University of Exeter
“Power shift” needed to improve gender balance in energy research, report says
Women still face significant barriers in forging successful and influential careers in UK energy research, a new high-level report has revealed.
A team of experts from the University of Exeter’s Energy Policy Group has analysed gender balance within the crucial field of energy research and spoken to female researchers about their experiences of academic life. The study, launched today (14th June 2019), sets out how research funders and universities can ensure female talent and expertise is mobilised in transforming our energy systems.
The report is particularly timely as the UK parliament declares a climate emergency and the government commits to legislate for a 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target. It is clear that energy research needs to harness 100 per cent of available talent in order to meet the challenge of rapidly decarbonising energy systems.
The study revealed that women are still significantly under-represented in energy research and application rates from women are low. It also found that grants applied for and awarded to women tend to be of smaller value, when they do apply female academics are equally and sometimes more likely to be funded than male academics.
The report also highlighted the ‘significant drop-off’ between the number of female PhD students and funded researchers – meaning the sector loses a substantial pool of potential talent at an early stage.
The research presents four key ways in which funders and universities can work together to improve gender balance: look at the data, fund more women, stimulate career progression for female energy academics, and build on what’s already working.
Jess Britton, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and co-author of the report said: “Progress on gender balance in research has been too slow for too long, but we think now is the time to bring together action across funders and universities to ensure that female talent in capitalised on. Taking action across the funding, institutional and systemic issues we identify could drive a real shift in inclusion in the sector”.
The new report, commissioned by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) saw the researchers speak to 59 female academics conducting energy research and from various disciplines, institutions and career stages. They also analysed available data on gender and energy research funding.
Crucially, interviews with the researchers unearthed an array of issues that were felt to be holding women back from career progression – including the detrimental impact of part-time work or maternity leave, and inherent institutional and funding bias towards established, male academics.
While the report recognised that since 2017 there has been some progress in the gender balance of Peer Review Panel Members and small increases in awards granted to female researchers, progress has remained slow.
The study suggests that any progress should be accompanied by systemic change within the institutional structures and cultural environment of institutions involved with energy research.
Jim Watson, Director of UKERC added: “This report shows that there is an urgent need to address the poor gender balance within the UK energy research community – particularly with respect to leadership of grants and career progression.
“It not only reveals the extent of the problem with new evidence, but makes a series of practical recommendations should be required reading for funders and universities alike.”
The research identified four key ways in which UKRI, other funders and universities can work to improve gender balance. They are:
Look at the data – There remain significant difficulties in accessing meaningful data on gender balance in energy research. Data should be published, used to set targets, monitor progress and provide annual updates. The report also suggested using quantitative and qualitative data to identify key intervention points, speaking to more female energy academics to identify biases and barriers, and continuing to improve gender balance in funding review processes.
Fund more women – the report identified that funding structures can be a barrier, and that both part-time working and career breaks are perceived to slow progress. It suggests that the assessment of part-time working and maternity leave needs to be standardised across funder eligibility criteria and in the review process. It also identified that a lack of diversity of funding types impacts on women, and suggested trialling innovative approaches to allocating funding and supporting early career researchers.
Stimulate career progression for female energy academics – The report highlighted the need to acknowledge and take action on the individualistic, long hours culture of academia and also overhaul existing institutional structures and cultures. Early career stages are often characterised by precarious fixed-term contracts and over reliance on quantitative measures of progress. It also recommended building suitable training, mentoring and support networks to help more women progress and ensure the visibility of female researchers.
Build on what is working – The study recommended identifying key points of engagement to build gender balance: combine specific targeted actions, such as UKRI and university frameworks and targeted funding initiatives, with long-term action on structural issues that promote cultural change in our institutions. It also identified the need to ensure equality of voice – so that female academic voices are heard.
Alison Wall, Deputy Director for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at EPSRC said: “We welcome this report, its findings and recommendations. Many of the issues raised are ones we recognise more widely in our research community.
“Enhancing diversity and inclusion is one of the priorities in our new Delivery Plan. For example, we plan to make further progress on embedding EDI into the grant application process, developing our peer review processes, provision of further data and increased flexibility in our funding.”
