Inclusivity & Diversity
Valentina’s Lens and Role
My experience as a woman navigating academia has many parallels with my experience learning a new language. While trying to integrate into a foreign country/community, I have felt the frustration of having clear ideas in my mind but not being understood – it was as if my voice was muffled, sometimes mute. In the world of science, built by and for white men, some of the ways I and many other women have been socialized to articulate ourselves and behave seem to be inaudible or incomprehensible to our male colleagues. It is like we are speaking a different language. Some of these behaviors – softness, kindness, self-deprecation, group overriding individual needs – are important assets for long-sustained productivity of groups, yet are often viewed as “weak” in the professional world. As such, no matter how strong of a scientist I may be, others may miss what I say because I lack the characteristics they look for in those that they consider at the top of the societal ranking order. I am asked to have all the scientific talents plus the ability to morph into the language, the behaviors, and even the appearance that white men recognize and value.
Asking anyone, explicitly or tacitly, to conform to white male norms robs the field of true diversity and all of us of our identities. We all bring intersectional identities to our work together and to our science. Some of these identities come with privilege while others come with vulnerabilities, but they all can be a source of insight, creativity and contribution. My role as PI is to create a space that unlocks and connects the creativity of the people I work with.
Depiction of how Valentina’s membership in various groups informs her lens as a scientist and PI, and how we all bring our multiple memberships and perspectives to our work together in the lab.
What keeps me anchored is the hope that one day our diverse backgrounds (gender, race, country of origin, sexual orientation, physical characteristics) will be welcomed in any field we choose to enter, a day when none of us has to surrender or deny a part of our self in order to feel like we belong. To reach this goal, we are in need of immediate and sustained action for all historically excluded and undervalued memberships (including but not limited to women, non-white, LGBTQ+, disabled scientists, etc.) to become truly equal contributors and leaders in the world of science. At the institutional level, we need to reflect on what universities have rewarded and what criteria they use to identify excellence. Are we truly fostering excellence - one that is measured by both the scientific output as well as the quality and health of the process that leads to that output? And do the criteria that our institutions reward truly welcome diverse thinking? Within the Greco lab, we regularly explore these questions as they come up in our daily interactions, and set aside time every six weeks for dedicated discussion on these topics in our Inclusive Academia Journal Clubs.
Inclusive Academia Journal Club
We reserve one lab meeting slot every six weeks to discuss a topic related to current exclusionary practices and structures in academia. The purpose of these “Inclusive Academia Journal Club” discussions is to reflect on issues that affect how we and others move through the world of academia and the world beyond, but that we are otherwise not incentivized to spend time learning about. For each journal club session, one member of the lab selects the topic and distributes one or two relevant readings for the other lab members to reflect on. We rotate through choosing discussion topics and readings, and sometimes discuss topics that reflect our own lived experiences, and at other times identify topics related to identities we do not share but nevertheless need to learn more about.
At the journal club session, the lab member who chose the topic will give a brief introduction before the lab breaks up into small groups to discuss their reactions to the readings or the issue in general. We often consider questions like, “Where do I see myself in this issue? Have I been subject to these systems of exclusion or oppression, or been complicit in those systems?” “What is it about our values in academia that create such a system?” and “What concrete actions can I, the lab, or our department take to subvert these exclusionary systems?” The whole lab then comes back together for a final discussion, in which each small group summarizes its discussion.
Inclusive Academia Journal Club Topics
The Myth of Racial Progress
Both pieces for this journal club dealt with the mythology of racial progress in America and how it can "absolve us of responsibility for changing that reality". Our discussion revolved around who holds responsibility for making structural changes to racist systems and institutions. We also discussed who we should be making these changes for -- those who have been victimized in the past, rather than the institutions themselves.
Asian Americans & the Model Minority Myth
In the wake of the global pandemic of 2020, there was an alarming increase in anti-Asian sentiment and racially motivated attacks against individuals of Asian descent. In light of these events, we felt a need to educate ourselves about the unique forms of racism experienced by Asian Americans. Our discussion focused on the harm caused by mashing down a diverse set of national and cultural origins into a single designation, the racism that is often deemed “acceptable” due to a perceived lack of hardship by these groups, and how these factors influence the Asian experience in the workplace and society.
Comprehensive list of inclusive academia journal club articles
Gender and Sexuality Diversity in STEM
LGBT+ membership is often hidden from view in a professional lab environment, despite equal levels of job commitment, work ethic, and education level. The hierarchical nature inherent in STEM fields selects against the LGBT+ community (higher levels of health issues, social exclusion, and professional devaluation) – this needs to be combated through education of those in power positions.
