Richard Easther
Last week, Science Twitter was roiled by claims that “disruptive science” was on the wane and that this might be reversed by “reading widely”, taking “year long sabbaticals” and “focussing less on quantity … and more on …quality”. It blew up, which is probably not surprising given that it first pandered to our collective angst and then suggested some highly congenial remedies.
A few weeks ago I listened to a bunch of super-enthusiastic high school students share their excitement about astronomy, astrophysics and the space industry. We were at the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand’s annual meeting; every year they fund a dozen or so keen students from around the country to attend the event. It’s competitive, with many more kids applying than there are places to take them.
The students get to share what lit their passion for space, but as they recounted their stories maybe a third of them mentioned a teacher or career counsellor who had done their best to quench that fire. “There’s no jobs in that.” “It’s really hard,” “You can’t do that in New Zealand.” “It won’t help you get into university.” And I wondered who listens to a smart, ambitious youngster’s hopes and dreams and tells them to play it safe?
It isn’t all teachers – others told of enthusiastic and supportive mentors – but it was potentially way too many of them, even if the nay-sayers imagine they are protecting kids from disappointment or quietly steering them away from games that are out of their league. Ironically, this is happening at a time when there is a lot of talk about reinventing school – getting kids to code, preparing them for a future where machine learning, AI and 3D printing are big things, building baby entrepreneurs. But none of that will be much use if some teachers are telling students not to chase their dreams.
Ironically, when educators talk about preparing kids for the future, part of their message is usually that the age of linear careers is behind us and today’s kids will change jobs more far frequently than their parents did. Which makes it particularly strange for teachers to tell students to aim only at safe and dependable careers as they chart their educational trajectory.
So what should you say to a smart kid with dreams that would take them off the beaten track? Here’s my list:
Tell them “Wow that’s great. Go for it!”
Say to them “That sounds like it’s going to be a lot of work.”
Ask them if they know what they need to do to get to their goal. What skills will they need?
Tell them “That sounds awesome” (whatever it is).
Tell them “Go for it. Whatever happens, you will be OK”, but help them figure out what they are likely to hit if they miss their actual target. Don’t be negative, it just never hurts to look before you leap, to make sure they will be ok.
Ask them, “What can you do right now that will get you closer to your dream?” Get them doing things today that will engage their passion.
Ask “How can I help?”
Item 1 is easy, and it works for anything. Item 2 is honest – no-one sleepwalks to being an astronaut or an All Black – and it is likely part of the fun.
Item 3 is a biggie, and for some goals the answer will be more obvious than others. What should someone who wants to be a professional athlete do, beyond just training for their sport? I’m not the best person to ask about that (really, I’m not) but whatever you want to do, my guess is that some of the things that will get you there won’t always be obvious: one of my key skills as a scientist is that I like to write and know how to tell a story. (Seriously: every grant application is a story about what I would do if you gave me money – and it helps if I tell it well.) If a kid at your school wants to get into astronomy (something I do know something about), it could be a long wait before they can actually do astronomy. But astronomers need to know maths, computing, statistics and physics – does the kid you are talking to know this? Set them to finding out what is on their list.
Item 4 leads into Item 5. If a kid chases their dreams, are they really taking their whole future into the Casino of Life and putting it all on 22? Or are they laying down skills that also lead to all sorts of other opportunities? If I am brutally honest, I will only retire once, and while my field is growing it is certainly not expanding fast enough to accommodate everyone who trains to work within it. Numbers as miserable as a 2 or 3% success rate for making the transition from a PhD to a permanent job in the field are thrown around – the situation is not as dire as that, but in astronomy the success rate may be around 20% for people who actually get PhDs. At some point, it is possible students stand a better chance of success if they don’t spend too much time stressing about the odds. But all my former students are doing well. Some have tenure – and others have successful startups or jobs in Silicon Valley where they use knowledge they acquired while they were working with me.
