Science and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Women in STEM careers , HC 701
Monday 4 November 2013
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 November 2013.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Higher Education Funding Council for England
Members present: Andrew Miller (Chair); Stephen Metcalfe; Stephen Mosley; David Tredinnick
Questions 127-169
Witnesses: Dr Lesley Thompson, Director, Sciences and Engineering, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, representing the Research Councils UK, and David Sweeney, Director, Research, Innovation and Skills, Higher Education Funding Council for England, gave evidence.
Q127 Chair: Good afternoon. I welcome both of you to our hearing. I would be grateful, for the record, if you would introduce yourselves.
Dr Thompson: I am Lesley Thompson. I am director of sciences and engineering at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Today I am representing RCUK as part of the research group.
David Sweeney: I am David Sweeney. I am director for research, innovation and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England—HEFCE.
Q128 Chair: First of all, what, if any, commitment to gender diversity do universities have to show when applying for RCUK or HEFCE funding?
Dr Thompson: Back in January of this year, Research Councils UK released an expectations for equality and diversity statement for anybody in receipt of or applying for our funding. The statement is available on our website. Now, when we go on an assurance visit to any university in receipt of our funding, we go through questions to try and ascertain whether the institution that has applied for funding in the departments is following our broad statement of expectations. We are just starting to roll that one out now.
Q129 Chair: So that is a new process.
Dr Thompson: It is new. It was introduced in January of this year.
Chair: I will come back on that in a moment, if I may. Mr Sweeney?
David Sweeney: Our primary responsibility for equalities and diversity comes from our public sector equality duty to encourage and support universities. We monitor and report on equality and diversity across the sector, working with partners in the Equality Challenge Unit and other organisations. Also, as part of our normal assurance processes, we expect a statement on equality and diversity as part of their annual returns, and that features on the visits that we make to universities. In addition to the assurance and the general public sector equality duty, we have concerns over equality and diversity in the Research Excellence Framework or the Research Assessment Exercise, as it was, and are very keen to ensure that the processes and procedures in that scheme do not encourage discrimination in any way. We are about to do some capital funding where the Government have asked us to take equality and diversity—in fact gender diversity—into account in allocating the money.
Q130 Chair: Right. So you have the dataset from your existing monitoring process to be able to do that, have you?
David Sweeney: We have large datasets. To know exactly what we are trying to do is a much bigger question.
Q131 Chair: In terms of the monitoring that you currently do, is that all in the public domain?
David Sweeney: Yes.
Q132 Chair: Are you, in RCUK, going to be duplicating that or complementing it?
Dr Thompson: We are very complementary. We work together on these issues and it will be complementary. We already produce some diversity data, but our plan, rolling forward, is to produce more diversity data on an annual basis for the centre.
Q133 Chair: One of the things we have found difficult in this inquiry has been finding out where ownership lies. Mr Sweeney already gathers information on diversity but not necessarily on issues around the causes of the leaky pipeline, for example. Do you, for example, as part of your monitoring, require people whom you fund to be doing leaving interviews to find out why women leave?
David Sweeney: No. We don’t mandate behaviour in universities at that level, but that is the sort of good practice that we would encourage and support. We certainly do gather lots of data, for example, on the leaky pipeline. Why is it that more young people go into chemistry and computer science, but that doesn’t show by the time you get to academic careers? That is exactly the area in which, together with other partners, we are active. We are aware, because it is such a complex issue, that there are so many different groups that are active in this area, some of which have given evidence to you. A couple of months ago we held a somewhat pretentiously entitled “diversity summit” to try and bring together all of the bodies involved in this area and check whether we were aligned. A lot of work had to come out of that initial meeting. It is a very difficult problem because there are so many different aspects to it. It is understandable that people want to concentrate on something about which they have a particular expertise. It is quite difficult to co-ordinate that, in a way, without stifling what are some fantastic initiatives.
Q134 Chair: Do you think it would be a good idea if somebody overall took responsibility for pulling all this data together?
David Sweeney: It depends on what you mean by “all this data”. HESA has a responsibility for collecting most of the data that we gather.
