 Okay, I'd like to welcome everybody to the EGU's Sharing Geoscience Online Great Debate on the topic of academic meritocracy. And is it a challenge to women's careers? I just want to say a few words quickly about participation. For those of you who want to ask questions during this session, please make sure that you drop your questions into the Q&A rather than the chat, because those of us who are moderating this session and the questions that will follow, we'll only actually be taking questions from the Q&A. So apologies to those people who drop questions into the chat. We might try and get to them, but I can't guarantee that we will. So I want to start this webinar this afternoon by thanking you all for joining us and for your interest in EGU Sharing Geoscience Online. I also want to welcome the speakers who will be contributing, and I'll say a little bit more about those in a moment. But I want to start this webinar by saying a few words about the motivation for this webinar and the topic. So I think it's fair to say that most people would acknowledge that to have a successful academic career, generally it's thought that hard work and dedication, it will bring you some form of success. But this actually assumes that everybody has equal opportunities to access and to be recognized to different opportunities, but also that those people who work the hardest get recognized and also rewarded for the contribution that they make to research. However, this is not necessarily the case. It is often shown that women researchers are at a disadvantage in academia in particular because they lack sufficient network ties or were still unconscious gender biases among those people who are assessing their contribution and the caliber of that individual actually have some form of unconscious bias. For example, I hear a lot, particularly on social media recently, that there's a perception that women who have children do not have sufficient commitment to their career to progress to the highest levels. And I think this is something that is increasingly being recognized during the current pandemic when a number of researchers have additional personal pressures, those people who suddenly find themselves at home having to care for their children who are no longer in school, or equally they have some form of dependent they now find themselves caring for. And I think it is generally acknowledged that it is usually women who end up having this increased pressure and a disproportionate pressure upon them to take on these roles, particularly in the current pandemic. And it is these kind of factors that actually contribute to a disproportionate number of women being in higher ranking roles throughout academia. I wanted just to briefly reference a recent paper published by Andrea Popp. It was actually published in 2019 where she observed that the underlying causes for women to choose choosing to leave academia at certain stages of their career, which is widely acknowledged as the leaky pipeline phenomena, is actually a major challenge for women. And actually solving this problem and the contributing factors to it is not as straightforward as might initially be thought. There's definitely a need to better understand the interplay between a complex number of factors that contribute to a woman's career progression. And those complexities are magnified right now as a result of the current pandemic. And so there is a major concern about how we manage to reduce the loss of female talent in academia. And how do we improve the gender balance in academia so that it benefits not only science, but science, but society and the economy. So today we're going to explore some of these topics with our speakers. And it gives me great pleasure to introduce our speakers. I'll say a few words about each of them and then I'll move on to invite them to contribute to the debate. We'll start with Dr Mary Ann Holmes. She's a sedimentologist who uses social science in her research to address inequality in the Geosciences. She's a former director and co-PI of Advanced Nebraska at the University of Nebraska. Advanced is a National Science Foundation program in the US which aims to increase the number of women in STEM. Dr Holmes is also past president of the Association of Women Geoscientists and co-editor of Women in the Geosciences Practical Positive Practices Towards Parity. Our second speaker will be Dr Matthias Nielsen. Matthias is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He's a sociologist by training and holds a PhD in social science from Aarhus University. His research focuses on gender in science including how gender diversity is linked to knowledge outcomes. He's currently part of the European Commission's Gendered Innovations 2 expert group and Dr Nielsen has also published widely on the topic of gender in science including pieces in nature, human behavior, PNAS, elife and research policy. Our third speaker will be Dr Legia Peres Cruz who is president of the Mexican Geophysical Union. In this role she has promoted geosciences throughout Mexico and the Americas. Dr Peres Cruz is also director of the research vessels Justo Sierra and El Puma as the National University of Mexico. She's also a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico and she is focusing her work on paleo climate reconstruction particularly the Schicksalub impact crater and also the paleocene eocene thermal maximum something of particular interest to me as I've had a general interest in this for a number of years. Dr Peres Cruz has also participated in more than 40 oceanographic expeditions including IODP expeditions 364 and 385. So with that I would actually like to invite the first of our speakers Dr Mary Ann Holmes to talk to us on her perception of meritocracy in academia. So Mary Ann can I invite you to share your screen and give us your views on this very interesting topic. Thank you everyone for putting this together and for