“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

By all [twitter] accounts, the plenary at ESA (A = Australia in this case) on Gender Equity in Ecology was a barn burner. I really wish I could have been there because the staccato bursts of live tweeting – even when curated nicely in this Storify – can’t possibly do justice to what must have been the moments of collective jaw-dropping and forehead-slapping as plot after plot of dumbfounding data on just how bad it really is popped up on the screen. I mean, we knew it was bad, right? A male mentor recently jokingbutnotreally suggested I submit first-authored manuscripts under the first name of Evan or Eric or maybe Emile? rather than Emily. But this bad? This blatantly FAIL?

Emma Johnston and Mark Burgman led the session, but worked with a host of researchers to gather and analyze the data on gender equity. Some of the zingers are below:

• Society at large: There are more men named “Peter” running large companies in Australia than women – period. [Ed: SNAP!]

• The Ecology Pipeline is leeeeeaky: In the Australian university system, the only faculty level at which gender parity is achieved is the lowest, and males increasingly dominate as you move up to full professor (>85%male, <15% female).

• You’d expect this to just be an artifact of history, and that things would be getting better over time. Apparently they are – somewhat – but I think you really have to squint to see it.

• Women comprise about 30% of the authors of ecological papers internationally (except in Argentina, something to be learned there?).

• Oh! This one is my favorite: there is a statistically lovely, if morally distressing, inverse relationship between impact factor in proportion of papers first-authored by women in ecological journals.

You’ll notice that some of the data are explicitly about Australia, but both presenters made the case that Australia falls in line with other western countries in a lot of these areas.

The talk addressed a number of the standard explanations for the leaky pipeline, such as gender differences in behavior and risk-taking, the glass ceiling, and a gendered-difference in approach to work-life balance. But Burgman also presented data making a compelling case for double-blind grant and publication reviews. Namely, it turns out that there is a strong correlation between self-assessments and peer-assessments (though how that feedback loop starts is perhaps open for debate), but there is no correlation between peer-assessments and actual measures of performance. We bias our evaluation of someone’s ability based on how we think they should do (based, in turn, on their own self-presentation?), and our guess is as good as any. It’s pretty depressing to think about what effect this has had on the progress of science.

This leads to two additional explanations for the leaky pipeline that people generally don’t like to talk about as much – implicit bias (both male and female) and sexual harassment. Recent events have made clear that the days of the latter are certainly not behind us in academic sciences, and universities have work to do before sexual harassment is no longer a null hypothesis for women leaving STEM.

The idea of implicit bias has been receiving a lot of attention over the past few years. Meg Duffy explored how it is likely to influence the role of women in ecology in a Dynamic Ecology post a few years ago in response to the EcoLog Babyinthefield-Gate, including women’s own implicit biases and stereotype threats. This talk by Meg Urry is two years old, but a good starter on current evidence of bias.

So, this is my post-Ada Lovelace Day hangover, where all of my good-faith optimism about changing the face of STEM fields just sputters out of me like a deflating balloon. It’s not enough to paint a happy picture on STEM women, heroine-izing those who have come before us to inspire those who will come after. The only way through this is to get real, and explicit about our own … implicit … biases.

The plenary, similar to other recent calls for action about race/gender/ability equity, suggests checking your own bias on the Project Implicit Gender-Science Implicit Association Test.

 

One, and arguably the primary, purpose of taking the test is to confront yourself honestly, in the hopes of encouraging us all to evaluate where our biases come from, and identify precisely where they enter our actions.

OK, but what does all this mean practically? Particularly refreshing for me was that the plenary did not just recommend that women “lean in”, as if this continues to be a problem where women are the only ones somehow screwing up, but asks that men “lean out”: refrain from asking the first question, or even try assuming that other participants might have also thought of that stunning, revelatory, idea that they thought was their biggest contribution to mankind (sorry, my cynicism got the better of me there). And I’d add further that this advice applies even to men who fall in the blue 10% (Female with Science) end of the spectrum from the test above.

The message is clear throughout this discussion that reducing gender/race/etc. bias in ecology or any other field is not someone else’s problem. Even as students, we are all colleagues, mentors, participants in seminars, and many of us review for journals. The responsibility is ours to identify and own up to, and account for, our biases and the mark they leave on the field to which we have chosen to devote our careers.

December 9, 2015