Someone chasing their dreams may be walking a high wire, but they can build a safety net by laying down serious and transferable skills. (And many of the people I know who pulled the cord on their personal Plan B made a conscious decision to do something new; ambitions change.) Help them figure out what those will be for them. The real trick to Item 5 is to help kids take measured risks without hinting you don’t think they can do it. And this goes double if you are talking to people who might feel that they won’t fit naturally into their chosen field – my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein often says that African American students hear well-meaning talk about a personal Plan B as “I don’t think this is for you”; the same likely goes for Māori and Pasifika kids in New Zealand, or girls heading into fields where women are scarce.
Item 6 and 7: whatever it is they want to do, there will always be something they can start on right away. There’s no time like the present. And be there for them. Check in. Ask how they are getting on. And wish them well.
And one last question: if you’re a teacher, what’s your ambition? It’s got to be better to watch your students chase their dreams than, when they come to tell the story of their success, be remembered as the person who said they couldn’t do it.
CODA: It is also true that if we are talking about academia, it is not just the student’s job to be sure they have a Plan B, it is up to their teachers to recognise that many of them will need one, make sure that they get the chance to maximise their transferable skills and know how to demonstrate them to potential employers. But that’s a story for another day.
IMAGE CREDIT: The image is from NASA.
Fabrication and plagiarism are the unforgivable curses of science – crimes of no return. If you are caught committing them you will not wind up in an academic Azkaban but you would be hard put to find another job in a university as a parking warden, much less a research role. Ironically, to outsiders these infractions may appear to be relatively victimless crimes. Do a few faked graphs really hurt anyone? If music can be downloaded with impunity is plagiarism a terrible sin? However, these transgressions are unforgivable because they undermine the integrity of the system, not as a result of their impact on individuals. An expert counterfeiter whose bogus Benjamins are never spotted by banks might claim that no-one was hurt by their escapades, but financial systems can be damaged by a flood of fake notes. Likewise, we trust the integrity of our colleagues when we build on their work. We tell students to “check everything” but this is an impossible goal, since at some point you would do nothing but verify the work of others, so dishonesty undermines science just as debased coinage threatens an economy.
Last month the American Geophysical Union revised its understanding of “scientific misconduct”, a term encompassesing plagiarism and data-faking, to explicitly include a new category of crime – discrimination, sexual harassment, and bullying. These are transgressions against individuals, but the AGU’s decision recognises that they weaken science itself; systematically burdening those who are disproportionately on the receiving end of “poor behaviour”, blighting lives and careers, boosting inequality, and robbing the field of talent. This recognises that many female geoscientists experience harassment or worse in the field, often while they are physically isolated and far from help. Just last week sickening allegations of bullying and assault during trips to remote Antarctic valleys were levelled against David Marchant, a geoscientist at Boston University. It was telling that while many of the worst allegations were corroborated by others, some of Marchant’s defenders pointed out that they themselves had never witnessed such behaviour by Marchant and that these infractions were “historical”, with no recent allegations of misconduct coming to light. However, if this had been a case of data-faking there would be no ill-defined statute of limitations and “some of his work is legitimate” would in no way constitute a defence.
A similar paradox was visible last year, thanks to a defamation case pursued by astrophysicist Mike Bode against Carole Mundell, who intervened after he wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for a mutual colleague facing an active harassment investigation. The claim that Mundell had defamed Bode by this action was witheringly rejected but I cannot imagine anyone writing a letter of reference – much less a good one – for a person facing live allegations of intellectual misconduct. Moreover, the position in question was Chief Scientist in the Square Kilometre Array – South Africa, an organisation which will have a key role supporting South Africa’s engagement with a multi-hundred million dollar international collaboration involving vast amounts of public money from a half-dozen countries. This hire fell through, but the job was later filled by a scientist who had left (and was apparently “dismissed” from) a leadership position at the Arecibo Observatory while “under a cloud“, demonstrating just how hard it can be for a senior scientist to definitively torpedo his own career.* [This situation may also lead one to draw inferences about the institutional health of SKA-South Africa, but that is another matter.]
