What makes a good day at work?

There has been considerable interest in the literature in happiness in the workplace. We already know quite a bit about what makes one person happier than another, but we have very little understanding of what researchers call 'episodic happiness': what makes one day (or one episode) better than another. This is potentially a really useful area to explore. The factors that make one person happier than another at work are generally fairly stable, and a high level of job satisfaction is down, in large part, to the characteristics of the individual - there are simply some people who enjoy work more than others. Whilst this is of course interesting, it's not very useful, because there isn't much we can do about it. An exploration of what makes one day better than another, however, puts the spotlight on the external factors - the things we might be able to change. If we can find some common themes, then this could be a great starting point for organisations trying to improve the work-experiences of their employees. 

A couple of years ago one of our students, Natasha, conducted a study into what makes a good day at work. It was this that piqued my interest in the topic, and this year the whole cohort of students helped me to collect some qualitative data exploring this topic. The students interviewed 40 adults, currently working in the UK about their jobs, and asked each of them to describe two different good days at work and reflect on what made them so good. 

The analysis of the data revealed three key findings. Good days involve i) making positive contributions,ii)  having positive relationships, and iii) a boost to self-esteem. 

Positive Contribution: what I do
A positive contribution is focused on the content of the participants' work, and at its best, involved people working hard and achieving a lot of useful stuff. This was the most dominant of all the themes and could be seen in every single narrative.

Central to a positive contribution usually was a tangible achievement, as people really enjoyed seeing the fruits of their labour or making clear progress towards a goal. These achievements tended to be particularly satisfying if the project was hard, beset with challenges, daunting or if the success was unexpected. It's interesting to see that (almost) the worse the project is, the more people gain from finishing it. 

People also found their work more rewarding if they could see its value - either working on projects that they believe are important, or through seeing that their work had a positive impact on others. The last feature of 'a positive contribution was feeling productive. The good days identified by the participants were often described as long, tiring or busy days, and people said that feeling worn out at the end of a day made them feel they had been productive. This was also seen in the number of people who spoke about the satisfaction they got from being able to cross things off their to-do lists. 

Positive Relationships: who I am with
It will come as no surprise to hear that other people featured prominently in people's good days. 
Participants enjoyed the opportunity to connect with others, both catching up with colleagues and making connections with new people. As well as social relationships, people reported enjoying collaborating with colleagues, working together on projects, or just being with others who shared the same values, mindset or goals. Finally, the idea of support came up frequently in the narratives: people's good days often included either feeling supported by others, or having the opportunity to support others. 

Positive Self-Evaluations: how I feel about myself
Two thirds of the participants' good days involved an incident that boosted their self-esteem. This theme never appeared on its own in the narratives - it seems that on its own, a boost to self-esteem isn't enough to make a good day, but it is much appreciated alongside another positive incident. Sometimes, these were moments when they realised that they were learning things, were actually pretty good at the job, or had achieved something quite tricky. More often, these moments were linked to feedback from others. Feedback was appreciated from every quarter, with participants quoting positive feedback from co-workers, clients, patients, pupils and their parents. But most impact came from being praised (particularly publicly)  by their managers. In fact, even just being noticed by managers seemed to give participants a positive boost. 

So what can we take from this?

• Managers should feel ok keeping staff busy. People enjoy working hard, so giving people extra work (within reason!) is not necessarily a bad thing. Taking on difficult or daunting tasks reap particular rewards, so should not be avoided. 
• A detailed to-do list, and an opportunity at the end of the day to tick things off and reflect on everything we have achieved might well help us to feel more productive.
• In terms of relationships, there are good things to be gained from social connections, so we should all be making time to talk to our colleagues (or clients, or students, or stakeholders) about non-work things. Managers should encourage this kind of informal interaction and support workers developing personal relationships with each other. 
• Finding ways to boost our own or others' self-esteem is important. Obviously giving workers the training and support they need will make sure that they are more likely to learn, develop their skills and expertise, and succeed in their projects. But on top of this, a culture of praise and specifically public praise can be a great way to offer extra ego-boosts to staff. Senior managers can help substantially here, as praise from them carries particular weight, and managers should remember that even just attention and engagement with their staff can make a huge difference. But it's everyone's job to help with this - giving positive feedback to anyone, whenever we can is going to help. 

