Computers, creativity and learning

Nerdy strutting: how to put women off the tech industry

[cross posted from CACM blog]

As the twittersphere erupted over Donglegate last  week, I was attending a workshop on career development for women in IT. There is a striking contrast between the collegiate, supportive environment of the workshop and the howling hounds of fury which were unleashed by the crazily escalating interactions between participants at a developer conference.  In short (because I don’t want to get lynched online myself), a female conference attendee tweeted photographs of male audience members who she said were telling off colour jokes. A storm of vicious discussion blew up online, and two of those involved lost their jobs. I bring up this news story because one of the main barriers to women in IT which workshop attendees identified was the aggressive  behaviour of male colleagues either in person or online. Behaviour doesn’t have to be explicitly offensive to make colleagues feel uncomfortable; there are many ways to exclude people in a workplace.  Further, although this was a gathering of women, the sort of behaviours were discussed were likely to make lots of people miserable, regardless of their gender. We decided to nickname some of the behaviour which makes us feel uncomfortable as "nerdy strutting", and our ensuing laughter at the phrase helped us to feel better about it.

What is nerdy strutting? Garvin-Doxas and Barker (2004) refer to "strutting" as a style of interaction where  people show off their knowledge by asking questions carefully designed to demonstrate that they know a lot about the topic, and quite possibly that they know more than everyone else around them. The problem with this in a learning situation is that students who lack confidence assume that they are the only person who doesn’t understand, and quickly feel even more demoralised.  An example might be of a student interrupting the lecturer with a fake question of the sort "But wouldn't it be better to use a function to do X?" I say fake question, because the strutter knows the answer already but is merely trying to show that they know this advanced concept which has not yet been covered. Or if another student gives an answer, a strutter might say "But wouldn't it be more elegant to do X?" Garvin-Doxas and Barker studied computer science classrooms, and found that often female students were put off by male strutters.  A related off putting behaviour, identified by a workshop participant, was the sort of answer you see on discussion forums where an answer tears apart  the question, castigating the foolishness of a naive solution attempt.

I have noticed some fascinating behaviour among ultra nerdy students at seminars where they are so anxious to illustrate their technical worth to the speaker that they emit giggles, snorts and chortles of derision at the mention of seemingly arbitrary technologies. It is a  weird phenomenon.  Somebody outside the charmed circle might be baffled as to why the very  words "Prolog" or "Visual Basic" or even "Internet Explorer" evoke such mirth.  "It was awful", says the speaker, "he was trying to deploy his Rails app with Apache httpd running Ruby using Fast CGI".  If you don’t happen to know what Fast CGI is, you’re going to wonder why people around you are creasing up. You'll feel excluded.  (I don’t know, by the way, and I don’t care.  I asked a genuine geek  to provide me with an example to use for this article.)

You might be wondering why it’s a problem if people feel excluded by nerdy strutting. If so, the Computer Weekly’s Women in Technology report, may change your mind. It reports that only 1 in 7 people in the tech industry (in the UK) are women, and that a masculine culture is identified as problematic by both male and female participants. Fixing strutting, therefore, may be part of the solution to a male dominated industry. Further, it might also make work places more pleasant and productive for all employees.  So what can we do to address it?

1. Are you a nerdy strutter either by accident or by design? Think: do you really need to show off? If the need overwhelms you, can you thinkof a way to demonstrate your knowledge which doesn't belittle orbefuddle others? If you're trying to help is your advice going to makes the recipient feel better or worse?

2.  If you get strutted at... draw attention to discourtesies. Try
commenting "Thanks for your input, but I don't feel that your
criticism of my approach was very helpful there". Or calmly ask "why's
that funny?" My intuition is that it is easier to combat this kind of
behaviour face to face than online because it's harder to look someone
in the eye and keep being an asshole (in the sense used by Robert Sutton).
3. If you witness strutting (particularly for CS instructors but also for team leaders)...don't just let it go.  That is, if you're sure it's strutting rather than a
genuine quest for knowledge. You don't necessarily want to embarrass
the strutter who might have social problems already.  But you do need
to help the majority of the class feel at ease. Put the comment or
question in context. Point out if you expect the class to know the
topic in such depth for assessment. Explain the joke if necessary.
Demystify it. Help everyone to feel like they belong.

