The Paula Principle

Paula learning

Women achieve higher levels of competence than men through education and training

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

The Lonely Crowd and validation

One of my recent interviewees, Margaret, told me how she had just gone for a job interview at a prestigious university.  At the end of the interview she had effectively withdrawn her candidature, in spite of all the advantages and status that the job offered.  She felt intuitively that it would not have allowed her to maintain her identity, or authenticity as a researcher.  Yet the process had been an encouraging one for her, because she felt that it had validated her competences.  I don't think this was just because she had come close to getting the job.  It was also because it had helped her clarify what she felt…
Read More

Why it’s men that should be discussing the PP

I went on Friday to talk about the PP with the sixth form at South Hampstead High School, a single-sex school.  The 60 or so girls engaged with the issues in lively fashion (or so it seemed to me), and I learnt much from the discussion. Towards the end of the discussion one girl observed that I shouldn't really be talking to them, but to boys - and men - instead. How right she is, for two reasons. First, here are the latest UCAS figures on university applications. In England, in 2014, 39.9 per cent of 18 year old women have applied compared with 30.0 per cent of men, making…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

The shrinking (part-time) student

"Part-time students, particularly mature undergraduates, seem to be an invisible and, in national policy terms, poorly understood cohort. "  This is Professor Sir Eric Thomas, introducing a recent UUK report on part-time HE.  The report makes grim reading, for the most part.  Over the past decade or so, whilst full-time undergraduates  have grown considerably (11%), the numbers of part-timers have shrunk, by about 17%. Much of my professional life has been spent promoting lifelong learning in one form or another, and especially part-time learning within universities, so this makes painful reading.  My last full-time job in the UK was with the country's oldest provider of such opportunities, Birkbeck, and I'm…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Swedish skirt solution

My visit to Sweden earlier this week coincided with a great story from there, which made it into several newspapers.  12 male traindrivers were banned from wearing shorts, even in hot weather when their cabs are particularly badly ventilated.  So they turned up in skirts instead - and the company went along with this (it's not said how reluctantly) since to do otherwise would have been discrimination.  The original ban sounds nonsensical, but it's a nice solution.  ( I tried googling for an illustration for this post, but 'man and skirt' led me to adult only sites.) In discussion with a Swedish colleague I raised the question of why jobs are…
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Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
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