Disability in STEM
Disability is often left out of conversations about diversity and inclusivity, despite disabled scientists facing substantial stigma and barriers. We read first-hand accounts of disabled scientists to learn more about this issue. Our discussion mainly focused on identifying ways STEM careers are made inaccessible by the structures, expectations, and professed values of our institutions, ranging from our own lab to academia as a whole.
Equity in Faculty Hiring
We discussed the concept of equity as separate from equality and how to promote equity in faculty hiring. The current faculty hiring process is often opaque process and lacking accountability. Simple strategies like emphasizing clear goals of increasing diversity in conjunction with open advertising and increased transparency of the interview process itself can go a long way in hiring faculty from under-represented minorities. We also discussed the importance of a mentoring and establishing support systems for URM faculty and new hires to help maximize their chances of success in securing funding and publishing.
Collaboration
Impactful science both provides opportunities for and demands that people from diverse backgrounds work together, so we wanted to explore new ways to consider and implement successful collaborations. We reflected on an article arguing that collaboration is a skill that must be learned and refined, and identified several actionable approaches to effective collaborations – these included practicing empathy, active listening, and self-awareness about how our own tendencies and experiences shape our modes of communication and working.
Social Comparison Theory
In research, we are always working alongside others, being inspired by others’ work, or even perceiving competition with others. All these interactions can prompt us to compare ourselves with others, which can help us gain self-awareness and set goals, but can also lead us to diminish the value of all those involved. We explored how everyone exists as a multitude of identities, each with different privileges and challenges which we have partial and sometimes biased information about. We should use comparison to learn, improve our work, and ideally find ways to work together, rather than devaluing others.
Acknowledging Contributions to Our Work
Research projects depend on existing knowledge in the field and on contributions by current and former colleagues, but many of our current assessment processes (in publishing, fellowships/grants, and hiring) can disincentive taking the time and space to fully acknowledge these contributions. We discussed the need to properly balance ownership over our projects and acknowledging others’ contributions, and that different pressures affect this balance for scientists in different memberships, including career stage.
Failure in Science
Failure is rarely addressed in the STEM community, despite it being a constant presence during the process of scientific discovery. As such, we explored the importance of acknowledging and accepting failure in our individual scientific journeys and how, instead of avoiding discussion of these occurrences, we can embrace them to enhance our individual and communal scientific growth.
Defining and evaluating excellence in academia
The term “excellence” is widely used by academic scientists to define worth, justify funding decisions, and promote our work to the generate public. We reflected on the ways that our attempts to define and measure excellence can be helpful versus harmful to scientific progress, and how our ideas about excellence intersect with pre-existing biases about race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability. We also discussed how we can update and broaden our definitions of scientific excellence to improve funding, publishing, and hiring decisions.
Scientific outreach to the public
The response of the lay public to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an entrenched, growing distrust in both scientific and medical guidance rooted in several forms of division, including socioeconomic disparity and political affiliation. This is all the more concerning given significant, existential threats like climate failure that require coordinated public engagement to mitigate. Given the various forms of exclusivity intrinsic to academia and research, we explored how the scientific community might engage and advocate, as well as how the public's relation to scientific advances might evolve moving forward.
Roe v Wade being overturned
In the summer of 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, effectively eliminating the right to abortion access and leaving each state to determine its own abortion access rules. We reflected on how this decision will affect scientists' lives and careers - particularly, that many women scientists may face more limited choices of where to live and work, depending on where they can access reproductive care, and that this will likely amplify existing inequities. We also discussed the responsibilities that our institutions play in protecting the reproductive rights of the scientists they employ and providing healthcare access to their communities.
Privileges lead to inaction
Despite well-recognized inequity existing in STEM, there is rarely any action taken to address this problem. In this session, we talked about the mechanisms by which well-meaning privileged people uphold supremacy, justify their inaction, and maintain the status quo. Specifically, we discussed how well-intentioned privileged people (including ourselves) claim that inequity is not physically near them, inequity is too big to impact, and that they are helpless to act against inequity. In the end, we applied our insights to tackle the lab's hiring process and come up with actionable items to improve it.
The Yale and New Haven relationship
During the summer of 2023 we participated in the Yale Summer Enrichment Research Experience (YSERE) sessions on “How to read a scientific paper”. The goal of these sessions was not only to convey technical aspects of reading scientific literature, but also demystify the process of scientific publishing— understanding the personal lenses of scientists who are conducting the research, why scientists publish journal articles in the first place, and the multiple steps in the process of scientific publication.