 Okay, thank you very much everybody. We're sorry that we're running a little bit late. I'd like you to welcome you all to the Diversity and Stems session, and I want to introduce you to these four incredible people that we have here today. So joining us from Grand Canyon, Chris. Can you hear us? Great. Thank you, Chris. So this is Dr. Chris Atchison. Chris earned his PhD in Science Education from Ohio State University. He's an Assistant Professor of Geoscience Education at the University of Cincinnati and his research focuses on enhancing access and inclusion in the earth sciences through experiential learning opportunities for students with sensory and orthopedic disabilities. He is a founder and executive director of the International Association for Geoscience Diversity which is an organization charged with advocating for students and geosciences with disabilities while identifying and developing current instructional opportunities and resources that promote full access and inclusion in the geosciences. So Chris is joining us from the Grand Canyon right now where he is busy working on an NSF proposal or NSF project to try and increase access on field campaigns I believe. Thanks Chris. We also have Dmitri Dunas Fraser. He's a research associate in Physics Education Research Group at the University of Colorado Boulder. So he is a postdoc like you all. He earned his PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2012 in high precision measurements of atomic parity violation in a terbium is that correct? Good grief. We're also playing a leadership role in the diversity oriented Berkeley Compass Project. His research focuses on studying and improving upper division physics lab courses and increasing diversity in the sciences by supporting the persistence of students from under represented groups. We have Michael Williams. Michael Williams is faculty in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College in SUNY. Primarily a quantitative researcher. His interests focus on equity and diversity. The social psychological development of students and institutional diversity in higher education. He earned his master's degree in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in higher education and student affairs from Ohio State. And finally but not certainly not least we have Sandra Larson. Sandra is a senior research associate and co-director of ethnography and evaluation research where she leads research and evaluation studies focused on education and career paths in STEM fields. Her research interests include the under representation of women and people of color in the sciences and organizational change in higher education. She's also interested in inquiry based teaching and learning and the challenges of improving STEM education in and out of the classroom and across organizations. Her PhD is in chemistry from the University of California Berkeley and previously she's taught chemistry in Michigan and conducted atmospheric science research at NOAA here in Boulder. She's a faculty associate at CU Center for the American West. So I want to thank you all very much indeed for being here. We really, really appreciate your time. Sandra I'm going to ask you to set us up and go first. So everybody is going to be giving a short ten minute presentation and to give you a bit of information about data, about diversity in the sciences and then we'll switch into a Q&A session so we can get your questions. Let me say just as we start while it's getting teed up that what I'll be talking about today this is a very quick summary of research. I'm a researcher in this area and this is what I'll be talking about. So everything I say comes from research but I won't give you all of the evidence I have for some of these claims because we don't have time for that. But I wanted to start with some of the numbers for women in particular, sort of the largest of the different underrepresented groups we're going to talk about today. And just show you some data. These are sort of some nice summary charts from a recent National Geographic article. Just on the pace of women's incorporation into the STEM workforce. So 1970 about 7% of the workforce was women 20 years later that had increased to 23%. 20 years after that in 2011 it's still only 26%. So slow change to come up to what we would call representative of the population and I'll use that term under representation by comparison with the whole US population, which is about 51% women, we're rather behind on the numbers of women. Working women working in STEM occupations this is the same data sliced up by different disciplines and what you see is that the pace of change has been upward over the same period of time, these 40 years in this data set. But that you can see that it has been rather different in different fields. So for instance for engineering we're still only at 13% of the engineering workforce as women. Again a different pace of change. And finally this is just looking at the doctorates awarded by gender. Again the point here is different in different disciplines. And so the pace of change, part of what the research shows, the pace of change has been slow and it varies by field. So that tells us that there are some interesting disciplinary issues going on. I also want to just mention you're going to see a mix of things. I've taken some of these graphs from a variety of sources. The term I'll be using is gender and that's how we socially present ourselves as women or men or as we're increasingly coming to understand things in between or the gender is not just a binary definition. That's different than sex, the biological sex we're born with and so I will stick with the terms gender and talking about women and men as the way we present ourselves by gender. We usually in education or workforce data do not know about biological sex that's not what we ask. That would be more appropriate in biology studies or medicine or so on. And I'll also just say that this word underrepresented to use that word relative to some base number of populations such as the percentage of women in the entire US population. We have to know what that representation is. And as I think you'll hear from some of my colleagues later that in some cases for women we can measure that pretty accurately. For other kinds of diversity we don't know what the right representation should be what we're comparing to. And so we can't always use that term accurately although we can surmise that some groups will be underrepresented. The other term I want to just bring up and put into your thoughts is the term of intersectionality. This is the idea that when we talk about women we're talking about a very diverse group still. Women in STEM is still a very diverse group. There are women of color, there are women with disabilities, there are women who were born overseas, who were born in the US who have different, all kinds of variation. And so when we talk about identity and women's experiences in the sciences we need to remember that not every woman is the same as every other woman and not every man is the same as every other man. That we all have multiple identities and that when more than one of these identities are marginalized or underrepresented we may have particular issues. Women of color may have different issues working in science than white women. And so it's just a term to be aware of and to recognize that not everybody is the same. And finally I'll mention that when we look at statistics and numbers we can look at some of these numbers and say engineering has some issues in hanging on to women or attracting women. And so they can tell us there's a problem but when we get up to something that is representative, for instance 47% of the mathematics workforce is women, that doesn't tell us that we don't have a problem right? It tells us we're doing better on representation but it doesn't tell us about the experience that people have in those fields. And so don't take numbers, solving the numbers problem to mean that the whole issue is solved. Just some numbers for geoscience in particular this is a different way of displaying it. The blue curve of bachelor's degrees earned over time since 1974 up till recent times is time shifted by seven years so that you can see that the number of PhDs given to women or the percentage of PhDs given to women is tracking undergraduate representation pretty well if you sort of allow for the time lag of finishing a bachelor's and then deciding to go to graduate school and get a PhD. If you look at the orange dots, those are postdocs, those are you folks good representation but you can see it's lower right? Not all PhDs go on to do a postdoc. The number of faculty, the green triangles, those are assistant professors and so on on down to the blue square. So what you can see there is that there is a time lag for people to get degrees and then go on to become professors. Not everyone does that of course, but that the percentage of women on the professoria in geoscience is still well below the numbers of people that are coming through with these degrees now. Partly due to time lag and partly due to other issues in people's choices and opportunities and access to those careers. So the numbers again tell a story but don't tell us what the story is all about. Finally let me make one more point. This is data from chemistry not from geoscience but it's a study we did where we looked at 50 top departments in how many women PhDs they produced graduating with PhD and these are just, I'm just showing you the average for the whole group and then two departments that have called out as outliers. We studied 50, it's not that we just studied two, but what I want to point out here is that the average is nice slope, steady growth in the number of women getting PhDs in chemistry can hide a lot of variability. In this case you can see one department the blue line started near the national average 25 years ago and did some things in their department to make a difference. It's a really support and recruit and support women and now are one of the excellent national leaders with nearly half of their students graduating are women. Contrast that with another department that was below average when they started and are even more below average now. That's a department where something else must be going on in terms of their ability to attract and retain women. I just want to point out that local environments do matter and that these national averages can hide a lot of interesting learning about what environments are supportive for women and other groups. I just want to contrast this briefly with why is science different? Why is this a problem? What I want to show you here, these are data on the numbers of women in law and medicine. These are the same time frame as the data I showed before where we had a slow growth in the percentage of women getting degrees, advanced degrees in science, and then continued slow growth. What you see here is that in the 70s when law schools and medical schools