Cordelia Fine: Why does gender diversity matter?

In October 2020, I attended the virtual keynote by Cordelia Fine at the EMBO/EMBL conference on Gender Roles and their Impact in Academia. Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher, psychologist and writer. She is a Full Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Fine has written three popular science books on the topics of social cognition, neuroscience, and the popular myths of sex differences.  Cordelia spoke to us about why gender diversity matters.

Having analysed media articles on gender diversity, Cordelia found that 72% of them mainly looked at the organisational benefits of gender diversity, with most just stating that injustice exists. Only rarely did the media give the case for gender diversity, for example that it reduced power imbalance or helped an organisation to represent the community it served better.

In Cordelia’s view, journalists should go beyond plainly stating that gender imbalance exists in academia, or present this imbalance by itself as an injustice but should go on to explain why this is unjust. The counter argument is that people are not interested in the unfairness itself, they just want to know the benefits of better gender equality. But is this actually true?

In reality, we know very little about what people think about workplace gender diversity and what worries them about it. Cordelia’s team aimed to find out more about attitudes and concerns. They aimed to:
1. Learn how attitudes are moderated by demographic and organisational factors, comparing horizontal vs vertical workplace gender diversity i.e. between sectors and within the hierarchy
2. Better understand and respond to concerns, resistance and backlash

The study included 241, gender balanced, mainly Caucasian workers of whom the majority were managers. Cordelia’s team showed them the statistics for their sector and asked about the reasons, benefits and downsides of efforts to achieve greater gender balance across industries, occupations and in leadership positions. Benefits might include representation, fairness and a reduction in bias or disadvantage. Downsides might include undermining meritocracy or PC / virtue signalling. Participants could also say that there were no benefits or downsides.

The responses showed that perceived organisational benefits included a more diverse workforce with different attributes, a range of business benefits, a better workplace, a wider talent pool and benefits to the consumer. Downsides reported included psychological interpersonal damage resulting from tokenism and damage due to resentment from others.

In summary, people seem to care more about justice than concrete organisational benefits. There are substantial minority concerns, for example regarding psychological damage. Women are generally more positive than men about workplace equality, but this is more about justice than organisational benefits. Some said they could see no benefits to the organisation. People are also more positive about vertical workplace gender diversity, within the heirarchy than horizontal, across different sectors. They are more likely to say there are no downsides to diversity within the hierarchy. A wider study with 1000 participants is now underway to explore these findings further.

One tentative implication of the initial study is that horizontal workplace gender diversity is a bit neglected. We should be chipping away at that because sex segregation by occupation is the single biggest contributor to the gender pay gap in the UK. For leaders promoting workplace gender equality, they should work to anticipate concerns and address them upfront.  However, don’t give up on the justice arguments!

Organisational benefits are important but inclusion then becomes based on women needing to add value to the organisation in order to justify the efforts being taken. If the evidence for the benefits becomes shaky, this impacts on the justification for increasing diversity. The argument should be about what the organisation can do for women and to deliver justice and fairness for all.

On the whole, employees do care about gender justice for both vertical and horizontal diversity so there are receptive grounds for these ideas. That leaves the question of how to address the concerns of those who stand to lose from better workplace gender equality. It is not acceptable to just give up on the idea if people are concerned about diversity vs merit. Merit does not just reside in individual attributes but also in what people of all genders bring to the organisation. Affirmative action measures can help to facilitate access to goods, positions and opportunities, such as fellowships for women. You can also balance direct versus indirect actions, direct actions including those specifically targeted at women. An indirect action would be targeted in a way that benefits women more, for example for people who have taken time out of the workplace. Indirect actions often encounter less resistance. Try to get the naysayers involved by sponsoring someone – when not being forced, they are then part of the positive change. There is no simple answer to this issue but building up resentment is not good for anyone.

Book Review: “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez

I first became aware of Caroline Criado Perez through her campaign to keep a woman on the reverse of UK bank notes, after Elizabeth Fry was replaced by Churchill on the five pound note. This campaign was memorable firstly due to her success – Jane Austen now appears on the reverse of the £10 note – and secondly, from the deluge of threats, hate mail and acrimony she attracted through Twitter as a result. At the time, Twitter did almost nothing about this – the situation is (only) slightly better today due the changes they have made to the way abuse is reported.

