"You should work at home in the evenings"

[WhatPostDoc]

This is probably more of a rant. I'm a lab-based post doc, earning approx £36K, contracted 37.5 hours but easily work more (often an hour a day plus sometimes a few hours on weekends). Today my boss berated me in a meeting with lots of colleagues about the progress of my project. To be clear everyone else had just finished saying how good everything is, and he himself had to admit the standard of work was good but he thinks it's unacceptable there isn't more of it. Others in the meeting pulled me aside after to reassure me I have plenty and he is being a knobhead. He lives to work, no spouse, no children, no annual leave.

He apparently thinks I'm not doing enough and that I should just do work in the laboratory during the day, and do all the analysis and writing up etc. in the evenings after dinner. He also wants me to cancel my annual leave this summer (first holiday with baby) and not take any annual leave until the progress is 'acceptable'.

My first instinct is to tell him to fuck off and I don't get paid any where near enough for this! If he wants to work every evening on his professor salary he can knock himself out but I want to spend time with my little one thank you very much! But that's not going to do wonders for our working relationship. Any tips on how to handle this?

@acfree123 Your post is fascinating.

Does AS have any mechanism for bringing truly horrific problems directly to their attention? NB I am not suggesting that what we have heard of the OP’s situation rises to that level.

Absolute lol at the idea that one rude PI could kill an Athena swan award. I know some horrendously dog eat dog departments with silver nad even gold awards.

Athena swan is a piece of paper. The departments aren’t audited or assessed in person. They can say any old bullshit and things carry on as they always were. Plus writing the awards keeps the women busy while the men carry on with the grants and the papers. No admin for them

<bitter>

I completely agree with bge. Equality charter awards are mostly box ticking with no genuine commitment to change in most places.

It is far more effective to look up employment law etc and state firmly to managers/senior managers that you will make a complaint based on this, than to hope that something will be done by the AS rep because of university commitment to AS. OP doesn't really have a strong case in employment law unless their PI tries to force the issue e.g. insists on cancelling annual leave. But the latter would be slam dunk if OP is registering their working hours in the HR system.

Athena Swan reps have as much power as their department allows them to have, which is mostly none. Unless there is real commitment to Athena Swan, then the primary job of the rep is to write an application that will win the department the award they want.

The issue of annual leave is a difficult one. The OP would need to check the official documentation. Officially all the staff working on my research projects, including in some cases other Professors, are required to formally ask my permission as PI to take leave and I can say no if I have a business case, such as the demands of the project, for doing so. In reality, I, like most PIs, ignore this and just ask people to tell me when they are planning to take leave, but this is not actually the official guidance.

If AS is so useless, why the hell do we bother?

Officially all the staff working on my research projects, including in some cases other Professors, are required to formally ask my permission as PI to take leave and I can say no if I have a business case, such as the demands of the project, for doing so.

You can refuse leave at specific times of the year based on the needs of the business. You cannot however refuse to allow your team member to take their allocated annual leave, which is the terms of their contract with the university, over the course of one year. Many academic staff do not register leave consistently within the university HR systems but if they have done so and they can demonstrate that you refused to let them take their allocated leave over the course of the year this is a violation of employment law.

Put differently - the funded project covers x number of working hours per year. You can't say that the person needs to work (significantly) more than x to deliver the outcomes of the project because this is not the conditions under which it is funded.

If AS is so useless, why the hell do we bother?

Senior management do it as a tick boxing exercise and to meet OfS/REF/funders expectations. It is the same as for staff surveys, staff wellbeing initiatives etc.

It is a mystery to me why junior academics put a lot of time into AS. It is easy to see that AS only has influence in places where senior managers are already genuinely committed to improving diversity and culture.

Many members of departmental and university AS committees seem to be naive about how things work. They think all action points in an AS plan will automatically be implemented and delivered by management. In practice we (senior managers) don't even get the university AS plan sent over to us. Some of the proposed actions simply aren't implementable - how can science departments in which half of the staff are postdocs move meaningfully towards making them all permanent...? Others e.g. transparent workload allocation aren't monitored in any serious way.

Is AS like Investors In People*?

* Pretty plaque but rarely properly implimented

I think the early scheme as started by Jocelyn Bell Burnell did indeed have impact, especially when it was applied to small science only departments and tied to funding. But now it is a mega tick boxing exercise and dying under its own weight. It’s just a big admin exercise departments have to do, but with no real penalty for not implementing. There’s no political will behind it.

It’s the academic version of greenwashing. It’s for the brand image of the institution, not for the benefit of the people who work in it.

It’s the academic version of greenwashing. It’s for the brand image of the institution

And it seems to be working if even academics believe that AS is taken seriously.

We are trying for initial accreditation in my School. I refuse to have anything to do with it. I’m not going to be complicit in the institutional gaslighting of my own team.

Exactly. And why does it fall on the female academics to do this? The only positive that's come out of the scheme's popularity is that i can now refuse out of hours meetings (but it doesn't stop the awkwardness of having to do so )

Yep

Yep.

He's a twat, OP. It's such an unhealthy attitude. I'd want to tell him to fuck off as well.

A previous HoD wanted to get Athena Swan accreditation. He asked me to lead on this. I asked him why - if he felt that AS was needed because there were issues for women in academia and the department - it was a woman's job to sort this out rather than the men's. To be fair, you could see the penny drop instantly and he backed out of my office muttering apologies.

Sadly I agree that this attitude and culture is common in academia. My boss openly tells everyone how they work ten hours a day in the week and also some hours at a weekend as well. There is an expectation that we all should be doing this without complaining. It’s toxic.

We are Athena swan silver and they happily timetable you to give lectures 9-8. How long is left on your contract OP? Is this an important lab group to stay in or are there other opportunities elsewhere? Are you able to move or do you need to stay where you are due to family commitments. You have my sympathies, being a postdoc is hard, particularly when you have a family to support. But your PI is being completely unreasonable. I would not treat my group that way and would call out anyone else who acted that way in front of me. You are right though HR won’t be any help- your HoD may be though- unless that is your PI. But ultimately unless you plan on leaving you may end up with an angry resentful PI which won’t be a pleasant working environment.

I imagine you are on a temporary contract? If so this sadly means you need to do as he says or he will likely get rid of you and hire someone else. It is that easy. If your permanent then by all means tell him to eff off (politely ofcourse).

I'm not saying it's right but the normal workload of a postdoc is in excess of 50 hours a week, you are meant to be striving for promotion. I think exh worked nearer to 60

I notice he’s an ex h, which was the pattern I noticed with all of my DP’s supervisors/PIs - lovely guys, but no woman wanted to stay married to them. 60/70/80 hour weeks with the entirety of the parenting load on the other parent.