started to take seriously the admission of women, took down barriers to that, the women's movement civil rights movement were making noise about these things. The number of women entering law school and medical school shot up very quickly. There's a very steep growth in the 70s and it continues to grow. Both of those fields are fairly close to parity at this point in time. What that tells us is it's not that women are avoiding hard fields or demanding fields or aren't smart enough to do it. It tells us that maybe there's something different about science in the scientific fields in that engineering can be growing slowly over time when something like law and medicine changed very rapidly. Again, law and medicine still have the same problem of time lag, right? Doctors and lawyers graduating 40 years ago who are now in their 60s or 70s are still mostly male, but you can see from this graph, this is a graph of the percentage of women versus age of the medical and law practicing doctors and practicing lawyers. There's that same time lag, but it's clear that over time the workforce in these fields will have large fractions of women. Just so you don't think medicine and law have all the problems solved, I just want to point out a recent study of department chairs at top 50 medical schools. When they looked at the percentage of the chairs who were women, even though the percentage of women graduating with medical degrees is half, the number who are advancing into the top academic positions is still small. Only 13% of the leaders in these top schools are women. This was kind of a fun study because they compared that to the fraction of leaders who had mustaches. More of the leaders in these academic departments had mustaches than were women. It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek study, although it's done rigorously. They have a nice diagram in there that shows all the kinds of mustaches they included in their counts of mustaches. Not any old facial hair, not just beards, had to be on the top lip. The point is that there are things about women's characteristics that make them able and successful in getting advanced degrees, but not in advancing into leadership even in these fields. And so what that brings up is the notion of implicit bias. The idea of implicit bias, it's a well-researched subject at this point. The social psychologists have documented this over and over again. Our minds are good at finding patterns, right? And as scientists, we're really good at finding patterns. That's what we do for a living. These are mental schemas. They're quick ways of noticing patterns and organizing knowledge into patterns. They're very robust. They're very persuasive. They're very pervasive. We do it all the time, and we don't always know we're doing it. And so these patterns might be true in general, but the problem comes when we start applying that to individuals and we start making judgments about individuals or making decisions applying our general scheme to an individual, right? And so, you know, women are mothers. Well, that's true. The biology says that only women can be mothers and that women in our society still do more of the parenting. But then if we start explaining a particular woman's behavior because she's the mother or a parent or because she's not, that's where we get into trouble, right? And so these are habits of mind that we have. And so that's why they're called implicit, right? We don't always notice we're doing it. So it's psychologically advantageous. Evolution probably helped us develop this, right? It's good to notice that the saber-toothed taggers are out at night and we should stay in our caves and, you know, be safe. And so it's a useful ability to find patterns, but it can be pernicious. And what I want to point out is that because they're patterns and habits of mind, we can train ourselves not to do them. They don't have to predict our behavior. Let me just say a little bit about implicit bias or unintended bias. This is, I think, a particular problem within science because we think of ourselves as objective. We think of ourselves as fair and impartial. We think we're able to make judgments based on data and not let our personal habits or preferences come in. We also want to believe deeply in the meritocracy. We want to believe we've gotten where we've gotten because we deserve to that it's merit-based. We don't want to think that we're applying unfair criteria when we make judgments about people's advancement. We also have counter examples, right? We can all point to a superb, talented person who's the leader, who's the department chair, who's the dean, who's the president. We use that to say, well, if we can have a black president then it must be fair to black people in America. The counter example does not prove the rule. In fact, it sort of shows us that we know better than the rule. Unintended bias is our tricky spot, but they can be spotted. We are most likely to apply them when we're under time constraints in making judgments. We're trying to make a quick judgment. When the task involves ambiguity we're trying to make a holistic decision about which student should get the scholarship or who should get the job instead of having clear criteria that we can rate people. When we're doing sort of automated processing and we're not having to say why am I putting this person in the S-pile and this person in the no-pile. Those are the places where we're most likely to have these implicit biases. The research is very robust. We all have them. We have them about our own groups. Women have implicit bias against women in certain kinds of roles. We're most likely to associate women with leadership. That's where those medical school data on women and mustaches come from, in part, is because we don't think of women as leaders. Our mental image of a leader is different from our mental image of a woman. I think that comes into play when we are talking about things like scientists or engineer. If we think about the characteristics of an engineer, we think analytical, we think precise, we think whatever we think, and maybe that doesn't square with gender schema or our stereotype of women as nurturing and caring and people oriented instead of data oriented. We can all give examples that are counter to that, but our stereotypes are harder to reconcile when the idea of a woman and the idea of an engineer are different. It's harder to think of a woman being a good engineer or a woman being a good leader or a man being a good nurse. These stereotypes get us into trouble when they're operating implicitly. I just want to point out a cool tool for this. There's a test you can take online, implicit bias test. It uses images and it shows you quick images and you have to make decisions about those images quickly and your time response tells you when it's harder to make a decision that associates two ideas that don't reconcile as well in your head as two other ideas that do. It's based on robust psychological testing. It's kind of fun. There's a whole bunch of them you can take and the answers may surprise you. We try to be non-biased and we think of ourselves as not being prejudiced but the reality is we have a lot of prejudices and stereotypes because of the society we live in. To sort of boil it down then, I've talked a bit about schemas or implicit bias. Implicit bias results from our gender schema is not reconciling so that leads us to evaluate people differently. The same criteria can be read and there's blind tests, lots of research that shows us the identical resume as a man's name or a woman's name are read differently and evaluated differently. The same thing if you use a name that is stereotypically African American versus stereotypically white middle class European American kind of name, sounding name. We evaluate those differently even in experimental tests when the actual information is identical. So that leads people to not have opportunities to be evaluated differently and over time those things add up and this is the idea of accumulation of disadvantage, the small differences in how we get evaluated over and over over again as students, as undergraduates, as graduates, as faculty or in our jobs, over time these accumulated small differences in evaluation add up. And again because of this meritocratic culture of science we don't want to believe that's true and it's harder for us to spot when that might be happening. Lots of research on that area. Another area where there's good evidence about barriers for women in STEM are policies, procedures, cultures that are based on male career patterns. A lot of this has to do with things like family policies and institutions or workplaces and so on. Finally, when that happens when you live in that kind of environment for a long time as a woman, this actually takes a toll on your confidence. So there are also barriers for women internally, the psychology of this, handling the sort of thousand paper cuts day to day, these small micro inequities that add up over time. There can be self-doubt, loss of confidence. And the idea of imposter syndrome is one where we feel like we've gotten somewhere and nobody knows that we actually are incompetent. Some of you will find out that I don't really know all the calculus I learned when I was a freshman. And then also the idea of stereotype threat where there's actually research that demonstrates that if you remind someone that they belong to a group where we have stereotypes, common cultural stereotypes about the performance of that group, so you remind women just before they take a math test that, well, women aren't as good as math and you can do it very subtly. You don't have to do it that blatantly. Just remind them that they're women and remind them that this math test has the ability and they will unconsciously make that connection in their mind if they're familiar with that stereotype and it will actually affect their performance. So then we get this spiral where the loss of confidence and the self-doubt in that occasion actually goes to reduce performance, which means then the opportunity or the award or the score are not as in reach as they were. So the point is that if we don't actively intervene with these features the cycle reproduces itself. We have these gender schemas which cause us to unfairly judge people sometimes. Also if we have few people in the category, if the people are underrepresented and there's a small number of people we're more likely to apply. It's less appropriate to apply the general pattern but it's also more inappropriate when we do. So we have a small number of people and so we have a lack of critical maths and so we explain that one woman's behavior in our department by generalizing about all women, then that leads us to this evaluation bias. Then we're underestimating someone's performance consistently over time, the disadvantages accumulate, the success rate becomes lower. So that person does not achieve as much because we've had this pile on of