Fieldwork, family, friendship and feeding

(Suggested by Clare Boston)

Interesting blog from Tori Herridge on the excitement of fieldwork in a Maltese cave as well as the network of friends and family and their attitudes that make such fieldwork possible with a baby. The blog highlights the importance of attitude and acceptance of others for creating an environment where a new mother feels that her presence isn’t a burden nor merely tolerated.

 

Parenthood and career – how do you change?

(Suggested by Clare Boston)

 Another interesting piece in the guardian about how parenthood changes your perspective as a researcher. Personally, it isn’t ‘Wheels on the Bus’ but ‘Let It Go’ that is the current melodic meme taking over my brain! This appropriate song maybe related to the age of your child – is there a research paper in that? More seriously, the impact of these short pieces lies in the personal stories that come across and the key issues they raise about how we work as researchers and academics and how the supposed barrier between our personal lives and our work lives are continually dissolving. How this impacts our careers is a concern. Better let it go now!

Can you be a research scientist and partner/parent?

(Suggested by Clare Boston)

 Interesting piece in the Guardian from the Royal Society on whether it is possible to have a life outside of work as a research scientist. The general tone seems to be that ‘we’, by which I assume they mean the established hierarchy, needs to be more inclusive in what is seen as a ‘normal’ working life that includes family life, having a partner and so on. So there is hope, possibly?!

 

Athena SWAN Conference 26th April 2016

A very interesting conference and well worth reporting back on the presentation, or rather hour long chat by Professor Tom Welton, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London and proud owner, not personally, of an Athena SWAN gold Award in the Sustainable Chemistry Department. His talk focused what he thought Athena SWAN was all about. Awards, of any colour, are nice and look to be increasingly essential as an initial hurdle for getting grants but that should not be why we are taking on the Athena SWAN principles in his view (although he does already have a Gold Award!).

Athena SWAN is about tackling issues of Equality and Diversity, but these are not issues that can be easily isolated from the type of department we want to work. Tom Welton linked the drive for Athena SWAN principles with his departmental vision for the future – their desire to be the top Chemistry department in Europe. It is fine to have a vision but why do you want that vision in the first place and what do you need to do to get there? When asked what the best chemistry department in Europe would be like, staff come up with a place top people would want to work in, a place top students would want to study, a place where going to work would be enjoyable. Is this general vision any different from one we would think of?  

The question is how to get there from where you are. So where are you? This is what the data analysis and staff surveys should reveal. They should also reveal how far you are from your vision and point towards what you need to do to get there. Putting in place formal procedures and practices can help and are essential for some things such as formal flexible hours. We all know though that procedures do not mean things actually happen nor do they necessarily reflect the sum total of what we can  or should do. If Athena SWAN principles are to really work, if we are really going to tackle issues of Equality and Diversity then we need to all buy into accepting that there are issues that need tackling and into the belief that our actions as individuals and collectively can make a real difference to these issues. Little things can make a difference – coffee and cakes, the odd pint or eight, saying thank you – we can improve our working environment by small and large steps, as individuals and by our collective efforts.

A key point that came across to me was the importance of listening. Not just remaining attentive before you construct your defensive response, but actually listening and thinking does the person have a point and could things be done differently.?We may all believe we do this, but I can tell you from individual experience I certainly don’t do this some of the time 9or is it most of the time?) I think it’s called empathy but I will have to check! Listening doesn’t mean agreeing with the other person’s viewpoint but it does mean trying to think about that viewpoint.

Anyway what do you think?

 

Athena Swan Conference Wednesday 27th April - not too late!

It's still not too late to sign up for the conference this week:

Athena Swan conference: Portsmouth

Starts at 13;00 and finishes by 16:30

Feminist glaciology – at least it is being talked about!

 

The recent paper in Progress in Human Geography:
Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. 

Has caused a great deal of controversy, with the authors being drawn into the ‘culture wars’. The paper is worth a read so that you can form your own opinion, but remember the authors set out to promote discussion so maybe they intended to be controversial (see article).

At roughly the same time as the paper came out I received a paper to review for the Canadian Geographer  on critical thinking in physical geography that I reviewed positively that as part of its introduction distilled the arguments of the Progress in Human Geography paper down to three key points that seemed, at least to me, to be quite reasonable.  The key points were:  knowledge producers, the gendered nature of science and the domination of the scientific viewpoint. Each of these can be presented as a reasonable argument, by which I mean an argument that most physical scientists would not necessarily disagree. At the same time most physical scientists would ask what has this to do with my work? This is the harder part of make clear but one that we need to increasingly address as the difficulties of interdisciplinary research become clear. This is not a trend that will go away so trying to understand the implications of who produces what nolwdge and how are issues that even the hardest of physical geographers will need to grapple with. So what is your view?

Graduate premium for women, but is it high enough?