This is the same month that the Harvey Weinstein story broke and his serial sexual assaults appear to have been an open secret within the entertainment industry. Despite this, any number of male stars who had benefited from their association with Weinstein were shocked, shocked to hear the news, or to think that their industry may suffer from an endemic harassment problem. And while we lack Hollywood’s glamour, senior academics have a similar ability to make or break the careers of young people vying for their big chance, and it is similarly a breeding ground for abusive behaviour. Likewise, just as many men averred that they had personally never seen poor behaviour by Weinstein, many scientists assert that because they have never witnessed a colleague harass that person cannot be an harasser – a stunning lack of logic for people who spend their professional lives drawing inferences about events we cannot hope to witness with our own eyes. Likewise, we all know that many senior harassers in science are yet to have their “Geoff Marcy moment” and, like Weinstein, some are rumoured to have agressively lawyered up to keep a lid on simmering scandals.
If this is our truth, all scientists – and particular all white men in science whose progress has never been potentially impeded by our gender, our race, or our sexual identity – are complicit in having allowed it to happen. And it is on us to sort it out.
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FOOTNOTE: *To be clear, the investigation of the original applicant was apparently never completed so these allegations were never formally substantiated. However, published sources refer to them as “sexual assault” so it does appear that they were of a serious nature. Likewise, the specific employment issues faced by the person now in the role have not been fully disclosed.
COMMENTS: Comments off on this one. Getting way more than normal and they didn’t seem to be heading anywhere constructive.
Over the coming week 2016’s slate of Nobel Laureates will be announced. These are the Academy Awards of science; it is not the only prize scientists can win (and others, such the Shaw, Gruber and Kavli prizes, are financially competitive) but only the Nobel is simply “the Prize”.
Ironically, while we lionise the Nobelists, contenders are often separated by the slimmest of margins. For instance, the idea of the Higgs boson was independently conceived three times over the summer of 1964; by Higgs himself; a team of two, and another team of three, who all published their results in the same journal. The Prize was awarded 49 years later, after the Higgs particle was finally discovered at CERN. The statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that no more than three individuals may share a single Prize. In this case the award went to Higgs himself, and François Englert, the surviving member of the twosome. While the three-handed paper had been the last to appear, it arguably provided the most complete description of the underlying idea – but unfortunately there is no “highly commended” in Stockholm.
Near-simultaneous discoveries and fights over priority are common: many Nobel announcements are followed by suggestions that someone else should have been in the spotlight, ranging from bitterly angry to wry “woulda, coulda, shoulda” reflections on roads not followed to their logical end. But what you almost never hear, even as we argue about who did the work, is that the topic itself was unworthy of a Nobel.
This situation suggests that most breakthroughs are not made by transcendent individuals running far ahead of their colleagues, but occur when the field has matured to a point where the discoveries become possible and even inevitable. Consequently, many (but by no means all) Nobel prizes effectively mark a major advance in human understanding which attaches itself to a handful of talented but undoubtedly fortunate scientists.
Within physics, this dilemma is particularly sharp, as many big experimental discoveries are made by teams with a thousand members or more. This year’s front-runner, the discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO, is surely in this category – pre-Prize speculation is focussing on which three people will get the famous phonecall, rather then whether LIGO itself will be recognised.
It would seem that the more effective the overall scientific enterprise, the more rapidly it will generate discoveries. Maybe we should have prizes for those who contribute the most to the health of the scientific community, in the spirit of Jimmy Stewart’s character from It’s A Wonderful Life, an apparently unremarkable man whose decency and kindness quietly underpins the collective happiness of his town of Bedford Falls. Call it the George Bailey Prize for the inspirational teachers and generous mentors.
It’s A Wonderful Life hinges on Bailey being shown how world looks without him, allowing him to understand the value of his contribution and how much it would have been missed. On the other side of the coin, astronomy and astrophysics are having their own Bailey moment. Far from achieving the quiet contentment of Bedford Falls, our fields have experienced several major harassment scandals over the last two years, including those which led to Geoff Marcy’s 2015 departure from Berkeley and the suspension of LIGO-affiliated Caltech scientist, Christian Ott. Many good people have left our community because of the treatment they have received within it from harassers like Marcy and Ott; their potential contributions unquantified, unrecognised, unfulfilled – and there is no trainee angel at hand to reveal to us the scale of the loss.