A copy of the report and the full list of recommendations can be found here: https://geography.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/schoolofgeography/pdfs/Power_Shift.pdf
###
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The only people who think there is a problem with the under representation of females in energy research are those who look for difference that are none issues. I guess that means Exeter Uni professors who have received grant support to make such pointless claims.
I personally, am particularly concerned about the lack of women in the tarmacking industry. Any positive gender employment policies going on there? Perhaps Exeter Uni, would like to comment
The easiest way to get my wife riled up is to read her an article like this. She is so sick and tired of people who want to tell women (i.e., her and our daughters) what kinds of work they should be desiring.
Bingo!
bingo again
My Gawd! Things just keeping crazier all the time, don’t they?
Gender equality (an imaginary problem) as applied to research on alternative energy (a fancy name for wind mills) to fix global warming (another imaginary problem). Is that absurdity squared or absurdity cubed? Do you think we can squeeze in there a little something on environmental social justice (whatever that means) and maybe reparations for things our great great grandparents did?
I wonder if all this intellectual craziness is because modern people have it too easy? No one dies of the black plague anymore, the last big war ended in 1945, we haven’t had a real economic depression in ninety years, and “I Love Lucy” re-runs have almost completely disappeared from television. Maybe people require a “big” problem, a crisis, something to hoot and holler about. Soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy don’t have time to worry about global warming. Maybe people are inventing imaginary problems and imaginary grievances because they have to have an itch to scratch.
Men court danger, women avoid it – that’s the way we evolved – for good Darwinian reasons (there are of course exceptions).
No amount of lawmaking or incentivisation will induce women to indulge in high risk (perceived or real) occupations in equal or higher numbers than men.
I have no problem if they do but gender equality is in many cases a political contrivance rather that a real bias or exclusionary practice by male dominance (although our past and less so our present history is littered with examples of where this was certainly true).
One wonders…what are they looking at in order to declare a “climate emergency”?? Models I guess. Europe and GB seem to be slowly hanging themselves, sad to see it.
So a “gender imbalance” in energy research is a problem, but an even greater gender imbalance in energy production is not? Explain.
At an event decades ago where there were high school teachers I recall meeting a female math teacher. Since there were males around with college degrees who had no college math, one denied entrance into graduate school for that reason despite an otherwise decent background, several of us had an interesting discussion about these differences. Gender was still in its proper grammatical realm, and as she seemed clearly above the average male in such math skills, we all went away with obvious but better understanding. Of course, we were well trained in science before the ‘change.’
When you force a quota on students, regardless of whether male or female, your are doing a great disservice, or worse, to them and what should be the educational imperative to get the best out of everybody with the realization that we all have different talents not easy to immediately put into categories. There are a few competent females in the energy profession, nothing new there.
Also, in casting out old papers I just ran across an order from our Director of Personnel Services, no telling what the title is now, about sexual harassment. “As a supervisor of classified employees, it is your responsibility to immediately report any incident, complaint, or suggestion…..” This was 1994, not long before I retired and had no more such responsibility, but sure enough such increased, the apparent more common male on male harassment ignored, including that by administrators. Lots of hypocrisy and “innocent until proven guilty” lost in the haze.
Not a new debate.
+42
Highly privileged upper class women, mostly white, are not doing enough to develop clean energy and save the planet. They need to be mollycoddled more.
They need to have more babies, or there won’t be any highly educated women in five generations.
For my sins, I have worked in IT for nearly 30 years, and now, at the age of 60, have a lady boss who is somewhere in the order of 10-15 years my junior (I’m old fashioned and will not ask). She has management skills I don’t possess, and is great at the public/senior management presentational things. But she understands me, and relies on me to give her ‘organised facts’ extracted from our IT estate so that she can do whatever planning /persuasion is required. We are different in our capabilities and interests, but respect each other’s talents. In many ways she’s one of the best managers I’ve worked for, and she was no ‘diversity hire’.
Interest, talent and effort. Three ingredients for a successful career in any field.
