics who have never grappled with the complexities of running a well-functioning organisation.

But neither, if you probe a little deeper, is it inconsistent with a well-wrought approach to DEI*. How, for example, do you know if you’re hiring and promoting from the widest pools of talent? How do you know you are treating people the same, whatever their background? How do you create a workplace where people can work hard, without the distractions and detriments of harassment or discrimination? CEOs and their organisations can only properly answer these questions if they are monitoring the data that reveals the demographics of hiring and promotion, or working hard themselves to credibly foster a culture where everyone can give of their best.

Ironically perhaps, Leslie appears to endorse this latter point because in the Rattle Bag portion of his Substack he recommends Nabeel Qureshi’s list of 64 “principles for life” which includes at No.4 :

“Environment matters a lot; move to where you flourish maximally. Put yourself in environments where you have to perform to your utmost; if you can get by being average, you probably will.”

As stated this principle places the onus on the individual rather than the organisation to seek out places where they will flourish. I suspect this is part of its appeal to Leslie because elsewhere in his piece (tracking the vibe shift across the Atlantic) he cites Iain Mansfield’s tweeted attack on the recently announced pilot of moves by UK higher education funders for universities to incorporate reporting on People, Culture and Environment (PCE) in their submissions to the powerful Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Mansfield-tweets

There’s certainly a debate to be had about how to implement this reporting without excessive burden on universities, but Mansfield’s angry volley betrays next to no engagement with the careful and consultative way the PCE framework has been constructed with the sector, with its clearly articulated links with the desire to enhance UK research performance, or with the extensive scholarly literature on why these REF reforms are so necessary.

It’s a viewpoint that, bizarrely, dissociates organisational cultures from the ability of employees to do their best work, seeing attention to culture as performative virtue-signalling that the HE sector can ill afford. But it is at odds, not only with the deeper rationale underlying the REF reforms, but also with the insights of deeper thinkers, such as Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose organisational – or institutional – insights are quoted here in a thoughtful post by James Plunkett:

“The Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, has a useful way of thinking about institutions as rule-based games that get repeated. We move through life in institutions, each trying our best (within constraints like bounded rationality) before repeating, and trying to get better. Ostrom spent decades working to understand institutions, so that we can improve them. Her guiding vision — which feels to me more resonant with every passing day — was that the ultimate goal of government, and of public policy, should be to build institutions ‘that bring out the best in people’.”

So, I still hope, contra Mansfield, that the REF reforms, refined by the pilot, will be given the chance to prove their worth in the full exercise in 2029. And I still hope, contra Leslie, that the vibe shift that has accompanied Trump’s re-ascendancy to the White House will not endure.

For there is a fatal flaw at the heart of the Trump project: it is sustained by a disregard for evidence and for the truth, both of which can only be concealed temporarily. Those of us who advocate for progressive causes – ideally of course with all due regard for evidence and truth (as in this excellence piece)– would do well to remember that on this day.

 

*This is not to assert that DEI policies have never been constructed or implemented unproblematically, or without being buffeted by ideology. Of course they have. But the view that DEI is necessarily performative and beside the point is not one that can withstand scrutiny. To be fair to Leslie, given what he’s written previously on this topic, I suspect his main beef is with performative or virtue-signalling DEI, but I don’t think he’s made that so very clear in his post on the Great Vibe Shift.

Posted in science | Comments Off on Trump, DEI and the REF – what is the vibe shift?

Unreactive Audiences and Pertinent Questions

Posted on 19 January 2025 by Athene Donald

Given that it is now a decade or more since I was particularly involved in research, if I am asked to give a seminar – usually to students, sometimes undergraduates, sometimes and more commonly PhD students and early career research researchers – I always make it plain that I won’t be giving a purely technical talk about my research. I was amused, before my last such talk, to be told by the undergraduate lead that they get fed up with speakers waxing lyrical about some minute area of physics that goes straight over the head of the majority of the audience. In prospect, they seemed excited I might talk a bit more about my policy and gender work.