inviting me to participate. I'm very pleased to talk about one of my favorite topics. So when when Alberto invited me I wondered what we mean by meritocracy and Helen has given us a good description with which I concur. I think of meritocracy as a system in which getting into and advancing in an organization is based solely upon a person's merit which begs the question what is merit and I submit that it differs by context so what constitutes merit in academia will be different from corporations and so on. But what all merit has in common is that an evaluation is required. Someone must demonstrate merit and they are demonstrating it to someone who evaluates that merit a person or a committee or some group of people. So this is a human interaction that requires humans to work together and I submit that currently no true meritocracy exists. To claim a meritocracy ignores the privileges that some of us have at birth. For example I was born in the southern U.S. as a white person a Caucasian and that gives me major advantages over people of color born in the same place at the same time. It ignores the role of luck and there's actually quite a bit of research on this. The first one studied almost 3000 physicists and found that the impact of a scientist is not only dependent on their productivity but an element of luck. So you have to run across an impactful research project in order to be an impactful scientist. Pluchino and others studied American corporations and they coined the term naive meritocracy. They said that talent follows a Gaussian distribution but the benefits of being in a corporation the salary and promotion do not follow a Gaussian distribution but more log normal distribution with the tale consisting of people with the highest salaries but not the highest talent. Castilla and Bernard coined paradox of meritocracy and corporations and this is the idea that the they studied several American corporations and found that the more likely the corporation was to tout that it is a meritocracy the more uneven the salary distributions between white men and women and all people of color. There's also a phenomenon known as the accumulation advantage or the Merton effect or the Matthew effect and it was named for this passage in the Christian Bible who whoever has will be given more that is the rich get richer. So if we look at something like honors programs once a person has won an award they are more likely to win a second and a third award because their profile has been raised higher and we notice them. The opposite is also true there's an accumulation of disadvantage so if a person comes in second for an award one year and they come in second for an award the second year they may have a taint of having never won this award even though coming in second is very very good so there's accumulation of advantage and accumulation of disadvantage and not least implicit bias is inherent in all types of evaluations so I'm going to talk about that in a little more detail implicit bias is the set of unconscious it arises from the set of unconscious beliefs that influence performance evaluations these beliefs arise from the culture and are shared by all within that culture so for example we sometimes hear girls are not good at math and if that's an idea that's prevalent in your culture both men and women will share that belief. There are hundreds of studies that showed gender bias in evaluations I give you one example most of these studies start with some kind of made up CV curriculum vita or resume and they are sent to academics for example to or people in corporations to evaluate how hireable is this person and if the name at the top is male the person is always ranked more hireable by both men and women the pronounceability of the last name has an impact on how we evaluate CVs the use of a middle initial if you can believe it actually increases evaluation scores and in the US the inferred race of a first name for example Jamal is interpreted as African-American and Greg is interpreted as Caucasian Greg is going to get a lot more callbacks at a higher rank in evaluation if his name is over a made up CV marital and parenthood status Helen referred to these if you take two CVs and one of men with a men's names at the top and one indicates the man has a family he will be ranked higher than men without children that's called the fatherhood bonus women have the opposite impact if they have some indication on the CV that the woman is a mother she's considered to be less dedicated to her work as Helen alluded to the motherhood penalty in addition the way we write letters both men and women and I was appalled to look at my own letters of recommendation after seeing these studies we write more superlatives in letters for men we refer to their accomplishments on their CV for women we use more personal comments she's nice she gets along with people and we have references to their service and again many studies confirm this the last one by kuhaley do and co-authors actually study geoscience letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in the u.s. I think this quote from the late ben bars a neuroscientist at stanford is telling he says shortly after I changed sex a faculty member was heard to say bars gave a great seminar today but then his work is so much better than his sisters and of course just to remind you bars doesn't have a sister this was him before his sex change and after the very same person the Pew Research Center found that people in higher income brackets are more likely to credit wealth to hard work whereas people in lower income brackets are more likely to see the role of luck in attaining wealth so I submit that we do not live in ameritocracy now but it does make us feel uncomfortable to think that luck played such a large role in our lives um an american author of uh our manual of style eb white said luck is not something you can mention in the presence of a self-made man