 

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) report on earnings differentials between graduate and non-graduate women suggests that there is a significant graduate premium, with female graduates, 10 years after they graduate, having median earnings up to 3 times greater than the median earnings of non-graduate females. The analysis used big data (260,000 graduates), so is one of the most extensive of its kind. Despite the higher earnings by female graduates they still tended to earn less than male graduates who had been graduated for 10 years. Male graduates earned about 23% more than female graduates 10 years after graduation, so still a significant gap despite the supposed equality of higher education.  At the upper end of the pay scale the differences are even starker with 10% of male graduates earning over £55,000 (the equivalent statistic for female graduates is £43,000, a difference of £12,000), 5% of male graduates earning over £73,000 (the equivalent for female graduates is  £54,000, a difference of £19,000) and 1% of male graduates earning over £148,00 (the equivalent for female graduates is £89,000, a difference of £49,000). So inequality seems to grow as pay does!

 

 

Gender and the Institute of Fiscal Studies Graduate Earning Report

 

The recent Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) report on variations in graduate earnings by gender, institution, subject area and socio-economic background has some interesting points to make about the relative differences between male and female earnings whatever subject individuals take. Of as much importance to the equality and diversity agenda, however, is the observation that the socio-economic background of individuals can have a relatively large impact on earnings. The potential implications of this observation for long-term social mobility are not considered but something those in higher education need to be aware of.

 

 

Steps to Gender Equality in Politics and the Workplace

The Guardian recently published an interesting piece on 12 steps needed to achieve gender equality in the politics and the workplace. The piece highlights the international dimension of the issue of gender equality as well as the long timescale over which changes needed to occur. The key points are the need to listen and act, sensitivity of actions to gender and the eradication of violence.

12 steps to achieve gender equality in our lifetimes

 

 

 

The Stereotype Trap (CogTales blog)

That women in science and in the professional world in general are subject to gender biases with real consequences (lower pay, less career opportunities) goes without saying.
In this context, I find it important to be aware of how easy it is to be biased myself. Not in order to justify, but to better understand. I have recently made two experiences with my own and fellow female researchers’ biases, in situations where I somewhat slipped into a man’s skin.
Now, slapping on my man skin aka MetaLab poster for the BCCCD conference, I got one female researcher who looked, mumbled  “Oh, oh, this looks complicated!”, and left. There was another one who actually started talking to me but who stated, before I could even open my mouth: “I am not sure I will understand this. It looks very difficult.” Granted, this is a sample of N=2 (although Christina just told me that she got similar reactions exclusively by women on a similar poster recently), and there were many others that did not say anything like this. Nevertheless, I had never gotten any such reaction on any other project. So man skin experience #1 showed me a few examples of women having a that’s-too-complicated-for-me-bias against themselves.
Well, you might say, this man skin isn’t too convincing. But I have an even better one. It’s my first name. First names ending in ‘o’ are, across many cultures, associated with men rather than women. I think I first got painfully aware of this when the Russian family friend persistently called me “Shoa”, because he just didn’t want to deal with the fact that a little girl’s name ended with an “o”. Fast-forward, and I keep receiving an uncountable amount of mail addressed to “Mr./Herr/Dhr./M. Tsuji”, and recently this involuntary man skin, actually in combination with the MetaLab man skin, culminated in me being imagined as an “over 40-year-old single guy who watches porn movies in his free time.”

Read the full post here.

University of Portsmouth celebrates International Women’s Day (Staff Essentials)

 

The University of Portsmouth celebrates International Women’s Day with the following talks and film screenings:

Female Philanthropy and the Inter-War World in Twentieth-Century Britain
Date: Tuesday 8 March 2016
Time: 5.15pm
Venue: Dennis Sciama, Room 2.14
Dr. Eve Colpus, Lecturer in British and European History Post 1850 at Southampton University, will speak on ‘Female Philanthropy and the Inter-War World in Twentieth-Century Britain’, organised by the Women’s and Gender Studies Research Cluster, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. No booking needed. All are welcome!

International Women’s Day Film and Talk
Date: Thursday 10 March 2016
Time: 6.30pm talk, 7.00pm screening
Venue: Eldon Screening Theatre, Winston Churchill Avenue, Portsmouth PO1 2DJ
The screening of Suffragette and talk by Professor June Purvis, a world-renowned expert on the subject and who advised the filmmakers.
Admission is free, but please reserve your place on Eventbrite.

Make More Noise (UK, 1899-1917) Cert | 80 min
Date: Thursday 31 March 2016
Time: 7.00pm
Venue: Eldon Screening Theatre, Winston Churchill Avenue, Portsmouth PO1 2DJ
Cinema was born as the Suffragettes campaign was gathering momentum, and so they made it there business to get in front of the camera. A fascinating compilation of 21 short films from the BFI national archive that show how these women were being portrayed on screen.

Tickets £6 from http://www.portsmouthfilmsociety.org.uk/tickets/.