[ad_1]
What does sexism look like? One of the clearest manifestations is the manel: the panel with no women. (For those thinking, “Oh, what’s the big deal”, a little thought exercise: how would you feel if, over and over, it was only women and no men?)
Back to the manel, it has been established that such panels deprive their fields of expertise and vital perspective, raise the risk of bias, and can reasonably be said to represent a skewed playing field.
And so there have been attempts to include more women; people of colour; people of different orientations and, in India, castes.
In the US, projects such as BiasWatchNeuro, run by a community of neuroscientists, track the gender representation of speakers at conferences in their field.
Now, two Indian women have created a similar repository across STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in India.
Neuroscientist Shruti Muralidhar, 39, and cell biologist Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan, 37, began this work in the pandemic, tracking panels across STEM conferences held online.
They have now collated the data gathered so far, and found that about 32% of such conferences had no women speakers at all, in a dataset of 417 such events held over nearly three years.
The two women met on Twitter, in June 2020. Muralidhar was then a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge, Massachusetts (she is now a scientific consultant in Toronto). Ananthanarayanan was an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru (she is now faculty at University of New South Wales, Sydney).
Muralidhar had tweeted inviting other women in STEM to help her document the gender ratio of speakers at Indian scientific meets. That same month, they decided to create BiasWatchIndia.
Data is the first step in tackling any problem, they say.
Data plan
Muralidhar’s first such effort had begun in 2019. Tired of the “abysmal representation” at neuroscience conferences, she put together a database of women experts in this field.
“When I asked organisers about the lack of representation, and they once again told me there was ‘an overall lack of women in the field’, I would share my NeuroFemIndia list with them,” she says.
In the US the following year, she realised she was now fighting on two fronts, and decided to expand her effort. “I frequently encountered microaggressions that were both sexist and racist,” she says.
For Ananthanarayanan, her first explicit memory of gender bias dates to high school. In Class 12, she was asked to share the Best Student Award with a boy who had scored less than her. Years later, at IISc, an administrative staff member would ask for a signature from “her sir”. “I had to remind them,” she says, “that I was the ‘sir’.”
In the pandemic, the discomfort she had felt turned to anger, as she saw women fade from prominence as additional caregiving duties in the home automatically fell to them. When she saw Muralidhar’s tweet, she thought: At least I can fight for the women still here to have greater visibility.
She put her money where her mouth was and dug into her prize money of 15,000 euros (about ₹14 lakh), from an international award she won in 2019, to help meet the initial costs of setting up the website (biaswatchindia.com) and hiring a small team.
Through this portal and its X account, the team started publicly calling out gender imbalances in virtual and in-person conferences. They started as early as possible in the event cycle, scouring promotional posters for line-ups of speakers, so that organisers could respond to their calls for change, if they had a mind to.
An online meeting titled Celebrating Science was called out for a 0:5 gender ratio. A webinar on genomics had a woman moderator but no woman scientist, on a seven-member panel.
In all, 80% of math conferences and 83% of chemistry conferences had no women speakers at all.
In March this year, Muralidhar and Ananthanarayanan published their first paper on their findings, in the journal Communications Biology. They plan to keep publicising data as it is updated, and pushing for change.
Will they move on to other inclusive goals such as caste? “Our hope is to remain focused on women for the foreseeable future,” Muralidhar says.
[ad_2]
Source link