Q135 Chair: Yes, but there is no point in collecting data if nothing is done with it, is there? Lots of agencies are collecting different bits of data, and you have identified some things that you regard as good practice. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if somebody took overall responsibility for pulling all of that together from all the different agencies so that we would have a better picture about what is really happening?
David Sweeney: That is why we fund the Equality Challenge Unit to be at the heart of this. I am slightly nervous about “Shouldn’t somebody be responsible?” Clearly, the responsible people are the employers, the universities. Our core task is to get them to take their responsibility seriously and to discharge it. I do not want them in any sense to feel that this is somebody else’s problem. In developing the codes of practice for submission to the Research Excellence Framework, we don’t issue a standard template, although there is guidance material around. We require universities to get to grips with the issue themselves, to consult their staff and then to send us their code of practice for approval. We want to give the responsibility to the employer to encourage, support and, indeed, require them at times to discharge that responsibility.
Q136 Stephen Mosley: Looking through some of the policies for the research councils in terms of giving out money—and I am looking at the website of the National Environment Research Council—right at the top it says that “the primary criterion for assessment is scientific excellence”, and all of the research councils, of course, have excellence as one of their main criteria. Could you tell me what defines excellence in science?
Dr Thompson: Excellence in science—and let’s broaden it to research—is judged by peer review, by other excellent scientists working out the relative merits of the proposals, benchmarked against international standards. The job of all research councils is to deliver an excellent science or research portfolio that has impact. In order to do that, we use and are very dependent on a peer review process, which leads us to think very hard about the people we involve in the peer review process. We work quite hard to try and make sure that there is nothing explicit, and we are very careful about briefing people who take part in peer reviews to make sure that some of the hidden consequences of what they might do on any diversity issue is brought to their attention when they go through the process of undertaking a peer review. Excellence is internationally benchmarked, and that has stood us in very good stead in the UK, if you look at our comparative performance for the investment made in UK science.
Q137 Stephen Mosley: In terms of a specific funding application, what would make that application excellent?
Dr Thompson: The idea, the execution, the track record of the individual and the context in which the research is undertaken. If it is a brand new, groundbreaking idea, that is rather different in excellence terms from something that is an incremental improvement on something. All of the research councils have that breadth of research within their portfolios.
Q138 Stephen Mosley: We have had some suggestions that the definition of excellence is too “narrowly focused on specific research-related metrics,” and we have had a suggestion that that discriminates against women in some ways. Would you agree with that?
Dr Thompson: No. We could give you broad sets of statistics. I have statistics from my own research council which show—let me just get the numbers so that I am absolutely right on this—that, in 2011-12, the success rate for male applicants was 34% and for female applicants it was 33%. The proportion that applies is different because the population that applies for funding is different, but within margins of error—and I am not complacent—I think that is an interesting statistic. Everybody will know, and I hear them all the time, of personal circumstances where things have happened. Research councils routinely have success rates of 25% to 30%, so it means that at any one time, through lack of money, we are funding fewer people than we are funding people. We are not complacent.
Stephen Mosley: Those statistics would be really useful.
Dr Thompson: If you want a broader set of statistics, I could get it for you.
Q139 Stephen Mosley: Thank you. We have had suggestions—I am looking here at the STFC WiSTEM network—that different measures should be used other than purely excellence. We have had suggestions that it should “provide acknowledgement and credit for tasks such as organisation of group seminars, engagement with visiting school-children, mentoring junior colleagues, taking on placement students, acting as counsellors, to name just a few.” Do you think that those suggestions have a role to play in determining applications for funding?
Dr Thompson: In terms of applying for a research grant, it is the excellence of the idea that has to be paramount. In the context of being an employer, all of those factors are part of the mix of tasks that you do as a researcher that contribute to the department or the area of research you work in. Whether it is for the research councils, which are charged with delivering excellence with impact, or whether it is for the employers, which are the universities or the research councils, which have their own institutes, is a very moot point.
Q140 Chair: Can I just push that a little further? In a previous report we did on science capacity building within DIFD, we made an observation that there are some disciplines where simply using citations as a measure is not adequate, such as for people who are at the coal face, saving lives in difficult tropical conditions. I am not aware that RCUK has formally responded to that observation. Is it that you are fixated on citations, because that must be a disadvantage to younger women?