barriers and therefore that reinforces our schemas that that group is not as successful and that reinforces the low numbers. So it's the vicious cycle of these things. So there's an inertia in the system which makes it hard to change and I think that's part of the explanation for those slow slopes that we saw in the earlier data. So just to finish up here, some things you can think about to do. One is educate yourself about these issues, recognize that there's an uneven playing field and I'm talking here about women. I think you're going to hear about the same kinds of issues with different nuances for other groups. Women are the largest of these represented groups in science and so I think much of what we learned from the research about women can be applied to other groups but also we have to be careful in doing so. But know about the uneven playing field. Don't let people talk about that lowering standards. Diversity is equal to excellence. If you haven't tapped all of the pool and you don't have a diverse group of people in your applicant pool, your scholarship pool, your student body, then you're not getting all the talent that's out there. And do things to improve the environment. As I showed in that one slide, different local environments do matter and there can be different successes in supporting people locally. So you can do things to help improve the environment for students and colleagues of all groups. For the young women in the room, the biggest thing you can do is to be ready for this. Know about these issues. Be able to recognize them. Be ready in both senses. Psychologically ready to support each other. Have that group of girlfriends that you just debrief about stuff. But also be ready in your work. Do excellent work so that you're doing your best in these circumstances. Put on your superman cape and stand in front of the fan. And finally, you all may not think of yourselves as leaders yet, but some of you are becoming leaders and you will be leaders and you can start to be leaders as soon as you are in any scientific environment. You have already achieved a lot. You've achieved advanced degrees and you're shooting for other positions and other opportunities. So be an example and put pressure on other people. If you find yourself in a leadership role ahead of a search committee or ahead of a department someday you can do things like be sure that your colleagues get training on things like implicit bias. And you can accept accountability for face things and assign it. Your opportunities to do that will be greater in the future when you're in leadership formal leadership roles. You can start doing that now. And I just want to mention finally a resource that is focused on this is our institutional level resources, policies and procedures and things. This is a research based resource that I and my colleagues have built called the strategic toolkit. And a lot of the things in there are not quite at your pay grade yet, but there are ideas for what institutions can do. So if you get to the place where you'd like to know what can institutions do about dual career hiring or family leave policies or faculty development, this is a good resource for those kind of institutional strategies. Thank you, Michael. Just again, my name is Michael Steven Williams. I'm an assistant professor at Baruch College and City University in New York. Our topics and our conversations are so deeply connected that I don't even feel the need to slide through my slides anymore. What I do want to do is kind of add a little bit of nuance and help us think a little bit differently. So every time I have an opportunity to speak to a group I do the normal preparation that you're all familiar with at this point. You know, go back through the major statistics like kind of look at the stuff that I think is important, look at the things that I don't think are so important. And looking at this group having an opportunity to kind of pop in and see who is here. You know, personally see like there's a single other black face here. I mulled over and kind of went back and forth a lot about like what I wanted to share. And so I want to play with and kind of think about a couple of ideas and then I'll back it up with some of the data that jumped out at me as I was thinking about preparing this time. And really I want to start by building on the idea of structural diversity. So this idea that if we get to this critical mass, even the word critical mass suggests something like oh, like if they're just enough of us, like suddenly things are going to magically change. That's not true. It's not true anywhere. It's not true for women. It's not true for people of color. It's not true for whites. There are three forms of diversity that kind of dominate the conversation generally. So if you remember, if you've ever heard of like higher education research and the big affirmative action cases that went on at the University of Michigan, Patricia Grun who's a researcher from the University of California Los Angeles and probably one of the foremost voices emeritus professor that deals with diversity. She kind of separates diversity into three distinct groups. So there's structural diversity, the one that we're probably most familiar with, the one that actually a lot of the slides that were shown before and some of the slides that I'm going to show tend to deal with. What's the count? What's the percentage? How many people are here? How does that relate to the larger population? But probably more important, particularly for those of you who are moving into fields where you're going to be working with, where you're going to be mentoring students, where you're going to be dealing across difference, whether it's with your coworkers or with the students that aspire to be like you, are the other two forms of diversity that they outlined and that's interactional diversity and classroom diversity. So classroom diversity is a little bit easier and it's really about what's happening in the classroom environment, what's going on that creates opportunities for people to draw on the diversity that's in the room. So if magically people are of difference in these rooms, what are the professors doing, what are the instructors doing, what are the graduate students who are working with the students doing, to ensure that the diversity of thought, that the diversity of experience is actually coming out in the classroom and it's enhancing and otherwise creating a better experience for people. And then that's related to interactional diversity. There's interactional diversity within the classroom, but interactional diversity outside of the classroom is probably just as important, if not more important. Those co-curricular interactions, the things that make people feel like I belong on this campus. I'm a member of this community, whether it's, there's a strange breakdown on the panel. I was like, two UC Berkeley and two Ohio State. Go books to my homie who's not up there right now. What's happening outside the classroom? Are people talking to each other across difference if they're not working on a project together? Do people who carry identities or a social address that isn't normal, quote unquote, or normative for that campus, do they feel comfortable navigating the various spaces that are available on campus? Are they taking advantage of academic support services? Are they willing to ask for help? Because of fear the stereotype that was mentioned before, that maybe they're confirming in some cases a negative stereotype about them, or in some cases they're disconfirming a positive stereotype. Some of the most interesting work that I've done recently has been a transition to some qualitative data collections where working with students who actually have to overcome the problems associated with being in a group that's positively stereotyped. An Asian American student who can't do math, what does this look like? Am I a disappointment to my family? What if somebody sees me going into the academic support services? Have I shifted this? Have I somehow let down my race and created a narrative that isn't aligned not only with what other people view, but also with how I view myself? Retention and persistence in science and engineering, particularly the hard sciences, a lot of the more interesting work, at least the work that I spend a lot of my time with, is about have you developed a science identity? Can you be resilient in the face of failure? Do you still want to be a doctor if you take organic chemistry? Helping people get over these hurdles and think differently about the way that they interact, but also what diversity means is beyond just these broad generalizations and these separations into underrepresented minority and well represented minority. These are words that I constantly come across that are kind of the coin of the realm, if you will, particularly in science and engineering. I can tell you right now that the slides that I'm about to share are from the NSF. The NSF has probably the best and most comprehensive data collection about science and engineering students, but they drive the conversation because they choose to collect data in certain categories and they choose to report that data using certain coded words. An underrepresented minority is somebody who is black of Latino heritage or American. A not underrepresented minority is an Asian American. And so like these buckets, these kind of categories that we create the scheme of that we're forced to kind of deal with, it ends up changing the conversation and stopping us from thinking critically about other groups and other people that need help. Our unwillingness in some cases or our inability to disaggregate in meaningful ways what the data is telling us about in the process. So referring back to the Asian American students just because it's fresh in my mind because I'm doing a lot of work with it right now. If you disaggregate Asian American students by ethnic groups, Laotian, Hmong, they're not doing as well as Chinese, Japanese. And so some of the questions that we need to ask are about not only what's going on with this group, this broad group, this broad group that has a really unlimited amount of diversity underneath it, but like how can we serve everybody? Science and engineering as a career, as a major field there are declines in a lot of places. White students are declining as a share of the field completely. It's not just demographic shifts, it's people moving away from it. And I think our willingness to ask new questions and different questions to think about diversity as more than just whatever social labels are convenient man, woman, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, non-white is really what I want us to kind of think about and push on while we're here. So I kind of thought about what I wanted to share in a couple of broad categories. For those of you who like heard my bio, I'm a post-secondary education researcher and so like what I generally care about is are people getting