Computers, creativity and learning

Gender discrimination in the UK Research Excellence Framework

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

All over the UK, academics are frantically writing papers. Yes, I know academics everywhere are frantically writing papers – there are after all over a million papers published per year. But UK academics are writing now to publish in high impact journals in time for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), the result of which determines how government block funding for research is allocated. We are meant to publish 4 world beating Turing-award level papers between 2008 and 2014 to bring in the maximum funding for our cash strapped departments. However, this is not a post about the problems of channelling researchers’ efforts into stalking their own bibliometrics on Publish or Perish instead of doing something productive. This is a post about how the REF discriminates against female researchers. It's an issue which could prevent the recruitment of more female computer science academics (or encourage existing ones to leave) at a time when as a discipline we should be trying to address the gender imbalance.

You might expect that female researchers who have been on maternity leave during the REF period would be expected to produce a number of papers proportional to their time spent at work in that period. No. Instead, the draft REF guidelines indicate that women will be expected to produce one paper fewer only if they have taken more than 14 months off for maternity during the REF period. Because of the way statutory maternity leave works in the UK, it is common to take between 6 months and a year off. So to qualify to produce one less journal paper output, you’d probably need to produce more than two human outputs (babies!) over 5 years  (See http://www.swipuk.org/notices/02-09-11/ for a good summary).  An alternative proposal is to reduce the REF output by one paper for each child. I do find it bizarre - almost comical- to equate the effort of carrying, delivering and raising a child to researching and writing a paper but at least this proposal acknowledges that children have an impact on their carers’ careers.

This proposal, if carried out, would further divide academia along gender lines. It’s already a fairly bleak situation. In Europe, only 18% of professors are female, only 9% of universities have a female head , and there is a pay gap of 20% in the US.  An interesting article in the Times Higher from last year cites studies which show that women’s publication output falls after childbirth, although it does bounce back later. Further, in countries which invest in high quality childcare, female researchers are more productive. So it is not inevitable that women who have had children must be less effective researchers in the long run. It is however probable that their productivity will drop in the period when they take maternity leave.  It would be strange indeed if being off work for 6 months to a year didn't affect one's output.

What about computer science in particular? A report from the main research council which funds computer science in the UK (EPSRC) shows that only 13% of grants are awarded to female researchers. Of course, the prospects in the computing industry outside academia are not good either. In the US, an NCWIT report states that there is a gender pay gap in CS jobs  starting at 7% and increasing to 11% for workers with more than 15 years experience. Also worrying is the trend reported in the same source that two years after graduation from CS degrees, only one third of women remain in science and technology jobs. 

The odds are stacked against women succeeding in academia, and in computer science  as it is. The discrimination built into the REF would penalise women who have had children, increasing their stress at work and reducing their chances of promotion. The good news is that the REF document is still under consultation. There is a chance to change the way the REF is conducted by writing comments here before October 5^th. Please do this for your sister computer scientists!

 

A crazy day

 At the start of December I had a crazy full-on academic mummy day which I have been meaning to write about but I have been too busy. Now the baby and the husband (and both the cats) are asleep and I have a spare few minutes.

We had a lot of snow early this year which seemed to bring the UK transport infrastructure to its knees. Naturally this coincided with a workshop which we were committed to running for a network I am organising. The blizzard timed itself for rush hour so that people who were coming from other parts of the UK had already travelled safely. Which was good in a way, but it also meant we couldn't cancel the event as that would have been pretty lame if people could make it from Southampton but couldn't come from the other side of the Meadows. So I took Mr Bitey (who now has 2.25 teeth) in his pram to nursery in thick, thick snow. Have you pushed a buggy in the snow uphill? Not very easy, even in spite of kindly souls who help you over kerbs. Nursery was in uproar because the catering supplies couldn't be delivered, but luckily Mr B had a a packed lunch. I was running a bit late by then due to my Arctic buggy voyage so I had to jog through the snow in my hiking boots to the Edinburgh Uni campus where the workshop was held. Just as well it wasn't on our own campus which is in the real wilderness.