another problem is we have something called the availability heuristic so we remember difficult challenging times in our lives like living through this pandemic is probably burned into our memories but when we kind of slide through and get promoted we we don't remember those not difficult times very much so we remember when we struggled and so we attribute our achievements entirely to hard work I was musing on the privileges that I had as an aspiring scientist I mentioned being born white in the south in the us in the 1950s I was born of college educated parents at the time I was born less than six percent of the women in the us had had a college education and I was born to one of them so parents who valued college and ensured that I got to go they also sent me to private schools so that I could actually learn English in the south and um this is the lingua franca of stem so that gives me an advantage I had travel like I could go on and on on the privileges that I have experienced but one thing that isn't a privilege for me is my gender aspiring male scientists will never hear you know you cannot have children if you become a scientist this really generates a very negative atmosphere for aspiring women scientists and I hope males will never have to hear I will not approve your thesis unless you spend the night with me I have seen the email in which this was written it didn't happen to me personally so if we want to promote a true meritocracy we have to recognize the role of luck and privilege in our own careers and we have to work at reducing the impact of implicit biases we should work to write more equitable letters of recommendation there are actually gender bias detectors online we should mentor students equally in an open fair transparent manner learn about bias and make sure that those people in power male advocates and allies know about it and so they can help with the effort clarify criteria for hiring promotion and awards before you look at applicants and become biased towards a particular applicant look at department roles uh karyana mirror showed that most uh service roles are occupied by women in academia this is a lifelong challenge a career long challenge it's not something that we'll be able to check a few boxes and change overnight so I want to leave you with a field photo of course because we're geoscientists this is uh chumalungma mount everest from the Tibetan side we can see meritocracy from here but we've got a long way to go so thank you very much thank you very much Marianne that was that was a great way to start to start this great debate um meritocracy is clearly a very complex and nuanced issue and there are obviously a range of issues that are that influence academic success and but I I just quickly like to get your views on just one and we can return to this after all of the speakers um but I think one of the things I'm personally most interested in is this concept of implicit and unconscious bias and this is something I work for a geological survey in the UK and increasingly where they're trying to educate people including quite senior researchers about the concept of of unconscious bias and a lot of people don't they they say I'm not biased I'm not prejudiced how do we get how do we encourage people to to recognize and understand these implicit and and unconscious biases that some people that all of us have at some level when in fact they're the product of a lifetime and and and starting childhood and and I'm quite open about the fact that that I came from quite a privileged you know Caucasian background but my father was very racist and and actually I went to completely the other end of the scale but how do we educate people about those implicit biases those unconscious bias just quickly Marianne can you just give us your perspective thanks and what was most impactful to me and what I have seen be impactful for faculty deans department chairs and so forth are these theater groups that have sprouted around the US and a group comes in and sort of has a play about a faculty meeting or a search committee process and everyone sits around and sort of participates asking questions and you see it so glaringly on display when someone says oh well you know this job requires somebody to supervise other people and there's this unspoken thing in the room that oh but women can't supervise people I mean I've lived through that so then we replay that in front of people and it's pretty glaringly obvious so I found those are very effective thank you Marianne that's really interesting and hopefully we can return to that topic in the discussion at the end of the session I'd like to move on now and and introduce Dr Matthias Nielsen who hopefully is going to give us another perspective on this topic so Matthias I'll hold out hand over to you thank you and can you see my screen we can the slides okay so first of all thanks so much for inviting me to contribute to this important session I'm very happy to be part of it and I only have 10 minutes so I'll go straight to my key points most of the current science policy debates are about about gender and when you're talking you tend to revolve around the question of unconscious bias as Marianne has already given you an excellent introduction too and this is of course a very important question but to fully understand the gender inequalities at play in science I think we also need to examine the social and organizational context that serve to amplify such gender biases and in this presentation I'll give three examples to demonstrate this social logical point and two of them build on my own dissertation research on gender inequalities in academia the idea of the meritocracy you can say is in the dna of the modern university and as part of my phd dissertation on gender inequality in science I interviewed 24 department heads at my university at the time all whose university which is the second largest in Denmark and I asked them