Just as we may not always recognise our George Baileys, we have been unwilling or unable to take decisive action against individuals whose poor behaviour disrupts the careers of those around them. As scientists, we know in our bones that there are no second chances if you plagiarise or fabricate results. We condemn these transgressions because they undermine the foundations of our shared enterprise: we can’t make progress if we can’t trust our colleagues to produce fact and not fiction. The serial harassers, bullies and bigots in our profession destroy careers and derail the hopes and ambitions of their students; their trail of damage can be deep and decades-long. We should recognise that harassers inflict the same harm as the fakers and thieves, and treat them accordingly.
That said, the Nobel announcements highlight much of what is best about our ongoing quest to make sense of the universe – whoever wins will have done work that is truly astonishing. If Nobelists have one unifying trait it is their willingness to upend their particular corner of the world, rather than to take the status quo for granted. But one way to make a difference in science is to make science itself different, and to ensure that we build communities in which everyone with something to contribute can thrive. And if we do that, there is every reason to believe that science itself will do better.
Today, the astronomy grapevine, Twitter and Facebook were lit up by the revelation that Geoff Marcy, one of the world’s foremost astronomers, had been reprimanded by Berkeley for multiple episodes of sexual harassment, committed over a ten year period. Marcy, frequently tipped as a future Nobelist, pioneered the discovery of exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our sun.
The story was broken by Buzzfeed, and Marcy has posted a half-assed apology on his website.
Berkeley is a fantastic place. It is not just one of the world’s leading universities, it is arguably the top public university on the planet, a wellspring of innovation and originality. So I would love to see Berkeley take the lead in making science a hospitable place for women. I would like to see Berkeley openly ask how this happened inside their community, to investigate whether Marcy is the only bad apple in the barrel, and do what it takes to become an institution within which everyone who earns a place can thrive.
Of course, we know how this sort of thing happens – it happens because “everyone knows” who the problems are, but nothing happens to stop them. Sooner or later, astronomy and the rest of academic science will face a reckoning over its long-term acquiescence in the face of bad behaviour by prominent and not-so-prominent individuals. Theft, fabrication and plagiarism are all sacking offences for scientists and we know it. But behaviour that blights careers and drives students out of the field often goes unrecognised and unpunished, or brings only the mildest of reprimands. This has to change.
CODA: Image via Flickr; Stephanie Watson
The advent of the web and social media have led to a huge outpouring of enthusiasm for science but almost all sciences have skeletons in their closet, some real and some imaginary. Physicists gave us the bomb, chemists cook up the chemicals they put in the food (yes, yes, and you cheerfully drink H-2-O and breathe O-2) and even if medical researchers have doubled our lifespan many will claim they are in thrall to Big Pharma and specialise in diseases of the rich, in addition to perpetrating more specific and chilling abuses. But astronomers often sail past earthly concerns. After all, what’s not to like? Astronomy generates an endless stream of stories about strange planets, unlikely stars, and the birth of the universe, but nothing anyone can easily get upset about.
Even journalists suspend their usual rules for astronomy and other good-news science stories. Copy approval, sending sources a draft of an article for commentary and correction, is anathema to journalists on a hard news story, but I am often sent drafts “to check the details” when I talk to the media about astronomy. So perhaps this is why astronomers have been caught flat-footed by the apparently sudden eruption of protest around the Thirty Metre Telescope, or TMT. The issue is not the $1.3 billion price tag but its location at the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest peak on Hawai`i’s Big Island. The problem is that while Mauna Kea is a fantastic place for astronomy (a huge mountain rising out of the Pacific Ocean; the skies above it are stable and clear) it is also sacred to many native Hawai`ians. The issues are far from straightforward, but Buzzfeed (in its new incarnation as a purveyor of long-form news) and the Huffington Post have summaries of recent events and TMT consortium has put its own response to the controversy online. However, for some astronomers it has led to the discovery that they may not always be the good guys.