Let's take a moment at this point to dwell on the extreme irritation that academic workshops can cause. There seems to be a universal law of Obstreperous Professors (OP) which will guarantee one will show up at any workshop I am involved in. An OP will seize upon innocently chosen words from everyday language and insist it should be defined. An OP will quibble over tiny points and generally waste as much discussion time as possible. An OP will have an endless fund of stories which illustrates their importance and grandeur. An OP will insult other workshop attendees and start academic cat fights. An OP will be incapable of accepting that a (relatively) young female academic might be leading a workshop and therefore, be temporarily, leading them. The OP of this day chose to address me as “Little Miss Bossy Boots” as I facilitated his group. My outrage is hard to frame in polite text so I shall not comment further. Without wishing to be sexist, OPs tend to be a certain age of gentleman who like to draw attention to themselves. I have never met a female professor who behaves in such a way, but I suppose my sample size is smaller as there aren't many female CS professors.

Alright, back to the snow. About half the people registered managed to come for the workshop. Some had to leave early to pick up their own children because the Edinburgh schools closed at midday due to the snow. Things gradually became more chaotic as the snow got worse and the local bus service stopped, trains stopped running and the airport shut. The nursery called me mid-workshop to tell me Mr Bitey had a fever and Calpol (usually magic stuff!) wasn't working to reduce his temperature. Please could we pick him up early, they said. My husband, knowing that I was trying to facilitate the workshop all day, kindly set off from work to nursery, a journey which normally takes 25 minutes but on this day took 4 hours and involved loaf bribery from a Warburton's driver. So I had to run the workshop until almost the advertised finishing time. I did try pretty hard to close it early to the relief of some attendees who needed to get home themselves. But, being an academic workshop, some attendees just kept on talking and I ended up quite bluntly and firmly saying “Now we should all go home!”. Then we had to tidy up which took ages. So I ended up running back across the Meadows in my hiking boots to fetch poor Mr Bitey who was the last child left in the nursery by this time.

You might hope that would be the end of a long day, but no. My husband made it home in time to find Mr B feverish again and me getting in a bit of a first time mum panic. I made the mistake of checking the NHS website and following a flow chart which directed me to the NHS phoneline and then an out of hours clinic at the hospital. Of course, these phone lines are ultra cautious about babies if you answer “yes” to a question about whether the baby has spots and even although he had perked up hugely by the end of the phonecall we still thought we ought to follow it through. Everyone wrapped up warmly, and ventured back in the car on the un-gritted roads to the local hospital where the out of hours doctor plainly thought we were mad to to come and see her about a cold and nappy rash (as the spots turned out to be). Particularly because Mr B was grinning and happily eating his socks during his consultation. All was well in the end, as it turned out. Although I am getting on OK with juggling work and being a mum, snow adds an extra layer of craziness which I can well do without! So let's hope there will be no more this winter. Please?

Thinking

In one of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, Mma Ramostwe ponders on how good it is that school teachers are paid by the government to think and grow wise during the summer. As an academic, I think I should be paid to think. In reality, it seems that I am paid to be busy rather than to think, to produce lots of papers and funding rather than insight or understanding. The other day I was working on a framework which emerged from months of analysis and I was deeply engrossed init when I had to go to teach a class. I mentioned my frustration about this to one of the maths lecturers I met in the photocopier room, and she sympathised. She said she was sometimes able to work on research problems while lecturing. Wow – how on earth? She also said that she often thinks about her research when she is driving to the supermarket and then does the calculations in the car park. She suspected her kids thought she was a zombie when they were young because she would space out at bath time while chewing over a problem. I admit I have discussed the finer points of statistical methodology with Mr Bitey while taking him for a walk in his pram. I have scribbled diagrams on the bus to the accompaniment of students’ headphone pollution. I have bored my poor husband witless by describing my latest thoughts over dinner. Why isn’t there time to do this in the office? I hereby resolve to make time. An advantage of returning from maternity leave part time for now is that I have accepted that I don’t have time to do everything. So I don’t feel guilty about not getting everything on and I focus on the work which matters. Which is research at the moment, given the menacing emails we get about it from on high. So teaching will have to take a back burner although I will probably continue to attend classes. For now…

Interface Design for New Mothers

 [cross posted from CACM blog]

