Scientific Russian roulette – job security in research careers

While the $400 million destruction of medical research funding is the number one priority now, there’s another issue that perennially looms large  – the funding system that makes embarking on a research career more like playing Russian roulette.  Job insecurity is rated as the biggest factor in the low attractiveness of research as a career.

The uncertainty principle

I think it’s the biggest unaddressed issue of research careers that generation after generation we train up enthusiastic young researchers only to have them leave because of the funding system. It’s not a new issue – I know people with PhDs who left their careers as biomedical researchers 20 years ago because of the funding system. In the past week I’ve been noticing that in articles on the proposed NHRMC funding cuts there have been mentions of the immense lack of job security in science cropping up.

For a while I’ve been puzzled as to why when people talk publicly about what needs to be improved in science careers it’s usually about budget dollars and being paid more, which are both problems, but the biggest problem of tenuous job security remains behind-the-scenes. I’ve also had trouble explaining it to friends in professions outside of research - I’m often met with ‘well, there are performance reviews in lots of jobs’ or ‘people do lose their jobs sometimes’. I find it really hard to convey the magnitude of the problem. I’ve ended up using analogies – like equating the job uncertainty to being a politician, but at least they’ve got an inbuilt superannuation safety net. Maybe a better analogy is an actor. Working as a researcher has about as much certainty as an ugly actress in Hollywood.

So while we find ourselves compelled by the budget cuts to step out of our labs and engage in funding politics, could we (especially us junior researchers) start pushing this issue as a priority? Below, I’ve tried to put together what I think the main factors are, together with a few numbers.

Numbers

Since I’m at scientist, I’ll start by creating a graph. Here are the applications to the National Health and Medical Research Council (the funder of medical research in Australia) for Awards – a fancy way of saying how many biomedical researchers they gave jobs.

From left to right it goes from junior to senior, ie from those who’ve just finished their PhDs to senior Professors. The numbers are here, adapted from NHMRC.

The exponential rabbit curve and attrition

I look at the graph above and think that it’s normal for workplaces to be structured like a pyramid, with a small number of bosses at the top and more people lower down. The problem is research isn’t like a normal profession where you can just be a teacher, psychologist, physio or engineer. If you’re a teacher and you don’t become headmaster of your school you can still stay on as a teacher. You can’t just be a scientist. You can’t stay at the same level and let your career plateau, even it’s only for a few of years. You have to keep climbing the rungs of the fellowships, progressing from one to the next as the rungs are knocked away behind you. Can you imagine the outcry if eg. school teachers were told they had to apply for a more senior position every few years, and the ones who didn’t make it had to find a new profession?

Publish or perish - running the peer review gauntlet. Image: ACS Chemical Biology

At uni we had a really good session for PhD students about research careers and most of the people I talked to afterwards said that it also succeeded in terrifying them. One presenter, who was an early career researcher, showed a steep curve representing the increasing number of papers she produced year by year; a graph that looked more like it was documenting the population of a warren of randy rabbits.

There were also representatives of what I’ll call ‘para-science’ – people working in science industry, policy, communication etc. It’s good that they were promoting options for us other than the usual straight grant funded research. During the Q&A I asked the senior scientists who sat on grant funding panels what happened if you did any of those jobs then wanted to go back to research. The answer was utterly predictable – if you lose your track record, you can’t come back. Even if you’re doing research in industry, you may no longer be competitive for grant funding if you publish less papers while in industry (eg due to intellectual property issues). To some extent needing to stay up to date manifests in many professions, such as having to do annual professional development to maintain your registration. But I don’t think that most of them are to the extreme of science. You leave pure unadulterated research and it’s a one-way street with no going back.

This is a fearsome prospect. Anecdotally, many see what’s ahead and leave voluntarily. A few will make it to the top, but most will be whittled away. You’ve done 7-10 years of university training, but your chances of still being in research in ten to twenty years are very small.