Undeterred, Criado Perez published “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” in 2019. Her book is rather neatly summed up by the quote from Simone de Beauvoir she includes in the frontispiece:

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.”

The gender data gap

Criado Perez’s aim is to flag up the huge data gap that exists about the lives of half of humanity. She dubs this the ‘gender data gap’ and it crops up again in again in almost any context you can think of – medicine, product design, protective equipment, town planning, governance. The silence of women’s voices in these areas leads not just to irritations, such as too-cold offices or phones that don’t fit your hand but also to life threatening situations. From stab vests that don’t fit female police officers’ bodies, to cars that are 47% more likely to seriously injure women drivers, to medicines that do not work for women, or actively make them sicker, the assumption that the average male represents the average human is causing unnecessary harm.

Female-specific concerns that men (mostly) fail to factor in crop up repeatedly in the many areas that Criado Perez examines, but fit into three themes: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden and male violence against women. Males of course do experience violence, lots of it, but as Criado Perez says, “…it manifests itself in a different way to the violence faced by women.” Facilities such as suburban housing centres, travel networks, homeless shelters and refugee camps are usually planned by men, and do not take into account the types of activities women need to engage in, nor do they keep them safe while they do them.

There are multiple examples in the book of how women are missing from our data. Data is not only not collected about women, when it is collected it is then not disaggregated by sex. For example, few medical studies or trials specify the sex of the participants. When they do, participants are usually overwhelmingly male. If the sex of the participants is revealed, the results are not always then separated by sex. Even tests on animals or single cells are not often carried out on male and female animals or cells, even though research shows the results are likely be different between sexes. The most common adverse drug reaction in women is that the drug simply doesn’t work, putting their health and sometimes their life at risk as a result. It is likely that many drugs only make it to market because they are effective in men in early trials – anything that might have been a good treatment candidate for women alone is screened out at an early stage because it is not effective in men. And that is before you even address the woeful lack of research into conditions that principally affect women, such as period pain or endometriosis.

A scarily prescient section in the book describes how a lack of sex-segregated data can impact during a pandemic. We know from previous coronavirus epidemics, such as SARS, that symptoms can be more severe in pregnant women. During the last SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 in China, pregnant women’s outcomes were not consistently tracked. “Another gender gap that could so easily have been avoided, and information that will be lacking for when the next pandemic hits,” writes Criado Perez. Here we are, in the middle of the worst pandemic most of us can remember, still without this information. Is data being collected now on outcomes for pregnant women, or will we remain in the dark for the next one, and the one after that?

Gender blind is not always gender neutral

Another gender data gap exists where supposedly ‘gender blind’ neutral policies have an unintentionally discriminating effect against women. For example, US academics in the tenure track system have 7 years to achieve tenure. The years between completing your PhD and receiving tenure, ages 30 to 40, are when most women are likely to have their children. The result is that mothers with young children are 35% less likely than fathers to get tenure track jobs. A ‘gender blind’ policy to give all US parents an additional year to achieve tenure actually decreased mothers’ likelihood of being successful compared to fathers. The extra time gave fathers an advantage over their male peers, while the bulk of childcare and recovery from birth fell to mothers and comparatively decreased their chances.

We are seeing the same phenomenon appearing during the COVID-19 crisis – while everyone attempts to work from home and take on home education, according to Nature, women seem to be publishing far less compared to their male peers. The crisis seems to be gifting additional time to male academics to write up their research and submit grant applications, while at the same time robbing female academics of their chances, as they spend extra time caring for families, home-schooling and prioritising their students ahead of their own research interests.

The burden of unpaid care work

Academia is just one area where women do far and away the greater share of unpaid care work, to the detriment of their careers and to national productivity (GDP). A study of working patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London in the UK shows that due to the disproportionate childcare and housework burden, in households with home-working mothers and fathers, men have three times the uninterrupted work time that women do. 