Why is there so little research into interface design for new mothers? As a mother of a 10 week old, I can assure you that we are an user group with specific needs. Yet, a quick
ramble around the ACM digital library reveals lots of articles with metaphorical references to mothers (as in the mother of all algorithms) or babies (baby steps towards solving an excessively dull problem) but very few actually about the puke filled reality of being a parent. There are honourable exceptions in projects for recording baby's developmental progress , and for supporting mums to socialize with their families  abroad -let's have more of these.
Interface designers- hear my cry! Heed the following advice. Remember that you too were once a baby with an infinitely patient mother who indulged your newborn whims. Also consider there are lots of mothers around: 63 births per 1000 women of childbearing age in England and Wales last year  (that's 706248 mums in the south of the UK alone who could be struggling to use your technology).
Have you any idea how much time mothers spend feeding babies when they are very
little? At least 2.5 hours per day, split into short 20 minute or so sessions. My son often
feeds for longer - up to 1.5 hour sessions if he is on a growth spurt, sometimes for 30
minutes every hour during an evening. Not to mention the time babes spend asleep on their parents who daren't move them unless they start crying again. My point is that us mothers spend a lot of time trapped on the sofa. (New fathers are often trapped too, but are less likely to be breastfeeding, I imagine).  With well designed interfaces to support us, we could be profitably writing papers, or at least shopping for groceries. So what constraints should designers take into account?
1.  Design one handed interfaces. I am typing this with one hand on an iPad which is
positioned on a pillow to my right. My left hand is supporting a sleeping baby. I am
breastfeeding the baby which means one hand is usually free to type but it may not be
my dominant hand. I am not sure whether it is possible to bottle feed and type. Maybe
another new parent could enlighten me? These physical constraints have implications for all kinds of routine tasks on the interface. Old versions of windows where you log in with cntrl alt del are out. Capital letters and punctuation are slow to do so I have to be careful with passwords I type often. The iPad on screen keyboard works pretty well for me until I need more obscure punctuation like slashes or square brackets which are buried two levels down the interface. Just as well I am writing, not coding. It also means that keyboard shorrt cuts can be tricky, and editing is torturous.
2 . Device size and viewing angle. There is an issue of physical space. Can you fit a laptop close enough to you so you can see the screen without frying the
baby with laptop heat? Can you tilt the screen so you can see it behind the baby's
head? I have an iPad stand which balances it at a reasonable viewing angle on a pillow behind the baby when I am reading. If I use the bigger laptop, the fonts are too small and there is a glare on the screen. Plus, the wretched thing is too big to fit on the pillow and I get a crick in my neck from reading when the screen is to my side.
3 . Quick configuration and start up. When the baby needs fed he typically doesn't
politely wait until I  have my hardware set up and ready to use. Searching for a power cable while holding a screaming baby and then bending down to plug it in without dropping the little angel is harder than you'd think.
I need a laptop which is ready to use as soon as I pick it up,which means long battery life and instant recovery from stand-by. Macs seem much better at this than Windows in my personal experience. My blue-ray player is immensely frustrating in this respect as it is very slow to start or eject discs and forces me to sit through unwanted adverts before it loads the menu.

4 . Interface support for interruptions. It's quite rare to get a chance to finish a task at
one sitting when looking after a baby. He might decide he has finished feeding, puke
everywhere, have a nappy apocalypse or simply insist on being walked around instead
of sitting still. "Just wait a moment until I have finished this email." doesn't work.
So what I need is an interface which can help me pick up the threads when I do get back to it to avoid wasting precious time. Sites which time out are irritating.
Especially if they have annoying two handed log in screens, like the university library.
My evil blue-ray player's habit of losing the place in the disc when it is switched off
is not appreciated. It is possible that an automatic reminder of tasks which still need
completed would be beneficial, but it would require very careful design to counter the
next design constraint.
5 . Your user may be grumpy. She will certainly be sleep deprived, leading to possible
forgetfulness and confusion. She may well be ferociously impatient to complete an
essential task such as paying a bill before the baby next demands her attention. You
don't want your UI design to thwart her anymore than you want to stand between a
bear and a river of salmon.
6 . Demanding secondary user. I suspect this constraint gets more and more pressing as
the baby grows. For now, having a touch screen which doesn't respond to small flailing
feet, a speech interface which automatically filters crying and a white noise generator built into every app would suffice.
7. Moisture resistant hardware. Let's not dwell on this one, but your device needs to be
waterproof. If they can do it for watches, why not laptops? They wouldn't even need to
withstand such depths unless the baby has some kind of gastronomic disorder. More
so than usual I mean.
8 . Specialist applications. I think there is a gap in the market for both software which supports mothers in mundane tasks and software to help entertain babies. For example a decent app to record feeding and sleeping cycles or weight gain and growth would be handy. I'm not suggesting that babies should be abandoned in front of laptop screens, but simple software with amusing sounds and bright patterns would be nice for me to use when playing with the baby. It doesn't need to be specifically educational because as far as I can see babies learn from most things they do!