 

Garvin-Doxas, K. and Barker, L. J. 2004. Communication in computer science classrooms: understanding defensive climates as a means of creating supportive behaviors. J. Educ. Resour. Comput. 4, 1 (Mar. 2004), 2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1060071.1060073

How to get a paper accepted for Interaction Design and Children

[edited after doing another review!]

You may have read my last post and concluded that a) I am on some kind of crazy power trip b) I have just served on a Programme Committee as an associate chair or c) that it is Friday afternoon. All three are true, and as I have been doing nothing but reviewing and marking all week, I feel like writing instead of reading. Here are my thoughts on how to get a paper accepted in IDC which I hope might be useful to authors for future year. [IDC notifications and reviews will be out on Monday and this post does not contain spoilers!]

Interaction Design and Children is a conference series entering its second decade, a fact which makes me feel old as I attended the first one as a post doc. As the years have gone by, the conference has become increasingly popular and standards have improved. This year we moved to a system where Associate Chairs are responsible for checking review quality and writing meta reviews. This is another step towards being all grown up and scientifically mature.  This year 28 papers were accepted (some with shepherding), which is about 30% acceptance rate. (For comparison, CHI 2012 had an acceptance rate of 22% in 2012, but started out 20 years ago with 45%.) Having reviewed papers almost every year for IDC, papers co-chaired in 2007 and acted as AC this year for 10 papers I feel like I have a handle on what is expected. Here are some thoughts to help new authors planning a submission in the future.

1. More than cute systems.  The days when you could get published at IDC for developing a cute system for cute children are hopefully gone. You'll need some kind of evaluation with kids, and more than just testing it on your neighbours' children and reporting that they thought it was "awesome".  If you just have a cute system, a demo might be more appropriate.
2. More than involving kids with the design. In my view, we should also be past the stage where a paper gets accepted simply because the paper used kids as design partners. There is certainly a place for critically evaluating design methodologies or introducing new methods for working with challenging user groups. But the paper needs more of a contribution than finding that the kids provided useful suggestions for the design.
3. Describe the design of the software/technology. I want a screenshot!It ddn't occur to me to include this one the first time, because it seems obvious to me as a computer scientist. But I have now reviewed several papers, possibly written by psychologists, which report results extensively but not the technology which was used. For the results to be interpretable we need to know about the design features of the software which was used in the study.
4. Methodology is important. Choose your methodology carefully, and execute it well. In my experience, IDC doesn't particularly value quantitative over qualitative methodologies. I don't think reviewers really have physics envy and want to see lots of numbers. So you don't need to put stats in just because you think they are expected. What matters is whether the method matches the research questions,and whether the conclusions can be supported by the evidence the methods produced. Pick a well estblished and documented methodology and a set of of commonly used measures. If you are going to include stats then please make sure you get them right! You can see my previous rants about this here and here.  In short: don't bother with stats on small sample sizes, don't use t-tests or ANOVAs on likert data, report effect sizes, be careful about drawing conclusions when you have low power. Don't do multiple comparisons without applying post-hoc corrections, and don't throw in co-variates without good reason. (See also Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological science, 22(11), 1359–66. doi:10.1177/0956797611417632)
5. Rich description is more convincing than weak stats. As a more specific version of the above point, if you have access to only a small number of participants, but feel there are still valuable points to be drawn from your study, consider a rigorous qualitative methodology instead of statistics. In some sub fields, it is difficult to find large numbers of participants (such as when working with children with autism or those with particular medical conditions). Rigor is the point here: don't just informally describe what the participants did, but use a well known approach such as case study analysis or grounded theory to systematically draw a picture of the participants' experiences in some depth.
6. Try to use well known measures such as questionnaires rather than making up your own questions or tests.
7. Let the kids speak for themselves. It's generally frowned on to have teachers or parents' views to be used a proxy for kids. Gather data directly from the kids unless there is very good reason not to.
8. If using quantitiative methods, state your hypotheses clearly and base them in the literature. I'm looking for a match between the findings of previous studies reported in the literature, and clearly stated directional hypotheses (ideally with effect size predictions). Instead of "There will be a difference in children's attitudes to geography after playing with the Amazing Jupiter Robot", go for "The geography scores of children who played with the Amazing Jupiter Robot will be 10% higher than the control group". Where did you get that prediction of 10%? You got it from Robertson (2012)'s work on the Amazing Mars Robot which reported similar effect sizes.You didn't pluck it out of the air. For a set of prompts for critically evaluating your article, see p79 of Dienes, Z. (2008). Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference (1st ed., p. 150). Palgrave Macmillan. To be completely honest, I have never reviewed or read a paper in CHI or IDC which does give effect size predictions. I would like to, though. Please make my day! If you can't do that, at least specify the direction of the hypothesis: "Users who play with the Amazing Jupiter Robot will perform better on standardized geography scores than control users". Don't sit on the fence. The more specific the hypothesis, the more informative it is to have to supported (or disconfirmed). Also, don't introduce new variables into the experimental design without having a good reason from the literature. Gender or social class might be easy to get data on but please have a good theoretical reason for believing there are likely to be differences according to such groupings.