Dr Thompson: I was very careful not to say that we measure scientific excellence by citations. I said that we measured scientific excellence by the peer review process, and peer review will use a number of different factors to work out scientific excellence. Let me give you an example from my own council. During the past 10 years, if I look at the funding for people who have never applied to us for funding so do not have a track record, year on year we have funded about 100 young scientists by that route. So peer review is able to work out excellence, taking account of whether you have a track record.
Q141 David Tredinnick: Mr Sweeney, this is really a question for you. How is excellence defined and measured in the Research Excellence Framework?
David Sweeney: It is measured in a very similar way to the way that Lesley has described for the research councils: the significance of the work and the rigour in the way it is undertaken. We only use metric information in a peripheral way. It is the peer judgment of those experts in the discipline that primarily determines the excellence of the work.
Q142 David Tredinnick: How do you avoid creating a gender divide? What steps do you take to avoid creating, or perpetuating, if it exists, a gender divide?
David Sweeney: We require institutions in their selection of staff for the exercise to do an equality impact assessment and to publish that after the event. After each exercise, we report on that and look to see if there is any evidence of discrimination in selection. There has not yet been such clear information, although the percentage of women selected is lower than that of men, but that accords with the independent measures of women’s performance from citations. We are concerned about that, but we ensure that everyone who is involved in the selection of staff is trained on equality grounds and we train the members of our panel similarly. We try and have diversity on our panels. We expect them to read the work that is published and form the judgments on the basis of the content of that work.
Q143 David Tredinnick: Following on from that, how does the REF reward non-research activities, such as teaching? Does it have a method?
David Sweeney: It does not. It is a Research Excellence Framework. It is not a measure of the quality of academic work; it is a measure of the quality of the research.
Q144 David Tredinnick: Do you have a view on who should measure those activities?
David Sweeney: There has been a consistency in these reports about assessing quality in teaching, which has come to the conclusion, nationally and internationally, that there is no appropriate robust measure of the quality of teaching.
Q145 David Tredinnick: Finally, how do you plan to monitor the diversity impacts of the REF?
David Sweeney: We will publish the equality impact assessments that institutions have done and we will do a very detailed analysis ourselves, possibly also with the Equality Challenge Unit, as we did in 2009, looking at the outcome. We will see if we have made progress since 2001, which is when I am aware that we first did such an analysis.
Q146 David Tredinnick: Finally, what steps are taken to make sure that there is not a penalty for career gaps?
David Sweeney: Underpinning the exercise is that we assess quality and not quantity. We require only four outputs per person submitted. If you have career gaps, we allow the number of outputs to decrease. We have provided considerable advice to institutions on when it is appropriate for that to happen. There are some clearly defined circumstances that you can just apply formulaically, and for more complex circumstances, such as caring responsibilities, we have an equalities and diversity advisory panel that considers cases that institutions put. We are absolutely determined that clear gaps, whether it is from gender-related issues or industry engagement, should not hinder those who are really good from demonstrating their excellence.
Q147 Chair: Some of the evidence we have received would suggest that some institutions do not follow that as robustly as others. Is that a fair comment?
David Sweeney: Actually, I am not sure it is a fair comment. After the last exercise, the Equality Challenge Unit, as opposed to just reading the materials that the institutions put forward, surveyed 32 universities; they visited them. There were only four appeals in those 32 universities against non-submission, and only one of those was on gender-related grounds. I am not aware that there is a very big problem, but we, indeed, are monitoring it, and, if there is, we will take action.
Q148 Stephen Metcalfe: Good afternoon. Dr Thompson, the number of women on the Research Council grant committees and peer review boards varies dramatically across the range from just over 40% to just over 10%. Is there a minimum percentage requirement—a minimum applied? Also, those figures are based on 2009-2010. Are there any more up-to-date figures that might improve the situation somewhat?