questions about recruitment and selection practices in the organization and many of these they described their recruitment activities as based on neurocratic principles so we only look at qualifications all of our researchers are hired on their merits for us it's all about getting the best candidate many of them told me and these quotes I think demonstrate a strong belief in the meritocracy and not only a belief or not only seeing meritocracy as an ideal that recruiters aspire to but actually a belief in how recruitment and selection practices work at the university and as Marianne also just touched upon social psychological experiments remind us that strong meritocratic beliefs can be detrimental to gender inequality in organizations and this is shown and I think in a good way in in New York City and Stephen Bernas study experimental study where they kind of show that performance assessments are more likely to be gender biased in organizations that explicitly pride themselves as being meritocratic and they explain their findings by arguing that excuse me that in context in which people are led to feel their unbiased fair objective they're more likely to behave in biased ways so there's something about this idea this belief in being objective that kind of also triggers some of these kind of blind spots related to science so to say so my statistical analysis of more than a thousand recruiters for professorships at the University also raised some questions about how closely the departments at the university followed the principles of meritocracy and in the decade from 2004 to 13 about one-fifth of associate and full professorships were filled through what we could call closed hirings and that means that there were no advertisements for these positions and there was usually only one applicant for positions and when I looked at the development over time in this period I also saw that the use of closed hirings actually increased and this was a period in at least the Danish context where we saw an increasing emphasis on what we could call new public management accountability and transparency nevertheless this was the pattern and this trend was not unique for all of us in the period 2011 to 13 17 percent of all professorships in Denmark and 21 percent of associate professorships were recruited through closed recruitment procedures and much excellent research on gender and recruitment suggests that informal hiring practices such as these are at high risk of reinforcing existing gender inequalities in organizations and I also found this to be true in my study of Albus university in a logistic regression model where I of course adjusted for scientific field and scientific rank of applicants and the number of male and female applicants for position I found that women's likelihood of being appointed for an associate of full professorships was 79 percent larger when these appointments were placed in open as opposed to closed procedures so when they're announced openly women's chances were much higher and the share of female candidates for closed hirings was particularly low at the full professor level where just 12 percent of applicants for full professorships were women and when the recruitments were opened up and the proportion of female applicants for these positions was 23 percent so almost double so notes here again that these hirings on the close procedures typically only have one applicant and in this case can be seen as a form of pre-selection so to briefly summarize this first part of my presentation I think it demonstrates that women may often be at a disadvantage even before a formal assessment of applicants for positions is taking place so despite the strong belief in the meritocracy among the recruiters in this case women are not always provided with the same opportunities to even compete for the permanent positions at the university and this problem cannot be solved solely by kind of making recruiters aware of their biases because it has more to do with their networks so it's some it's more at least reflecting on the implicit biases in their network what we could call a form of homophily where you tend to surround yourself with people that reflect how you are yourself and that men tend to also surround themselves with other men that they see as alike in this system so my second example here concerns another aspect of meritocracy the standardized the standardized people are metric indicators that academic recruiters used to screen their local environments for talent and to identify scientific excellence and this is of course an increasingly prevalent kind of instrument in identifying and selecting candidates in academia and my goal here is to demonstrate how this form of standardization despite underlying objective which are often focused on making performance assessments more fair more objective they can also contribute to perpetuate inequalities in academic organizations and this also happens often in implicit and unintentional ways so my empirical sample here concerns the Danish bibliometric research indicator which was introduced by the ministry of science in 2009 as a way of allocating performance based funding for universities and it's based on you may know similar approaches elsewhere it's based on different shaded counting of scholarly publications where it makes a distinction between prestigious high quality journals and book publishers and normal level publication channels and when researchers publish in prestigious outlets their universities will receive more indicator points for their work and based on a stratified sample of 2000 Danish researchers are carried out a study that demonstrates negative gender consequences of this form of standardization specifically I compared how many indicator points women and men on average received for their peer-reviewed publications over a three year period and in a regression analysis that adjusted also for scientific field and