Even in normal times, the world cannot function without this care work – looking after children, elderly relatives, the vulnerable and disadvantaged. The vast majority of this work is unpaid and is carried out by women on top of their hours of paid work. They fit in multiple extra, short trips every day to support this unpaid work, dropping off children, doing shopping, seeing relatives. These journeys are poorly supported by the radial transport networks designed, largely by men, to serve the traditional daily commute from home to office. As we ‘clap for carers’ every Thursday to express our sincere and heartfelt gratitude for what care means during an international crisis, we shouldn’t forget that the caring burden is a daily reality for most women. For the moment, many of our commuter transport systems are empty. Post COVID-19, should we really go back to investing more and more money in systems that whisk us from home to office, but leave local neighbourhoods under-funded and under-served?

Building bias into the system

While we might be able to understand the presence of bias in humans, it can be tempting to rely on machines to fix the problem. Surely computers are neutral, with their artificial intelligence and gender blindness? Unfortunately, Criado Perez explains why this is not the case, because a large gender gap exists here as well. She describes how women are hugely under-presented in image and speech datasets. Speech recognition technology in smart speakers, phones, medical devices and cars are trained on male voices and struggle to respond accurately to women’s voices. Not only that, the images and text databases that AI systems train on are just as biased as humans, which is not surprising as they are generated by humans. So not only are datasets lacking in data from half the human race, the information that is in those datasets is biased towards gender stereotypes in the same way that humans are unconsciously biased. I encountered more research on this area at the Gender Summit in 2019. This has a real impact on outcomes for women when CV selection systems and even medical diagnostics are becoming increasingly automated using AI.

An individual perspective

If I have a criticism of Criado Perez’s book, it would be that the experiences of one person are sometimes used to make a point about the invisibility of women in general. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence, but does that person represent many? On the other hand, the whole point is that bulk data is lacking in many areas for all the reasons outlined above, so perhaps it’s understandable.

I found reading this book an eye-opening but ultimately rather sobering experience. Getting into a car to drive, will I feel as safe having read it? I certainly won’t stop feeling absurdly irritated by the smart speaker at home that responds instantly to my husband’s voice but stubbornly ignores mine until the third or fourth attempt. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve nearly dropped my new phone trying to use it to take a photo one handed. As a materials science student at university, the protective equipment we used for welding or casting metals practically drowned me – it seems unlikely it made me safer if I could hardly move without tripping over it. Who knows how many times my CV didn’t make the cut for a science job due to skewed AI algorithms? I need to work flexibly and part-time to fit round my roles as mother of a special needs child, school governor and fundraiser for the National Autistic Society .Realistically, this limits my career options. Minor points on their own perhaps, but over a lifetime they add up, they really do.

Read this book – it will certainly make you think.

Enhancing practice to support Athena SWAN charter achievement

On 14 May, I joined a virtual Advance HE networking meeting on enhancing practice to support achievements in the Athena SWAN Charter.

In what used to be my normal life, I had to work around school pick up times during the week. Getting to full day conferences was tricky, so I’m actually finding I can attend a lot more of the virtual variety than I can face-to-face events. As I am rapidly becoming a serious consumer of Zoom meetings, I’m always interested to see how organisations manage these.

I thought that Advance HE’s approach worked well – they fielded a few speakers via live video feed, kept a staff member on hand to curate the Q&A and we could use the chat box to raise questions or post links. In between speakers, we were allocated to small discussion ‘rooms’ with 5 or 6 others to discuss any challenges we wanted to raise with colleagues. Joining a video chat with 5 strangers made my anxiety levels climb rather rapidly, but it’s probably no worse than facing a room full of delegates during a ‘networking’ coffee. After some initial awkwardness about who was going to speak first, the discussions did start to flow and I felt like I’d made some new virtual friends by the end.

Job sharing in academia

The first two speakers described their experiences of working in (different) job share partnerships. Emma Watton is a Programme Director at Lancaster University and had very positive experiences to report. She felt that the role worked seamlessly across the two of them. She said there is a risk that colleagues can see a job share as more of a job ‘shirk’ but there were no issues with productivity for her, in fact quite the reverse. They have published their experiences in Flynn, Patricia M., Haynes, Kathryn and Kilgour, Maureen A., (eds.) Overcoming challenges to gender equality in the workplace: leadership and innovation. Greenleaf Publishing, Saltaire, UK, pp. 67-77. To find new flexible working opportunities, she recommended contacting DuoMe. Ginibee is another talent sharing platform you could try out.