I'm sure there are many more tips which other IDC bods could suggest, but that seems enough to be going on with for now.

I am the meta reviewer. I see into your soul

Authors: I am the meta reviewer. I see into your soul. I scrutinise your literature review.  I inspect your evidence. I evaluate your claims. I consider your conclusions.

Reviewers: I am the meta reviewer: I see into your soul. I judge your accuracy.  I evaluate your expertise. I doubt your motives. I witness your inexperience.

Programme Commitee: We are the meta reviewers. We save souls. We guard standards. We argue, defend and justify. We shepherd papers for the good of the community. We are time starved, weary eyed but truimphant. Science has been served once again.

Motherhood and HCI - call for papers

I am excited because we got a workshop proposal accepted for CHI 2013 on Motherhood and HCI.Write a position paper! Come along! It'll be fun!

Here's a previous post of mine about interface design issues for breastfeeding mothers, written, as I recall, while feeding a sleeping and very heavy baby.

 Call for Participation: CHI 2013 Workshop on Motherhood and HCI Important Dates 11 January 2013: Workshop Submission Deadline 8 February 2013: Notification of Acceptance 27/ 28 April 2013: Workshop held in Paris, France Website: http://motherhoodandhci.wordpress.com/ *********************************** Becoming a mother and the experience of being a mother are increasingly influenced, mediated and invaded by technology and digital interactions. We invite the CHI community to grow and nurture the emerging topic of motherhood and HCI and explore how the lens of “motherhood” changes implications for design, development, and notions of care through participation in the CHI 2013 workshop “Motherhood and HCI” (http://motherhoodandhci.wordpress.com/). This one-day workshop will address research and design issues relating to technology use associated with the processes and experiences of conception, pregnancy and infertility, labour, childcare and the mother’s work in the family and home. Topics include (but are not limited to) the experience of motherhood, technologies for supporting mothers, and perspectives on the role of the mother, as well as everyday practices relating to technology and motherhood. We invite non-mothers,mothers and mothers-to-be to participate in our workshop through the submission of a 2-page position paper in CHI Extended Abstracts format that describes the authors experience engaging with a specific theme, or challenge involved with designing, using, or evaluating technologies that relate to the concept or experience of “motherhood”. We positively encourage submissions from a diverse range of participants, perspectives and disciplines. We also encourage active participation from industries already engaged in the design and development of technologies for motherhood. Submissions will be selected based on their originality, quality and ability to promote discussion amongst the community. Submissions and questions should be directed to madeline.balaam@ncl.ac.uk. More details can be found at: http://motherhoodandhci.wordpress.com/. At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop. Please submit your position paper by Friday 11th January 2013. *********************************** Workshop Organisers Madeline Balaam, Newcastle University Judy Robertson, Heriot-Watt University Rebecca Say, Newcastle University Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Vienna University of Technology Gillian Hayes, UC Irvine Melissa Mazmanian, UC Irvine Belinda Parmar, ladygeek.com