And what's next?

There are lots of theories which try to account for well-being more broadly, although they haven't generally been used to help us understand episodic happiness. One of the most well-known is Seligman's PERMA model (2011) which suggests that well-being is made up of: 
Positive emotions - that's probably most similar to self-esteem in this study
Engagement - this wasn't really explicit in this study, although perhaps is linked to productivity
Relationships  - as above
Meaning - that emerged as part of 'making a contribution'
Accomplishment - closely linked to the 'positive contributions' from this study. 

So, this study does a good job of showing that Seligman's model might apply to one-off episodes at work as well as broader life experiences, but as a qualitative study, we can't be sure that we can generalise this to a wider range of people. Perhaps that should be my next study?

What kind of shoes does a social worker wear? And does it matter?

I’ve just had a paper published which describes some research about prototypical social identities – the image that we conjure up in our minds’ eyes when we think about a ‘typical’ member of a particular profession.

As a society, we have become quite wary of stereotypes. We know that they can be inaccurate and can foster discrimination and so we try to eradicate them. But actually, stereotypes are a very natural and normal part of human cognition. Our brains have developed all sorts of mechanisms to maximise the amount of information they can process, and minimise the amount of effort this takes. Stereotypes are one such mechanism and whilst it is clearly wrong to set too much store by them, it’s important to recognise that they are inevitable, and therefore I think we need to learn a bit more about them.

The study

I gathered some students together for some focus groups (24 psychology undergraduates in four focus groups) and asked them to close their eyes and imagine a typical member of four different professions: primary teacher, organisational psychologist, clinical psychologist and social worker. I then asked me to describe these prototypes. Their stories were fascinating.

The first surprising thing was the amount of detail my participants were able to give me. I was keen to push them to see how far they could go with their descriptions. Although they were a bit slow to start, once they got warmed up, they were able to give me all sorts of details about their prototypical characters. They told me what their prototypes looked like, what they wore, what their homes were like, how they spent their holidays, their weekends, their money, who they were living with, what their children were like, what they ate, what they drank, etc etc etc.. I pushed them hard but they met me step for step, and I couldn’t find a question they weren’t able to answer. How amazing to think that they all had this wealth of data about these professions, lurking in the back of their minds!

The second strange thing was that they seemed much more fluent when talking about their imagined prototypes outside work, than in work. A couple of them voiced concerns at the start about their lack of knowledge about the jobs – they said that they didn’t know what an organisational psychologist was, so weren’t sure that they would be able to contribute to the discussions. I told them not to worry, but just to close their eyes and see what came up. And despite not knowing any details about the job itself, they were able to tell me that their imagined organisational psychologist lived in Clapham, had a golden retriever, enjoyed skiing, lived with someone who worked in finance and liked a cocktail bar. It was intriguing to me that these personal stories could be so vivid, when the knowledge of the job itself was so shaky.

The prototypes described seemed to be based on a mix of societal stereotypes and personal experiences. There were clearly some characteristics that the participants’ images of the different professions had in common: the clinical psychologists were intelligent and a bit quirky; the social workers were warm, had clear left-wing values, and lived in slightly shabby homes, and they wore comfortable shoes - this came up surprisingly often. These aspects felt like socially-shared stereotypes, shared by many of the participants and probably influenced by things that we all have access to - the media, fictional characters from tv, films and books, and cultural stereotypes. But the participants’ also described some particular characteristics which seemed specific to them and were based on their own individual experiences – some spoke about primary teachers they remembered from their school days, and psychologists they themselves had met, and they clearly drew on their own experiences when imagining their prototypical professionals.

One final interesting thing was that the particular features of the prototypes described seemed to be clearly linked to personality characteristics. The comfortable shoes, slightly shabby sofas and hearty casseroles of the social workers all seemed to conjure up a warm personality. The colourful accessories and off-the-beaten-track holidays of the clinical psychologists sounded quirky. The dungarees, the karaoke and the comedy tv programmes illustrated the primary teachers’ playful nature.

So why do we care?

