Our work with CIAT freed up Stéphanie to focus more on what matters
Maybe you can relate to our friend and client Stéphanie Jaquet, who doesn’t always have enough time to both conduct her research— and write about it, too.
Who could blame her? Stéphanie is both an interdisciplinary scientist, a research team leader and a project leader. She’s busy observing the intersections of agriculture, climate change, gender inequities, and policy… across three continents. “I feel like my strength is awareness. I’m good at thinking of, structuring, and developing ideas, especially if I’m in a good mood and feeling creative,” says Stéphanie. But when we met her, she also described finding that she spent more time than she wanted to on writing reports—often across a language barrier.
By now you understand that Written Progress was founded to help people like you and Stéphanie win more grants, write clearer reports, and increase the impact of good ideas. That’s all true… but that’s only part of the story.
Confession time: Written Progress also has an ulterior motive. We’re also trying to make science a better place to work.
Nearly everyone at Written Progress is a scientist or researcher, so we’re well aware of the fact that science is difficult. It requires discipline and commitment and rigor. We’re not trying to change that. We just happen to believe that scientists should be able to focus on what they’ve been trained to do – SCIENCE.
You know the difference: there are parts of your work that are exciting to you. The kind of stuff you can’t help but think about. The challenges that give you energy. And then there’s the other stuff: the bureaucracy. The never-ending requests for you to explain and justify your work for this institution and that publication and this grant application and that father-in-law.
All of this underappreciated busywork takes up time and energy, which gets in the way of your effectiveness and enjoyment of your work. It hangs over your head. It forces you to shift gears. It fills you with dread.
Plus: if you’re a woman in the sciences, odds are you’re picking up more of the administrative burden than your male colleagues. As noted by Johnson, Widnall, and Benya (2018), women scientists are broadly expected to pick up a disproportionate amount of the work that goes into recording, translating, and sharing knowledge on behalf of their teams—which detracts from the time they can commit to research and leadership. In short, for every Otto Hahn who enjoys the glory of winning the Nobel Prize, there’s often a Lise Meitner who brings under-appreciated critical theoretical insights. This implicit bias often prevents women from collecting the markers of “success” that translate into career advancement, which has a chilling effect on the number of women entering the science fields—a cycle that perpetuates itself.
Communicating about your work is a necessary step towards having an impact; without the funding, regulatory support, community engagement, and partnerships, you won’t get far. Even still, that labor shouldn’t be put on the shoulders of a scientist who is already busy saving the world. That’s a major part of why we created Written Progress: we want science careers to be a place where people like Stéphanie get to actually tap into their training and passion and make bigger impacts.
As someone who constantly needed to report her findings and submit requests to various government agencies, Stéphanie didn’t have the luxury of sharing ideas in the ways that are most natural or convenient to her. This is how we came to collaborate on a research project that she developed as part of her role at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). It was important to us that Stéphanie felt able to communicate with us in the ways that she wanted—and was able to. “I always appreciate Written Progress, because if it's a report [I’m working on], if it's a profile, if it's something else, you can always discuss what you want. And they have the capacity as a team to produce it. Also, they have research capacity, which is very interesting, because sometimes we have so much to do that we don't have the time to manage the literature review.”
Stéphanie identifies as a geographer, who is often qualified as a generalist. In grad school, she and her peers were required to choose specific research subjects—which she felt able to do, but frustrated by. The positive side of being a geographer is interdisciplinary thinking, being able to put things into perspective in the space. For her, being to specific was too constraining “It’s like: you look at a stone falling down a mountain, you can be a scientist who looks at the speed, or who looks at the type of rock, or who can calculate whether it reaches a village, but I’m more interested in how the humans are going to be affected—in the interaction, the relation, the impacts.”
If you’re like Stéphanie, we want to free up the time you would normally spend compiling reports, grant applications, and white papers. That way you can spend less time fretting about your to-do list and more time attending to your growth, goals, and brilliant ideas. Get in touch now!