VIEW to the U transcribed
Season 9: UTM in the Community; Episode #4
Equitable environments in academia
Professor Lindsay Schoenbohm – Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences
University of Toronto Mississauga
Professor Scott Jess – School of the Environment
Washington State University
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Scott Jess (SJ): I don't think there's a need to close the gap statistically with quotas and making sure everything is even.
I'm Scott Jess, currently an assistant professor in Earth Science at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.
That's the goal: to ensure that we create academic spaces or afield that ensures everyone gets to be who they are and do the work that they love with their own unique perspectives.
Lindsay Schoenbohm (LS): So access programs in general are important, but particularly mentoring programs that focus on increasing the pool of candidates when we attempt to hire into faculty positions.
I am Lindsay Schenbaum. I'm an Earth Science professor, and I'm also the Chair of the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.
At the departmental level, we've normalized discussion of equity, diversity, and inclusion within the department, and I think that's been valuable in changing the tone.
[theme music fades in]
Carla DeMarco (CD): Equitable environments in Academia.
Hello and welcome to VIEW to U: an eye on the UTM academic community. I'm Carla DeMarco at U of T Mississauga. VIEW to the U is a monthly podcast that will feature UTM faculty members and students, from a range of disciplines, who will illuminate some of the inner workings of UTM science labs, enlighten the social sciences and humanities hubs on campus and put a spotlight on our academic community at large
On this season called “UTM in the community,” I introduce you to some of the people from our vibrant and ever-growing scholarly community from some of our UTM faculty members and leadership team to students who are making an impact with various communities, both at the local level and on a global scale.
On today's episode of VIEW to the U, my guests are Scott Jess and Lindsay, Schoenbohm. Lindsay is a faculty member in the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, where she has served as its chair since 2019, and Scott, a former postdoc in Lindsay's lab, is currently a faculty member in the school of the Environment at
Washington State University. Over the course of this interview Scott and Lindsay talk a bit about their field - geosciences and how they got into this particular area of research – but also, and dare I say even more importantly, they talk about their motivations for partnering up for a very profound collaboration that they undertook: A Demographic Survey of Canadian Academic Geosciences. Their “Demographic Trends in Canadian Academic Geoscience” report was published in 2023.
The findings in this report are stark, and, as will be discussed, focus primarily in relation to the state of equity, diversity, and inclusion – or what's commonly referred to as EDI or DEI – in the geosciences. However, the statistics, which are not widely available in Canada, one of the reasons Scott spearheaded this research with Lindsay and Emily Heer from the University of Calgary, in the first place. But there are stats out of the U.S. that indicate a lack of diversity across other fields.
For example, the “Diversity and STEM: Women Minorities and Persons with Disabilities” report produced by the U.S. National Science Foundation - NSF for short – indicate that when it comes to gender, which is only classified in their report as male female, that 59% of doctoral degree recipients in science and engineering in 2020 are male, while 41% of recipients are female.
Disparities become much more pronounced in terms of race and ethnicity: 70% of
doctoral degree recipients in science and engineering are people who identify as white and people with a disability accounted for just about 10% overall of doctoral degree recipients in science and engineering. And through Scott, Lindsey, and Emily's report they find the big drop in numbers appears when it comes to salary positions, such as doctoral and faculty, for researchers.
Over the course of this interview, Scott defines a lot of the terminology that gives this report context along with discussing the baseline this survey establishes upon which to hopefully improve, or at the very least assess whether the initial initiatives or programs that have been implemented by different institutions are narrowing the gaps in representation. And, in conjunction with our theme for this season of the podcast, Lindsay and Scott offer some advice for how we can all help to foster a more inclusive and equitable community in academia and beyond.
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CD: Lindsay Schoenbohm is a professor in the department of Chemical and Physical
Sciences at U of T Mississauga. She is completing her fifth year as chair of the department, having started her term in 2019.
Lindsay earned a Ph. D. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before going on to do two postdoctoral positions: one as research associate and an Alexander von Humboldt, postdoctoral fellow, both at the Universität Potsdam in Germany.
Lindsay joined the faculty at UTM in 2009.
Scott Jess is an assistant Professor of Earth Surface Processes at Washington State University in the School of the Environment. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Earth Science at the University of Glasgow, and a PhD in Geology at the University
of Aberdeen, both in Scotland.
Scott also completed two postdoctoral positions: one at the University of Calgary in 2019, and one at UTM from 2021-2023 in Lindsay's lab.
Scott Jess joined the faculty at Washington State University in 2023
And please note: Scott, Lindsay and Emily's report, as well as the NSF report, and their respective websites, an article that Lindsay references by Dancy and Hodari are all available in the show notes.
