Gina the Geneticist

Rosie the Riveter seemed to be the very definition of American competence. One of the many jobs American women were recruited to perform in WWII was to make fighters and bombers. For example, they took part in building the SBD Dauntless dive bombers that performed spectacularly and were essential to winning the Battle of Midway. 

The word “competence” seems to be coming up a lot these days (by these days, I mean years) as we look at how our federal government is functioning. Some people have recently questioned whether the current definition of competence is relevant suggesting that it’s not just “skill and efficacy” but also “judgment, humility and empathy.” Rather than redefine competence, which one dictionary defines as “the ability to do something successfully or efficiently,” performing an act with humility and exercising empathy seem like additional qualities that don’t quite fit. 

No one would trade off competence for humility for something they truly cared about. You don’t care whether your airline pilot, your brain surgeon or even your plumber is humble. If the taxi driver gets in an accident when ferrying you to a critical appointment, you don’t care whether they express their empathy for your predicament. And when approaching their air carriers nearly out of gas, I’m guessing the WWII pilots did not care about anything other than competence when they pulled the lever to lower the wheels. 

Today, though, I am also concerned with what appear to be incentives to be incompetent. I saw this repeatedly when I worked in the federal government at the Food and Drug Administration. Success was defined as putting out a regulation, any regulation. Early on, when I expressed my frustration over one regulation that didn’t appear to accomplish anything I was told, “We don’t have to accomplish anything. That’s not the goal. The goal is to appear to be doing something.” 

The theory was further explained that the real goal was to keep Congress and the media at bay. More recently, I have become concerned with science, particularly the science that the federal government uses to make regulatory and other policy decisions. Over the last decade or so researchers have been exploring how scientists are so strongly incentivized to get funding and tenure that many have produced poor studies so that they can show big, novel findings. The result has been that a number of scientists suggest that half of the studies published come to false conclusions. 

A 2016 study in Nature found that 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Over half of the nearly 1,600 scientists agreed that there was a “significant crisis.”

The focus on lack of competency in government and science needs to be sharpened even further. What will not help is to redefine the definition with adjectives like humility or empathy. The reason is simple - if you’re not competent, none of the other adjectives matter. 

Maybe what we need is a new call for competency like we had with Rosie the Riveter. In science, for example, we could have, “Sandy the Scientist.” If we want to get more specific about the new sciences, it could be “Gina the Geneticist” or “Nancy the Nanotechnologist.” 

We don’t need a war to know that “We Can Do It!”