Dr Claire Senner, Cambridge University reported on her time as part of a job share post doc role at Babraham Institute. Still a rarity as a job share model, she was lucky enough to partner with a researcher whose expertise as a bioinformation dovetailed with her own wet lab skills. She is very grateful for the opportunity that the job share gave her to continue with science while taking time out for family. She is struggling to move past the sense that part time research is still seen as evidence of a lack of commitment. Will the academic community ever stop seeing a career in research as a ‘calling’ that has to rule our lives rather than complement them, I wonder?

Reverse mentoring and culture change

Prof Jon Rowe from the University of Birmingham introduced their reverse mentoring programme, where a staff member from an under-represented group (in this scenario, the mentor) is partnered with a senior manager (the mentee). Reverse mentoring is an opportunity for a senior manager to learn about different kinds of backgrounds and routes through academia that diverge from their own. At Birmingham, the aim of the programme is to raise awareness and drive cultural change. It also provides a chance for often ignored voices to be heard and can evolve into sponsorship for the mentor. Initially, Jon encountered reservations from some leaders about the scheme but he finds that the more you talk about doing something, especially with people other than your direct supporters, the more acceptable it becomes as a concept. Then you swiftly implement when the time is right! He had the following tips if you are tempted to set up your own scheme.

Tips on reverse mentoring:

• Use staff networks to find mentors
• Provide pre-training – remind managers to stay quiet, as they may be used to taking the lead in most discussions!
• Do some pre-screening to identify what the manager needs to learn and what the mentor can provide e.g. experience of returning from maternity leave
• Match people carefully – sometimes the pairings may not ‘click’
• Embed the scheme into senior management training programmes

Jon is also a veteran of many Athena SWAN panels and has probably read more than his fair share of applications. Here were his top ten reasons why a department might not achieve a Bronze award:

Ten reasons why a department might not get Bronze Athena SWAN:

• Ownership by leaders lacking
• Ownership by department lacking
• Ongoing life of the Self Assessment Team – who follows up on the actions post submission?
• Presentation of data – what is the obvious thing that people will see in your data? Make sure you address the ‘elephant in the room’
• Dealing with issues – have these been addressed effectively?
• Not having evidence – don’t submit too soon, wait until you have the evidence
• Weak/vague actions – especially the terms ‘review’ and ‘monitor’. These will not change anything!
• Hiding behind institutional policies
• Using small numbers as an excuse
• Forgetting the purpose of application – the point is to show how you are addressing gender inequality, not describe your Faculty Model in detail.

On top of those, he has also seen some themes in unsuccessful Silver applications.

Reasons not to get a Silver Athena SWAN:

• Speculative applications without a solid action plan from institutes not yet at Bronze award level
• Solid action plan but no demonstrable results

The main thing to remember is that Athena SWAN is about evidenced change. You are not going to succeed by just being good at equality and diversity!

Equality and diversity (EDI) at Reading University

The keynote speaker was Prof Parveen Yaqoob, the first female Deputy Vice Chancellor at Reading. As a British Asian, she spoke powerfully about growing up in the UK when racial abuse was sadly common and open. For her, if your childhood experience is to stay below the radar to avoid violence or abuse, later you may not feel very comfortable with the visibility that senior roles can bring.

She outlined some of the achievements at Reading, which received an Athena SWAN Silver Award in 2020. They are working towards a minimum of 40% of either gender as professors and have closed their Gender Pay Gap from 11% to 9% (compared to a national average of 18%). For the last two years, Reading has featured in the Stonewall Top 100 employers and they have an active network for disabled staff who they are consulting about accessible remote working.

Prior to the COVID-19 lockdown in March, they were planning a series of roadshows to encourage a collaborative approach to equality and diversity, and to bring home that it is everyone’s responsibility. At Reading, EDI activities are captured under a ‘citizenship’ criteria when applying for promotions.