Athena Irony

Last week was steeped in irony. I attended an Athena Swan self-assessment team meeting my university. Athena Swan is a scheme by which universities get accredited for not being rubbish about gender (and other sorts) of equality. Currently my university doesn’t have accreditation; it lost it in mysterious circumstances some years ago. Or at least, the circumstances are mysterious to me as they were not discussed at this meeting. Athena provide a giant checklist of practices which universities should try to follow to get themselves out of their mire of favouring white middle aged blokes (WMABs). They all seem perfectly sensible to me but let’s just say they may seem exotic – luxurious – to university senior management who after all are predominantly WMABs (and not just at my university).

The first serving of irony was the meeting itself. It was chaired by a WMAB,  and to an extent dominated by another WMAB who gave the impression of being somewhat dismissive of the scale of the problem.  There were women at the meeting. A lot of the preparatory work had been done by a well-informed woman. There was a female former member of Athena Swan panels there. So why the bias towards WMAB even in the meetings about gender equality? I have a suspicion, which might be completely unfair of course: the committee had to be taken seriously by the heads of academics schools so it was decided to have it chaired by an academic head of school to give it credibility. And due to the very problem which Athena Swan exists to solve, the heads of school in science and technology are WMAB. This is problematic in my view. There is a lot to be said for understanding stemming from lived experience, and clearly being a bloke academic prevents you from having experience of being a woman academic.  (Mostly. Apart from that psychologist who had a sex change and found that people took her a lot less seriously than her “brother”.) At any rate, I have decided not to continue as a committee member mostly because I think it is too important to be done “off the side of my desk”. The whole point of the accreditation process is to give serious time and resource to gender equality issues and I couldn’t realistically see it being factored into my work load. Further, I am increasingly taking the view that just because I could do something doesn’t mean I should do it. There are, after all, other women in my department who are working mothers and who would contribute to such an activity.

The second portion of irony was served as I desperately tried to do my share of an EPSRC Culture and Communities network proposal on Communities of Motherhood. This was in a week of potty training angst (my angst, toddler’s potty). I was attempting to appear like a normal sane mother to grandparents while costing a proposal during nap times and after bed time. My collaborators on this (and other proposals) all had way too much to do as well. I wanted to help earlier career researchers to get this (tiny amount of) funding in these times of frugal funding. (Don’t get me started on the futility of funding research networks rather than research.) It seemed like a lot of effort for not very much reward. And yet, academia is structured in such a way that people routinely put in mega efforts to achieve yet more seemingly impossible things – meet this funding proposal deadline, write just another cheeky wee paper. Because there are core teaching activities which simply must get done within working hours, research sometimes becomes a strange hobby. I have a colleague who saves his paper writing for Friday evenings.  And the problem with this for gender equality is that working mothers don’t have extra hobby time to spend on the research which advances their careers. There just isn’t any slack time in the week for anything extra.

