 Everyone knows, Dr. Malcolm, I think I'm sure many of you do, you've had a 40-year tenure at American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAS, and you have worked so tirelessly to create system change in so many ways in STEM education and in careers. So I think very well but I'll just say a few words about your work at AAS. Dr. Malcolm is the senior advisor to the CEO and she's the director of the program called Sea Change which is focused on colleges and universities creating systemic transformation through incentivizing change essentially. And she has a master's in zoology, a PhD in ecology, she's been a high school science teacher, she's been a university faculty member, she's a former member of the National Science Board, she received the Public Welfare Medal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. It's the highest award that's given by the Academy. So there's a lot that you're doing Shirley and I want to welcome you to this panel and we're really looking forward to your comments so take it away. Thank you very much. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to participate and the fact that I am able to interact with Dr. DePas and Dr. Cordova is just makes it even more special because they are people who really made things happen and I think that that's really the questions that you sent me about leadership I think are really trying to get at this issue of don't just sit there do something and the question is what is the something that we do. I want to begin by giving you a little bit of background on my life because I think that it is absolutely crucial that you know where I came from in order to understand why I do what I do today. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama and there's been a lot of things about Birmingham recently with the King Holiday, the letter from the Birmingham Jail, all of the pictures that I lived as a part of my childhood and as a part of my growing up and being in high school I mean my high school I graduated from high school in 1963 which was the year of the children's march. It was a year of turmoil when we were living under martial law living through bombings actually experiencing firsthand the bull conners and the George Wallace thing that President Biden was talking about and so I think that in addition to that and in addition to the kind of fire in the belly that that kind of experience gives you there's another part to that that is that when you live in a segregated society under Jim Crow there's lots of opportunities for leadership that you otherwise would not have had your schools are segregated somebody's participating in the club somebody's leading the group somebody's doing whatever the churches are segregated somebody's leading the choir somebody's leading whatever and so there was a lot of experience not only in terms of doing that myself I was actually student director of the choir but also in terms of the images of leadership that were around me I saw a lot of images especially of black women who were who were leading things and so it wasn't strange this idea of taking on leadership roles was about we're really about it was about serving it was about volunteering it was about trying to do something rather than just sitting there and so when I went to went from an all black community when I went to college in in 1963 I went to the University of Washington in Seattle and I was suddenly transformed from an all black community to a community where I saw very few black people very few people who who looked like me and there was no I mean zero leadership that you would see within the context whether there were faculty or no matter it was Jim Crow in a way leaving Jim Crow providing the reason for exercising leadership that might otherwise not have been needed you were fully aware of how different your world was from the one that you left and so the question of leading and adding that voice to the conversations that were going on that was something that kind of propelled you whether or not you kind of want it to you felt that you almost had to because the generalizations were being made stuff was being said that was wrong assumptions were being put on the table and so you ended up speaking out you you ended up having to take have a John Lewis moment of saying something you know speaking out when you heard things that were that were off and so the issue of of leading was one about knowing stuff being willing to do stuff feeling as though you had to share stuff and being willing to put yourself forward even when it was more it might have been more comfortable not to so I went from being one among many to the only in just about every place where I spent my time so I had to overcome my own inclination to sit back and say nothing in those settings and so that meant that I ended up volunteering for lots of stuff and I had to learn courage even when I was uncomfortable being courageous because in those kinds of settings you are a target and you are and there is no hiding and so this was something that I guess I learned early on that if you were the only one in the room the question is did I have a responsibility to speak up and so that has really played out in a lot of the places where I have worked and have taken on leadership role and the question was really well how do you what do you do the first thing is basically you have to do your homework and that is that if you are not really fully aware and of what the discussions are about and what it says you are you're hamstrung in terms of being able to push back so I can recall many times when I was on the national science board as the as the second woman in the only black that essentially that I said well that's not what it says on page 43 where someone wanted to come out and say something that was really just off just playing off I was trying to be a good ally Richard talked about our relationship when we kind of found ourselves as the among the onlys basically how can I support him how can he support me and really learning this whole question of of of allyship understanding that even though it might not have been about an issue about women or it might not have been an issue about African Americans if it was an issue about injustice I had to own a piece of it and I think that that understanding that that you what is it injustice anywhere is a problem the consequences of inaction for me they were real I you know it was a matter of in my world in Birmingham and in Alabama in general people died for the vote people died in bombings this was not hypothetical this was real and you knew the people who had died in the bombings or knew the families and so that makes it more real and and really kind of figuring out how do you make change in my particular case what I have done now at quote unquote the end of my career is to try to move and take action on something that has always been sitting there in front of us that is that there are a lot of programs that people stand up to try to deal with this massive problem among of under participation and under representation but quite frankly the approach has often been to try to fix the women or fix the minorities and in fact there's nothing wrong with them the problems are with the system and so in my years here now what I have voted myself to is standing up sea change STEM equity achievement change and that is this whole notion of how do you how do you change an institution and how do you take on the policies programs processes procedures practices cultures and traditions because those things bake the inequities into the structures the very structures of the colleges and the universities and sea change is modeled on Athena swan from the UK and we've seen the evidence for what has happened through Athena swan however they had a separate race equity charter and in our case a race equality charter in our case we living in an intersectional space we knew that we cannot do that we had to take on both of these things together at the same time because they interacted in fundamental ways but the all of those other roles and those boards and committees and things like this that I had served on over the year they played a major role because I understood a lot of the contours of the system that we were trying to affect and understood as Richard said that top down is absolutely critical but it has to be paired with bottom up and I think that understanding that organizational change requires understanding and affecting change within complex systems but using the data the assessment and the information that is apps that is needed and that is being produced every day that tells you where the problems are the undergrads the grads the postdocs the staff the research assistants the problems tend to be spread throughout the institution and it is absolutely critical to take on a systemic problem in a systemic way and this is what we have been doing we now have we're now looking at 25 about 25 member institutions that are engaging in this process of self-assessment reflection and then the standing up an action plan okay if if this then that then how to make that move and that is that is the thing that I think that is really very important right now and one of the key elements actually gets at something that Anthony said and that is about making people smarter we built an institute as a part of sea change to try to really hone in on the question of capacity building people have to understand what the research says and what the implications of the research for their own institutions and their own problems as they are manifested within those institutions as they are documented by their own data and so I think that the the notion of I've gone systemic I guess in a way that's kind of like going nuclear because it's saying that the the colleges and the universities is the agencies is the publishers these are all contributory problems and challenges to a system that is fundamentally inequitable it was not created by us or for us and it doesn't necessarily work for us and so to make these kinds of ships we're trying to put a totally different model a totally different approach on the table and I will stop there and we can delve into this in more detail later. Well that was amazing thank you Dr. Malcolm and we'll come back to questions later but please be thinking in the audience about questions I would love to see sea change for companies and the technology industry in addition to a sea change for the higher ed institutions and even on the higher ed I'd like one of their metrics to be how did I our students do five years after they graduated every institution not one keeps that metric aware are our students in progressing so it's only did they leave and get a job now that is not a high enough.