However, when it came to it, I gave my talk to an audience that seemed totally unreactive. I am always encouraged when I spot someone nodding their head sagely, or smiling at some mildly ironic remark. To get some feedback from at least part of the audience is reassuring, even for people like myself who’ve given hundreds of similar talks. To talk to quite a full lecture theatre who give no sign of engagement can be unnerving, provoking the thought that there is no interest or one is talking over their heads in gobbledygook. At the end of my talk, when I asked for questions, there was a long time (well, it felt like a long time), before anyone tentatively raised their hand. Slowly, over the next fifteen minutes or so, the questions started to flow. Sensible, thoughtful questions but clearly from a nervous audience who weren’t used to putting their hands up in such a situation.

After the end of the talk, there was a plentiful supply of pizza, and a further opportunity for students to come and talk to me one-on-one. And, despite what had happened over the previous hour, come they did. It turned out that they had been paying close attention all along, and wanted to press me for advice but, given the majority of them were undergraduates they just weren’t as confident about speaking up in public as most of the audiences I encounter. I should have factored that in; a lesson for me to remember.

Some of the discussions I did have were particularly heartening. The student who said they felt ‘seen’ was especially moving. Others were seeking advice I’m not sure I was in any position to give. One asked me how to decide what to do post-graduation if they had no idea what they wanted to do. I suggested they went to their careers service, but that had already been tried and it didn’t seem to have lead to any breakthrough in their thinking.   Beyond that, I suggested that they should try something that they felt might be of interest and, since jobs aren’t for life, it should be easy enough to move on if it was wrong. I often feel it’s important to remember there is no single right answer to questions like these, and many routes might turn out to be satisfying. If for every one of us there was a unique solution, we’d all be frozen doing nothing in case we didn’t find it. ‘Good enough’ is often good enough, and may lead to something that’s even better.

In the public questions, there was one question in particular that needs further thought for all of us. I had mentioned that sometimes people aren’t necessarily easy to deal with. This was paraphrased back to me, as ‘how do you learn to deal with jerks?’, although I’m pretty sure the word jerk had not passed my lips. (I have written about that characteristic several times in the past, such as here). The reality is in most sciences – as opposed to engineering – there is little time to practice team-work and thereby start working out personal strategies. Wherever you end up working, there will always be people who rub you up the wrong way, do things that irritate you (or indeed, not do things that need to be done, thereby also irritating you) or claim undeserved glory when they’ve not pulled their weight. There isn’t an easy way to handle them, and managers/leadership won’t always notice. Getting used to finding your own tactics for staying sane while pushing back on the behaviour that’s getting you down takes time. There are some people – as I was told firmly by a trainer on a course for ‘dealing with conflict’ – that you can never get on with. If you’ve been trying, the chances are that’s their problem and fault not yours. Nevertheless, finding some strategies is important.

I believe, as the world of work is changing, employers increasingly want team players, employees who can work well with others. Yet our education system is more likely to focus on facts that can be crammed in and then examined, than on anything to do with interactions with other people. This is true in schools, and it is true in most university science courses. Just as with promotion in later academic years, we reward the individual. Industry is not like this, and employers typically don’t want individuals like that on their workforce either. Soft skills – such as the ability to collaborate – matter to them as much as the technical, yet universities don’t help very much with developing those skills. We should think harder about the bigger picture, and not just cram facts that can be tested, but which can also easily be found online if needed for future use.

Posted in careers, deficit model, Interdisciplinary Science, jerks, Londa Schiebinger, macho, Project Implicit, Science Culture, Science Funding, social media, team players, Unconscious bias, Universities | Comments Off on Unreactive Audiences and Pertinent Questions