Goals of equality and diversity roadshows

• Understand the diversity goals and how it impacts on your role
• Participate in surveys openly and honestly
• Engage as a mentor, champion or ally or join a network
• Become culturally competent
• Become a spokesperson for diversity issues that are not yours
• Welcome ideas that are different from your own and support your team members
• Communicate and educate
• Commit to continuous improvement

For Parveen, the challenge is to move beyond just complying with legislation and to start to normalise discussions about race and ethnicity. Reading sees charter marks as audit and improvement tools to help create SMART action plans. Parveen advises us to think about what is going to change as a result of any new initiative. What will be different after doing the activity? It’s important to focus on impact and how it will change your institute for the better.

Essentially, achieving impact is the secret to Athena SWAN success!

Gender Summit 2019, Amsterdam: Identifying concrete measures for change

In Amsterdam last week, gender and inclusion professionals gathered for the 17^th Gender Summit. Ingrid van Engelshoven, Minister for Education Culture and Sport introduced the three themes for the event, which chimed with her ambitions for Dutch science policy: national frameworks to advance gender balance, diversity and inclusion; fostering diversity in open science and AI to connect science to society; actions towards a team-driven, innovative academic culture.

For van Engelshoven, there are two points to bear in mind to achieve gender equality. “We should judge research institutes by their gender equality and assume gender equality is the norm.” She cited the example of Emily Warren Roebling’s largely unsung contribution to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York after her engineer husband developed caisson disease. “Let’s not take 14 years to build bridges to equality,” she urged. “I am looking for very concrete measures we can take now, not in 10 years time.”

Mind the gap

Belle Derks of Utrecht University was the first speaker to rise to the challenge by identifying a number of ‘gender gaps’. “In Europe, the gender pay gap in academia is about 800 Euros. Age is a large factor in this as 50% of women drop out earlier in their careers. However, we actually see the widest gap at the highest pay grades.” Derks reported that there was no evidence that women negotiate less for their pay. “In fact, their more precarious employment often means that they negotiate more.”

Women at higher grades also report they spend more time teaching and have fewer resources in terms of staff, budget and equipment, leading to a ‘resources gap’. When men look ‘up’, they see people at the top like them. For others, the lack of role models can correspond to a ‘belongingness gap’.

Unconsciously, we expect women to be communal and men to be agentic and tend to dislike those who do not conform to these stereotypes. Simply trying to be more agentic is not as effective for women and taking a communal approach is not as valued. Women feel a lack of fit, which can lead to less engagement, work exhaustion, lack of agency and higher turnover. “The concrete solution here is to control for masculine definitions of excellence, focus on team science and value a diverse set of qualities in our reward systems,” explained Derk.

Bias in a meritocracy

For Prof Simone Buitendijk of Imperial College London, universities need to recognise the pernicious effects of bias and accept that it exists. “It’s not about being nice to women and ethnic minorities, it’s about including all talent to tackle global challenges,” she insisted. “If you tell us bias is not true, how dare you!”

The pervasive nature of bias is at odds with scientific research as a meritocracy. For example, BAME students experience more mental health issues while studying, which can become a vicious circle, impacting their eventual results.

“Just like a canary in the coal mine, minorities suffer most from competitive, individualistic and vicious atmospheres,” she reminded us. “Generally, we are poor at measuring excellence. No one can achieve perfection, even the superstars.”

“We need to tackle the system, but not shame individuals – unless they are in denial!” she said. Buitendijk called for leaders to be strategic in their approach and not let equality and diversity become the topic they aim get to once everything else is fixed. “Don’t leave it to the lone diversity officer in their cubicle,” she urged to a rueful laugh from the audience. “If we blindly insist that research is a meritocracy, then people blame themselves for bias in the system.”

The success factors linked to sustainable change are outlined in LERU’s recent report: “Equality and diversity at universities: The power of a systemic approach.”

• Discover and include a wide range of students
• Realise the potential of all staff and students
• Enhance performance and well-being
• Create an attractive community for all
• Increase the quality of knowledge production
• Connect with societal challenges

“Leaders should understand the statistics, listen to individual stories and take a strategic response,” urged Buitendijk. Hopefully, everyone in the audience is here to do just that.