Dr Thompson: There is no minimum threshold, but ensuring that you have the breadth of expertise, including both the scientific expertise and a range of views, means it is very important that you have well-constituted panels. So all councils strive to make sure there is some representation of different viewpoints. Clearly, in some disciplines it is harder than in other disciplines. I am not sure where the latest set of figures is, and we can look into that, but if you look into the figures there is a stretching of the number of women involved compared with the population at a certain degree of stages. We take it very seriously. My own council four years ago had one woman on it. I hope, shortly, that we will be able to be in a position where four of our council members are women.
There are some things you have to work very hard at. It is not always obvious that well-qualified women step up to the plate as quickly as men, so you have to make sure that you have those conversations with women. They have lots of other things that they are asked to do in departments, and it is not always clear to me that serving on a peer review committee or putting themselves forward for council membership is something they automatically think that they should do, but that is where conversations come in. The RCUK framework, where we are now talking to all the institutions that we fund about the issues, whether they are aware of what they are doing and their own statistics, will help along the way.
In the last two years I have certainly been involved in more meetings at the invitation of universities to talk about these issues than I ever was in the previous five years. There is a genuine realisation in the sector that, if we wait for evolutionary pace to catch up, we can’t do that because it will take for ever and a day. So can we step up and do things? The fact is that the research councils, following the lead of NIHR, decided not to go down the route of mandating Athena SWAN, but talked to the sector about the issues of diversity broadly, not just women, and produced a statement. It is a really clear signal. We have kept a very clear signal at the bottom of that statement that, unless we see change in the sector, we will come back and look at further measures.
There is more pace than there was, but can you be complacent about this? Absolutely not. It is noticeable to me, because I work in engineering and the physical sciences, that I rarely go to meetings where women dominate the male population. Is it right that my daughter does not have the same chances as my son? I don’t think so. It would certainly not be right for my grandchildren.
Q149 Stephen Metcalfe: While there is good intent, there is also some action to go with that, in your opinion.
Dr Thompson: Yes.
Q150 Stephen Metcalfe: There is a perception from some of the witnesses we have heard from that an unconscious bias exists when awarding grants. Is there anything in place to tackle that—to try and assess how many applications are coming from men and women and how many are being granted—to see if that bias exists?
Dr Thompson: We certainly look at that data. One of the things we now do, every time we introduce a new scheme or mechanism, is to go through a diversity assessment to make sure that no implicit or explicit diversity divides are caused by any of the policies we introduce. The chairs and CEOs of all of the research councils are meeting with Sir John O’Reilly in March to talk about the unconscious bias on diversity, and we see that as a good step forward. Part of me thinks that you have just got to keep talking about these issues and, maybe, not enough people—who are not women—have talked about these issues. It is quite interesting that I am here today, because we thought, if you want to talk about women in science, we had better find a woman. It is much better when you get men coming along talking about these issues, in my opinion.
Q151 Stephen Metcalfe: I have one final question. There is some evidence—I can’t remember who supplied it; I would have to look—that women do not apply as often for grants and for as large grants as their male counterparts. What is being done to address that?
Dr Thompson: Historically, there has been some evidence that women more often come in as co-applicants on grants rather than principal applicants. The way we address that is to go back to the universities and go through the equality issues, and get the universities to work on some of these issues. I certainly know of females in our research community where you have to have a conversation with them on why they are not the PA in the grant, and that is just about everyone having those conversations.
David Sweeney: The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, the work that Vitae has done on realising the potential of researchers, their stimulation through the European Commission HR Excellence in Research Awards, which 79 UK institutions have taken up, most of the Russell Group and the 1994 Group, more than all the other countries in Europe, the Careers in Research Online Survey, which Vitae have sponsored, and the Principal Investigators and Research Leaders Survey, are all ways of tackling the embedded issues that you describe. I am right with Lesley in saying that we should talk about it, but we have to talk about it in a structured way that challenges people. The Equality Challenge Unit moving to a charter mark from Athena SWAN is a good step forward. Talk—yes, structure—yes, pick off particular areas, and principal investigators will all contribute to solving the problem.
Q152 Chair: Just following that, it seems to me that in some disciplines, especially the very narrow ones, the idea of following a career might well require someone to be much more mobile, and that has, historically, been a massive disadvantage to women. Is there any way that something could be done about that?
