I come to science with privilege. To name a few aspects, I am the child of scientists and university professors, which helped me have an inside understanding of the opacity of the academic institution before I even started graduate school. As well, attending the university where my parents taught meant I got free tuition, which allowed me to pursue my undergraduate degree without student loans or the pressure to finish my degree efficiently. Being from Canada has given me a passport that is easy to use to travel for field work and speaking English allows me to access the majority of scientific literature.
I have benefited from these, and many other, aspects of my life, which have shaped my choices, opportunities, and the ways in which I move through the world.
Still, science is a largely a (white) man’s game. Anyone can google the statistics and see the attrition of women through higher degrees or in the gender balance of departments. While the University of Toronto EEB department has achieved gender parity, the division of genders across subdiscipline and research topic is uneven. When considering other aspects of diversity—gender, racial, and sexual orientation—the diversity of students and hired professors in STEM is largely abysmal.
For myself, these structural issues are most personally targeted while I am doing field work. For a recent exposé of some of the issues with field work—which happened at one of the most prestigious and well-known tropical field stations—check out this article.
There are many minor and slightly humorous ways in which field work is more challenging if you are not a man. Top of the list is going pee on long drives—it can be much harder to find a patch of vegetation to pee behind as a woman. Another minor inconvenience is dealing with menstruation while camping, it is not a big deal once you have a system, but this is not something that is freely discussed in information sessions and is left for menstruating students to figure out on their own.
On a more impactful level, while in the field I regularly deal with sexism from collaborators, being sidelined in meetings, receiving different types of attention than my male colleagues, and unwanted casual physical contact.
For myself, these issues are annoying, but are a known part of the world and of travelling. Usually, I can laugh at these examples with my team. But for my students, who come from diverse backgrounds with their own associations and histories, these interactions may carry different connotations and weight.
Given all this, how do I make this work inclusive to a diverse set of people? There are only so many aspects that I can control, which is essentially limited to my own behaviour. I can also work with a team that I trust to have share my values, although I cannot vet my entire team. Nor can I make sure that everyone we meet while in-country is inclusive—in fact I can almost guarantee that there will be at least one problematic interaction.
I don’t have answers for these questions, other than to keep having conversations with my students and my peers.