from high school to college or are they getting into college and getting out of college and then are they going on to graduate school and earning lots of money. So one of the most popular education statistics or like graphics you'll see is called education pays. It kind of gets splattered everywhere without proper attribution but it shows the step ladder of like if you go from earning a high school degree to earning a bachelor's degree you're going to make about a million more dollars over the course of your life. And then if you go from that to a master's degree to a million and then there's like a little tiny bump for PhD, sorry everybody. But then there's a big bump again for professional degrees so law school, medical school, things of that nature. And what that kind of speaks to generally is the interconnection and really education as a social shorting mechanism for our society. We've been kind of fed this idea one which that's a tangent that I don't want to get into about the education bubble bursting. But that we're in a meritocratic society and part of us being able to demonstrate that merit is that we have the appropriate credentials. You can't do that job unless you have a bachelor's degree. No you cannot work here unless you have a PhD. And our willingness to buy into that or not buy into that I bought into it since school for a really long time fighting dissertations and advisors and trying to convince my wife that I was going to graduate very quickly so that we could move. And it's really about how do we get people from point A to point B. Point A being whatever background they come from no matter where they start to wherever their ambition wants to take them. And to me it's really about that helping people realize their ambition. If a bachelor's degree is great for you, I have a lot of rich friends who only have a bachelor's degree. They spend more than I do. And they spend a lot less time in school. And they've been able to do what they want to do with their time a lot more. Being an assistant professor is not so awesome when you have the right when everybody else is hanging out because they're off work. So be it. So here this is just degrees earned by underrepresented minorities in science and engineering. You'll see there's a continued uptick in the soft sciences quote unquote sciences of psychology. There's a large representation. Just to give you some context the number one doctorate granting field for African Americans across all of them is actually education. And so there have been some interesting inroads as people focus on science education for example. But what you'll see and particularly interesting for this group is like physical sciences remain like relatively flat across time. When considering the differences between men and women what's happening across all underrepresented minority groups and it's particularly pronounced in certain groups so black and Latino are particularly disparate is that women are outpacing men. Women are going to college they're more likely to go to college. They're more likely to enroll in four year institutions as their first institution. They're more likely to pursue graduate education. They're more likely to earn doctorates. This is particularly pronounced in the black community as undergraduate women outnumber undergraduate black men 2 to 1. So over 66%. In most cases it fluctuates. Sometimes it's like 63. Sometimes it's as high as like 68. Of the undergraduate black population is women. And so when you're working with these like relatively small raw materials it becomes particularly important to support these groups as we start to intersect identities as we start to think about not just race but also race and gender. This is an interesting one and this is one of the ones that I wanted to talk about a little bit and make sure that we consume while we're here. And it's science and engineering degrees earned by white women and men from 1993 to 2012 and you see it's a downward trend pretty much across the board if not stagnant like generally leveled off. And so some of the issues that we're facing aren't necessarily about we have these mandates and so if you're a grant writer and you want money from the NSF you know the code words broadening participation of women and minorities in science and engineering. But that ignores the fact that hey this is becoming less attractive in some ways. This isn't just because of demographic shifts. It's not solely the fact that minorities are better represented. Other people are leaving the field. I'm good on organic chemistry. Material science. Field work. No, no, no. Business. Psychology. And so I bring this one up particularly because I think we all have to think critically about what the next generation of us looks like no matter what your field is. Are you doing what you need to do in your interactions? Are you making this attractive? Are you suggesting to people that this is a viable career? Are you sharing your zeal and your passion? Whatever animated you, whatever helped you to get through the slog that is getting to a PhD. Even if you had amazing advisors we've all, well I'll speak for myself. Some of you are probably superheroes who never doubted yourself and were like oh my dissertation was easy. But what are we doing? What are we doing? What are we sharing about our stories to encourage, to push, to help the next generation think critically about being like we are. Or pursuing the same type of fields that we are. Overcoming the obstacles that we have came. And then too, what are we doing to remove those obstacles? I throw this one up because again a lot of my work focuses on the intersection of race and gender. And underrepresented minority women are one of the few groups that have had a pretty steady uptake in some of the things. But again, you'll see that there's a stark difference when you go from the more social science type of aspect to the harder science. And so this is organized kind of in, there are a couple of different ways that people organize academic majors. And so this is kind of organized from soft to hard quote unquote in terms of sciences. And you see again, social sciences, psychology, you know, pretty steady uptake, a positive trend. But some of the harder sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences, mathematics and statistics stagnant, or in some cases decreasing. And then I wanted to, because the outcome of education and one of the hopes with education is that you invest this time and energy you participate in educationally purposeful activities. You're intentional about the time you spend on campus and the extracurriculars that you participate in. A lot of that is related to this larger idea, which I'm sure all of you care about, which is employability. And so like after you're done with that, after you've invested in college, after you've done all the work, to earn your degree, you know, what happens. And so science and engineering kindly kind of alluded to this before, but the numbers are still pretty abysmal in terms of the way that the workforces made up, you know. So over 51% white men, 20% white women. If you combine every single minority woman group, you arrive at about 15%. And so this sends larger symbolic signals to people. You know, if you go and you interview and you walk around a lab or you're at a corporation and you're looking for points of commonality or symbols that suggest that you belong there, a lot of times those symbols in terms of the physical manifestations of people simply aren't there because they don't work there. It could be that the discrimination or the difficulty of getting to the end of the pipeline. They've chosen a career that's outside of science and engineering, outside of their field. It could be any combination. I've heard anything from why would I do this when they hate me. You know, heartbreaking quotations from participants in research studies. Two, it wasn't fun anymore. That ethos those ideas, they reverberate. And they impact the next generation. Another piece that I'm particularly interested in, particularly because I'm a faculty member and always looking for ways to engage in ally behavior as a faculty member is underrepresentation of both women and minorities in the professoriate. That's another issue that is kind of connected to a lot of the stuff that we'll be talking about and hopefully that we'll engage with in the panel. Even now, with women being 51% of the population, with women outpacing men and earning degrees at every level when aggregated. So bachelor's degree level, master's level, and PhD level. Women still only make up less than a quarter of the full professors in science and engineering fields. Less than a quarter. That protection, that care, that suggestion that you deserve to be at the highest levels is not really being communicated. And even more scary is underrepresented minorities as a percentage of full-time full professors in science and engineering. This room is a little flash indicator of what that looks like, but here's some statistics. Like under 5% in a lot of cases at research one institutions, the institutions that have the capacity to win the grants to do the cutting edge, bleeding edge research to attract the best and the brightest students from all over the country. And again these abysmal representation numbers, they reverberate throughout the field. So with that, I'll jump out of here because I'm talking for too long. Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much, Michael. So we're going to switch over to Chris and have a chat with him while we're doing that. It takes a couple of minutes to do that, but while we're doing that, I really want to make the point that when we see this under-representation of people, certain types of people in the sciences, we know from the research that it really is about climate, about workplace climate or there's a huge amount to do with it. There's a fascinating study done in 1997 which looked at the reasons why people of colour drop out. And what they found is that persistence in STEM has virtually nothing to do with aptitude. It has everything to do with the ability to cope with the stressful social situations that happen in science. And I think that that's something that I really want to drive home to everybody is that we can make science a better and happier place for everybody. And in doing so, we can really change these demographics. So keep thinking about that as we're hearing from Chris. This is within our power to change. And these differences that we see in these representations of different groups right now is something that we can fix, but only by changing ourselves and only by changing our science to be more welcome to other groups. So I want to pass over to Chris now. Hi, Chris. And ask you to talk about your field of research. In this panel, we're trying to provide this variety of perspective on diversity. I think that I would argue with Dr. Larson a little bit by saying that when she said that women is the largest underrepresented group I don't disagree with you. However, individuals with disabilities span all groups. Whether it's race, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, anything, you're going to find disability. And in fact, each one of us falls on a spectrum of ability. And as we get older we become more and more unable to do common tasks. Yesterday I spent the entire day at the Grand Canyon. Today I was at Meteor Impact Crater, Beringer Impact Crater. And both days I woke up sore and I'm not old by any stretch and I am in fairly decent shape. But you got to imagine the order you get, the harder to do things the harder it becomes to do the things that we take for granted. And that spectrum of ability changes for us each and every day. For those of you who are sitting in the audience wearing glasses, would you be able to do a lot of the things that you're doing without your glasses? And I would probably argue that you couldn't. So the things that I bring up is more or less, you know, you have people that always argue, why are you trying to accommodate a few? Why are you spending so much time to accommodate few people when you have a much larger classroom of students that you need to spend that time on? And I think what I'm going to share with you now, you'll start to see why. You know, data has been introduced on both women in science, individuals of color in science. The data on individuals with disabilities in science is very unreliable. And a lot of that is because a couple of reasons. One, you've got compliance issues where there's certain things that you just can't ask and things that you can't collect and things that university data universities have that they're really not able to share. That's one. Two, the most of the population of individuals with disabilities do not self disclose their disability. And this goes back to the themes of bias and stereotype threat and all of those things that individuals just once they break out of K-12 they don't want to self disclose as being disabled any longer. They want to be normal, whatever that means. What does normal mean? If you think about that from the spectrum of ability, what does normal look like? I would argue that I don't want to get all existential on you or anything, but what is reality? What is normal? So how do you collect data on an underrepresented population that chooses not to self disclose their disability? I think the most recent data that was gathered on individuals in the geosciences is now over 20 years old. So this is definitely something that's lacking and something that needs to be improved upon. But I would argue that anytime that we try to collect data on this population it's going to be unreliable. The thing that I do want to share is that data has been collected that suggests that if you're looking at your classroom and in your classroom population, or in our population in the audience today, of those who have a disability of some kind, whether it's cognitive, whether it's sensory, and that would include hearing and vision, whether it's mobility disabilities, whether it's behavioral, whether it's emotional, any of that. Of all individuals with a disability, only 25% of them are self disclosing. So when I get back to the point I was trying to make that when somebody comes to me and says, why are you spending so much time accommodating the few? And I can come back to them and say, how do you know what the few are when 75% are not self disclosing? It means that when I'm accommodating the few I'm accommodating the many as well. And then they just usually turn around and walk away from me because they know I'm not done. They don't want to argue at that point. But we have this issue of apparent versus not apparent disabilities. You can obviously tell somebody who's in a wheelchair, who uses a wheelchair, you can obviously tell at some times when somebody has a visual disability if they're using a cane. I have a colleague that I lead workshops with, that I give presentations with, that I do research with, who is blind. And has the ability to look right at you when she's talking to you, you would never know it. So if she wanted to blend in, she blends in very, very well. So we have this notion of apparent versus not apparent. And we are completely surrounded by individuals who have not apparent disabilities. And it's not something that you just ask, it's just something that you understand that you've got to accommodate and when you're developing something through multiple means of representation. So if you're planning, so ideas in terms of how you would accommodate an individual with a disability in your instruction and your presentations, any of that, if you're able to provide the content through multiple means of representation. You're representing the material through different representations. You're going to start accommodating more individuals. So for instance, I'm sitting here speaking to you all audibly. I would venture to guess that there's probably not somebody there that's transcribing my conversation with you. But I would argue that if somebody were there, and there were a screen right next to the screen with my big head on it transcribing my conversation with you, 75% of you, if not more, would be reading the transcription and listening at the same time. If you've ever watched a movie that has subtitles after you realize that they're subtitles and you're annoyed by their subtitles, halfway through the movie you probably realize that you're reading the subtitles as well. Because it's a multiple mode of that representation. And it starts to accommodate more people than you realize. So considering that when you're designing your instruction, when you're designing anything that you do in the classroom, and anything that you do outside of the classroom, you need to provide that multiple representation. Additionally, if you are trying to assess your students, assess their knowledge, you've got to allow them multiple ways to express their knowledge to you as well. These are just two of the principles of universal design for learning. And if you're not familiar with UDL I would encourage you to look that up. Because again, if you're designing your instruction through the principles of universal design for learning you're accommodating the many and not the few. So I'll get off my soapbox on that one. But please do look that up. The other thing that I would impress upon each of you is that whenever you are faced with an individual with a disability, and sometimes, you know, it's convenient for me because when I develop a project and I recruit individuals or students into my project I'm able to learn about the student before we do the project. So for example, two years ago I led an accessible field trip in British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia and I recruited the individuals into it. I paid for them to come. I knew exactly what those individuals could and could not do. There were students and there were geoscience faculty and they'd be brought together again much like this inclusive community of learning that I'm working on now for this Arizona trip. I had the opportunity to get to know those individuals get to know their needs, get to know their abilities well before we actually went on that trip. And so therefore I was able to design the trip around their abilities. The problem that we have in the classroom is for the most part you won't know what students you have until the first day of class. I think that I'm not knocking on the offices of disability services or the offices of accessibility services or whatnot. There's just not enough time where notice is given that you have a student coming to your class that has specific needs and accommodation needs that needs to improve. So a lot of times you're scrambling to accommodate an individual in your class and if you don't already have experience doing so for example you're going to try and find what you can and a lot of times it doesn't work out. So I go back to the planning issue. If you're planning for things through UDL if you're planning for delivering the content through multiple modalities if you're planning to assess and evaluate your students and allow them to not just take a paper and pencil exam or any of that kind of information you're going to be able to accommodate them a little bit better than nothing at all. So my point here is to focus on an individual's ability rather than their inability. And create a climate where ability is celebrated that you create a climate where everyone is both advocating and advocating for each other. You've got to create a climate where it's okay to struggle it's okay to have challenges and it's even more okay to work as a community to overcome those challenges and I think a lot of times this might be why individuals choose to not self-dispose the disability is because they're afraid of being judged they're afraid of ridicule they're afraid especially in field-based learning environments they're afraid of pulling the group behind they're afraid of being considered as receiving preferential treatment. But if you created this culture this accessible this inclusive culture where individuals are relying on each other's abilities their each other's perspectives you're going to do away with a lot of that fear pretty quickly and I noticed that right away on that Vancouver trip that I presented. In your designs but focusing on academic rigor over physical rigor for those of you who have been in any kind of field-based learning experiences you will remember a lot of what sucked about it versus what you actually learned I think back to my field camp and I can tell you ten things about the heat and being stung by wasps and the rain and everything that didn't go so well versus I can tell you maybe half a dozen things or fewer about what the learning objectives were what the learning outcomes were and what I actually learned from it. That's a problem we need to focus on the learning objectives and the expected outcomes the anticipated learning outcomes. We need to put the preference or we need to put the focus on that rather than having this notion of having a physically rigorous outdoor learning experience and if any of you are interested in talking more about that I can talk about that to them below the face but I'm not going to talk about that much more now. I think also about these field-based learning approaches keep this in mind and this isn't just for individuals with disabilities this is for every individual from and underrepresented population and I would even go so far as say this is based on any individual that what interested us what made us interested in the science that we are in now doesn't necessarily mean it's the same thing that would interest an individual from an underrepresented population. There's a great study that's coming out right now that talks about individuals from different racial backgrounds, different ethnicity backgrounds and it talks about what the science means to them