David Sweeney: There are things that can be done about that. Some universities have an enlightened practice about helping people between grants. We would encourage that. By not disadvantaging career breaks of all kinds, we are trying to indicate to folk what we believe and provide encouragement. International ability is both a tremendous benefit for this country and a challenge because it is very difficult. I have always thought that the simplest measure that a university can take to support staff in this kind of situation is just sponsored housing, so that when people come over for short stays there is a place for them to stay as a family and not as an individual. Many universities do not provide that.
Q153 Chair: Dr Thompson, in response to Stephen Metcalfe, you mentioned the NIHR. I do not think I heard you correctly, but let’s just make sure that we are agreeing with each other, that the NIHR has set a precedent by requiring applicants, as far as I understand it, to come from departments that hold either Athena SWAN or some other diversity accreditation. Should that apply to a wider group of funders?
Dr Thompson: We looked at it quite seriously, before NIHR introduced it, because we know that we need to do more to promote this issue. The research councils, on balance, came to the conclusion that we would put down a statement of expectations that puts requirements on universities. We would then go through assurance on those and we reserve the right, if we don’t see improvements in the diversity issues, to go back and re-look at that. We were quite cautious about some of these organisations that do these things, not because they are not doing a great job, but you could imagine that if you had every department in the country run headlong into a particular scheme it could cause those organisations to trip over. Actually, we wanted universities to think through what they were doing.
We have four bullet points that we are trying to achieve, and it might just be worth sharing those with this Committee. They are to promote and lead cultural change in relation to equalities and diversity—that is an expectation now; we expect that from any organisation we fund—to engage the staff at all levels with improving the promotion of equality and diversity; to ensure all members of the research work force are trained and supported to address disincentives and indirect obstacles to the recruitment, retention and progression in research careers; and to provide evidence of the ways in which equality and diversity issues are managed, both at an institutional and a departmental level.
If we could make that change, it would really be significant. The early indication that I have—my day job is working particularly with research-led universities—is that most of them have taken on board that statement and they are now thinking about how they act on it.
We have seen the numbers go up for Athena SWAN qualification quite remarkably since 2005, from 19 who qualified in 2005 to—you probably know these numbers better than I—257 in the latest round. From 2005 until now, that is a big step up. I am not complacent, but we are moving in that direction. I am very encouraged by the conversations going on in at least some institutions. Last week I was at an institution that has now set up a senior equality network. It is a small step, but I can now go and share what that institution is doing with other institutions. Hopefully, by that route, you spread best practice and things get better, because I do not want to sit in front of this Committee in 10 years’ time with the same set of statistics that we have now. It is just not good enough.
Q154 Chair: Leading on from that, is the real problem that it is not just a matter of setting up a scheme, it is seeing real progress in your institution? At the end of the day, the only way that people are going to make comparisons between institutions is if it is measured.
Dr Thompson: We are collecting that information and we will publish it, but we don’t want to go to the step where we have some league table and some penalty for institution x and some reward for institution y. All my experience of working with the research base tells me that it works best if you incentivise and work together. It does not work well if you get a big stick and hit it.
Q155 Chair: So you are arguing, I think, that there would be a sort of self-inflicted penalty—that people would vote with their feet in terms of the way they treated that organisation.
Dr Thompson: Yes.
Q156 David Tredinnick: I was just thinking that it used to be called the “Theory X direction”; you told somebody what to do rather than allowing them to work it out, which is Theory Y. Have the funding policies of the research councils made academic careers less stable and flexible?
Dr Thompson: What sampling period do you want to go from? If you want to go back to the period when I was a postdoc in 1980, there were no academic careers. Now we are seeing considerable appointments of people to lectureships, in part because universities are getting ready for REF. Research is not an easy career. One of the disappointments that I have is that I know, if I look at the number of people we fund to do PhDs and the number of people you need to refresh the academic community, if you assume no net migration into the UK, less than 5% of the people currently doing PhDs can become professors. Actually, that is a gain to the UK because great people who have qualified in science going out and working in all sectors is a good thing. It is disappointing that that career opportunity, despite the work that Vitae and others are doing, is not quite realised when you go and talk to a group of PhDs. Over in the BIS forecourt today there is a sports car. Kids from the university of Bath all think that, if they do a PhD, they can be the next professor in their department at BIS. Life is not like that.