It seemed then that the participants had a vast wealth of knowledge about each of these professions, hidden slightly below their consciousness: they didn’t always know that they had this knowledge, but with a few questions and just a little bit of focused attention, they were easily able to bring it to the forefront of their minds. I think it’s inevitable that this information will have an impact on their career choices. How could it not? If they think of themselves as a warm person, they are bound to be more drawn to a profession whose prototype they see as warm. If they like the idea of being seen as a playful person, they are going to be more enthusiastic about choosing a profession they associate with this characteristic.

The career guidance profession is rightly concerned that people should be making their career choices on the basis of up to date, accurate and relevant careers information. Of course this is important. But if people are using their own prototypical ideas to inform their opinions, then we need to be aware of that, so that we can draw this information out, and get them to scrutinise it. If they can identify their own preconceptions, work out where their ideas have come from, and consider whether the information is accurate or relevant, then we can help them to base their decisions on the right kind of information. If we ignore the fact that our clients have a vast array of existing information then we are allowing it to influence their choices, regardless of whether it is accurate, up to date or relevant.

My suggestions might lead to some unusual career conversations, which could touch on some topics that have traditionally been outside the typical carer guidance remit. But that’s no reason to avoid them. If it helps clients to explore their ideas fully, then surely it’s worth a try?

The paper

Yates, J. & Cahill, S. (2019). The characteristics of prototypical occupational identities: a grounded theory of four occupations. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. Online first. 10.1080/03069885.2019.1706154

University Students' Career Dilemmas - Part 1 The Autumn Term

I'm involved with a study that is trying to find out what issues and dilemmas clients bring to career practitioners. I think it's a bit surprising that no-one has done this before, because I think it's really important. Of course, anecdotally, we all have some kind of sense of the questions we most often face from clients, and there is some decision literature which gives us a starting point. But I don't think anyone has done any kind of rigorous analysis until now! 

I'm working with university careers services, finding out about the issues that they discuss in careers interviews and have now had a go at analysing the first set of data from the autumn term. The advisers involved were each allocated a week during the term, and were asked to record the details of every interview they did during that week. We've got data about 249 individual one to one interviews with 24 qualified careers advisers based in 10 universities across the UK.  It should provide us with an interesting snapshot of what was going on. 

What did we find?

The careers interviews this term took place between September 15th and December 15th and lasted on average averaged 27 minutes. This is longer than I might have anticipated, and shows that the longer careers interview is still alive and kicking. Clients were mostly female (60%) and about evenly split between UK and non-UK. More than half the clients were undergraduates (58%) with 26% post-grad students and 15% graduates. 

1. Client issues are complex

The client dilemmas were generally complex, with each client bringing on average four different issues to the interview. Even those just asking for help with their application forms were generally complex with 80% of students bringing CVs to check had at least one other issue. This is interesting - I wonder what this means for some of the cost-cutting approaches we are seeing at the moment such as using untrained graduate students or computer programmes to help with CV checks, online guidance and shorter interviews? 

2. Lack of information and anxiety were the two most common types of query

The most common issues which arose during the term were those to do with information, with over 50% of clients specifically wanting information about applying for jobs. This is perhaps to be expected, particularly in the autumn term when so many students are applying for training schemes. More interesting, and troubling, was the finding that over 1/3rd of the clients were displaying clear anxiety, generally about the uncertainty of the process, but also significant numbers who were worrying about the outcome of the process and comparisons with their friends. This interests me because I'm not wholly convinced that we usually train our career practitioners to manage anxiety - perhaps this is something we need to consider for the future. Low confidence and lack of self awareness were also fairly common issues.

3. Practitioners found nearly half of the interviews challenging

The other interesting thing we asked the practitioners, is to make a note of any particular issues they found difficult. Practitioners found 57% of the interviews straightforward, and struggled with 43%. I feel this is quite a high proportion, although I guess it's good to be challenged in your work. 

4. Most difficult issues are clients expecting the practitioner to tell them what to do and clients with low confidence

The career dilemma that practitioners found challenging most often was clients' unrealistic views of how to make decisions, in particular, clients who thought that the adviser would be able to tell them what to do. This will be familiar territory for all advisers working in higher education but perhaps this finding highlights clearly that we need to make sure that practitioners are equipped with the skills to handle it effectively. Practitioners also found it difficult to deal with clients who were struggling with external conflicts (for example, those who disagreed with their parents as to the right course for them to pursue), and those who were low in confidence. External conflicts didn't come up that often during the term (in only 6% of the interviews), but practitioners found nearly half of these instances difficult. Low confidence was a more common issue, seen in 20% of the clients. 