Of course, many of these design constraints apply to ordinary users too. Lots of people
are in a hurry, or are forgetful, or need to use the device one handed, particularly if they
are on the move. Getting the design right for this demographic group will probably benefit users in general. Consider it cosmic payback for the time your mother spent rearing you. 

 

Mr Bitey's first conference

Being an account of an academic mother's first return to work during maternity leave.

3am. Mr Bitey wakes me up to politely request some milk. I dash through from spare room where I have been desperately trying to get some sleep. His subsequent loud pantings keep his dad awake and fretting until he despairs  and evacuates to the spare room leaving me with the next shift.

6.30am. Alarm wakes me up. Force myself to get up and have shower to make myself respectable. Mr Bitey awakes while I shower and requests more milk. Feed him. Change him. Change me. Mr Bitey is sick on my smart skirt. Too late to change, mop it up, transfer angry baby to car seat, head out. Wail "I can't do this!" Husband looks at me with silent agreement, but continues to hustle me out door, first taking photo of now resigned infant.

8.30am. Arrive at conference. Pretend to be normal. Marvel at sight of female colleagues adoring Mr B and male colleagues trying to think of appropriate pleasant remarks.

9am. Pull myself together and meet international speakers who I coaxed into crossing the Atlantic long before Mr Bitey was conceived. Try to remember what their work is about. Find colleague who knows the work and introduce them. 

9.25 Husband leaves for work.

9.26. Remember I need to introduce Principal and open conference. Park pram next to anxious colleague. Dive onto stage. Say something welcoming. Go for sympathy by pointing out 7 week old baby to delegates. Hope I don't have baby sick on shoulder. Introduce principal and then keynotes.

9.40 Collapse back in seat beside pram. Mr Bitey has slept through it all. This is fortunately the pattern of the day. He does squawk during the keynote once but a cuddle sorts that out.

10.30 Realise that I am meant to be timekeeping the session which is hard for someone who has been living on baby time for 7 weeks. 

10.40 End session. Direct delegates to coffee. Various friends swoon over Mr Bitey during coffee. Take advantage of this to gobble pastry with customary greed.

11am Mr B decides he needs to gobble with customary greed. This means breast feeding in public in the cafe where my students and colleagues hang out. Square shoulders. Get on with it. Chat to keynote speaker who is finalising slides for afternoon session. Mr B thrashes and pants as normal.

11.15. Feed is finished but I can't choose between the three parallel sessions so I decide to sit on a sofa and chill out instead. Feeling incredibly relaxed considering I have a conference to run. Normally I would be running around mental. Looking after a baby forces me to slow down. Accept invitation to friend's conference in a couple of weeks.

12.30 Change baby in my office. Meet various students who regard him benignly, if awkwardly. Computer support officer ignores baby but corners me about a student's misdemeanor. Like I care - I'm on maternity leave. (Or at least my version of it where I do the work I like but nothing else).

13.00 - 15.30. Conference passes in a blur of feeding, passing Mr B to colleagues, wheeling him in his pram to drop in on sessions. I even manage to listen to some of the content.

15.30. Can't be bothered taking Mr B out of a session to feed him. Have no shame left, so feed him in the auditorium. Possibly disconcerting for speakers but I have my back to everyone else. When he starts to slurp particularly noisily I decide I really ought to leave.

16.00. Wind up conference in a rush. Forget to thank the admin staff in my eagerness to get it over with and go home and relax with Mr Bitey. Ooops.Just as well I got them choccies earlier.

19.00 Get changed to go to dinner with speakers. This will be the first time I have been let out alone in 7 weeks. Just as I leave, Mr Bitey's nappy leaks all over my white top. 

21.00 Return home to a screaming baby and a husband with gritted teeth. 

Such is the life of an academic mum?