So, what could universities (or funding councils) do to improve gender equality? Here are my thoughts:

• Stop having stupid sand pits where people get walled up in a country house for 5 days at a time, in a terrible Lord of the Flies scenario. This makes it hard for people with family responsibilities to attend. It is costly in terms of childcare, puts strain on other family members to manage the child care in one parent’s absence and is particularly hard for breast feeding women.
• Don’t spring funding calls with short deadlines on people, particularly not during the school holidays.
• Make targets and expectations clearer and more feasible. Academics seem to carry a burden of guilt that they should have more grant funding or write more papers. It would help to know when one has done enough.
• Introduce careers paths where people can succeed through high quality work which can be done without extensive foreign travel. For example, this might mean weighting journal articles more highly than conference articles, and considering reviewing duties rather than key notes as indicators of esteem. Or not expecting EU grant funding (which often requires travel).
• Make an effort to put women on interview panels for promoted posts, even if this means asking women from outwith the university to serve on the panel.

Research excellence and the gender gap

Monday was the "the point in the year when women in effect start working for nothing because of the gender pay gap – for every £100 men take home, women are getting £85 – a 14.9 per cent difference."

Doesn't that make you happy to be alive?  That makes me feel great about all those essays I marked this week. To cheer me up, I can look forward to a lifetime pay gap of £423,000, if I make it to a managerial position. My university is feeling very pleased with itself because it now has gender equality in the strategic plan. Huzzah! That'll make all the difference then.

One of my reasons for starting this rant is that I just filled in the form to apply for reduction in my expected REF outputs. You may recall me blogging about this before when it appeared that those who took a period of maternity leave would be expected to produce the same number of publications over the 4 year period as those who did not. Luckily the REF people saw sense and decided not to pursue this policy and now people who have been off work get a reduction in the number of papers they were expected to write.

What made me snort (loudly) was there was also a box to fill in asking you to record any other factors which might affect your work (like breastfeeding or maternity). Sleep deprivation? General distractedness caused by raising a small person? Babies don't just go away once they are born. Turns out they grow into toddlers who also need looking after. Apparently this state of affairs continues for some time. Like 18 years or so.

What bothers me about this is that research careers (and in the UK, REF is one of the main ways of measuring research success) are built on hours of dedicated work above and beyond contracted hours. If you have small children (or indeed are caring for other family members) you don't have any extra hours. None. (If you want a further depressing read, here's an article on the impact of child rearing on female academics.)

What I want to know is this: why do academics feel compelled to work so hard? I can understand the lure of data analysis and the pursuit of new knowledge That's exciting work, worth doing and worth spending spare time on it. But applying for more and more funding for projects you don't really want and writing more and more obscure papers? That's make-work. I refuse to spend my very precious working hours on it.

 

Better

I have been rereading Atul Gawadne's book "Better", mostly because I have been thinking about how we can improve teaching in my department since I became a course director. Here's an inspiring quote. Betterment is: "to live a life of responsibility. The question... is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsbility, how does one do such work well?"p9. Gawadne suggests there are three aspects to making things better: diligence ("giving sufficient attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles"), doing right, and ingenuity (thinking anew). He also has some suggestions for how you can become a positive deviant (i.e. striving to make things better even if the people around you don't). 

1. Ask an unscripted question (when talking to people)

2. Don't complain

3. Count something (i.e. monitor something which interests you numerically)

4. Write something (to reflect on what you have counted)

5. Change

This is me doing number 4 - writing!

I find the quote above striking because even although it was written by a doctor about medical practice, it applies nicely to teaching. I believe that as lecturers, we have signed up to educate and that we can always do better. Even if you get great course feedback and high averages and win teaching awards, there will always be something which you can improve on. Having spent 6 months being a course director and talking to both staff and students about teaching, I am beginning to see that not everyone sees things that way. I think that maybe some staff see the pursuit of betterment only as a criticism, not something which is just built into the job.Maybe this is a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. But my point of view is that you have to check whether it is broken regularly, and try to keep it in good working order! It's part of the cycle of reflective practice, planning, teaching, reflecting, then replanning. Trying new teaching methods or content from time to time will make things more interesting for you, and might well make things even better for the students.