academic rank I found that women on average received notably fewer indicator points per publication than their male colleagues and if scientific performance to say it simply if that was measured by these new indicator points instead of being measured by number of publications the average gender gap would increase from 14 to 20 percent so that's around a 40 percent increase in the performance gap so how then can we explain this kind of widening gap caused by the indicator I think one possible explanation concerns the gender composition of the 68 field specific committees that were appointed to identify which journals were going into the prestigious and less prestigious group in this system because the ministry of course with guidance from the university selected experts for this group that many of them were professors and if we look at the gender composition 24 percent of them were women and that starts raising the question about who is it that that's defining excellence in this system who's defining which journals which types of outlets are seen as the most prestigious response and I think in this case it demonstrates that even when we try to introduce these objective measures sometimes we may kind of miss a view of the importance of mainstreaming gender in these cases too because otherwise we'll end up kind of reproducing a system that's benefiting the group that is already doing well in this system so some of the men will kind of of course identify the journals and the outlets that they prefer the most and this is not necessarily only related to questions of journal impact factors and citations because in the Dana systems we've shown that women are cited as much as men so that's not the issue it's more a question about where you want to publish your work and as a final point let me just highlight a recent study published in Lancet which I think does an excellent job at quantifying the negative gender consequences of placing too much emphasis on these standardized metrics of academic performance especially in selection processes and this study draws on data from close to 24,000 research applications to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the data in this study allowed the authors to compare women's success rates in two grant programs one program with an explicit review focused on the past performance of the principal investigator the other program with a key focus on the actual quality of the research presented in the application and while this may not come as a big surprise to you I think their findings are still both interesting and important in the grant program with an explicit focus on past performance women's likelihood of winning grants was 30 lower than men's but when the reviewers were focusing on the content there was no difference so the take-home message here which I think is relevant for both funding agencies and also for academic recruiters is that this explicit focus on past performance based on these diplomatic indices will lead to indirect gender biases and to avoid this evaluators should be specifically instructed to focus more on the quality of the research and less on the characteristics of the researcher and this is especially important I think at the early career stages where we start to see kind of differential kind of a process early on that will level out later on in the career but we're losing a lot of talented people in the early stages because we employ these measures in two crude ways so these were my points. Thank you very much Matias I think that's given another very interesting perspective on the problems of the meritocracy in academia and I found it quite interesting to hear about the potential role that funding agencies and other organisations can take in changing the assessment criteria the metrics that are used to assess someone's contribution to the scientific endeavour because I think a lot of the time the roles of the funding agencies and similar organisations are very much overlooked so thank you for highlighting that. In the interest of time I'd like to invite our last speaker Dr Ligia Perez-Carrouz to give her perspective on this topic so Ligia. Yes thank you very much I wish her my okay good afternoon first of all thanks very much for the invitation to participate in this debate. For the presentation I will focus on those barriers for women in developing countries on the perspectives and challenges. Women scientists face challenges in developing their careers and need to overcome numerous barriers to succeed so that meritocracy might seem to open an equality system. Meritocracy system happens when equal opportunities are there for everyone to grasp then those with more talent and merits have more chance of succeeding but what happened in our society with the strong inequalities where success does not depend on your capacity or dedication merits have no value this is the case in many countries particularly in the developing world unfortunately we are far from having equal opportunities and we will see in the developing countries women face overwhelming barriers. The situation is aggravated by poverty, social status, gender and lack of opportunities. So how can girls succeed and build a career in science in these countries that is a challenge for the academic system, scientific societies, EGU and for all of us. My message here is that we in the scientific societies need to increase our efforts in reducing inequalities to advance towards a more equality system. So in the next okay global map shows the share of women in the total number of researchers by country and we can observe global and regional profiles pinpointing where women are more succeeds like this right here yes and where they are underrepresented like in Africa and in some countries in Latin America. About that the global gender gap report in 2018 predicted that children born today will be able to see gender equality in Western Europe, South Asia as well as