Research, Resilience, and Recognition:

A Conversation with the Award-Winner
Dr. Ariane Bertogg

Date: 5th of July 2024
Interviewer: Liubov Borisova

Liubov Borisova:
Ariana, my name is Liuba. Welcome to the conference. Thank you so much for being here. You have succeeded in winning the first inaugural excellence prize. I congratulate you!  This is a great achievement, and I’m really happy for you! I just wanted to ask a few questions. First, can you tell us a few words about what your paper is about?

Ariane Bertogg:
Before I start, I would like to thank you for trusting me with this prize. For me, it is the first time at the ESHMS conference, and I felt very warmly welcomed by the whole network. This has been an amazing experience, and I will certainly remain a member of this association and come back to the conferences. 

Now, the first question was about the paper. Despite the breadth of topics I work on, I’ve seen myself as a sociologist for my entire academic career, and I was trained as a family sociologist. So, when you talk about family, it’s often about normative expectations, how to behave. For instance, who should provide   care in old age, who should go out and work, and who should look after the children—the man, the woman, or both? And who should do how much of such paid and unpaid work? These questions have been  haunting me for all these years, and when I started to turn to health research, especially research on cognitive ageing, I was always carrying these questions in mind. I have worked together with Anja Leist, who is the co-author of the paper, for quite some years. While she  brought in this epidemiological perspective, I brought in the family sociology perspective when we developed this.

We know from the literature that employment is extremely important for stimulating cognitive reserve and for maintaining cognitive functioning in later life. But actually, fewer studies have looked at the combination of employment and family activities, or other non employment activities, even though these are all highly gendered. We asked ourselves,  what drives differences in cognitive functioning across contexts? Maybe the factors are not just at the individual level (like, individuals’ behaviours, their participation in employment and non-employment activities across the life course), but also at the contextual level? And this is how it came back to the idea of context-level gender norms, and how they might be affecting cognitive functioning both directly, and indirectly, via work-family-life-courses. 

We  started to dissect the association essentially. What came out is that even if you actually adjust for people’s life-courses in work and family, you still find a strong correlation between gender norms on cognitive functioning. We interpret it in the way that if you’re exposed to a society where the division of labour is relatively traditional, you’re deprived of the opportunity of accumulating cognitive stimulation and maybe also social relations in different domains than the one that is assigned to you by gender. I think this first, descriptive finding is crucial for policymaking.

Liubov Borisova:
That’s fascinating.  How long did it take you to come up with the whole project? I don’t mean publishing itself, but the whole project. How long did it take to develop it all?

Ariane Bertogg:
If I’m honest, two days. I went to visit Anja in Luxembourg, and I had this idea, and I pitched it to her, and she said, “Oh, this is great. We should look at it, but we need to think about the theoretical mechanism”. And then we just ran the analysis, and we had these really strong associations, and we started to figure out what could be behind it. But we just couldn’t explain that effect of social norms on cognitive functioning away, and that was actually the birth of the paper idea. It was really fast writing it up because the findings were so strong and the idea was so clear that it actually took us two days to conceptualise and maybe a couple of months to write it up. And then the longest thing was the publishing process. As usual.

Liubov Borisova:
This is amazing. I haven’t read the paper yet, but I’m really looking forward to it now! Another question I wanted to ask you was—how did you decide to participate in this prize? Or was it Anja who recommended it? How did it happen?

Ariane Bertogg:
It was actually me who decided, because I was recently pointed out towards the [ESHMS] network, and then I saw that there is a conference coming up, and then I saw the call for the inaugural prize. I thought, “Oh, this would be great, to make the findings of the paper more known”. We would like the paper to be seen by scholars in different disciplines. I  believe it really speaks not only to sociologists, but to epidemiologists, psychologists, maybe even practitioners, and policymakers. So this would be the perfect occasion and the perfect occasion to actually reach out to scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. And I succeeded with it.  

Liubov Borisova:
Yes, you definitely did! I think it was a very good idea! And the last question I have is, What could be  your advice? Maybe three recommendations to early-career researchers who are starting this journey of writing papers. What are your recommendations for success? Perhaps to become one of the winners of prizes and, generally, have success in publications. What would be your three main recommendations?

Ariane Bertogg:
There are more than three recommendations I could give (laughing).  I will start with a positive one—or, no—I will only give positive recommendations. I think you hear enough of “don’ts” from your supervisor when you start your academic journey. 

So the first one is, believe in your ideas and be authentic. You do not have to be someone else. What I mean is that one needs  intrinsic motivation to bring up the energy during the PhD and the  precarious postdoc phase. I think the drive should come from within. So believe in your ideas, stay authentic, and just do what you believe is the right thing to do. 

The second recommendation is to search for mentoring. Not only from your supervisor or someone in the department, but also from outside. Reach out to other scholars that are at a higher, or maybe also at the same career level as you, to get valuable feedback. For instance, my co-author Anja Leist was such a  mentor for me. When I started working on health, I noticed there is no one in the department who can help me. We don’t have demography or health sciences in Konstanz. Because we did not have the experts in place, I had to reach out to other scholars, extending my network and organising research visits. So that I could receive  the feedback that I needed to get me ahead. Thus, my advice would be: look for a mentor, look for feedback. Be outgoing, and don’t be afraid of asking people. The worst thing that can happen is probably,  “Oh, this is a nice idea, but I don’t have time to give feedback or discuss your paper with you”. You really don’t get turned down in an unfriendly way very often.

The third recommendation is maybe connected to the first two. Just don’t give up. I mean, academia is a really harsh terrain, and there is so much competition, and I think it’s just normal to get rejections, and it’s normal to sometimes also get negative feedback on your ideas. Use it as an opportunity to grow and develop your ideas further, while at the same time staying yourself. To give you an example, I just recently obtained a larger grant from the German Research Foundation, which is in terms of duration and sum equivalent to the ERC starting grant. It was not the first time I submitted a larger grant application. It’s the fifth time. It took me a while to get the hang of it and to understand how you need to frame your ideas for the broader disciplinary panels that review your proposal. It just takes time to learn how to  pick up the essence, the innovation, in your ideas and then sell them to the panel that makes  the decision and gives the money.  So my third advice is maybe simple, but very important: just go and try again!

Liubov Borisova:
Great. Thank you so much. I’m sure that many early career researchers will appreciate this motivational advice. It was really a pleasure to talk to you! Good luck with your next project. And again, congratulations!

Once again, congratulations, Ariane! And thank you for the Interview!