David Tredinnick: I think they have a Ferrari with them.
Chair: It’s a Bloodhound.
Dr Thompson: There is a Bloodhound and there is Bath inside the foyer.
David Sweeney: Our funding arrangements in this country try to support academic careers. We have a vibrant research-grant ecology, as do many nations, including the European Union, but we also block-grant funding to universities, which is intended to provide a degree of stability for universities. We expect universities to use that wisely in supporting their staff. We have run HR initiatives to encourage universities to do that. I think we have seen considerable progress in research careers, but we are going through a challenging period because of the economy.
Q157 David Tredinnick: What about short-term grants? Do you have a view on that? Is it a good thing or a bad thing
Dr Thompson: My own organisation has increased the proportion of funding for longer-term grants markedly over the last 10 years. It has been a policy of our council to move from less than 5% of our grants being of three years or longer in duration to a third of the grants being of a longer duration. Sometimes that goes back to when you talk to the institutions. Institutions don’t always use the flexibility they could have for managing their population of short-term researchers as creatively as they might do because the responsibility is, more often than not, put on the shoulders of the individual research lecturer, not on the shoulders of the department or the institution as the employer.
Q158 David Tredinnick: Do you think that the move away from the old platform grants has reduced employment flexibility?
Dr Thompson: We have not moved away from platform grants. They are an important part of our portfolio. The demand for platform grants has gone down to some extent as we have introduced more longer-term funding opportunities.
Q159 Stephen Mosley: In terms of funding opportunities, we have had some concerns around maternity leave and how flexible the grants are. If you have a short-term grant, is it possible to go on maternity leave and pick it up again, and issues like that? Do you think that the research councils and HEFCE make it easy for women to take maternity leave and to come back into research afterwards?
Dr Thompson: Any research council grant will cover any additional costs of paid maternity leave of researchers employed on the grant and the period of the grant can be extended. Researchers can be employed part time. Any fellowship pays maternity leave, if that is needed, and they can be extended. They can be held part time or they can be changed to part-time working. Studentships allow for six months at full stipend for the six months of unpaid extension. At the end of the day, the universities are the employees. We are aware, following discussions with the Russell Group, that not everybody fully understands the flexibility that we provide on research grants. So we have undertaken to produce new guidance that makes sure this is absolutely crystal clear to the community.
Q160 Stephen Mosley: You say that you provide extra funding to cover the costs of maternity leave and so on. Surely, that is no help to the lady who is taking maternity leave who is not working. It covers her work while she is not there; it is a benefit to the university and to the research project. But for that individual who has gone on maternity leave, how easy is it for them to get back into the research project if the funding stream is for a limited period?
Dr Thompson: The grant is extended so that she can come back and work on the grant as well. Is it easy? I returned to work having had a baby and it is not easy. That is part of life, I have to say, but it is not easy to come back to a demanding career, like a research career, with a young family. We need to move this away from a women’s issue to a family issue, because it is equally hard sometimes on the partner. My husband is an academic. If I am here tonight, he has got to go home and pick up the kids. It does not always go down well in your department if you say, “I can’t be at a departmental meeting because I’ve got to go home and do childcare.” It is not a women’s issue; it is a family issue, and I think that is really important.
Q161 Stephen Mosley: Do you have any statistics on how many of the researchers whom you fund come back into science after having children?
Dr Thompson: There has been a problem with data recording. We have just amended the requirements of HESA data so that we can start collecting that information more systematically. As part of that, as well as any breaks in contract, we want the reasons recorded so that we can get data on that. We do not have that data at the moment, but it is in hand.