Recording an Audiobook

Posted on 11 January 2025 by Henry Gee

IMG_8687Here I am in my home studio, Flabbey Road, which serves double triple multiple duty as office, library of SF, repository of ancient and medieval literature, reptile room, and man cave, just about to record the audio version of my next book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. Amazingly, you can already order it, so I’d better get on with it. Last time I recorded an audiobook (A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth), listeners complained that I read too slowly, but mostly that I had had too much fun adding sound effects. This time the publisher wanted me to record with a producer listening in, but after a gentle reminder that I’d be frequently distracted by men women and dogs, and that they’d allowed me to do it unsupervised last time, they backed off, with the advice only that I spoke a bit faster. They didn’t say anything about sound effects (I shan’t add any. Well, maybe one or two). The studio has also improved since last time, when I recorded audio directly into  my trusty but very ancient iMac (OSX Lion was all it could manage, poor thing); a trusty but equally ancient version of GarageBand; and a trusty but very ancient no-name dynamic microphone I’d used for backing vocals in any number of beat combos from the year dot. Today I am using a trusty Untitledbut somewhat newer iMac (OSX Sequoia, noch); a newer version of Garageband; and a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface. You might both remember that I resisted upgrading for some while, but now I have everything set up, the sound quality seems a lot better. This is no doubt due to the interface; and the greater processing power of the newer computer. The coup-de-grace, though, was that my ancient and trusty dynamic microphone was rendered useless as a consequence of having been peed on by one of our three cats (I think it was Elvis, but he’s saying nothing), so I now have not one but two yes two count ’em two microphones, a Samson Q9U and a Shure SM57, which also make the sound better. The former I bought some time ago as it can feed either USB or audio and is great for podcasts. The latter I bought to trigger the vocoder application in my Korg Nautilus synth, but I am pressing it into service here. I balance the microphones in my trusty Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer, which feeds into the Focusrite and thence into the computer. Using two mics at once, simultaneously and both together  gives a nice, warm, intimate sound. And I DO like the sound of my own voice. So now I’m all set. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

 

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2024 Top Ten

Posted on 6 January 2025 by Richard Wintle

And here we go again! 2024 saw me lean in to concert photography in a bigger way than in any previous year (I think), including my second visit to the Norfolk County Fairgrounds Festival, and some more lurking around clubs in Toronto and places nearby. I also continued my long-standing relationship with the Canadian Musicians Co-op, the Toronto IndyCar race weekend, and the Norfolk County and Royal Agricultural Winter Fairs. Bits and pieces of most of these find their way into this year’s list.

So, in the customary “no particular order”, here are 2024’s top ten. All of these are found on Flickr, along with many others from the year past.

May: The Lemon Pistols, Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto
Sometimes, it’s the bass player that give you the most fun image. This band, a raucous mix of ska, punk, and general tomfoolery, headlined an entertaining evening along with three other bands. More here.
The Lemon Pistols, Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto

November: Aerialist, Royal Agricultural Winter Fair
The opening night, in a box with friends from Raynham Stables. Even so, there were opportunities to make some photos, including shooting down on a pair of aerialists dangling precariously from the rafters of the Coca-Cola Coliseum. More here.
Royal Agricultural Winter Fair 2024

March: My Own Money and fan, See-Scape, Toronto
An enjoyable evening at a venue that bills itself as “Toronto’s original Sci-Fi/Cyber Punk Themed Bar and Cafe”. There is a nice little live music stage upstairs, ideally suited to this high-energy, electro-pop band and a couple of other acts that were playing. More here.
My Own Money, See-Scape, Toronto

July: Bif Naked at Big Shiny Saturday, Toronto
An unexpected opportunity to photograph this legend of Canadian pop-punk in the inaugural season of The Bowl at Sobey’s Stadium in Toronto. More of Bif and band here. I also photographed this band in 2023, and would do again, anywhere, anytime.
Bif Naked, Big Shiny Saturday Toronto 2024

July: Team Penske at work, Ontario Honda Dealers Indy Toronto
I do enjoy photographing pit stops. This one was a challenge, given the notoriously claustrophobic pit lane on the Streets of Toronto. Here, Will Power’s crew makes short work of getting him in and out, with new tires and lots of fuel. More here.
Ontario Honda Dealers Indy Toronto 2024

November: Riders, Royal Agricultural Winter Fair
I like this study of intense concentration as competitors watch show jumping at the Royal Horse Show.
Royal Agricultural Winter Fair 2024

July: Your winner, Ontario Honda Dealers Indy Toronto
Andretti Global driver Colton Herta picked up his eighth career IndyCar win in Toronto, and once again I had the chance to dive into the media scrum on pit lane as he hopped out of his winning car. He would go on to also win the season finale in Nashville, en route to second place in the championship.