5. Least challenging are interviews which focus on information 

At the other end of the scale, practitioners tended to find interviews which focused on careers information easiest, with only 8% of the interviews about the job hunting process (including CVs), and 4% of those focused on how to research options rated as challenging. Whether these are perceived as straightforward because they are, or because they come up so frequently, so advisers are very skilled at dealing with these issues was not examined. 

So what do we do with all of this?

Some interesting findings so far. I think I'm most struck by the high proportion of our clients who are struggling with anxiety. Mental ill-health is a hot topic in Higher Education in the UK - we know that students find university life hard. But it's quite stark to see how many of them are finding career development problematic. I wonder if this is an interesting one for careers services to consider. Might it be possible to offer more support for this psychological side of the careers process?
It was also interesting to note that practitioners found nearly half of the sessions challenging in some way, and I wonder if we need to think about how to make sure we equip ourselves to deal with some of these most challenging issues. 

What next?

We will get more data coming in throughout the year and I will report back on the findings as we go.

'As a man it's easier': a qualitative study into the experiences of women engineers in the UK

I've blogged before about the challenges facing the engineering industry as it tries to create a more diverse workforce, and we know that women are more reluctant to enter the profession and quicker to leave it. Previous studies suggest that one of the key reasons for women's dissatisfaction with their jobs is that they are frustrated with their career progression, feeling that the are not being as well paid, as quickly promoted or as valued, as they deserve. 

We wanted to find out a bit more about what was going on here, so interviewed 50 women working in one global engineering firm based in the UK, to find out about their career development experiences. We asked them how it felt to be working in a male-dominated environment, what impact they felt that their gender had on their career development, and how they accounted for the gender pay gap in their organisation. 

Before I describe the key findings, I need first to introduce the Intelligent Career Framework. This was developed by Arthur, Claman and Fillippi back in 1995, and offers advice on how to navigate your career. According to this framework, you can really enhance your chances of career success through Knowing How, Knowing Whom and Knowing Why. Knowing How is about your actual work-related skills - do you have what it takes to do the job well? Knowing Whom is all about your networks - do you know people who can advise and inform you, and who will put career enhancing opportunities your way? Finally Knowing Why is all about motivation - being clear about your career goals and your professional identity and having the drive to work hard. High levels of all three Knowings combine to give an individual the best chance of career success. 

And trawling through our women's interviews, it became clear that for each of the three Knowings, women were disadvantaged. 

Knowing How: This one is about having the right skills to do the job, and whilst the women we spoke to all were highly skilled and competent, they found that their skills were not give the same value as their male counterparts'. The participants talked about the assumptions which they saw all over the place that showed that women had a lower status than men in the organisation. Women's achievements were devalued (she only got that promotion because she was flirting with the boss / they wanted to promote a woman); feminine characteristics were devalued (empathy, emotions and sensitivity were looked down on); and women were assumed to be less capable than their male peers (women were asked to do lower level tasks than their male colleagues). The examples given were often quite subtle, but the message was clear: although women were just as capable as their male peers, their skills and abilities were always considered to be a bit inferior.

Knowing Whom: This one is about social capital, and when it came to developing useful networks, we found that men seemed to have two advantages over women. The first was that the men seemed to be a bit more comfortable putting themselves forward. They tended to talk more at meetings, brag about their achievements a bit more and ask for promotions and pay rises more often, so they generally did a better job of making themselves known. The second advantage was to do with friendships. The women talked about how much easier it is to make same-sex friendships, and they could see that the men were more likely to share common interests and just felt more comfortable with each other than they did with women. There was a lot of talk about the banter in the office, which cemented the men's friendships, but risked sounding flirtatious when it was seen between men and women. The men weren't trying to exclude the women, it was just that they more naturally gravitated to other men, and in such a male-dominated organisation, this meant that they had plenty of opportunity to build good relationships with a large number of influential colleagues. 