Women in research

Which brings us to the issue of women in science. Curiously this is one of the few places the uncertainty issue is being addressed, because of the appalling attrition rates for women in science. At a PhD level it’s 60% women, steadily dropping to 26% at the research fellow level (a possibility is that it’s a generational thing, but anecdotally there were already more women than men studying biomedical science back when the senior fellows would’ve gone to university). The funding system makes it extremely difficult to take time off to have children or to work part-time, because you lose your track record and you’re no longer competitive. Equally, you can’t pause your career and be a scientist at the same level for a while and then when the kids get a bit older start putting in the long hours again to progress. Or maybe some are put off by the ultra-competitive system? I think that these underlying funding problems affect everyone; they just show a greater effect for women.

Uncertainty

A research career - feeling as uncertain as Schrödinger's cat

A lot of the talk about money in science is either about more funding or better pay. Yes, we’re paid really badly, and if anyone has the link to the urban legend economics report that shows that science pays the worst for the amount of study, then I’d like to link to it. But many young researchers who are devoted to science will put up with lagging behind their peers on bad pay - what really kills off young scientists is the uncertainty.

Health and medical researchers rated lack of job security as the worst factor in their employment, with 76% saying it had a negative impact. The same study also found that  73% of health and medical researchers had considered leaving the profession in the last five years. The greatest factors were shortage of funding (91%), lack of career development opportunities (78%) and poor financial rewards (72%).

Often I’ve found that the very people who are held up as examples of successful young researchers, and are asked to give seminars telling us PhD students about how great research is, if you talk to them behind the scenes then they’ll speak about the funding uncertainty and admit to having an exit strategy in [ insert alternate career here, eg school teaching ]. The length of grant funding varies, but it is usually renewed about every three years. This means all researchers, and everyone they employ on grants, lives in a state of constant uncertainty, knowing that in all probability their grant, and therefore their job, won’t be renewed next year.

Where do they go?

Loss of funding means people leave science. In many other professions there are lots of employers you can try to get jobs at, or in some, like physio, psychology, medicine etc, people can go into private practice instead. So if in biomedical science the main employer is downsizing, there’s nowhere much else to apply for a job. People retrain to be an overqualified teacher or nurse, or become a newspaper delivery guy (real examples I know of).

Once they’ve left science we don’t hear about them any more – the only scientists we hear from are the few who are still in science (sample bias). I think that to get any idea of the enormous extent of the problem we should keep track of not only the people who are still in science, but also where everyone else goes and why they left science.

Where have all the researchers gone?

Why don’t we hear more about this problem?

Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but that graph also shows that by the time you’re a senior research fellow the success rates for applications are far higher. The success rate for existing NHMRC fellows is 66.7%, compared to first-time fellows at 29%. So the uncertainty affects them less. Does that mean there’s less impetus for people at senior levels to campaign for change to the system? I think another important factor could be that the senior researchers are the few that the system has succeeded for, so they are less likely to see its flaws. It’s in their interest to campaign for more money for research, but reducing the uncertainty is probably a less important issue.

What to do?

To me it seems like the obvious key points are:

• Less uncertainty for all researchers
• An ability to be a scientist and not have to keep climbing the thinning ranks to stay in research.
• To be able to vary your career – greater flexibility to be able to go away and do something else (whether that’s  a related science job in eg industry, lecturing or policy, or having kids) and have a chance of coming back. And maybe to be able to work part-time.

After you’ve read this far, now I have to say really don’t have a clue how to fix this. I’m certainly not an expert on the funding system, but I assume if there were easy solutions they would have been tried by now. Any suggestions (or corrections) welcome.
While we’re mobilising nationally to save research funding from budget cuts, could we also start talking about the importance of fixing the chronic insecurity?

Tagged: australia, biomedical, brain drain, discoveries need dollars, funding, health science, medical science, NHMRC, research, science, women in science

Posted in: biology, funding, science