Last month, the parliamentary science and technology committee released a report on “Women in scientific careers”, in particular the under-representation of women in academic careers in the sciences.

We were discussing this on Twitter. Olly asks:

@lchilds Good question. What should be done?
— Oliver Johnson (@BristolStats1) February 7, 2014

to which Laura responds:

So here’s an attempt at a very incomplete answer.

It certainly seems that many of the “obvious” solutions are either too small to be all that effective (Give postgrads the option to attend diversity training! Add “Good quality women candidates are particularly encouraged to apply” to the bottom of job adverts!) or too huge to be practical (Reduce social stigma around girls being interested traditionally male activities! Change cultural values pertaining to gender balance of child-rearing duties!).

But I think that if any academic institution can’t even think of any feasible ways to attack this problem, then they’re just not bothered.

As a demonstration, here’s five ideas I though of on the walk home yesterday. I’m not saying I can defend all these as deep, well-considered, pragmatic, easily workable, thoroughly evidence-based plans – but if I can come up with these in 25 minutes, I can only imagine how many brilliant ideas an expert committee could come up with in a year or so.

The emphasis here is on ideas that your university/funding body/whatever could introduce right now, if they just decided to.

  1. American orchestras have had huge success in reducing gender discrimination using “blind” auditions. To the greatest extent possible, universities should anonymise applications in the pre-interview stage to recruitment committees, journals should anonymise papers to associate editors and peer reviewers, funding bodies should anonymise research proposals to review boards.
  2. In American football, the “Rooney rule” forces teams to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate whenever a head coaching position becomes vacant. When the Rooney rule began in 2003, 6% of coaches were African American; three years later it had gone up to 22%. Universities should be required to interview at least one female candidate for any advertised post.
  3. The “panel pledge” asks male speakers at (mostly non-academic) science and tech conferences to sign that: “I will not speak on or moderate all-male panels at technology and science conferences.” Academics: don’t organise and refuse to speak at conferences where all the (plenary) speakers are men. Campuses: refuse to host conferences where all the speakers are men. Universities, funding bodies and professional societies: refuse to financially support conferences where all the speakers are men.

Two things that would help early-career academics (and particularly women) with partners / children / care duties:

  1. As the parliamentary committee suggests (para. 47), universities and funding bodies should “increase the number of more stable and permanent post-doc positions”, even if this means reducing the total number of positions.
  2. As the parliamentary committee also suggests (para. 48), “research funders should remove from fellowship conditions any requirements for researchers to move institute or country and instead provide funding for shorter visits to other institutes for collaboration purposes”.

Maybe relatively easy fixes like these won’t work, and the only solution is gradually, slowly influencing wider culture. But at the moment it doesn’t even look like we’re trying.