David Sweeney: Generally, we don’t fund individuals, although we do in some circumstances. We re-profile grants routinely in order to allow for career breaks and for submission to the Research Excellence Framework. Our equalities and diversity advisory panel produced suggestions for an amelioration in the number of outputs required. In fact, when we went out to the community to consult, they suggested that further relaxation should be allowed. We agreed and we have done that. This has led, because there are tricky issues in applying it, to a considerable debate in universities, which is great, because it has brought far more attention in universities to the support of women who go on maternity breaks and come back. I don’t think that what we do poses additional problems to the challenges that already exist. We have gone some way to try and shed light on what those issues are.
Possibly the most significant thing that universities can do is to fund additional-funded research time for folk who have been out and come back to pick up the reins on their research again, but that is an employer requirement for which they can use our funding.
Q162 Stephen Mosley: There are specific schemes that support women and men after a break from research of two or more years. The Daphne Jackson Fellowship is one. How many of those types of schemes are there and how many people can you fund through that route?
Dr Thompson: We are a funder of Daphne Jackson awards. We are in discussion with the Royal Society about the levels of funding for those. We are all waiting to know the outcome of our spending review settlement before we commit to anything like that at the moment. A number of institutions have their own returner schemes, some of which work incredibly well. One of the things we have been doing in the last year is sharing some of those opportunity spaces with other institutions to get them to think about that. The total number is not huge, but when you talk at the individual institution level there are all sorts of flexible arrangements that people will put into place, but it has to be done with dialogue. It is not a scheme and everybody goes for that scheme. Universities are quite flexible, particularly in a very competitive world, when they have great researchers and they know they can make a difference to their long-term excellence and bottom line if they can keep them. If you employ somebody in a university, you are likely to be employing them for 30 years. The time you take for a career break is not big in that time scale. So it is important to think about the time frame for which you are normally employing people. You don’t normally employ a lecturer and expect to have them on the books for only two or three years. It is an investment in a long-term activity.
Q163 Chair: I want to return to this issue of relocation, if I may. We have had some fairly blunt evidence. Let me give you a few short quotes. One is: “Most fellowships require you to leave your current location and move to a location where you have never worked before.” Another is: “When a woman is not single or has dependants, her geographical mobility to progress her career may be constrained more than that of a similarly qualified male,” and, finally: “Academic STEM careers also often expect international mobility,” which in turn has its consequence, particularly for women. What proportion of your research grants, Dr Thompson, require relocation, and who gets the real benefit out of that?
Dr Thompson: That is a very difficult question to answer because we do not specify that. We fund research grants as they come through from institutions. They can either have a named postdoctoral worker on them, and that can be somebody they know locally or somebody from around the world whom they want to recruit, or, if they don’t have a named RA, they have to openly recruit on the jobs market. Then the RA will come from wherever the most qualified person is.
I can speak about our fellowships. Certainly Research Council fellowships do not require relocation nationally or internationally. Fellowships can be held part time. We also allow Research Council-funded fellowships to move from one location to another. If you secure a Research Council fellowship, you are at your most employable because it is your own personal award and you can take it wherever you want. It is regrettable that lots of people who hold fellowships don’t realise the value that they have in their hands when they get a fellowship. That is a very good way of working out where you want to go and work once you have a personal fellowship.
Q164 Chair: The other aspect of the complexities of family life is that many women scientists who are in relationships or married are part of a dual-scientific career couple, which is very common; in my own family there is one. What can be done to reduce the number of women who find themselves forced to give up their career because of this? I know you are going to say that it is a family problem, but there must be a practical way forward.
Dr Thompson: Why is it the female’s problem?
Chair: That is a very good question, but we are asking you.
Dr Thompson: No. I am not convinced it is a female problem because if you have got two great people, both of whom are scientists, and one is appointed to a great job, is it the female or the male who—
Chair: Or is it the institution?
Dr Thompson: Some institutions do take some measures to try and help followers, be they male or female. Any follower could apply for a Research Council fellowship. In my own case, when my partner got a job somewhere else, I applied for a Royal Society Fellowship so that I could be a follower, and they are mobile. There are ways round this. It is absolutely not a female issue. It is a “two scientists who want to be together” problem.
Q165 Chair: Are there any data that show where women go when they leave STEM careers?
Dr Thompson: There are some data.