and the importance of the science and for a lot of individuals from underrepresented backgrounds especially racial backgrounds that being outdoors and learning outdoors is not an interest. It's something that we promoted if you go to any geoscience or any field-based learning science website the departmental websites you're going to find that there are pictures up there of people outside learning and getting dirty and it's more of a rite of passage than it is an actual learning experience for some because you can always talk to individuals and say hey where did you do your field camp they don't say hey what did you learn at field camp they just say where did you do your field camp and you know yeah I did this and I was awful and this is that and the other thing and I loved it but not everybody is going to be interested in that and so we continue to promote this traditional collective of field-based learning that is not interesting to individuals from underrepresented populations so why are we doing it we're continuing to push them away through the way we promote our science and the last thing that I would just urge you to consider how you are how you individually are promoting access and inclusion how would you promote inclusion I would imagine that a lot of the things that you're hearing not just from me but in the panel itself is quite new to you it's quite unique and novel so I would encourage you to consider these things to continue to consider how you will promote an inclusive environment and continue to look for resources and in my bio you can find a link to a resource that's focused on the geosciences a lot of the resources that we present on that website are not specific to the geosciences so I would encourage you to look that up but consider that and if you ever have questions if you ever want to talk about how to accommodate somebody and if it's the last minute and you're panicking I'm more than willing to hear from you and to talk to you and kind of walk you off the ledge and that so that's all that I'm going to present now if you have any other questions or comments I can talk at the end here but please feel free to email me so thank you I'm actually a researcher whose research focuses on say LGBT issues whereas we have say experts here in the issues of gender and race disability and accessibility but I'm a gay scientist and I'm a postdoc so I'm coming from that perspective and I'm also I'm going to throw maybe some statistics at you but just know that there's not actually a lot of statistical work out there so we don't know about issues of representation in say specific sub-disciplines like the geosciences or physics which is my discipline or other disciplines but before I do that I just wanted to start off with this idea I want to have some sort of technical understanding of say what gender is and I want to talk separately about gender expression, gender identity, biological sex and then sort of what's happening at the chromosomal level because those can all be very different so I'm up here right I'm wearing pants and a button shirt and a belt I'm dressed in a pretty masculine way I have a pretty masculine haircut and masculine sort of facial hair so that's my gender expression and I'm presenting as masculine that's basically all the information you have about me you don't know about how I identify you know I identify as male or a man and you definitely don't know what's going on underneath my clothes and what's happening in my body and you certainly don't know what's happening at the chromosomal level I don't either so if we think about this sort of using a scientific lens right we have some four-dimensional vector space that can be used to describe gender right we have gender expression and we have identity and we have biological sex and then we also have chromosomal sex and so the gender binary really is the reduction of that four-dimensional vector space to just two points masculine, male, man XY, feminine, woman, female XX but actually it's a really rich space and one of the reasons I want to introduce this sort of technical way to start thinking about gender in a more complex thing is because I also want to be talking about say the way that we use technical language to marginalize gender and sexual minorities and this is one way we can use technical language to better understand the whole complicated landscape of gender. Just real quick some numbers now lesbian, gay, bisexual people make up about four percent of the US population I don't really know like how solid is that number these are all estimates right because not everybody is out, not everybody self reports similar issues to what we just heard about with respect to disability people with disabilities people who are not, have non-binary biological sex so these are people who probably can be lumped into the group of intersex people about one to two percent of the US population and just for reference that's about the proportion of people with red hair in the United States so it's, you know when I found out the statistics I was like oh this is a lot more common than you usually think about, trans people make up about half a percent of the US population and so our LGBT and trans people underrepresented in the sciences I have no idea. Are we marginalized in the sciences? Yes. We're marginalized in society general and the sciences aren't like some magical safe haven I want to be really quick so we can transition to panel stuff and so I really wanted to focus on this idea of how we use sort of our technical identities unintentionally marginalized LGBT and trans people and so there's this idea that I want to throw out there which is this technical social dualism and we heard a little bit about it when Sandra was talking about our schemas right for male and female like who's technical and who's social, who is really good at math and who's really good at caring for children. So the technical social dualism is the idea that technical things are different from social things and technical things are better than social things. The dualism is bullshit right but it exists it's an important schema it's an ideology that we use to understand the world and it intersects in problematic ways with our ideas about male-female binary right men are seen as more technically proficient women are more socially proficient and also with our ideas about race right white and Asian people are seen as more technical Latin people are seen as more social or more socially competent and this is reinforced through media not just at our workplace right the big bang theory has a lot of people whose technical proficiency comes at the expense of say social proficiency. How does this interact with LGBT identities and trans identities? When you start thinking about the stereotype of what say gay man looks like or an effeminate gay man what happens is as a gay man occupying a scientific space right if I present as feminine or effeminate that sort of dings me on my technical proficiency right that dings me as someone who is seen or expected to be good at physics and so there becomes a social pressure now at work for me to pass and cover and to come off as masculine and I can tell you my personal experience throughout high school and college I practiced not coming off as queenie right I practice being masculine really deliberately and I think all of us actually practice that but not all of us do it very deliberately the last thing I want to say about this is that the pressure to pass and cover is really similar to pressures that people feel who have other invisible dimensions of marginalization and so this passing and covering is not actually unique to LGBT people or trans people but it's a broader issue but it is something that LGBT and trans people face before we transition to the panel I also want to give you some ideas of things we can do right and one of the things is be really careful about our language so as technical people we have male and female connectors right we talk about male and female connectors a lot if you look at the research on LGBT engineering students the idea that male and female connectors connect and then you get power or you get current flow right is actually something that students use to marginalize each other and to say like hey look male and female and female connectors you can't get any current flow this is a wrong type of connection in physics right we talk a lot about opposites attract the word attract is really problematic whatever but so you have this idea the opposites attract and it gets translated into social contacts right to reinforce heteronormative ideas about what kinds of relationships are okay but actually even in physics that idea doesn't make sense right so opposite charges attract but like gravitational charges attract and when you start talking about quantum stuff right the idea that you have opposite charges with color charges breaks down because you have three color charges so there are ways that we can start talking about using our technical language around binary things that translate into the social space in problematic ways a little bit differently similarly right getting out of the technical just how we start talking to each other and how we start talking about each other in different interpersonal ways I think is really important so are you assuming that somebody has an opposite sex partner are you assuming that somebody has a traditional family if you're somebody who's in charge of say forms right are you asking people to fill in just male and female bubbles if you're somebody who's mentoring a student who's changing their first name because they're undergoing a gender transition are you supporting them in navigating the institutional red tape around changing names and all the issues that come with legal name changes versus changing a preferred name so I just wanted to toss out a bunch of those different ideas technical social dualism how we use technical language in the lab around each other how we interact and are personally some of the institutional barriers that are out there and I think now just transition to the panel so we've heard a huge amount of information so I guess there's so many different ways in which we can take this discussion but I really want to hear from you about your thoughts for you know what comes up for you for diversity and do you have certain questions about diversity in general about accommodating people about how to create welcoming spaces you know what are your thoughts what are your questions and how can we take the discussion in a way that's useful for you somebody be brave yes hello I'm Kiana Frank from University of Hawaii so I fall in the other bubble and I just want to make a comment that it's very cultural specific and I mentioned earlier that I often feel like I'm in between two worlds but I think it's very rare that I'm also ostracized by my community for choosing this profession because science is seen as not Hawaiian and so I get a lot of kickback from my community