It’s always a bit of a crap shoot as to where to stand during these photo-frenzies, but I needed to show the crowd in the grandstand behind him. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this result, and a few others from the same moment.
Ontario Honda Dealers Indy Toronto 2024

October: James Barker Band, Norfolk County Fair
My concert photography friends know that I love a behind-the-soundboard photo. This is the best I managed this year. Canadian country musicians The James Barker Band, headlining Friday night’s “party on the track” at the Norfolk County Fair in Simcoe, Ontario, Canada. More here.
James Barker Band, NCF 2024

November: Show jumping, Royal Horse Show
Sean Jobin rides Coquelicot VH Heuvelland Z at the International Jumper Speed Challenge. It had been quite a while since I’d photographed any show jumping. I wish I’d done more.
Royal Agricultural Winter Fair 2024

November: Saddle bronc riding, Royal Rodeo
Another exciting opportunity – this time, my first experience shooting rodeo from down in the corrals, on the final day of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. A little hair-raising, but very fun, up close with a wide-angle lens. I’d definitely do this again!
Royal Rodeo, RAWF 2024

So, there you go. If you’d like to see everything from the previous year, by all means start at the top of my Flickr page and work backwards.

Happy 2025, everyone.

Posted in acrobat, autosport, car racing, concert photography, country and western, equestrian, fair, fall fair, festival, Hobbies, horse show, motorsport, Music, music festival, musicians, Photography, pop, pop-punk, racing, rock, rock and roll, rodeo, show jumping, sports photography, Western, winter fair | Comments Off on 2024 Top Ten

A Long December

Posted on 5 January 2025 by rpg

Last winter seemed to go on for ages. At least, way back at the end of January I remember desperately longing for summer.

And then I was made redundant, which hadn’t been on my bingo card for 2024.

Some good did come of that. I left a rather toxic environment, got a new MacBook (yay!), did some writing, worked on some infrastructure in the woods, and found a job that landed me back with some clients I knew from a previous life, working in my favourite therapy area again. The only downside, really (apart from the initial shock to the system and the stress of interviewing) was the eye-watering tax hit arising from the redundancy package. Oh well.

Summer did make an appearance, of a sorts, but it was wet, wet, wet.

It was the wettest year since records began, in fact (the records in question beginning in April 2017, when I got my weather station).

But we did have two weeks in Italy, and a weekend away in Devon (where I shot my first roe buck), and towards the end of the year even managed to see Crowded House in concert.

Which was a first for me, and finally helped me to answer that most awkward (for me) of all questions—”What’s your favourite band?”

I even managed to keep—for half the year, at least—a resolution to write a blog post ‘every couple of weeks or so’. Just don’t look too closely at the calendar.

Joshua passed his Eleven Plus (‘The Kent Test’ as they call it here).

And then the days disappeared and I was in Berlin again and then I came back and put the Christmas tree up, fighting off the fludemic as I did so, and it was dark too early but the lights brought joy to our end of the street. And we managed to fit in a quick weekend in Paris with bonus Eiffel Tower-climbing.

Christmas came, and is just ending for another season, and soon we’ll notice the days lengthening again and maybe, just maybe, I’ll stay employed but also manage to finish my novel.

Stranger things have happened.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Posted in Christmas, Crowded House, Don't try this at home, employment, Happy New Year, Me, novel, rain | Comments Off on A Long December

We Haven’t Had Enough of Experts

Posted on 3 January 2025 by Athene Donald

When I talk to student groups, as I still do quite often, I talk as much as what else one can do with a science/Physics degree beyond the obvious, as about the research I used to do (quite a long time ago now). I like to encourage them to think about careers beyond the academic lab and roles for which their science education will provide an excellent base. Obviously, teaching is one where the need for more graduates entering the profession is crucial, particularly in Physics where the shortfall is massive: in 2023 only 17% of the target for trainee teachers in the subject was achieved, ‘up’ (if one can call it that) from 16% the year before. But I also like to highlight the policy arena, both politics itself and the civil service.

Angela McLean, as GCSA,  has stressed the desirability of having more scientists in the civil service, with a specific science and engineering fast stream, which is steadily growing. There were 113 participants in this scheme in 2023, compared with 18 in 2015. The more generalist fast stream entry now has a (Cabinet Office) target of 50% of their new entrants being scientists, a figure that was achieved, and even exceeded, in 2023. However, having achieved that, it is important that their scientific expertise, their numeracy and analytical thinking skills, are put to good use. Reading an account of how the Civil Service is deployed in Ian Dunt’s 2023 book (How Westminster Works….and Why it Doesn’t), may make one question whether that is, in practice, the case.