Knowing Why: This one is about motivation, and only started to be problematic for women once they because mothers. At the heart of the problem are two ideologies - two ideas or templates, of an 'ideal'. The ideal mother (according to our current Western culture) is one who is always available for and devoted to her children. The ideal worker (according to this organisation) is one who is always available for and devoted to the organisation. You can immediately see then how this puts mothers in an impossible situation: they simply can't be the ideal mother and the ideal worker: something has to give. The women we spoke to explained that they made the choice to leave work on time to pick up their children, they accepted calls from the school when their children were ill, and they sometimes choose to work part time. This all meant that the organisation got the message that they were less than 100% committed to their organisation, and so were less keen to put career enhancing opportunities their way. 

So with lower value accorded to their abilities, less chance of developing useful networks, and conflicting motivations for mothers, the women were disadvantaged on all three aspects of the Intelligent Career Framework. No wonder they found negotiating their careers an uphill struggle.

The framework was intended as a tool to help people to work out how to navigate their own careers, and assumes that it's down to the individuals to put the effort in, and that people are in control of their own career destinies. This study suggests that the problems are far more entrenched than that. Think about the example of conflicting ideologies: where do these ideologies come from? Of course workers don't need to be 100% devoted to their organisation to make an excellent professional contribution. It is quite possible to do an excellent job at work, but still feel that your children come first; but as soon as you make your dual loyalties apparent to your employer, they assume that your commitment to work has plummeted to zero. And there are many different ways to be a good mother - who is to say that the idea of total devotion is the right one? But these ideologies are deeply entrenched, and embedded within individuals, organisations and the whole of society. It's just not as easy as suggesting that these women should Lean In a bit more. 

So, what can be done?

One obvious solution is to make sure that the culture reflects the policies. In the organisation we were looking at, there are many good policies in place to support career development, to ensure that selection for promotion is fair, and to allow for flexible working and shared parental leave. In practice though, the culture did not support the policies. In reality, the systems for promotion were opaque, so the senior men could promote their (male) friends without anyone noticing; the family friendly policies sound great on paper, but in practice, women were penalised for taking advantage of them, and men certainly don't feel that they are encouraged to take paternity leave or work part time. A culture shift is not easy to manage, but it would certainly make a difference. 

Women in Engineering

The under-representation of women in engineering is well documented. 11% of the engineering workforce is female (WISE Campaign, 2017; Women in STEM Workforce) but only 5% of the registered engineers and technicians are female (Engineering UK, 2015). Women are less likely than men to join the profession and more likely than men to leave it, with half of female engineering graduates pursuing careers outside the discipline, and women engineers being more likely to leave the workforce and go elsewhere than men. And crucially, this is not changing. Despite decades of effort and hard work, nothing seems to have made much of a difference and the proportion of women studying and working in engineering has not materially increased in the last two decades.  

So what's going on?

1. Women don't become engineers

The first problem is that women and girls don't enter the field of engineering.

Girls don't think they will be good at engineering, maths and physics, despite the clear evidence that girls are as talented in these quantitative subjects as boys. Girls also don't think they'll fit in within these fields. The stereotype of engineering is that it is dirty, physical, masculine and full of men. Girls just can't see themselves fitting in (Wang & Degol, 2013). Compounding the assumptions that girls make about themselves, are the assumptions that everyone else makes on their behalf, with teachers, parents and friends all echoing the same message, that girls and engineering don't mix, and not giving girls the same levels of encouragement to pursue these subjects (Tomorrow's Engineers' Week).

2. Female engineering students don't always become professional engineers

The second trouble spot comes after university.  About 20% of engineering students in the UK are women, but these undergraduates are less likely than their male counterparts to look for jobs as engineers once they have graduated. Women and men studying engineering claim they are equally likely to look for jobs in engineering, but twice the proportion of male grads go into the field than female (Diversity in Engineering, WES, 2014; Xu, 2014). Seron, Silbey, Cech and Rubinean (2016) explored this in a bit more depth, tracking women engineering students from entry to graduation. They found that everyday sexism during informal interactions both at college and during internships makes women feel they won't fit. 

3. Women engineers are more likely to leave the profession than men

Then finally, women who make it through to embarking on a career in engineering are more likely than men to leave the profession. Frehill, (2012) showed that female engineers were more likely than men to leave engineering for another career and Hunt (2015), showed that women leave engineering far more quickly that other areas of science, or other male dominated spheres such as economics or architecture. 

A host of reasons, structural, cultural, individual and contextual reasons have been put forward to explain why women leave.