in Latin America and Caribbean within the next 61 to 74 years. In Latin America we have many many barriers that vary from country to country while also sharing common future such other value of female capacity and contribution in science, exclusion on insulation and traditional male career areas like science, technology, engineers and mathematics, STEM subjects, traditional cultural perception about the role of women and absence of the role models especially in the higher ranks of the hierarchy. In particular a gender gap is marked in the STEM fields at all levels where women participation is low and for example we can notice in this graph based on the analysis of female researchers in Latin America as percentage of total researchers that participation is increasing in some countries in Latin America and Caribbean for example you can we can recognize like the participation of Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. Also these countries were part of the 11 countries that devoted more than 1% of gross domestic product to higher education in the year from 1921 to 213 but in what happened in 2016 in Latin America and Caribbean research and development invest remains very low compared to the international average. We can see that in the region Brazil reported the highest level of investment for 2016 that was around 1.3% followed by Argentina, Mexico and Costa Rica that was about 0.5%. As you notice this is the results of a long process of political, economic, social and cultural changes and in this figure it is notorious and it is a pity the imbalances between the number of women and men in Latin America. So we can see the global proportion of women and men in science as graduated in research in 2018 illustrating the leaky pipe. Female researchers here continue to be underrepresented at the highest level of the professional career and persist a minority in many fields of esteem in most countries. The underrepresentation of women in higher echelons and leadership position in academia is a complex matter that can be hardly justified by poorly meritocratic criteria is the evidence of the glass ceiling referring to an invisible barrier to advancement. The possible drivers are the combination of rigid academic structure, social and family pressure, lack of a fair playground, lack of opportunities which include research funding, insufficient legal framework, pre-existing biases, poor education of women rights that avoid women's participation in science. But how to avoid the loss of female talent in academia and promote gender equality first is necessary for countries in Latin America and Caribbean and developing countries to have and rebuild the statistical numbers in order once the problems have been identified to move towards the implementation of and to reduce the gender gap. We need to understand the difference in different countries where the conditions are different and also we require to work on larger scale programs and initiatives which provide the ground for developing and implementing gender policies. There are important and it is crucial that the scientific societies take the lead in those actions revising and adapting policies for participation for women scientists. We need to create a fair playground with equal opportunities, one in which talent, capacity, merits make the difference, not the imbalances, barriers, gender biases, and lack of opportunities. Scientific societies need to increase efforts, new initiatives, more opportunities. Having this forum in the great debates for the European Geosciences Union sends a positive message, this is important for the membership for the union for science. We need more women across the diversity that forms the scientific enterprises and surround enterprise in different countries, institution, economic capacities and language barriers. Forcibly and effectively remove barriers, biases, role models, gender and gender attitudes. We require women scientists in committees, projects, discussion forums, editorial shifts, and all aspects of the academia. We just need to be aware and be proactive and we will succeed in breaking the glass ceiling and patching the elite pipeline. I realize this is not an easy task but it is a challenge worth undertaking. My hope is we can advance more rapidly and in constructing a friendly diverse, inclusive playground for talent, capacity, and merits count. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ligia. We're going to open the floor for questions now. Can I just remind people that we will only be taking questions from the Q&A, so for those people who've dropped questions into the chat, if you'd like to just copy your questions over to the Q&A, then we can try and pick up as many as possible in the remaining 15 minutes. I'd like to first thank all of our speakers for the really interesting perspective they've given on this topic, but I'd like to start the questioning actually with a question for Ligia, because Ligia, you touched on a topic that's come up frequently for me in recent months, which is the role that strong positive role models can potentially have for women in academia and I'd just like to ask you, what is your view on how we encourage more women to identify themselves and recognize that they are excellent role models for other women in academia, because my experience is that even some of the most senior women in academia are reluctant to almost take up this mantle of being a role model, so can I ask you first, Ligia, what is your view of how we encourage women to understand how they can support other women in academia through their career? Well, I think our role, when I say our role is the people that we have the fortune to have a good position in the academia or relatively good position in the academia on the development countries, is to try to push to the new generations to continue this kind of us, to continue with this kind of science of objectives and due to the