and I get a lot of kickback from the science community because of my race and my cultural identity and so I think at least at the University of Hawaii Hawaiians are 25% of our population on the islands and they make up 16% of the undergrads less than 1% of that is in the sciences and there are three Native Hawaiian faculty in the natural sciences and so I feel like they always go they're like oh we need to increase diversity in STEM we need to bring in more minorities we need to bring in Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians but they're not really they're creating new programs which are fabulous but they're not addressing the issue the issue is that the community thinks of science as not Hawaiian and so I just want to bring up the point that it's not just about addressing the issues within science in general it's also about bridging that gap to the community that you're interested in targeting and making it okay within that community to pursue this profession as well. Thank you. So I had a question for I guess it would be Mike and Sandra really for any of you though so that you a lot of folks were talking about just how important it is to create an inclusive climate in your workspace and on campus and everything but could you give some sort of some concrete suggestions or examples or things that you think actions that you think should be taken to create an inclusive climate so I'm very interested in doing that but heard a lot of kind of more general and abstract things during the talks. This feels weird. Can I just talk? Can you hear me or do I need the mic? Oh okay. Oh you're right. Multiple modalities. That's such a multifaceted question that I'll try to zone in on like one or two specific things. Yeah and so there are a lot of different ways to think about diversity. There are a lot of different ways to think about creating an inclusive environment. A lot of the most important things for you as somebody who's looked to as a leader as you assume postdoctoral positions as you assume faculty positions as you move forward is being in touch with your own humanity like having a good sense of who you are what you can do and what you can't do and looking for the appropriate support you know so I don't expect anybody to be an expert on dealing with the cultural issues across groups so the previous commentary about Hawaiian culture you know something I'm very familiar with you know when multiple identities intersect and you know oh my family doesn't care about me getting a graduate degree they care about me living close to home and taking care of our elders and having children for example which are some of the cultural issues that you come in touch with. It's really about being open realizing that they're shared humanity that we all have families that we have to navigate that we all have issues in the environment that we have to think about and giving people space by open and clear communication and also by kind of demonstrating the way demonstrating that you care demonstrating that you want to make space for people and so engaging the people that you work with in conversations about difference giving people an opportunity so if you have students with disabilities if you have students who identify as LGBTQ giving them the space to be themselves you know something as simple as asking at the beginning of class which is something I do every semester and I didn't even think about it as a inclusive practice until we were actually having a conversation as panelists is I always go through my role list and what's your name what's your preferred name like here's what's on the list here's what's on the roster what would you like me to call you little simple strategies like that open the door and they start the conversation and they give people an opportunity to decide their identity decide the way that they want to engage it gives you an opportunity to meet them where they're at and offer the resources I say another really important piece of that is just being yourself share that you're not perfect that it took you a long time that it was difficult for you to get where you got but that you had people that supported you and that helped you and offer yourself as a person that will do that same type of work for the students and faculty members and colleagues that you come across because the only way that we can really change our environments is through the individual interactions that we have you know you know the difference between somebody who walks into the room and everybody lights up because they're excited to see them and somebody who walks into the room and everybody gets quiet and kind of looks away because they're not so excited to see them and like actively working to be the former rather than the latter you know that's another like concrete takeaway think about you know what what helped me what helped me persist what helped me be resilient what brightened my day what made me think I can do this and making sure that you embody that positivity as much as possible just about something to that you know I really like the fact that you talk about preferred names I think the one thing that trans students have told us is that they are terrified before that first day of class that they're going to be misgendered and that they're going to be outed to everybody in that class so I'd actually strongly encourage you all before your first class to email your entire class you've got their list of names there on the roster that may not be their preferred names so email your class before that first day of class and ask them over email what they want to be called and make sure you get it right because that way you know that they're not coming to that first day of class terrified that they're going to be outed or misgendered and they know that you're a safe space and I would also also in your first class mention your preferred gender pronoun so my preferred gender pronouns are she her and hers and that's just a way of opening up high you know my name is Dr. Carolyn Brinkworth my preferred gender pronouns are she her hers you know feel free to share yours or not as you see fit you don't need to add yourself so that's another way that you can go about that I think language is a huge part of climate that being attentive that you don't use examples in your teaching or in your talking to colleagues or whatever that talk about wives you can talk about spouses you can talk about partners it's a habit change that you have to make but it's one that you can work on I think inclusive language around family structures parenting and inclusive practices you know being attentive to maybe that meeting at the end of the day is not good for people who have to do the childcare run but also being attentive to maybe the single person is not always the one who has to come back for the nighttime student you know geoclub meeting right that being attentive to the ways people arrange their lives maybe different and trying to think about those spots where you can I think that has a lot to do with climate and little signals like that mean a lot to people right so it goes a long way I think inclusion in decision making if you are you know part of a group inclusion inviting people to weigh in just thinking about who's there this can also have to do with just you know not just the types of groups we've talked about but if you're on the curriculum committee for your department and academic department are there non-tenure track faculty who should be included because they do a lot of that teaching right that's a status difference in academia that those people may have a lot to say the undergraduate advisor may have a lot to say about those things so thinking broadly about who knows about this issue and should be included in the conversation decision making is important and again sense a big signal to people and you win a lot of friends that way right I mean now you have that person on your side and they will help you and that goes for hiring decisions if you're in a company and or in a national lab you know these kinds of things being attentive to the assumptions that we might make about people and trying to catch your language so I think that's a big piece of climate as Michael said the everyday interactions and just watching out for these things and things like this is something I've become sensitized to recently I have a good friend who has a pretty substantial hearing loss and I have been oblivious through much of my life until recently to how noisy restaurants are right so now I've started making a practice of checking out restaurants before I make it you know a date to have dinner with her so that I'm choosing a quieter place and I'm not putting all the load on her to be listening in a noisy environment and that's just an awareness I've come to only recently but it and it turns out to be a more pleasant dinner too right if they're not in such a noisy place so it's a constant self-awareness practice I think I would agree I think language is the biggest and you know from my perspective making sure that you know a lot of times it's you that you have to be the one to do the legwork to establish an inclusive culture inclusive community person first language you're dealing with individual disabilities is a big one it's a cultural issue I think it's becoming more prevalent person first language becoming more prevalent in the United States you go over to Europe and England and France it's not so much of a big deal to say that this disabled individual which is more of an issue for us more of a respect issue to realize that they're not identifying as they're not identifying with their disability they're not identifying with their sexual preference or sexual orientation they're not identifying with their race with their gender they're identifying as the individual and I think it's necessary to make sure that you realize that you practice what you're teaching with your students and with your faculty colleagues as well that it's going to take time but through language and through cultural development that that inclusive practice is going to start to take hold it's not going to happen overnight just understand that just coming from the perspective of someone who passes us straight in a lot of context it can be really hard to be I think connecting students with role models is an important thing and I think for a lot of queer faculty or queer teaching assistants or whatever it's hard right there's this decision do I come out to my students and if I do how and how can I be a good role model and so one of the things that we can do as straight allies or people who aren't comfortable coming out right because not everybody that's not a responsibility I don't have a responsibility to be out to my students but one of the things that we can do is elevate visibility so some things like I'm going to be speaking now from a very physics background because that's where I'm coming from but the physics community has a website lgbtphysicist.org and that has