While we might wish it were otherwise, astronomy is not apolitical. Science communicators (myself included) wax eloquent about space exploration, but the space race was launched by Cold War competition. Nor is the politicisation of astronomy new. The British navigator, James Cook, set sail in the Endeavour from Plymouth in 1768 to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, as part of a campaign to determine the overall scale of the solar system. Cook carried additional sealed orders to be opened after the transit observations were complete, which told him to continue from Tahiti on a voyage of discovery into the Pacific; part of the larger competition between European powers to explore trade-routes and acquire outposts around the world. (By many accounts, the contents of those orders were well-known around London before he sailed.) And like a modern-day space programme, Cook’s voyages were a simultaneous national investment in pure science, prestige and geopolitical leverage. [And Cook and Hawaii are tightly connected – he commanded the first European ships to make landfall in Hawai’i, and was killed in a skirmish there in 1778.]
New Zealand and Hawai`i are both parts of the Polynesian world. As a New Zealander, much of the language used by the Mauna Kea protestors is familiar from local debates. From a purely linguistic perspective maunga, which is mountain in Te Reo (as the Māori language is referred to in New Zealand English), is cognate to the Hawai`ian mauna. Hawai`ian and Māori both speak of their alienation from their traditional resources by the arrival of Europeans, and their deep connection to the land. In a formal setting, a person introducing themselves in Te Reo will open by listing their whakapapa or ancestry, along with their maunga, awa (river) and moana (sea), identifying themselves both with their genealogy and their specific point of origin.
And worldviews really do differ. If you are an astronomer or astrophysicist it is not uncommon to hear enthusiastic talk about founding “colonies” on the Moon or Mars. Obviously, the “final frontier” is genuinely unpopulated, but it is worth reflecting that colonisation is not a happy word for many of our planet’s inhabitants.
No group is monolithic, and many Hawai`ians are clearly excited about the construction of the TMT. However, it is tempting for astronomers and advocates for the TMT to listen to these Hawai`ian voices, and assume that the other side is being stirred up by a few malcontents. However, from the perspective of a European New Zealander (pākehā, in the local terminology) the concerns being raised about the TMT and the use of Mauna Kea for astronomy in Hawai`i closely match those heard in discussions about the ownership and use of natural landmarks in New Zealand.
As an astrophysicist, I hope that the TMT will be built – it is an astonishing instrument, big enough to catch the the light from the first generation of stars to be born after the Big Bang, and sharp enough to make images of planets around other suns. However, I also hope that my community can do this without riding roughshod over a people who claim Mauna Kea as their own. Whether or not this this is possible with Mauna Kea I cannot say, but simply denying the validity of these concerns is not a promising start.
Image: Visualisation of the TMT; tmt.org
When I recently wrote and tweeted about the increasing ubiquity of the h-index, almost no-one rose to its defence. It turns out that we all seemed to know that the h-index has only two real purposes. The first is penalising one-hit wonders (some of them Nobelists and Fields medalists) relative to reliable sloggers; the second is putting a fig leaf on crass comparisons of citation totals. And if we are honest with ourselves, we all know that the h-index is largely useless for anything else.
Despite being a widely used measure of academic impact, the h-index tells you little more than the square root of a scientist’s overall citation count. The math behind this was nailed down by Alexander Yong and the phenomenon had been described empirically in several places, including Michael Nielsen‘s 2008 blogpost, a paper by Redner in 2010 and an analysis of astrophysicists by Spruit in 2012.
So my resolution for 2015 is this: I am going to go h-free, wherever possible. I won’t use it in recommendations I write, I won’t cite my own h-index in my annual performance appraisals, and I will discourage comparisons of h-indices when considering candidates for promotions, appointments and prizes.
Good scientists help set the direction for their fields, and that contribution is reflected in the citations they receive. But beyond the huge differences in collaboration styles and citation etiquette between subfields, there are many kinds of citations. A mention like “Following the work of Guth [REF 1]” means far more than being embedded in a long list like “Recent work includes [REF 2 – REF 27]”, but citation counting treats both cases equally. Scientists are creative, and I am sure it is possible to design metrics that measure the worth of citations. But I am equally sure that these metrics won’t be created just by adding epicycles to h.
