Organizations need to get early career researchers to the “table”

A new Nature Careers News Article, “How junior scientists can land a seat at the leadership table” by Kendall Powell, discusses the important role early career researchers can play in the leadership of research organizations.

Nature Careers takes a very deliberate stance of writing things from the perspective of how early career researchers can take action themselves. This is a topic that I’ve been involved with for quite some time, but my perspective focuses on the other direction - how organizations can take advantage of the vast pool of talented early career researchers that can help their organization. So I have a few points that this article raised in my mind that I want to discuss: the absence of such positions for early career researchers; the number and rate of turnover of these positions; the somewhat closed network of ECRs involved in this positions; and an important topic realized by my colleague Dr. Prachee Avasthi on Twitter yesterday - the problematic (in many ways) pushback that early career researchers should be “focusing on their science”. Finally, I want to warn about the dangers of tokenism.

The absence of “seats at the table”

The Nature Careers article refers to the anecdotal increase in participation of early career researchers in leadership positions, and rightly suggests that ECRs should seek such opportunities out. But a number of the examples cited in the article are self-created - such as my own former home at Future of Research, as well as other initiatives such as PREReview - and a self-created organization in the research ecosystem is a very different beast to a traditional and establishment entity, such as a professional society, including early career researchers on its board.

Back at Future of Research we did a lot of work aiming to increase such positions, starting with professional societies, and my colleagues published a paper looking at a small number of societies who had such positions, and what that looked like, in eLife: “Research Culture: Why scientific societies should involve more early-career researchers“. While there are a small number of societies, publishers and funding agencies that have included early career researchers in their power structures, this is still not a standard setup.

This, in part, is why so many grassroots efforts get started. Certainly at Future of Research, the origin of the first meeting was based on the premise that there was a need to communicate early career voices that were not being included in these conversations. But a self-organized group of early career researchers is still somewhat on the outside, or requires buy-in, from establishment organizations. This requires action on the part of organizations to recognize the importance of having representation from their stakeholder groups. Importantly, this may require “dismantling” the “table” at which people sit and make decisions. Many traditional power structures may be inequitable, and in need of replacement, for example in how service work and labor is disproportionately distributed.

An ECR may be at “the table” for life - but not as an ECR

Early career researchers become mid-career researchers become late career researchers. The addition of ECRs to a committee should not just happen once - as the people in those positions progress in their careers, they become further away from the issues facing the people they initially represented. These people can of course be retained on committees, but there should be a continual process of recruiting new early career members to committees. I see this as particularly important at a time when I and my peers are not only aging away from early career status, but also have not been working in early career positions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The world of a graduate student or postdoc is likely very different to that which I and my colleagues experienced, and organizations need to appreciate this fact and ensure they seek out these perspectives immediately.

Take care to avoid a “young boys” network

At one point several years ago, I joked to Dr. Jessica Polka (at ASAPbio) that people must think we were the only postdocs in the U.S., because of how many people were reaching out to us for our opinion or participation on committees. It was really because we were easily identifiable as people speaking out in this community - who also, I should add, came from elite institutional backgrounds and reminded some senior people of their younger selves. Obviously, this has the clear potential to bias what people hear about from the ECR community, and can exclude voices that needed to be heard.

In reading the Nature Careers article, I was acutely aware that I personally know most of the people mentioned or referred to within it. The network of ECRs involved in these efforts is, perhaps unsurprisingly, well-connected with each other - but in an article that calls for greater self-selection of ECRs into these positions, it’s important to remember that we should also be ensuring that we also seek out perspectives that may not necessarily come forward.

There is a diverse range of ECR voices out there to hear from and who are well-known; it’s not clear to me that those in charge are making the best effort to listen to them. And it’s very important that any young voices added are not just those from the same labs and institutions that the senior voices come from. The academy will not be fixed simply by having more early career voices on committees, if the voices are simply those who are continuing to benefit from the status quo. And believe me, some of the worst things I have heard against fixing this broken system have come out of the mouths of the privileged postdoc.

Paternalism

The most frequent reason I hear against this is that we can’t burden young people who need to focus on their careers. I urge folks to stop the well-intentioned but paternalistic urge to do this and let. them. decide. https://t.co/waHpJD16kU

— Prachee Avasthi (@PracheeAC) April 13, 2021

As Dr. Avasthi points out, one of the key retorts that we hear is that early career people “need to focus on their science” and so shouldn’t be serving on committees. As stated above - this is paternalistic. But there’s also other signals at play. There’s the admission that the academy doesn’t value this work in advancing people’s careers. The academy may overtly not value this work, but this was a stark lesson that helped me to decide to exit the academy, and seek out spaces where work like this is valued.

But there’s more. There’s another layer, where we pretend that the way to get an academic position is through merit and “science” alone - working at the bench, and publishing papers - whereas, in any profession, it is true that your network is key in advancing your career. And what better way to advance your career than to be on first-name terms with the Great and the Good of your field in your professional society committees? The idea that sitting on a committee next to well-known scientists is somehow detrimental to an academic career (if you want one, and indeed my experience is that while many who sit on committees are exploring their way out, others are just as determined to stay in the academy) is, to me, quite laughable. But the paternalism shouldn’t be ignored, for a very important reason: tokenism.

Tokenism

At all costs, early career researchers should avoid sitting on committees where they will be a token addition. This can be even worse than not having an early career researcher on the committee at all, because it gives the illusion of caring, pays lip-service to the idea that the organization is inclusive. I myself recently resigned from a committee for this precise reason, and I can personally attest to the great disappointment there is in carrying out a lot of work, and speaking up regularly, only to be ignored. Disagreement and debate with what I said would have been fine - it’s important to clarify that people don’t have to agree with what I say - but many times I would speak up, or speak out over email, and there would be silence or, in one case, a reply to an early email that chose to completely ignore my input. Added to that, numerous projects into which I had dedicated effort, and asked for help, and received no response or nothing was taken forward from my effort, and I realized that it was simply an entity that was draining my energy, and my efforts could be put to better use elsewhere. A warning to take care when stepping into committee roles!

More work to do

In short, as ever, I believe there is more work to do in making the participation of early career researchers normal in the top of research organizations - it is far from being the default. For more on this topic, I again recommend the Future of Research paper in eLife: “Research Culture: Why scientific societies should involve more early-career researchers“. Please feel free to leave comments below!