An ‘under-representation’ of women (or men) in any field is likely to be due a lack of one of these, most likely the first. The vast majority of women I have met in my working life have not lacked the latter two.
‘Power shift’ needed to improve gender balance in energy research, report says.
charles the moderator / 5 hours ago June 17, 2019
University of Exeter
“Power shift” needed to improve gender balance in energy research, report says.
Where’s the problem – re-install Rajendra Pachauri as IPCC boss and numbers of female researchers with experiences of academic life will skyrocket.
Power shift indeed. This reminded me of the following gem:
Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions,” reads the paper’s abstract. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography in January. – See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2016/03/08/feds-paid-709000-to-academic-who-studies-how-glaciers-are-sexist/#sthash.hgfAs8Av.dpuf
These people would never earn a living in the real world
Back in the day Exeter Uni, formerly the School of Mines, was pretty much at the end of the line for those desperate to gain University admission. Not so now, since every twopenny ha’penny Technical Collage opted to morph into a Uni, its standing has improved greatly. Probably the same phenomenon that Will Rogers referred to regarding the movement of Okies and increments in general IQ levels.
Fact is, that as in the USA, Universities need to promote themselves, and gender imbalance is one of this seasons big flavours 🙂
I didn’t realise one’s sex organs were relevant to energy research . I just want qualified people doing it thanks. BTW I am female
This “study” has all the usual features of pseudo-scholarly reports feminist ideologues write all the time.
For example, we have the usual tacit assumptions, like:
– A group of people are “underrepresented” in a given area of human activity if proportion of people from that group participating in that activity is lower than that group’s proportion of the general population.
– “Underrepresentation” is proof of society-wide injustice.
– The observed difference between the male to female ratio in a given area of human activity and the male to female ratio in the general population is the result of systemic sexist discrimination against women.
– In the absence of this presumed systemic sexist discrimination, the male to female ratio in the given area of human activity under examination would match the male to female ratio in the general population.
We also get the usual explicit assumptions, like:
– It is self-evidently a problem – even a serious problem – whenever the percentage of women in some area of human activity that feminist ideologues have taken an interest in is smaller than the percentage of women in the general population.
– Where such areas of human activity have been identified, immediate corrective intervention to bring the male to female ratio in that activity in line with the male to female ratio in the general population is self-evidently justified on moral and other grounds. [Note that female overrepresentation is rarely, if ever, a problem.]
And of course, the argument being put forward is reliant on things like:
– Selective use of statistics without other information that would put them in their proper context (for example, as researchers, women as a group have been found to be less productive and less likely to make major contributions to their field than their male counterparts).
– Ignoring biology and how it systematically has driven and continues to drive consistent population level differences all over the world between men and women (many of which have been observed in other primates) in terms of their interests, their career choices and their time use preferences.
To me, the holes in the arguments put forward in these kinds of pseudoscholarly “studies ” are wide enough that a ship could sail through them. I’m in a perpetual state of shock at how frequently people who should be intelligent and knowledgeable to spot them continue to take this formulaic grievance mongering seriously.
My first thoughts were ‘Hang on, the claim is that woman get less research grants than men, does this have anything to do with woman maybe releasing pointless papers?’
So I looked into this paper authored by Julie, Jess and Basia, and discovered that the opening line of the Ex Summary was “As the UK parliament declares a climate emergency…”
Now this is actually deliberately misleading. The UK parliament has NOT declared a climate emergency. The UK parliament has agreed to debate the issue. Deliberately misleading.
Also completely unrelated to the topic being discussed. You are debating gender balance within science. Are the authors suggesting that if the earth magically became a Gaia World then gender balance would not be a discussion point?
That is the opening line and they are already completely off topic, and, getting back to my original comment on this issue, a group of female authors complain that female authors are not being awarded the same study grants, and THEN open their discussion by being deliberately misleading?
Yeah… Maybe there is a reason the grants are lower…
“The study revealed that women are still significantly under-represented in energy research and application rates from women are low.”