The engineering industry doesn't seem very family friendly there seems to be very little opportunity for flexible working and the hours are long, and some authors suggest this might explain why so many women leave (Buse, et al., 2013; Kahn & Ginther, 2015). There certainly does seem to be a dip in the number of women working in engineering after they have children, but other fields such as medicine and law also have similar working cultures and fewer women seem to exit these professions, so on its own this explanation isn't enough. 

I have come across three studies which compare women who have stayed in engineering with those who have left. Buse et al., (2013) conducted a qualitative study of 10 ex-engineers and 20 current engineers and found that those who stayed tended to have higher levels of self-efficacy than those who left, although this finding has not been shown elsewhere (eg Fouad et al., 2016). Buse's study suggests another reason, that the women who leave are those who can't see how they can navigate their careers in the field. This issue was also spotted in two large-scale quantitative studies conducted in the US, comparing female engineers who left the profession with those who stayed. Fouad et al. (2015) and Hunt (2015) both found that the women who left engineering had a much less positive view about their career development within engineering, the opportunities for increased pay, promotion and general organisational support and didn't feel that their contributions were particularly valued. 

4. Women don't progress as well in engineering -pay and seniority (Xu, 2015)
Women who stay in engineering report having to contend with an alien and unwelcoming masculine culture, putting up with what are described as micro-aggressions on a daily basis. These micro-aggressions include social undermining and workplace hostility, harassment, sexist behaviour, marginalisation and isolation (Ayre, Mills & Gill, 2013; Fouad, Fitzpatrick & Liu, 2011). Faulkner, through an observation study, notes that engineers are generally a respectful bunch, but saw many subtle examples of behaviour which just make it a little bit easier for men to build relationships and fit in, noting in particular the typically masculine conversation topics, and sexualised and sexist banter. Faulkner gives the example of greetings: men greet each other using male language (such as 'hey man') and shake hands with each other, but don't do either of these things with women. Those small subtle intimacies are not available for male / female relationships which just means that every day in tiny ways, women are not able to build up the relationships with their male colleagues that men can with each other. On top of this, women are judged more harshly than men, and their colleagues and managers undervalue their achievements and contribution (Hall & Sandler, 1982)

Female engineers develop certain strategies to help them cope with this chilly masculine climate. One of the most common is defeminisation (eg Faulkner, 2009; Powell et al., 2009; Rhoton, 2011), where women adopt masculine behaviours to fit in, distancing themselves from typical feminine behaviours and habits. Miller (2004) in the oil industry gives examples of women who have embraced the masculine culture - almost pretending not to be women in order to get on. Short term this strategy may work for the women involved, but long term this does women no favours, as it reinforces the idea that there is no place for femininity in engineering.

One other interesting response which is seem quite widely in the literature, is women denying that they are on the receiving end of any sexist behaviour. Fouad, Fitzpatrick and Liu, 2011 found that their participants all described gender discrimination but didn't see it as a gender inequity. Rhoton (2011) found that when they did see it, participants saw it as exceptional. Seron, Silbey, Cech and Rubineau (2018) cover similar ground but with engineering students. They found they whilst their female participants recognised that they were being marginalised, they found narratives to explain it away. They blamed themselves, believing in the meritocracy of the industry (I haven't been recognised for my work because it's not good enough, or because I haven't shouted loudly enough), and felt that it was down to them to sort it out.

One thing that women don't seem to want is more female only opportunities; their achievements are undervalued as it is, this just makes it worse. Seron et al., 2018 found that engineering students were quite anti-feminist because they wanted to make it on their own merit. 

So, it seems that we know quite a lot about the career experiences of women in engineering. We know that they don't join, and why they don't join; we know that they leave and why they leave. But whilst we know that one key reason that they leave is because they feel that they are not progressing, we don't know why they don't progress. I wonder if that's the next thing to explore?

References
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Vantieghem, W., Vermeersch, H., & Van Houtte, M. (2014). Why “Gender” disappeared from the gender gap:(re-) introducing gender identity theory to educational gender gap research. Social Psychology of Education, 17(3), 357-381.

Walker, M. (2001). Engineering identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22(1), 75-89.