David Sweeney: We have some data but we don’t think that they are rigorous enough to be used. The data we have do not show the difference between men and women as to where they go after they leave their careers, which is failing to get at the root of the problem, if there is a problem. We accept we need more work in this area.
Q166 Chair: Coming back to my earlier point, that is an acceptance that there are some things that do need measuring.
David Sweeney: Oh yes. We have provided in our written evidence the destinations of academic staff leaving in 2011-12 by gender. I know of an HEI in this country and an HEI in an overseas country. It is very difficult to detect gender differences there, but that just means that we have not yet got to the bottom of the problem.
Q167 Chair: Finally, to both of you, I want you to think out loud. I have just come from a fabulous event downstairs organised by Engineering UK. It was the run-up to bringing Big Bang into Parliament. One of the great things about the event today was the number of young women who were there with their schools. I spoke to a number of them about how they got involved. I found it very interesting. What do you think the key things are that Governments could do to help improve gender diversity in science and engineering?
David Sweeney: Far be it from me to tell the Government what to do, but universities could work more closely with schools on this issue. Clearly, the experience that students have at school of science is all important. I went to my 15-year-old daughter’s parents’ evening and I was told with a straight face by the science teacher that science was a very difficult subject for my daughter because it is difficult inherently. I was infuriated—absolutely infuriated. We have to work more closely with schools. I hope that the number of people going into science teaching, which looks as if it is perking up, will be an encouragement. This is a collective problem that we all have to work at. Employers have a big role to play along with the Government and universities.
Dr Thompson: For me, if there is a magic bullet, somebody would have found it and we would be acting on it. There is not one single thing. This is drip, drip, drip, and it needs a concerted effort from everyone. If the UK is really going to play its part in science and technology going forward and really deliver an excellent research base, we need diversity in our research population. People are waking up to that. Schools are taking this more seriously than they did some time ago. The fact we are having this discussion is good, but it needs widening to think about how you have families when you are in science and what you do about that, because all the time you make it a women’s issue you ghettoise it. What we want is great scientists with great home lives, who enjoy what they are doing all the time. That is really difficult to achieve currently.
Q168 David Tredinnick: Picking up one of Mr Sweeney’s remarks, I seem to recall when I was at school thinking that it was generally understood that physics and chemistry were the more difficult subjects, and if you did English literature and English language they were probably easier. Is it, really, then an issue of who can answer quantitative subjects and who can deal with qualitative subjects? I can see that Dr Thompson has a view on this. In health care there is a great fear of cancer and a lot of it is unjustified, because there are treatments now that can deal with it. It is almost a branding. It is rather like in Africa pointing a bone at somebody, and that means that they may think they may no longer survive. Can you expand on this?
David Sweeney: All subjects ought to be challenging at school. They are not worth doing if they are not bringing folk on and if they are not leading to intellectual development. We want the best possible support for primary science so that when kids get to secondary school they are used to practical science work, they are used to science concepts, and I have seen that happen. I think, exactly as Lesley says, we need to do it all over the place. To be fair, lots of people are doing this. I am not suggesting that there is not much brilliant work going on. The Association for Science Education is very active. As with so much else in our school system, there is a big mountain to climb.
Q169 Chair: You mentioned the primary sector. I totally understand that that is where it begins. Interestingly, three young women to whom I spoke this morning said that their interest in engineering came from their experiences at primary school, and that is great. We have lots of inspiring teachers, but teachers do not get the benefit of continual professional development to help them maintain their confidence in subjects with the development of science and engineering. What would you do to solve that?
David Sweeney: We have seen some great work from people such as the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and, indeed, the Association for Science Education. We just need more of it. Of course, teachers’ time is highly pressured these days, with teaching to a curriculum and league table measures. I guess we all have our own experience of inspirational teachers who transformed our view of things. I am now straying way beyond my brief, I have to say, but universities do have a role to play in that, particularly with secondary schools. The ability of universities to work with school teachers is something that we can progress with faster and further.
Chair: Thank you very much for your attendance this afternoon. It has been very helpful.
Oral evidence: Women in STEM careers, HC 701 15