Dunt discusses the history of the civil service from its reform in the 1850’s, following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. At that time, civil servants were expected to be generalists, coming typically from Oxbridge with an arts degree, but expected to be able to tackle anything. My grandfather – who read Classics in Cambridge before the first world war – would occasionally talk about the Indian Civil Service exams he sat after his degree. My memory is imperfect of the things he said to me during my teenage years, but these exams involved something like fourteen separate papers covering different topics over three days. I assume the questions were similar to those old types of name the principal rivers in Mesopotamia or list the kings of England in the thirteenth century, but I never pressed him on that. Not necessarily, however, knowledge particularly useful even to an Edwardian civil service – or India come to that. I don’t know if he ever intended to go to India (I often think of the questions I wish I’d asked him, but wasn’t interested in at the time, plus I had zero appreciation of the consequences of colonialism back then), but he ended up as a clerk in the House of Commons instead, where he formed a dim view of both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The war put an end to that position, as he headed off to France.

But enough of the personal detour, although recalling his account of the exams he sat may have mislead me about the more modern civil service. Dunt points out that many people over the last 50+ years have raged against the lack of specialist knowledge the civil service system utlises (and it is the structure he is railing against, not the individuals serving). He quotes an essay from 1959 by Thomas Balogh entitled The Apotheosis of a Dilettante and the 1968 inquiry led by Lord Fulton, who highlighted the issues around generalism and churn. Then, as now, people get moved on as the obvious way to gain promotion, so that knowledge gained in one sphere becomes irrelevant a couple of years (or less) later. For, according to Fulton, scientists and engineers – and yes, even in 1968 there were such people employed –

‘get neither the full responsibilities and corresponding authority, nor the opportunities they ought to have.’

I suspect Dunt doesn’t believe much has changed since then, and he rails against the widespread use of consultants instead of constructively using what experts they do have. He states:

‘On a very basic level, government departments have no idea what skills, knowledge or experience their staff have, because no one bothered to track it. Many departments do not collect basic workforce data…’

There are government departments where science sits squarely and centrally in its policy-making and their teams include many scientists. But, as I discovered some years back when I became chair of the Science Advisory Council for the Department of Culture Media and Sports in 2015, that particular department had precious few scientists on its staff, about one as I recall. (It didn’t even at that point have a CSA, only a deputy who was an economist.) That position changed subsequently when it assumed responsibility for digital, between 2017 and 2023 until DSIT took on that responsibility.

Talking of DSIT reminds me of a visit I made to its predecessor, BEIS, soon after the creation of UKRI. The primary focus of that visit was to stress the importance of UKRI making progress on interdisciplinary funding, for instance through the newly announced Strategic Priorities Fund, and I was talking to some of the staff assigned to UKRI from BEIS as it got going. I may have thought I was going to talk to those who knew what was going on, but ended up realising I was instead giving some new and junior staff a tutorial about how grant-funding committees worked. I was disappointed that the direction of knowledge transfer was from me to them, not vice versa, but I hope they found it useful. What I do recall was the insertion of various Latin epigrams into the conversation by one of the civil servants, and I left feeling that he, like my grandfather, had a Classics degree from Oxbridge, but that it didn’t mean he had a good grasp of how UKRI could or should operate. I had to hope I had inspired him to do more homework.

Now I work with another Department (the Department for Education) as chair of their newly formed Science Advisory Council. They have now, and for the first time I believe, a CSA (Russell Viner, a paediatrician) and a small science team, actually populated by scientists, one which probably could usefully be larger. I am excited to be working with them, and excited by the signs of genuine cross-departmental working under the new government’s missions. I am also encouraged by the willingness of those in Whitehall and elsewhere to talk to me about their work and potentially mine. I hope Dunt is wrong in his pessimistic analysis of the way Westminster works, or doesn’t; and that the vital place of STEM within Whitehall is fully recognized in our increasingly technologically-led society. We live in a world in which innovation and growth are crucially important for our economy and consequent societal wellbeing but which can only be delivered with a well-functioning education and skills system. All of which requires an appropriate spread of scientists and engineers across government departments.

 

Posted in careers, Civil Service, Government Departments, Ian Dunt | Comments Off on We Haven’t Had Enough of Experts