Postscript: I am grateful to Alexander Yong for pointing me to the previous discussions of the correlation between the h-index and citation counts. And, if I had to guess as to how a useful metric of scientific impact might be built, I would look to sophisticated analyses of citation graphs (in the technical sense) and machine-based natural language parsing, but both approaches are intrinsically more nuanced than the h-index.
The great Russian physicist, Lev Landau used to rank physicists on a scale from 0 to 5. The better you were, the smaller your number. Newton alone was a 0, Einstein scraped in at 0.5, and founders of quantum mechanics like Bohr and Planck were 1s. Landau rated himself a 2.5 which he bumped up to a 2 after winning the Nobel Prize. Grade inflation was not a concern with Landau — for him, the vast majority of professional physicists were mundane 5s.
Landau constructed his list for his personal enjoyment, but scientists must frequently judge their colleagues: for hiring, promotions, awarding prizes and fellowships, parceling out grants, and ofr “Research Assessments” of one sort or another. And since scientists are scientists many algorithmic ranking schemes have been proposed, spinning off the sub-discipline of bibliometrics.
The basic coin of science is the published paper. These are easy to count, but that doesn’t help much on its own: the brutal truth is that many research papers are of little interest to anyone but their author and possibly the author’s proud parents. The next level is tallying citations: how often one article is referred to by other articles. Good scientists have an impact on the work of other scientists and citations reflect that influence. But there are caveats: good papers may be overlooked, while papers which are annoyingly wrong gather multiple mentions in articles refuting them. And not all citations are equal: you can spend a career churning out “fast followups”, looking busy while doing little to advance the field.
Beyond counting papers and citations, the h-index, proposed by Jorge Hirsch is 2005, is by far the most popular ranking tool. The h-index reduces the output of a scientist (or several scientists) to a single number: “h” is the number of papers you have written with h or more citations. Clearly, the bigger your h, the better you look.
In the decade following its invention the h-index has become ubiquitous and Google Scholar and major academic databases will compute it for you. The h-index is simple and yet feels “science-y’, so it is tempting to use it as a stand-in for nuanced judgement.
However, the h-index is only meaningful if it contains information you couldn’t learn from just counting citations and papers. Right off the bat, your h-index can’t be larger than the total number of papers you have written. And it must be smaller than the square root of your citation count, since it says you have h papers, each with at least h citations. But you can get fancier. Alexander Yong at UIUC did a lovely analysis of the h-index, deriving a rule of thumb that says an h-index is likely to be around half of the square root of the total citation count. (Yong models the h-index via partitions, the number of different ways a number can be chopped into sums of integers – it is a lovely piece of work.)
Yong’s plots his guesstimated h-index against the actual value for a group of mathematicians, and the match is pretty good:
From Yong, Bulletin of the AMS 61 1040 (2014) Used with permission.
Ranking scientists by their citation count seems simplistic — if we were happy doing that there would have no real need to invent the h-index. However, if the h-index is pretty close to the square root of the citation count, comparing h-indices is not too different from comparing citation counts and we are back to square one.
The h-index has been on my mind because I seem to be seeing it more and more frequently on academic CVs. Given that the h-index is easily computed from public data there is no profound reason not to provide it yourself, but the other day I found myself asking on Twitter
Academics: putting your h-index and impact factors on your CV is participating in your own bibliometric oppression. Discuss.
— Richard Easther (@REasther) January 15, 2015
It was an offhand comment, but it prompted a discussion that lasted most of the weekend. (The conversation made several points I hadn’t considered — in particular, some databases are more thorough than others (and their coverage varies by subfield) and Clare Burrage pointed out that providing it yourself lets you put your best foot forward.)
In some professions and countries it is common to include a photo on your CV, although this practice is fortunately rare in the sciences. That said, most scientists have a significant Google footprint and you will be googled, so when you are ranking applicants you are likely to see their photos. Like photos, h-indices are easy to find, but my feeling is neither photos nor h-indices have any place on a CV. The h-index is a very blunt instrument and by volunteering your h-index you are tacitly acceding to its use in the hiring process.
