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The Lab and Field

~ Science, people, adventure

The Lab and Field

Tag Archives: LGBTQ+ STEM

What a long year the last month has been

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

diversity, LGBTQ+ STEM, Pride month

I know I’m not alone in feeling like there’s far too much wibbily-wobbly timey-wimey lately. We just passed 100 days of working from home because of Covid-19, the bubbling undercurrent of anti-Black racism and police brutality has (finally?) has broader recognition (though not without tragedy), and Pride Month has largely been replaced by Wrath Month (traditionally celebrated in July, but brought forward by unanimous consent after a Big Queer Meeting in which it was the first item on our agenda). For lots of folks, it’s like the hits just keep coming, as so wonderfully illustrated by this calendar my friend Izzy Jayasinghe put together for a talk:

Some self-promotion: I’m going to talk about my Pride Month of Protest this afternoon 👇🏾. I’ll also talk specifically why there is blindspot in the LGBTQ+ community in UK STEMM towards the experiences of queer folk of colour. You need to register to get a link for the seminar. https://t.co/DpJddaDX5v pic.twitter.com/MZmFmAuMY5

— Izzy Jayasinghe (@i_jayas) June 24, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

And even since Izzy’s calendar, we’ve had the release of a report from the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity in STEM highlighting yet more disparity, and UKRI, the main research funding mechanism in the UK, releasing data on applicant diversity showing just how, well, awful it is.

Throw in some internal institutional battles and frustrations, profound disagreements with the UK government’s Covid-19 response, and our first heat-wave of the year, and it’s been tough. It seems like every week for the last 2 months I’ve felt utterly drained, and each week I seem to find more scope for further draining with even less respite. And no sign of respite in the immediate future (in the UK we still shouldn’t be travelling great distances for overnight stays, hotels etc are still closed, and work demands mean a week of leave isn’t really an option). Pride Month is also often quite tiring, as requests for guest blogs, seminars, and media ramp up in a way that suggests many of us don’t exist the other 11 months of the year.

As a friend and I discussed, it’s soul-level tired, to-the-core-of-my-being tired. All  I want to do is cocoon myself in a crofter’s hut in the Highlands for a week with good books, tea, and food and a couple of good friends that I haven’t seen in months. But that will have to wait.

—

I started to write this post early this morning, and promptly abandoned it until I read Ben Britton’s piece that touched on so many of the same thoughts and added some much needed fuel. In particular the utter frustration so many of us have when trying to address systemic inequities in science resonated quite deeply:

If you present at the hospital with a severed arm, your Doctor does not immediately start drafting legislation about the safe use of chainsaws, or even how best to trim a hedge. They fix you up, address your needs, and move on from there.

 

It’s an analogy I’ve used when talking about how we can address plastic pollution, another global systemic issue – it presenting at A&E with a bleeding head wound, one doesn’t start by thinking about how to clean up the floor.

And doing this – “causing trouble” as Ben puts it – is necessary. Progress will always be slower than we want, and I genuinely don’t know if “true” equity will exist in my career, or my lifetime (I suspect not seeing as we’ve made it this far and, well…). I’m a cis white man, and if *I* find it this exhausting, think about how my trans BIPOC friends & colleagues must be feeling (hint: it’s probably more tired, and for longer). But we keep pushing because it’s the one thing we must do.

That pushing, though, takes effort. You can’t expect Sisyphus to run a marathon between each ascent of the mountain up which he pushes his boulder. When research/academia already feels like a Sisyphean task, fighting to make it a more inclusive, equitable, diverse and accessible part of society can feel like running the marathon. And then another, and then another. This is where other folks can help.

I have a fraught relationship with the term “ally”, especially when self-applied. It’s a transitive state that’s defined by one’s actions, not one’s desire to be so labelled. Allegiances can change, diverge, or be revealed to be something else. Ben Britton (can you tell I’m a fan?) has adopted the term “co-conspirator” or “accomplice” because this means the person has some skin in the game (i.e., if you get cornered & need to fight out, they’re also there), and it’s rooted in action, the doing of things rather than just cheerleading from the sidelines that leads to so many empty statements (hello organizations with rainbow social media avatars in June), promises of further study and working groups and committees that will have no genuine power, influence, or resources to achieve anything.

We don’t need allies. We need accomplices.

—

In The Guardian this morning is coverage of a EU Fundamental Rights Agency report on LGBTQ+ experiences across Europe. It paints a pretty bleak picture. It contains many sobering statistics, but the one I find most straight folks find the most confronting is whether someone would avoid holding hands with a same-sex partner in public for fear of being assaulted, threatened or harassed. Looking at at my own demographic (gay/queer man in the UK) tends to bring this home. 37% say “always”.

And when we toss in those who answered “always” or “often”, it’s 70%.

70%.

Including me.

It’s not about abstractions, or fighting for the sake of fighting or equality “league tables”, or causing “trouble”, but real tangible impacts on people’s lives that many just can’t even fathom.

And that’s in science, in academia, in research, and in our broader society. It’s not easy, it’s bloody exhausting, but when it matters this much, we have no choice but to keep fighting. I often say that “science is people” – and people will always come before “science” in my books. That’s part of the unseen and/or unrecognized community mentorship and support that many marginalized groups do, and will continue to do.

I can’t say it’s been a “happy Pride Month” (not that last year’s was much better). But (he said, wanting to end on a marginally positive note), the fight goes on.

5 years of LGBTQ+ STEM

17 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by Alex Bond in Queer in STEM

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

LGBTQ, LGBTQ+ STEM, STEMinar

For the last 4 years or so, I’ve helped run an organization called LGBTQ+ STEM, which seeks to promote and support LGBTQ+ folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We achieve this mainly through two outlets right now – a blog with interview profiles, and an annual one-day free-to-attend fully-catered science conference, the LGBTQ+ STEMinar, which will have it’s 5th iteration in Birmingham in January.

Last week, I spent a day with Beth Montague-Hellen, the founder and other force behind the group, as we celebrated and reflected on 5 years of successes, and looked ahead to the next 5.

In 2014, there weren’t many other organizations dedicated to queer folks in STEM, and now there are quite a few, all over the world, and who rally together to celebrate LGBTSTEM Day each year. We certainly never would have guessed that there would be so much progress in the scientific community in such a short time.

Looking inward, the LGBTQ+ STEMinar went from about 40 people at the first one in Sheffield in 2016, to the first externally-organized one in York two years later, and now with >300 registered participants for the 2020 edition in Birmingham. Clearly, there was a gap that we were able to fill.

The website now boasts >115 profiles of LGBTQ+ folk in all areas of STEM subjects, from all career stages, and covering a huge swath of the world, and we continue to get new submissions regularly. The fine folks at 500 Queer Scientists have done something similar, with shorter paragraphs, but I’ve always favoured our longer form, which lets readers know a bit more about the interviewee, and lets them elaborate without space restrictions. And they’re still quite popular – we get about 2000-3000 visitors a month to the site.

So what do the next 5 years have in store?

First off, as an organization that is directed at queer folks in STEM, we want to hear from queer folk in STEM! We put together a short survey, which can be found here, and should only take a few minutes for anyone to fill in, and tell us what they’d like to see from us as an organization.

And secondly, we have our own thoughts – becoming an officially registered charity is top among them, and something we’re working on actively at the moment.

Personally speaking, it’s amazing to be even having that kind of discussion when I lamented only a few years ago that finding other LGBTQ+ scientists was nigh on impossible. There’s a fantastic community here, and one I’m proud to have played a roll, however small, in building.

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