Ultimately they just think you're dumb: the experiences of female computer scientists in the UK

It is well documented that there is a problem recruiting and retaining women in technology. People talk about a 'leaky pipeline' with girls and women being lost at all stages - the proportion of females gradually reducing through school, university and during work. This is a problem for a country committed to social justice and fair access to opportunities, and for the technology industry, as it is not capitalising on the talents of women. 

We already know a fair bit about what's going on and why this happens. First, women don't get the same levels of early exposure to computers that boys do. Computer games, which are a key route into developing an interest in the field, are developed by, aimed at and played by men and boys. Boys too seem to get more access to computers at school and at home. Second, there is a masculine culture associated with technology-related environments. The stereotypes (which do, to an extent reflect the reality) indicate that technology is a male dominated field, filled with coding-obsessed geeks, where women just don't belong. This is off putting to many women both as they are contemplating their own future careers, and when they actually start their first jobs. Finally, it's confidence. Despite the reality that women and girls are perfectly adept at coding and well able to hold their own academically in this field, women believe that they are less capable than men in this arena. 

A lot of research has been done in this field, but despite all of this understanding and the vast sums of money that have been poured into initiatives to change things, there has been little shift in the proportion of women choosing and sticking in technology. Clearly we are missing something.

My colleague Anke Plagnol and I decided to take another look, a deeper one, to explore the experiences of female computer science students studying in the UK. We found 200 students (male and female) to fill in a survey, and then followed up with in-depth interviews with 20 female students. 

Some of what we found echoes findings we have seen elsewhere: the women have lower confidence than the men; they feel that they are less likely to fit in within the industry, and this seems to make them feel less sure about their career plans. But we were really struck by the extent and strength of the messages that these women had been getting from all angles, all their lives, reinforcing the idea that they are just not cut out for technology.  The participants had been told by their parents, their school teachers, university professors, employers, colleagues, fellow students and even each other, that women's brains just don't work in the right way to succeed in this field. Every one of the women we interviewed had experienced and witnessed multiple incidents where their achievements were undervalued ('you only got that job because you are a girl'; 'they let girls into these courses with lower grades'); their ability questioned ('you won't be able to manage this'; 'perhaps you could ask your [male] colleague to help?') or their ideas dismissed. As one of the women summed up 'ultimately, they just think you're dumb'. 

No wonder this relentless barrage takes its toll on women's confidence and choices. 

The other really interesting thing to emerge from the interviews was that there might be a problem (for some women) with the way that computer science is taught in universities. People, in general, are split into those who are motivated by agency (which means they like to learn independently aiming to master a topic on their own, and are stimulated by competition), or commune (which means they prefer to work collaboratively, learning through being taught and supported by a tutor). In general, men are more likely to be motivated by agency and women by commune. But the computer science classroom is highly agentic. Students are expected to learn things on their own, and are not encouraged to team up, to help each other understand the more complicated ideas, or ask for help from their tutors. Departments too encourage students by setting up competitions. This approach just doesn't suit communal learners (mostly although not exclusively women) who enjoy and gain confidence from working collaboratively, and who need more input from their tutors to feel sure that they are doing the right thing. And the agentic teaching style adopted in computer science classrooms seems to make women feel less enthusiastic about their subject and less confident about their ability to succeed.

But where should this lead us? You might argue that we simply need to make the classrooms more communal, offering more support, and more opportunities for genuine collaboration. But it's not quite as simple as that. Technology evolves at such a pace that the industry needs its workers to be self-directed learners. Making the classrooms less agentic could actually end up doing the students and the industry a disservice. 

But I wonder if it might be possible to find some kind of compromise? One in which students are taught to be self-directive, rather than tutors assuming from the star that they are comfortable with this approach to learning. Students could be given more support at the start, but encouraged to own their own learning, and taught strategies for working things out by themselves. And surely developing skills in collaborative working would be valuable for the industry? So perhaps close collaborations (not just group projects where everyone takes on their own tasks) could be encouraged alongside some of the existing focus on individual competition. 

This suggestion that the pedagogical culture might not suit women as well as men is, I think, a new one and I think is definitely worth pursuing. It would be interesting to see if we could measure the degree of agency within a computer science classroom, and to find out whether we can generalise these findings - is it generally true that computer science classes in fact serving the agentic learners better? And how easy would it be to teach people who are naturally communal learners to be more confident about learning independently?