And if we are using h-indices to rank colleagues and potential colleagues perhaps we should also think again, and make sure that we understand what the h-index is actually measuring.
Postscript: The corollary of Yong’s result is that the h-index is most interesting when the rule of thumb fails. The h-index was designed to penalise people with a single highly cited paper, but a one-hit wonders can still win the Nobel Prize — for example, Peter Higgs of the Higgs boson was quiescent for vast majority of his career, and his h-index is smaller than that of some PhD students.
Whenever you throw a party, there is always someone who double-dips the guacamole. In this case the jerk was Ephraim Hardcastle, a pseudonymous correspondent in the Daily Mail. This nimrod thought the most important thing to say about one of the biggest science stories in 50 years was that two of the experts asked to appear on the BBC news that night were both women of colour. Hardcastle’s shtick is similar to that of the old Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger — with the difference that Anger was a conscious parody. And while it is hard to take Hardcastle seriously, he caused real pain to real people in order to get off a few shots in a drive-by attack on “diversity”, and followed it with a non-apology worthy of Arthur Fonzarelli.
For the record, there is no person in the world better qualified to comment on the BICEP results than Hiranya Peiris. As a PhD student, she was the lead-author on the first-ever paper to put serious constraints on inflation with microwave background data and she has worked on two major space-based CMB experiments. [Full disclosure: I have collaborated with Hiranya for 10 years and count her as a close friend.] Ironically, the resulting brouhaha saw both UCL and the Royal Astronomical Society spell out her qualifications: not just Cambridge, Princeton and Chicago but half a dozen fancy fellowships and prizes, any one of which makes for a CV that hums and crackles when it sits in a pile of job applications. So next time anyone needs a leading British astrophysicist for a TV appearance they will know who to call.
The Mail has a gift for missing the point. While this may not be in the same league as backing the wrong side in the run-up to World War Two, if there is a story here it is that British astronomy is no longer the almost exclusive domain of white men.
You can read Peiris’ own commentary on the affair is in the THES and you can sign a petition calling for a genuine apology here.
A couple of years ago driving through the south of France I stumbled across this sign, and even if your French wasn’t up to the job, the cartoon mascot was easy to read.
This week a Sausagefest of a different sort has been bouncing round the science tweetosphere: a big, international quantum chemistry conference with 29 plenary speakers and session chairs, all of whom were men. And yes, the physical and mathematical sciences are far from a 50/50 gender ratio, so you would be rightly surprised if the list was 50% female. But the odds of having no women at all in a field that is 10% female are about 1 in 20. And if quantum chemistry is 15% female, the odds of an all-male line-up drop to less than 1 in 100. [I’ll leave the proof as a homework exercise.]
Today, I was looking at a conference announcement in my own field and it was the same deal, roughly 30 names (between the organising committee and invited speakers) and all men, to the best of my knowledge. Gender ratios vary significantly between adjacent subfields, but there are plenty of smart, high-profile and enormously talented women in astrophysics and cosmology — which puts this outcome in the 1% category.
If you want reasons other than random chance for an all-male list of speakers there is no shortage of options. There is even a helpful bingo card.
View fullsize
Source: Feministe.us
But the most likely reason is this: the (100% male) organisers asked the obvious, easy people, and those people just happened to be male. No-one decided not to invite any women, but a series of disconnected decisions led to just that result — an emergent phenomenon, if you want.
I have organised conferences and run colloquia and seminars. And I love it. You get to invite smart people doing interesting work to visit, you hear what they have to say, and then you take them out to a decent dinner. As “service” tasks go, it beats being on the committee that sets the Qualifying Exam for the PhD students.
Now, here’s the funny thing: if you draw up a list of speakers you always check it for variety against a slew of different criteria. Did I accidentally fill the departmental colloquium with cosmologists this semester, and will my colleagues complain? Have I invited three people from Princeton to visit in the same month? Do the 26 speakers for my conference cover all the hot topics in the field? Did I remember to invite anyone from Europe?
So checking for gender equity on a list of conference speakers isn’t difficult — you are already looking for half a dozen different kinds of balance, and this is just one more. It’s really not that hard to get right, and it matters.
