 Hi, I'm Mary Ann Holmes and I'm a professor emerit from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I've retired and I now get to live in Vermont. This is my third attendance at EGU. It's wonderful. I really appreciate it and it's made me think a lot about all the people who deserve this award and all the people who supported me in this work. So I'm very grateful. Well, I think science progresses better, perhaps more quickly, but certainly better when there are a variety of minds interested in the science. So different kinds of minds will see different kinds of questions. Questions that some of us don't even see are important to answer. So more kinds of minds, the better the science. Sorry, I'm thinking of all the different things. I began my deep interest in this in 1995, so it's been a long time. And there are so many wonderful people who support you along the way. And then there are people who are just, they want to focus on their science. They're not interested in the people who do the science. And I certainly understand that. And if you want to do that, that's fine. But don't stand in our way as we try to get more different kinds of people. So sometimes, yes, people try to persuade me that this is not an important thing and that's just not going to happen. Yeah, some people did. I'm like the Association for Women in Science and the Association for Women Geoscientists. So, yeah, I've had some support. And certainly from the American Geophysical Union, they've been really great. Well, as I said, if people were trying to be very diplomatic, and this is not my strong suit, I think if more people were aware of the issues that they would be more supportive and be more willing to do some of the things. So we don't expect people to change. Nobody wants to put a lot of effort into changing their way of thinking. But there are practices that you can do that don't require you to change your mind, but just do things a little differently that would make it better, that would make things a little easier, that would make evaluations more fair and balanced. Well, it's evolved a lot. There's a lot more women on faculty. There's a lot more women in leadership positions, but we're not there yet. It's a very slow process. A friend of mine told me when we first met doing this work, and I don't know if I want you to put this in the video, but academia changes one funeral at a time. It's a very slow process. And like I said, anyone who's not, like, actively supporting this work is probably just busy doing their own science, and they don't want yet another task laid upon them. So I get that. Well, first they need to learn about it. We looked at data and software. There are more women, for example, in biological sciences, so in geoscience that translates to paleontology. And there are fewer women in physics. There are fewer women in geophysics as well. So looking at the data is useful, but also learning these strategies that help kind of circumvent our natural biases. We all just have preferences for one thing or another. I like the color blue, some people like the color green. There are strategies that help us be more fair in evaluations. And evaluations, to me, seems to be the key. So if you evaluate someone to enter graduate school and then you evaluate them to become a postdoc and then evaluate them to become an assistant professor or the first job, each of those evaluation steps can either be fair and promote people sort of equitably or they can disadvantage one group slightly as the progression increases. And just a small amount of unfairness can lead to big differences, the higher up in the hierarchy that you go. So some of these practices include things like when you sit down to write an ad for someone to apply for a job, just the very first conversation might be, well, we have to replace Joe. And then everybody sitting at the table starts thinking about Joe. Now, we don't mean to do that, but there it is. Joe is now in our brains and now we're looking for a new Joe. Well, instead of doing that, we describe the position. We're looking for a new geochemist and we want a geochemist who does low temperature and we want a geochemist maybe who does, works in mesozoic sediment. So, but the more qualifiers you put on it, the fewer people will apply for those jobs. So you need to describe it as broadly as possible. And then whatever goes in the ad becomes the set of criteria by which you judge the candidate. Now, that seems very obvious, but if you've ever sat in a search committee, you've heard people say, well, I know they're major professor and he's a good guy. So this person is really much better than this person where I don't know the professor. So now you're talking about something that wasn't in the ad. Was it in the ad that we should only hire people who's major professors we know and like? That wasn't in the ad. But the conversation very often devolves into topics that aren't in the ad. They're not criteria for this position. And just that step alone could make a huge difference, I think. Okay, thanks. See you at AGU.