a list it has an out list where students can go to see hey are there any out queer physicists at my institution it also has an ally list right are there any people at my institution who are on the ally list and so making students aware of that resource or others like it maybe I don't know if there are similar resources in other spaces but I imagine that there are I know that APS has a list of minority speakers right if you want to invite minority speakers but making people aware of those making your students aware of those types of resources so they can go see people who are out is an important thing and they're also like features APS released sort of a feature of a bunch of different queer physicists which is pretty cool so you can forward that to your department or students or something like that. As you're talking Dmitri I'm thinking about another element of climate which is physical space when I do I do a lot of work on other campuses and when I walk around I look at whose picture is on the walls and what kind of things are portrayed and does it look like a place where there's stuff going on that I would want to do or are there you know a bunch of old fuddy-duddy looking people on the walls I mean you notice these things right the welcoming are there places to sit and hang out and have a chat after class and are there people doing things or does it look dead and quiet so it's something to be attentive to in sort of what might the spaces be communicating and again there's research about this that shows that differences in the physical environment also communicate things about what your workplaces like what your department is like and it's worth noticing those things and thinking about what messages they send so we've got time for one more question and then we're going to have to let you head out for the bus. So I was Sandra you showed a figure that I was really interested to see which was the time lag, time shifted, undergraduate graduate, postdoc, assistant professor associate full professor plot and it really made me think of all the discussions I've heard about specifically getting more women into faculty positions or more women to get farther in science I often feel like the places that they are trying to solve the problem are not actually where the problem exists and I think that plot really shows that there's no problem converting undergraduates to PHE it's basically you're getting a direct however many percent undergrad women you have that's how many you get in PHE postdoc was pretty good too and then you see this big fall off but even in undergraduate it's only 30 percent or something 35 percent so there's kind of two different problems then it's one getting women to be undergraduate science majors and then second to get them from postdoc to faculty and the in-between transition seems to be working okay so I would love to hear your opinion and this does apply to all the different ways of how can the research on these things help focus how we try to solve the problem because it's not recruiting more female graduate students that's not going to make more female professors because that's not where the fall off is happening so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's a great question because that is true for the geosciences in general that the percentage of women going into graduate school and getting PHDs is quite comparable to the percentage of women getting the undergraduate degree it's a little tricky for geo because a lot of you know you didn't come from an undergraduate geo degree right there are physicists and chemists and biologists and all kinds of things engineers who go into geosciences later it's also variable by different sub fields I didn't show that but oceanography is different than atmospheric science but your point is well taken in that and it also differs by disciplines right it looks different for physics than it does for chemistry than it does for geo so that's a really interesting research question I would call that a sort of cutting edge question right now what are these disciplinary differences we need to unpack them and understand them across STEM disciplines as well as unpacking across you know as Michael mentioned for instance lumping all Asian-Americans together you know and not understanding so I think that's a real hot research area right now is unlumping but it does also speak to the issue that the postdoc is a key transition time and also a hot area of research we don't know enough about what the barriers are we do know some issues about you know things like benefits and leave issues you know this is a time when people are often at an age where they're starting a family and this is kind of you know probably the crappiest benefits you'll ever have or right now on your postdoc unless you have a nice posh one which may be true for a lot of you but in general postdocs do not get good family leave benefits and health benefits and things that might support starting a family there's also that worry about the job transition and so on and people are making big life decisions there about what kind of career path they're going to go into so there's a lot going on in that it's a sensitive time and there are disciplinary differences that tell us you know there's some interesting things happening there but we don't know all of what they are certainly you know in the life sciences similar to the net numbers for geo lots of women are getting PhDs and then the postdoc period is a place where it really crashes and the proportion of women is quite a bit lower and there we think part of what's going on is the culture of needing multiple postdocs in the life sciences before you can get a faculty job so it's just really a long haul and people just are like you know forget it I want to get on with my life I want to finally make some money you know I know when I was a when I took a postdoc my mother was like postdoc you're not done I thought the doc was enough I said no mom this one has health benefits oh well then it's almost a real job but it's a long time right it's a long schlep it's certainly part of the issue for people as they want to get on with it so there are interesting questions there and the other thing I should point out in that figure that you're mentioning is that you know the people in the bottom the bottom dots where there are much smaller representation of women are the ones making the decisions and teaching the courses and admitting the students who are coming in so cultural change you know part of that is just a time lag of who is old enough to be a professor a full professor but part of it is also who's controlling the decision making so there's a lot going on there there's a mix of personal choice and also constraints right do we feel fully free to pursue what we want to choose or do we feel constrained by society and it's an important issue and one that the research hasn't fully unpacked yet I want to touch on that a little bit because that graphic isn't unusual across disciplines and that fall off even in fields that don't have postdocs like the move from PhD to assistant professor to associate professor to full professor it looks pretty similar Kimberly Griffin is a researcher who you'll probably be interested in her work and started to unpack this in some of the broad sciences and chemistry and biology and computer science and some of the outcomes and some of the reasons that they've started to point to you know yeah some of it is a slog some of it is the time to degree each additional year to degree decreases the likelihood that somebody is going to pursue a faculty career some of it is the money so a lot of the hard sciences it's much more lucrative for you to go and work in industry than it is for you to go and take a huge pay cut in academia and so people because they've spent so much time because they've invested so much in terms of their earning power in school they're not willing to sacrifice in terms of salary when they get out and some of it is a lot of what we've been talking about just the discrimination the problems and discrimination across all fields women are much less likely to have their academic journal article cited women are much less likely to be called as experts and be op-eds you know there are multiple numerous studies across fields showing that these huge disparities and like who's considered an expert is difficult and so if you write a journal article and a man writes a journal article and it's similarly placed but this person has 5,000 citations and you have four it becomes a difficulty where the work is being undervalued and that lack of value leads people to either exit or they get the suggestion that they should exit because they're not productive enough or they're not doing the things they're not living up to whatever the standard is in the field and so like there are a lot of researchers who are kind of working on that type of stuff Susan Gardner at the University of Maine does that type of work at UMass Amherst what is her name Benita Barnes does that type of work Kimberly Griffin at the University of Maryland College Park at Michigan State University Melissa McDaniels does that type of work and they're really starting to look across fields at why are people exiting and why can't we have this critical mass, why can't we push the number of full professors, people who are in decision making capacities up Alright so we're going to have to break, one thing I do want to let you know concrete recommendations, there was a conference organized over the summer which is called Inclusive Astronomy it was the first of its kind organized over the summer which didn't look specifically at one type of minority or underrepresented group in astronomy it looked intersectionally at all of them so it looked at race, it looked at gender identity, sexual orientation disabilities, size issues, socioeconomic status, you name it they just released a 36 page document of recommendations that came out of that conference so I would highly recommend that you take a look at that, if you can't find it online I know they're in a public comment session right now so if you can't find it please email me I'll be more than happy to send you that link and you're more than welcome to go and comment on that link and make suggestions yourself about how to make science more inclusive but it's not only astronomy centric, it also has a huge number of recommendations across all the sciences so I would highly highly encourage you to go and look at that because it contains all of the concrete recommendations that an entire group of 150 people could come up with which was a lot so in conclusion I would like to say thank you so much to the panel, thank you Chris for calling in from all the way over there, if any of you would like to talk further about this I've done a lot of work on this and be happy to talk to you tomorrow but thank you all very much indeed, your burst will be waiting for you outside and we will see you all at 8 o'clock in the morning