In being positively deviant, I am also doing numbers 3. and 5. from Gawadne's list. The counting is to do with the dreaded national student survey results - logging students' attitudes towards their teaching and seeing if in the long term we can increase scores. I am not convinced this is an end in itself, but it is a benchmark for us to use to see whether our changes are actually making things better. Number 5 - change- is hard, it turns out. Universities tend to be conservative beurocracies which work on long time scales. It is hard to achieve anything within one academic year simply because of when meetings at which approval decisions can be taken are scheduled. Staff and students are both busy and busy people tend not to want to make changes which will cost them time. It is hard to coax people out of the habit of complaining and into the more positive frame of mind where they will make constructive suggestions.

But I am trying, and I will keep trying.

We needn't be malevolent grumps in 2012

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

A few months back, Bertrand Meyer wrote about the nastiness problem in computer science, questioning whether we as reviewers are “malevolent grumps”. Judging by the user comments on the page, this hit a nerve with readers who were the victims of such grumpiness!  Jeanette Wing then followed up on this with some numbers from NSF grant rejections which did indeed indicate that computer scientists are hyper-critical. Much as I enjoy the colourful phrasing, I feel that a field full of malevolent grumps is not something we should simply accept. In fact, even if there are only a few grumps out there, it’s in all our interests to civilise them.

So what can computer scientists do to reduce the nastiness problem when reviewing? Reviewers, authors, programme committee members, conference chairs and journal editors can all do their bit by simply refusing to tolerate discourtesy. Let’s embrace the “no asshole” rule: we no longer ignore bad behaviour. As reviewers, we can aim to be polite (yet stringent) ourselves but also to point out to co-reviewers if we find their impoliteness unacceptable. As authors, we don’t have to accept a rude review and just lie down to lick our wounds. We can (politely!) raise the issue of rudeness with the programme chair or editor so it is less likely to occur in the future. As editors, chairs and programme committee members we can include the issue of courtesy in the reviewing guidelines and be firm about requesting reviewers to moderate their tone if we notice inappropriate remarks.

One of the first steps is to separate intellectual rigour from discourtesy. It is possible to be critical without being rude or dismissive.  We can maintain standards in the field without resorting to ill-natured comments. (Believe it or not, it is also possible to ask genuine questions at a conference without seeking to show off one’s own intellectual chops, but that is another matter). The purpose of reviewing, in my view, is to help an author improve their work, not to crush them under the weight of your own cleverness. It’s not the author’s fault that you had a bad day, or that some other reviewer just rejected your own paper. 

Of course, there are some pockets of good reviewing practice within the field which we can draw on. I am sure there are many, but I have chosen CHI because I have been writing for it recently. The CHI conference is one of the biggest well respected annual human computer interaction conferences. Last year there were 2000 attendees from 38 countries. This year there were 1577 paper submissions with a 23% acceptance rate.  This was the first year I submitted papers to it, and I have been impressed by the quality of the reviews in terms of their fairness, constructiveness and level of detail. They contained greater insight and intellectual oomph than the reviews I had from a high impact journal recently. For one of my CHI submissions, the reviewers did not agree with the paper on some points – it is on a controversial topic- but they still offered suggestions for how to resolve these issues rather than simply rejecting the paper. Was I just lucky in the reviewers I was allocated? Possibly, but the CHI reviewing process has some interesting features built in to maintain review quality*.

1. In the guidelines for reviewers, courtesy is explicitly mentioned: “please be polite to authors. Even if you rate a paper poorly, you can critique it in a positive voice. As part of polite reviewing practice, you should always state what is good about a paper first, followed by your criticisms. If possible, you should offer suggestions for improvement along with your criticism.” 