Indeed, and they always will be as long as men and women are free to pursue their interests. Because men tend to (on average) prefer things over people and women tend to (on average) prefer people over things. That is why the interest in technical fields (Engineering, Programming, Physics, etc) is roughly 80/20 in favor of men, while social fields (Teaching, Nursing, Veterinary Science) is roughly 80/20 in favor of women.
“It also found that grants applied for and awarded to women tend to be of smaller value, when they do apply female academics are equally and sometimes more likely to be funded than male academics.”
So, effectively, there is sexism…. in favor of women, in that they are more likely to get grants than men.
This kind of lunacy must be pointed out and ridiculed at every opportunity.
When “reports” like this are issued, I wish someone would do surveys of young men and women who plan on going to college and see which fields of study each gender is most interested in. If the young males show greater interest in energy research, hard science and engineering fields than the young women, it would be fascinating to see how the authors of this “report” would react to it.
It apparently never occurs to these holier-than-thou academic SJWs that the gender-based differences in academic interest shown in the surveys (if they indeed exist) might have nothing to do with societal injustice. Perhaps it is simply a difference in the ways the two genders view their role in the world. Is that difference a product of social inequality or injustice? Or is it just biological or genetic? Perhaps it is a consequence of human evolution through the ages? Who knows? How long have we Homo Sapiens been walking the Earth anyway?
I realize that my line of reasoning here probably condemns me to eternal Hell for heresy in the eyes of the SJW holier-than-thou academics behind this report. I couldn’t care less if I tried. If the SJW pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction, it is perhaps high time that it gets pointed out. There are plenty of lines in life that probably should not be crossed.
“..significant drop-off’ between the number of female PhD students and funded researchers – meaning the sector loses a substantial pool of potential talent at an early stage.”
Maternity leave & career interruptions remain a major barrier to women ascending the ladder to corporate and academic leadership based upon meritocracy. Providing women with an extra bump for whatever reason would mean that leadership is a process of social accommodations. Aside from a few weak individuals, the process will remain contentious .
Women working themselves into leadership positions will still require that they are observed to have “earned” it. That will take a long time. Some women will do it, just not at the speed the politically correct crowd can expect.
Engineering concepts are a lot like the Spanish language. Everything has a gender. A male end fits inside a female end. Hell, I learned this when working on farm equipment with Grandpa. I was the tool getter and sometimes the tool retriever when something dropped into a tight space (see what I mean?). Once, Grandpa asked me to go get the pecker. I eventually learned that a pecker was a stiff cylindrical brush used, among other purposes, to clean off battery terminals. It had a cover that screwed onto the pecker to protect the brush when tossed into the tool box. The cover was also lined with brushes that also cleaned terminals. Neat little tool. Pecker. Lol!
You would think there would be a 50/50 gender split. All the stuff they get to work on usually does!
I’m all for equality of opportunity. Equality of outcomes requires draconian interventions such as turning away men because their quota is filled and bribing women to press them into icky engineering. This would really happen if ‘progressives’ had their way.
One other solution is to increase the social engineering profession. Girls would at least be dealing with an interest in people rather than things. I’m sure they would come up with something nice for men.
The “too many white girls next-door” argument to rationalize diversity. Gender? Sex? Some other color judgment?
Actually men have made a total bollixup of energy under the Gang Green plan the last few decades. Maybe women energy researchers could make a name for themselves by pronouncing the mess will be cleaned up and sensible shiny new cheap fossil fuel fired plants will replace it it all.
It is certain that this no-ball exercise is going to fail miserably because it doesn’t accept the well established differences in psychology . Women are pretty well liberated, at least the ones I know, and there has been no noticeable change in the mix re STEM. Discrimmination is “progressing” against white (i.e. toxic) males, though. If I understand it, this group went on an evil rampage and created The Age of Enlightenment. Not satisfied, we moved on to roll out devil machines of two or three Industrial Revolutions.
I’ve argued in my own defence that I didn’t even invent the wheel, or even copy one. I’ve just enjoyed the fruits of it all like everybody else.
So where was the outrage when Judith Curry was driven out of climate science by men?
Diversity in everything but thought – the thing that actually matters in science.
Gender quotas in objective truth. How ardently communist.
Not even hyperbolic here, this is Marxism 101