conditions of economic conditions in this, in the economic and social conditions in our countries it's not easy, because I think in the families, the problem is in the families, so in the academia you should to push the students and try to change their mind in order that they can be more confident and believe in them and then can, and in order that they can believe that they can do something for sciences, mainly for women and also for men in these countries, but I think my suggestion is to try to invite and to push the girls to continue with these careers and try to get projects, for example, in my case in the institution I get projects and I consider fellowships or to support the investigation of this new generation and I think this is possible and maybe, and sometimes it's the results are very good, so maybe this is one of the things that we can impose and so in the, your question also said what can I break the role models and this is very difficult, but we can do it in each family if we contribute and we can talk with the people and with the girls and doing our best to do that. Thank you, thank you very much Lidia. I'm going to pass the word to my co-convener Alberto Montanari to ask the next question. Alberto? A set of incredibly interesting questions, many of them, and there are, there was one question asking how many participants are we now and we got a top of about 380, which is a good number by the way, and the question was are you able to estimate the percentage, distribution of genders among the, across the audience and my answer to this is not now, I'm not sure it is possible and this gives to me the opportunity to ask a question to Matias, a question that we got from the audience and the question is, the question is many struggle to find reliable data to make basic gender analysis and I can tell you that even in EGU this is not easy. So what is your experience on this? Do you find in our time finding data or what is your experience, your take? Well my personal experience has been as a PhD student getting access to recruitment data and so on that, that having projects to back you, so to say like having support from the European Commission in my case for instance, allowed us to open doors because the resources for the university kind of were contingent on them opening up also. So that's one example of this, but I agree that it is a challenge in field because university is also a bit careful about sharing these data for reasons that they don't want to be shamed in the public debate about this. So it is of course also a question about being open towards the institution where we want these data about that this is done to help them and this is running a meaningful way in acknowledging that this is the first step towards doing something to the problems and challenges within the organization. So I think it's a lot about framing it and selling your point of what you need these data for and then I would say another practical suggestion sometime is to start to use publication data to give some sense of the representation within your organization and at different levels and so on if you cannot get access to the actual data from the institution. That's the least it gives some sense of how much output there is and it can tell you something about the representation of for instance women within your department and so on or your university. Thank you Matias and Matias that's a really interesting point. I want to come back to we do actually have quite a lot of questions so my apologies if we don't get to your question but I wanted to to pick up a question from Lillian Barraclough that I'd like to to direct to Marianne because Marianne you mentioned the experience of of people who have who are transgender in this particular topic and Lillian Barraclough wants to know that she says meritocracy is biased assumptions of merit whole women back in academia but how do you think that this actually affects transgender individuals you touched on this in your talk because when we talk more of gender diversity it doesn't just mean cis women in academia it's more about academics of all gender identities. Do you want to say a little bit more about the fact that trans individuals in academia face far more bias and challenges and how do we perhaps have some more sensitivity to that particular issue? Thanks Helen and to the questioner for bringing this up because it is very important and the principal problem that I see is the lack of data so how do you so in the US we're fortunate to have a lot of data from our national science foundation mandated by our congress on who gets a degree and it's a binary gender choice so we know men and women but we don't know anything else and so just not knowing the numbers is is one of the challenges and Ben Barr's reputation went up when he trans from female to male but I also know scientists who have gone the other way and their reputation suffered as a result because they began to appear as a woman so I think this requires more study I think it requires more data and as we try to raise the awareness about all of the biases I think that that one should definitely be be part of the conversation. Okay thank you I think that's a really important topic because we talk a lot about inclusivity and diversity in the geosciences but a lot of people still seem to think that relates just to a very simple gender conversation but actually even that conversation is much more nuanced than I think a lot of people acknowledge. I'm going to ask Alberto if he'd like to pick another of the questions to give to our panelists. We are rapidly running out of time so I think Alberto this is probably going to be this will be your last question and then we'll be wrapping up so Alberto. Yeah I have a question on pick it up randomly from the long list to Ligia and Ligia if you could identify say two most important things that need to happen in your country to make change in gender balance what