“To fight fake news is science, one has to look for the evidence from trusted sources” — Alice Roberts
Professor Alice Roberts has some no-nonsense views about fake news, gender inequality and how career and family should not be mutually exclusive. The academic, author and broadcaster is very much inspired by the new breed of researchers and how they explain their work to the public using different channels. We bumped into Alice at New Scientist Live, just before she went on stage to give her talk and present her new book, “Tamed: Ten Species that Changed Our World”.
With so much publishing and broadcast experience, surely she is one of the best people to ask about science communication. So what do we need to do to do it better?
Do more of it, and support and nurture your scientists and provide the opportunity for them to do that. You come to something like New Scientist Live and you see the appetite for science. I’m here to give a talk, but I’m here to find out about different aspects of science myself as well. We all work in quite narrow fields, and there’s such a huge diversity of different sciences here. It’s fantastic. So I think the appetite is there. The thing that we need to do is to make sure that scientists are able to do it.
“I’m a real advocate of researchers doing it themselves and we have fantastic opportunities to do that now, because the opportunities that are provided to us by new media, I think, are amazing and we’ve just only started to grasp that.”
You are very experienced in this. What is your advice to younger people who are just starting out? What should they do?
Try it. Don’t be scared of it, and try it. Watch people who you think are good at it and try and learn in that way. We’re seeing more and more universities now incorporating training in communication into postgraduate research programmes now, which is fantastic. So I’m actually very optimistic, but I think that this generation of early career researchers are going to come through as natural communicators. I think this problem that you’re referring to is something that we’re perceiving as a community of slightly older more mature researchers.
“I think the next lot coming through — it’s going to be perfectly natural to them, and I’m always amazed at their ability to communicate.”
When I look at our early career researchers at the University of Birmingham, and they make videos about their research, they blog about their research, and they’re great at it! And this is what the internet has allowed us to do, i.e to have that direct communication with the public. We’re not having to be filtered through the words of a journalist in order to get our message out and all of these things like you’re doing , like The Conversation, an online newspaper written by academics, blogging, Twitter, Facebook — it’s allowing us to have that direct communication with the public.
Does that mean that there’s no more need for science journalism as a medium between researchers and the public?
I think it’s all part of the…it’s all in the mix. I don’t think there’s not any need for science journalism. Science journalists can bring a different perspective to science and can pull different strands together from disparate areas that might not naturally have joined up. But I think that it all comes together rather beautifully.
How do we combat ‘fake news’ in science?
My take on this is that it is not a new problem. It really isn’t a new problem. It’s a problem because of the internet, and because of the ability to disseminate ‘stuff’ — information and misinformation — quickly. But it isn’t a new problem. People have always gossiped. You’ve always had to think, “is this person truthful, or are they lying?” So you do this in face-to-face interactions with people. Some people are more trustworthy than others.
“When you got the invention of the printing press, people were printing pamphlets about all sorts of nonsense, and we’ve always had pamphlets. Do you trust a pamphlet, or do you trust the author of a book?”
Do you trust a pamphlet, or do you trust a newspaper where you that there’s been an editorial process that things have gone through? When we got video communication, do you trust people who are just uploading any odd video onto the internet or again, do you go to trusted sources? So I think that issue — it’s any issue of trust, isn’t it? And knowing where those trusted sources are. And I think most people are more intelligent about this than we perhaps imagine, so I’m less worried about fake news…
But there are so many outlets, so many people repeating the same stuff. Can we deal with so much information?
I think if there is a lot of misinformation coming out, we just have to make sure that there’s good quality, dependable information coming out. So the way to tackle fake news is probably not to tackle it head on in the same way as like creationism. The way to tackle it is probably not to tackle it head on, but I do get into fights on Twitter about creationism. The way to do it is to make sure the evidence is out there, the real dependable evidence from places people can trust.
What’s your advice in terms of what’s the most useful platform for science communication is?
That’s really tricky. I mean I think you might have as good an idea as I do. This is a landscape that’s constantly changing. So the really important thing is to evaluate what you’re doing, to try and have an idea of what’s going to be most effective. As you say, you don’t want to waste your time doing something where you’re not actually going to reach out to any people. If you put a talk on and only two people turn up, then you have wasted your time.
“If you create a very beautiful video and stick it online, and again only a few people watch it, then again you’ve wasted your time. So do a little bit of research on what the most effective methods might be.”
There are so many and they are so diverse. And then make sure you evaluate afterwards…And I’m still doing this. Every time I do something, I think, “right, what went well? What can I do better? How can I broaden this out so that it has a broader appeal?” And to just make it into an iterative process. The same approach that you have to your research: you do an experiment, then you think, “right, what worked? What do I change to make this better the next time I do it?”
We’re really keen to know what the main challenges you’ve felt getting to the position you are now in science as a woman? How you feel it’s important to communicate that women in engineering and science is something that can happen?
If we’re going to have an equal society, there’s a moral obligation there. But what you have to be careful of when you’re looking at gender balance is to look at it discipline be discipline.
“We have no trouble recruiting women into medicine, biology, psychology — we have a lot of issues when it comes to attracting women into engineering and physics. That I think is completely weird. These subjects themselves are neutral. They don’t naturally come with some sort of gender label on them, so we’ve done that as a society.”
We need to break that down, and we need to break that down starting at primary school, and probably even earlier, actually, getting rid of the idea that maths, physics, engineering those are boys’ subjects, and biology and psychology are girls’ subjects. This is ridiculous! What are we talking about? How can they possibly be gendered?
There’s obviously an economic imperative to do that, because we want to have the best workforce that we can possibly achieve in these areas.
Actually I’m more interested in the individuals. I think that we’re shutting whole areas of endeavour off to people, and I think there’s something immoral about that as well. That’s about attracting people into those disciplines to begin with. Once people are in the world of work, then women still face difficulties, and if we think we’re an equal society then we’re kidding ourselves. Women are not paid the same as men, we still have a big disparity about the way that men and women are treated in the workplace. We need to get rid of that. We need to get rid of unconscious bias, so we need to be trained. Anybody that’s on a promotion or progression committee in a university, for instance, is trained to spot that unconscious bias in themselves, cause we all do it, we’ve had it bred into ourselves.
“But the other thing is, as a society I think we really need to tackle the fact that family should not be incompatible with work. How can that possibly be the case? Families are the way that…they’re the workers of the future, the economy of the future — how can having children by so detrimental to somebody’s career? We really need to fix that.”
We need to be smarted about what we’re doing. Why aren’t we having a more flexible approach to working? And this would benefit men as well as women — we should have much more part-time working, much more flexible working.
Technology should be helping us do that, rather than constraining us. I don’t understand why we’re in the 21st century and still haven’t solved this equality thing.
Do you think there are any countries who are doing this better than us?
Iceland! And also the Scandinavian countries. And there are some really easy key things that you can look at, and you can see that they do very well. Providing free childcare, you think how on earth can we afford that? You do it, and actually the economy benefits. So you can afford it. So why wouldn’t you do it, if it means it makes it more equitable.
Yes, so you wouldn’t have to pick up your kid at 3pm!
Yeah! And it needs to be well paid! It’s no good having leave…parental leave needs to be equal. It needs to be long and it needs to be well paid, and you need to be able to choose when you do it. And it needs to be for fathers as well as for mothers. All of these things are really simple. Other countries are doing it — why the hell aren’t we?
Interview by Endre Szvetnik and Shiraz Ziya
