Which is great, if you can find the right mentor for you; of which more another day.
A recent blog post which caught my eye sums up the antithesis of the helpful relationship of mentoring; which, with reference to J.K.Rowling, was called dementoring. A mentor builds up, encourages and a dementor sucks the very soul out of you.
Another favourite blogger of mine, @athenedonald, has posted a couple of times on "imposter syndrome"; the feeling that you don't really deserve to be where you are and you will be found out.
I think dementors and imposters are irrevocably linked; most of us will probably feel like an imposter sometimes, but if that feeling becomes the dominant one in our working life then personal satisfaction and productivity are likely to fall. I tweeted in response to the dementors post that I could see analogies to the theories of "positive parenting" and I was only half-joking. Dementors, at their best, could be seen to be like the "Tiger Mother" for whom nothing is ever quite good enough and who uses criticism but never praise to spur ever greater efforts. At their worst, more like the Azkaban variety, they simply run you down because they can.
Jenny Martin describes in the blog linked above how she almost gave up academia as the result of one demotivating experience. Many of us (?most) have been there and probably also got through one bad experience, but what about the daily attrition resulting from chronically dysfunctional interactions?
There has been a flurry of twitter and blog activity this past couple of weeks around the issue of women in STEM: science, technology, engineering and medicine. This is in response to the UK parliamentary select committee report published on 6th February, intended to address the problem of gender imbalance within the STEM subjects in universities: the "leaky pipeline" .
I think dementors and imposters, while definitely not exclusively a female problem, are directly relevant to this issue. In their evidence to the parliamentary select committee,
"The University of Oxford considered that "within many science disciplines, work is organised into large research groups, which are often described as having a 'sink or swim' culture, with few formal reporting or support mechanisms". It stated that "the evidence is that the absence of such mechanisms is largely neutral for men, but has a significant negative effect for women, who place a higher value on structured support"."(1)
85% of the UK clinical academic workforce are at Senior lecturer/ Professor level but only 28%/ 16% of these are women, despite the intake in medical school being predominantly female (50-60% for each of the last ten years) (2). One argument runs that the upsurge in women applicants is recent and it will take time for this to filter through; however, women have filled 50% of the places at UK medical schools since 1990 and 40% from 1980-1990, so it is this cohort who would be expected to be providing the clinical academics of today; even at the most senior levels, and they appear to be consistently under-represented. Lack of adequate role models has been recognised to be a significant disincentive to taking up or continuing a particular career path.
My own experiences, which are hardly extraordinary, are summed up by a recent opinion piece in a UK newspaper, where a senior surgeon chose to deride the contribution of women to UK healthcare, asserting that the feminisation of the profession was harming hospitals and that women chose the "easier" medical specialties, including General Practice (3). There are many things wrong with that particular piece, not least that the author fails to recognise the key importance of General Practice to UK healthcare and the need to increase not decrease recruitment to this specialty, something which is becoming a major problem for the NHS. The lack of suitable role models, male or female, in the higher echelons of a number of specialties, is not addressed, strangely enough.
A similar attitude prevails in academia where women are more often asked to take up more "female" pastoral or teaching roles, neither of which have high status (and are not acknowledged by that arbiter of UK university activity, the Research Excellence Framework). This compounds the issue of failing to progress to the highest career levels.
It would be great to think that a parliamentary report will lead to some solutions. The optimist in me may continue to think so for a while. The Athena Swan initiative demands that academic institutions identify the barriers and challenges to women in STEM and promote best practice in supporting career equality. It is too soon to say whether this is having significant positive effects. At the worst, it will become another box-ticking exercise as universities ensure questionnaires are filled out and more committees (taking up more time of the limited pool of female academics) convened.
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| Athena Swan Charter |
So what would I do? Firstly, address the need to develop researchers with continuous constructive feedback, starting from the undergraduate level (getting women into the pipeline in the first place is still a serious problem in many areas of STEM). The "macho" culture is a huge disincentive to many women. Recognise the diversity of contributions within the academic environment, pastoral, teaching, administrative and research (REF, I'm looking at you, but also the grant-awarding bodies, for whom you're only ever as good as your last 3 papers), if they are seen as valuable. If not, stop asking anybody to do them! A commitment to appoint talented scientists is right; but there should also be a commitment that they should are effective mentors for others and that if this is not a skill which comes to them naturally, then they need to learn it. There should be little point increasing the academic stature of your institution today without taking a good hard look at whether those academics are securing the future of your institution in 15 years time. Again, the short-termism of the REF and grant-awarding bodies actively mitigates against this. What about adding an extra category to "impact" to include the career development of junior researchers?
This would not only address many of the "women in STEM" issues, but also make academia a better working environment for everybody, thereby increasing productivity. Win-win?
1. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmsctech/701/70107.htm
2. http://www.medschools.ac.uk/AboutUs/Projects/Athena-SWAN/Pages/Women-in-Clinical-Academic-Medicine.aspx
3.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2532461/Why-having-women-doctors-hurting-NHS-A-provovcative-powerful-argument-leading-surgeon.html
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