Surviving Racism and Sexism in Academia: Sharing Experiences, Insights, and Perspectives

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that gender bias is pervasive in all levels of academia, affecting all women regardless of social identity (Llorens et al. 2021). Despite many resources invested into diversifying the workforce in ecology, little has changed in terms of retention of underrepresented minorities (URM; Miriti 2020, Cheng et al. 2021). This is especially true for groups at the intersection of different identities, such as women of color or indigenous women. The bottleneck for retention in academia seems to be the lack of minority representation at the higher ranks: increasing the diversity of incoming students without diversifying the faculty body limits URM students' sense of belonging and their ability to envision themselves pursuing successful careers in Ecology (Miriti 2020, Cheng et al. 2021, Berhe et al. 2022). Unless we fix the institutional discrimination against faculty of color and/or underrepresented backgrounds, especially women, lift the barriers for their recruitment, retention and advancement, and recognize and reward the extra efforts they devote to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, there is little hope for improving diversity in the sciences. If we are not able to make this improvement, we also forfeit the benefits that come with it, such as the surge in creativity and innovation through diverse and multicultural perspectives (Freeman and Huang 2014), and an improved, more humane climate within departments. Motivated by the need to rectify this problem, we organized a symposium (Symposium 4, held at the 2021 ESA Annual Meeting), to which we invited women ecologists at different stages of their careers to share their knowledge, experiences, and perspectives on how impactful change can be made to promote women of color, and URM in general, in the academic workforce. The presentations by these scientists highlighted how training students to do research can be used for institutional assessment and for detecting bias, how academia can be transformed into a progressive lighthouse to inspire society, how it is essential to give a voice to URM scientists who have been wronged and to capitalize on the power of personal (counter) narratives, and how to educate URM on protecting themselves from micro- and macro-aggressions in their workplace.