Relational Frame Theory: a simple summary

I've become a bit interested in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) over the last few months, as I think it might have a lot to offer the careers world. Underpinning ACT is a theory by Steven Hayes, called Relational Frame Theory (RFT). I don't know how vital it is to understand RFT in order to make good use of ACT, but I thought I would have a go. 

RFT is a cognitive behavioural theory, which means that it is interested in the links between thoughts and behaviour. RFT has a reputation for being terribly difficult to understand, but I think that at least some of its key tenets are actually quite intuitive. One challenge is that the literature about RFT uses complex, technical and inaccessible language. It describes itself as an account of arbitrary derived relational responses non-arbitrarily applied. Well, that's clear, isn't it?

Let's start with the idea of relational responses. This is really based on the old notion of associations, but it takes it a bit further. So, an association is when you have an experience which links two things in your mind. At a basic level, you can imagine that the first time you tasted apple pie, you thought it tasted great. You thus established a link between apple pie and deliciousness. But you can go further. Perhaps you spent time during your childhood visiting your Granny in Woking and eating her fabulous apple pie; this may have established a link in your mind, between Woking and the loveliness of apple pie. And even though the chain of associations goes: Woking...Granny...Apple pie...delicious taste, the link between Woking and delicious taste becomes direct for you;  Woking forever becomes a place which warms your heart. And you remember about reinforcement? The more times you had delicious apple pie in Woking, the stronger and more enduring that link between Woking and happy times becomes. 

RFT talks about arbitrary relational responses, which are associations (relational responses) which are not linked to physical properties (ie are arbitrary). This can be illustrated with language as an example: there is 'cat' the animal, 'cat' the collection of sounds that we can produce and hear as the word 'cat', and the written word 'cat', spelled C-A-T. These are three separate things, and the links between them are entirely arbitrary. There is no God-given reason why the letter C should be pronounced the way we say it, or that the animal should be given the name 'cat' - the links are arbitrary, human inventions. But for us, the links have been very well reinforced, and it's almost hard for us to remember that the animal, the written word and the spoken word are three separate things. 

So the idea of relational responses is about two or more things that in your mind are related to each other. The two things linked together are known as a frame, and the relationship between them is defined in different ways, for example, the two things might be considered as equivalent, one might contain the other or one might cause the other.

The idea of derived relational responses means that you can make links between things you haven't actually experienced. For example, you might have been told about a link between two things, and even if you hadn't seen the link for yourselves, you could still internalise the association and make one of your own relational frames. For example, if you are told that tigers are dangerous because they bite, you might be afraid of a tiger, even if you have never actually seen a tiger bite. You have thus established an association (a relational frame) between tiger and fear, even though you had never seen a tiger do anything to frighten anyone. 

As well as these vicarious associations, which you can learn from others. you can also create associations between things based on two different sets of associations. So, if you went to a job interview in Tooting, and the interview went badly, you might develop two associations: job interviews make me feel bad; and; job interviews happen in Tooting,  and this could lead you to believing that therefore Tooting makes me feel bad.

This could then become even more obscure as you might then establish a close link in your mind between Balham and Tooting (two stations next to each other on the tube line) and this then extends the relational frame in this way: job interviews make me feel bad; job interviews happen in Tooting; Tooting is very similar to Balham and therefore Balham makes me feel bad. This is called transformation of stimulus which refers to the process by which one association (Tooting and feeling bad) is applied elsewhere (Balham is similar to Tooting, so Balham also makes me feel bad). 

RFT goes into a fair bit of detail about the different kinds of relationships that can be established between things, and talks about how they are built up. I'm not sure that level of detail is important for those engaging with RFT in order to understand ACT, but it's useful to know they are part of the overall RFT theory. 

One final important aspect of RFT is the idea of cognitive fusion in which thoughts get tied up (fused with) reality and you start believing that your thoughts are in fact literally the same as the truth - the idea that thinking the thought or using the words 'I'm rubbish at interviews'  leads you to believe that this is a true, literal fact. One thing that ACT is really good at, is making people understand that thoughts and words aren't the same as facts: the words are just words, the thoughts are just thoughts - and both these are distinct from the reality of your interview performance. 

References

Blackledge, J. T. (2003). An introduction to relational frame theory: Basics and applications. The Behavior Analyst Today, 3(4), 421.