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It’s (Still) a Mans World!

By Kerry A Kite, on 24 April 2019

Written by Rachel Pearson, 1st year PhD student in the Child Health Informatics Group at GOS ICH, researching unmet healthcare needs among mothers involved in care proceedings. Outside of my PhD I enjoy getting out of London and climbing, biking and hiking (not all at the same time)

A few weeks ago it was International Women’s Day – a day to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women and to raise awareness about issues that affect equality. International Women’s Day was born out of the early women’s rights movement of the 20th century and was eventually adopted by the UN in 1975. Celebrating this day each year helps to spark important discussions about gender-equality, from sexual harassment (in 2017, a YouGov study found that 52% of British women between 18-24 years had experienced sexual harassment in a public place in the last 5 years) to gender imbalance in the workplace (women hold only 10% of executive roles at FTSE 100 companies).

Working in UCL’s Faculty of Population Health Sciences, you may be forgiven for thinking that gender imbalance among UCL’s academic staff is a thing of the past (in fact, we have only two male researchers in our research group of more than 15). Indeed, go up UCL’s departmental hierarchy once more and you’ll find that over 50% of staff in UCL’s School of Life & Medical Sciences are women – so far so good. However, women only make up 37% of grade 9/10 posts in SLMS and just one glance at UCL’s descriptive analysis of the academic pipeline for female researchers in SLMS is enough to see that there is still work needed to combat barriers to career progression for female post-docs (the proportion of female academics drops by more than 50% from post-doc positions to professorships).

UCL Female Academic Pipeline

Source: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-resources/sites/human-resources/files/kwi_april_2018_kwi_report_final.pdf

I’m a statistician by training so, to mark International Women’s Day, I attended an event held by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) – Women in Statistics: Past, Present and Future.

Dr Linda Wijlaars (a senior researcher from the Population, Policy and Practice programme here at ICH) kicked off the event with an engaging talk about Janet Lane-Claypon – the first person to attempt to correct observational data for confounding, to conduct a case-control study and to use a t-test in health research (the t-test was developed in 1908 by William Sealey Gosset, a chemist at Guinness, to compare batches of hops). Lane-Claypon was also one of the first people to hold both an MD and a PhD (making her a Dr-Dr) and used many novel statistical methods for the time such as survival analysis life tables and the Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Despite having studied an MSc in Medical Statistics, where I routinely heard the familiar names of Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll in epidemiology lectures (and one of our lecture theatres was named after John Snow), I had never heard of Janet Lane-Claypon’s work before meeting Dr Wijlaars (it’s particularly disappointing as we had lectures solely on case-control studies and confounding – the perfect opportunities to talk about the person who pioneered these concepts). You can learn more about Janet Lane-Claypon in Dr Wijlaars’ article for the society’s publication ‘Significance’ (https://www.statslife.org.uk/history-of-stats-science/462-can-you-name-a-female-statistician).

Left: Dr Janet Lane-Claypon. Right: Her landmark case-control (and multi-site) study in the field of breast cancer for the Ministry of Health (1926).

The next talk of the evening was given by Professor Deborah Ashby, the current RSS president. Prof Ashby is one of only four women who have held the title (despite the RSS being founded in 1834); she is also the chair of Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials at Imperial College London, the co-director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit and the deputy head of the Imperial School of Public Health. She highlighted that more men named David (and William… and probably a few others) have been RSS president, than women of any name. For the rest of her talk, Prof Ashby took us through her career as a statistician – from getting her undergraduate degree in mathematics to her appointment as the RSS president. Concurrent to her appointments at various universities, institutions and committees, she highlighted the blatant inequality among the recipients of many of the society’s awards (such as the Chambers Medal, the Bradford Hill Medal and the Barnett Award – each with only 20% of awards ever having gone to a woman) and among the society’s current fellows (<10% are women). The Guy Medal in Gold, the RSS award for “lifetime achievement” that has so far had 38 recipients, has never been awarded to a woman, and yet there is no lack of women with expertise in statistics and data science – nor in academia.

 

Former Royal Statistical Society presidents

The remainder of the event was spent discussing the future of women in statistics and data science. Several women gave short talks about their experiences working as a statistician and highlighted several groups that have been created to provide a peer support network for women in statistics and data science. Peer groups are a valuable way to network, spark new ideas and to share advice. Female-only peer groups can also provide a safe space to discuss gender discrimination and issues around equality in the workplace and can be a positive tool to narrowing gender gaps in senior leadership roles. However, women are not a homogeneous group and not all women experience the same obstacles in the workplace. It’s important that peer groups are intersectional and recognise that there are barriers associated with overlapping social identifiers such as race, age, disability, religion and sexuality that can be compounded by those related to gender. Effective peer groups work to boost confidence and, therefore, female-only peer groups can be a positive tool to support more women into senior roles. A few groups mentioned on the night include:

Some other groups that are worth a mention:

For anyone interested in seeing the talks for themselves, the event was filmed and can be found at https://youtu.be/NMAIvv-5z40).