2. Authors can select both the sub-committee and the contribution type for a paper, which maximises the chance that the paper will end up with reviewers with appropriate expertise , and that the reviewers will use criteria appropriate to the paper when assessing its suitability (e.g. not insisting on empirical evidence for a theoretical contribution).
3.  The reviewing process is thorough and has several opportunities for unfairness or discourtesy to be weeded out. Each paper is blind reviewed by three or more experts, and then an associate chair writes a meta-review to summarise the assessment of the paper, and what action (if any) should be taken to improve it. In this way, individual grumpiness is moderated. A variant of this good practice from other conferences is when reviewers of the same paper can see each other’s reviews (once they have submitted their own), thus introducing peer pressure not to be awful.
4.  Authors have a right to reply by writing a rebuttal of the review. The rebuttal is taken into account along with a revised meta-review (and potentially revised individual reviews) at a two day committee meeting when final accept/reject decisions are made.
5. All submitting authors are surveyed about their opinions of the reviewing process – yet another chance to raise issues about unfairness or discourtesy which have not been addressed in a rebuttal.
6. This point is more about the nature of the conference itself, rather than the reviewing procedures. Because CHI is so interdisciplinary, participants have a wide range of backgrounds from art and design to hard core engineering. They are therefore exposed to – and may in fact seek out- different perspectives which may make them open to different paradigms as reviewers. Could colleagues from the arts and social sciences be having a civilising influence on the grumpy computer scientists?

Ts This is a fairly heavy weight process, but if conference organisers adopted even just one more of the practices from points 1-5, or if journal editors added a courtesy clause to their review instructions the world would be a slightly better place. Make it your New Year's resolution to stop tolerating malevolvent grumps in 2012!

 

*Thanks to Tom Erickson – the person who runs the CHI author survey – for kindly raising some of these points.

 

Celebrate Open Access Week with ACM’s Author-Izer tool

[cross posted from my ACM blog]

Happy Open Access Week! If you would like your work to reach the widest possible audience, Open Access week encourages you to take steps to make this happen. Think of all those unfortunate readers out there who would just love to read your latest article but can’t because it is hidden behind a pay wall. Luckily, the nice people at the ACM have developed a new tool called Author-Izer which can help you reach these readers by allowing them to download your ACM published articles for free via a link from your own web page.

This is a great step forward from the ACM in the support of the democratisation of academic knowledge. I’ve been following the arguments for open access publishing for a while. The arguments go like this: academics invest their time in research and in writing up their findings for conference and journal articles. Conferences and journals do not pay these authors for their contributions. Reviewers and editors volunteer their time to ensure the high quality of the publications. Publishers then charge readers a small fortune for the articles which they got for free, either through institutional library subscriptions or individual charges per article online. This means that potential readers of articles can be barred from accessing the articles they need, for example because they belong to a small institution which does not subscribe to a particular journal, or because they are not professional researchers and so don’t have access to institutional resources of this sort. Yet, for science to progress, researchers need access to the latest findings. And if science is to take the rest of the world with it, members of the public should also have access to articles which relate to the issues in their lives.

A lot of academics attempt to get round the problem by publishing early versions of their articles on their personal web pages for readers to download. The problem with that is that the final version which appears in the published journal may contain important corrections which your readers will miss. Further, if a reader downloads articles from your web page, this download is not included in bibliometric download data which the publisher collects so your true brilliance is not quantified for those who care about such things! Author-Izer takes care of both of these issues. Here’s how to set it up. First, get your free ACM web account, and then go the ACM digital library. From there you can edit your author profile page. Once you get an email notification that the author profile has been updated you will find that the ACM Digital Library shows an Author-Izer option under every article by you which was published by the ACM. When you click on it, you can authorise the article to appear the url of your personal publication web page. It evens generates the code for you to cut and paste into your webpage so it appears with the smart little ACM logo and – glory of glory- the bibliometric information about how many times it has been downloaded and cited. That last touch appealed to my academic vanity no end. There you are – next time a reader visits your web page, they will be redirected for free to an ACM archive of your article.  They will be humbly pleased to read your great work, and their click will be added to your download statistics. And the cause of science will have advanced, one article view at a time.

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!