your opinion is what would these things be? Well I think this question is related to how the government support the sciences in our country in many Latin American countries we have the same problem and currently we don't have the investing research and technology and science is very low so I think the first thing that we should resolve in my country is to invest in science and technology in order to promote the scientific activities and I think this is not applied just for Mexico apply for many countries because as you say as I as you see in them so sorry in the graph the invest in the in the research and development is less than two or five percent in country so I think it's we need to resolve this issue first of all. Okay thank you very much so I'm going to ask one last question which I think is pertinent at this point in time and I'd like to ask each of the panelists if in in a very few words if they can say how they think women can be encouraged to continue their scientific careers past the COVID-19 pandemic because I think this is something that's on all our minds at this point in time and we're actually doing this as a virtual great debate because we're all currently not able to meet face to face so Marianne can I start with you how do you think we can best encourage women to to continue with their academic careers beyond the current pandemic? We have to improve the culture of academia we have to make it a place where women are welcomed as much as men we need to be treating people of all genders equally and changing the culture is very difficult and it will take a long time it's a bit of a long slog but just having role models of really super successful women is not really sufficient to me that's not going to do it change the culture. Thank you Matthias can I ask you what your view is? Well yeah I very much agree with that point and I think it kind of it's an excellent question because we start to see that that COVID is perhaps kind of reinforcing some of the underlying biases in this system and I think an interesting example again would be we start to see journal editors observing that women are not submitting papers for the journals at the same rates as earlier where men are publishing more in certain fields and so on I think it's extremely important that universities take into account this situation in the coming years and start to kind of broaden out their their perspectives on how to support the redevelopment beyond the traditional approaches in the coming years. Thank you. Ligia. Yeah I think we need to recognize the bias and gender attitudes and I agree with Mary Ann that we need to change the culture and also I agree with Matthias that say that we need to involve universities in this force. Thank you. So I'm going to sneak in one last question. Just tell me for each of you what role do you think EGU can play in moving us to a truly meritocracy meritocracy I can't even say that word today meritocratic environment for researchers. So Ligia can I start with you what role do you think EGU can play in establishing meritocracy in academia. Yeah I mentioned in my presentation that I think the role of EGU is very important to impulse new projects to promote new projects and to promote that put together different ideas from different researchers in different countries and EGU I think need to continue opening opportunities. I think it's a very nice and amazing association that that could help in this big effort. So Matthias I will ask you the same question. Yeah excellent question again I think the the potential here is to show the way in different ways. For instance start to create some kind of culture where it's relevant to share data on what's the situation in the different organizations in the field. Start to share perhaps guidelines that will be implemented so you can kind of show the way and hope that people will follow and universities tend also to follow each other on these issues a lot so I think that's the way forward view. Thank you and Mary Ann can I ask you last but not least. Well there are studies that show that women are underrepresented as invited speakers as panelists as conveners and so to ensure that there's gender equity just by looking at the numbers that's one way and the other I think EGU has partnered with EGU to create a code of ethics and I think the code of ethics really can enhance culture in the long run. A code of ethics that makes sexual harassment, harassment and bullying on a par with scientific misconduct. Thank you, thank you very much Mary Ann I think that's a really strong point to end with. Suddenly we've run out of time on this really interesting topic. I'm afraid we have quite a large number of questions that we have not been able to get to so my apologies to those people who've not been able to get their questions asked to our really excellent panelists today. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of our panelists also to my co-moderator Alberto Montanari and I'm going to ask him to say a few words in a moment who is as you know EGU president and maybe I'll ask him in his closing words to ask it to what he thinks EGU can do to establish a meritocracy in academia so with that I would like to thank all of the panelists and I'm going to hand to you Alberto firstly to answer that question. Difficult question to close but I think two things very briefly networking is I believe extremely important giving visibility to the topic and the second thing but it is it is very challenging is to provide suggestions to the academia and institutions how to evaluate meritocracy and we are discussing a lot in the scientific community about this. It's challenging but I think we need to give ideas because it's the scientific community that should be proactive in giving ideas on how to assess meritocracy in an unbiased way. That's it. Thank you Alberto. Fantastic words to end this this great debate as part of EGU sharing Geoscience online.