LS: I'm in the field of tectonic geomorphology and landscape evolution. So, I look at how tectonic plates move around on the surface of the earth, when they collide, they build topography. And then I look at how erosional forces tear that topography back down. So, I look at rivers and glaciers, and sometimes wind, how they affect the landscape. And then I also look at how you can read the landscape to try to quantify tectonic signals. So, for example, we try to quantify slip rates on faults, and that plays into hazards and earthquakes and things like that.
And I work around the world. So, I have projects in South America and in China, and in
Nepal and in Western Canada at the moment.
SJ: It's important to know that I used to work for Lindsay as her postdoc, which is how we know each other. So, our research areas somewhat overlap. My title is the Assistant Professor of Earth's Surface Processes. Similar to Lindsay. I look at how the earth's surface evolves on modern scale, but also in the geological scale as well, primarily focusing in areas where, unlike the places like the Himalayas, where Lindsay focuses in what's called collisional tectonics, I look at where the earth's plates are being torn apart, extensional environments. So, places like East Africa and the Appalachians, and places where we have ocean basins, and then the sediments that we find in those basins as well.
LS: I've known I was going to be a geologist for a long time. I think a lot of people come to it at different stages in life, but I came to it when I was in Grade 8, and I took a class with a very inspirational teacher, and I was really moved by the thinking about the spatial scales and the temporal scales involved in understanding the earth. I remember looking at a map of the ocean floor and just being blown away by the fact that there are huge mountain ranges underwater that I didn't know about. So, I've known I wanted to do this kind of work for a long time, and I've really been lucky in having a career that's allowed me to do it.
But what we're talking about today is not the disciplinary research that I'm involved in, but it's research in the field of equity, diversity, and inclusion. And so, I can say a little bit about what brought me to care about this deeply, and it really has to do with personal experiences. I'm certainly, like a positional statement: I'm a white woman, but I enjoy
all sorts of other privileges in life. I'm not the first person in my family to have a PhD. I come from a strong economic background. I live in North America, and so I've had a lot of advantages in life, but I certainly have often been the only woman in the room in my field. I remember early days when I started attending conferences and had this shocking realization: there was maybe 15% of the room would be women, even less speakers, and I remember always counting attendees and speakers in the margins of my conference books that were on paper, back in the day.
And I'm in a field where we do a lot of fieldwork, and that's a rough, rugged, outdoors field, and so, there's a lot of men in my field. And I felt like I had to be tough and keep up. And I certainly have dealt with microaggressions on a daily or weekly basis and more direct harassment. And then I have a lot of women who are friends who have been harassed in small and really shockingly large ways over the years. And so that being a woman in stem is something that I have cared about for a long time and felt angry about, I would say.
And then I'm the Chair of the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences right now: I'm in the last year of my term. So, it's been four-and-a-half years or so, and I felt quite excited or empowered when I first came into that role, that maybe I could finally do something. And I think I was mistaken: I could have done something earlier, but it was nice to have a position where I thought I finally could support other people like me through their experiences. And I think we have made a lot of progress in the department in the last couple of years. But I think I also, unfortunately, quite recently, came to realize that it's not just about women that there are lots of people who struggle to be accepted and supported in the field of Earth science.
And so, I've done a bit of work, I think, in the last couple of years to try to become more aware of other underprivileged groups or underrepresented groups and intersectionality, and so on. And so, we've done work in the department. And then, as we mentioned, Scott came in to do a postdoc with me a couple of years ago, and he'll tell you about his research, which is amazing in the discipline. But he also is an amazing advocate for EDI. And the reason that I am involved in this research is entirely because of Scott and his initial his idea to sort of observe this gap and the data and fill it. And so, I'm very lucky that he brought me along on this research journey.
CD: Thank you so much. And so then, Scott, if you want to speak to some of what Lindsay has alluded to here: I am curious to hear how this became such an important platform for you as well.
SJ: It's a simple but long story, and so I’ll try and be as concise as possible. Where geoscience is one of these kinds of subjects that isn't wildly taught across high schools, and you get a lot of people who will only really engage with it at an early stage, once they enter university, so it's already kind of a barrier into it.
I grew up in Scotland, which very fortunately is one of those few countries in the world which provides free education and higher education for university. The opportunity to go to university was always kind of a privilege given to me just because I was Scottish in its own right. And so, it wasn't really until I got to university that I really began to engage with our science. I think I originally went to do physics, and sadly hated it. I just wasn't very good at it at a university level. So, I transitioned into Earth science after finding a great engagement with the subject itself, and the privileges that are offered with things like fieldwork and stuff like that. And I think really, for the early undergraduate stage I was surrounded by women, specifically, especially white women. Importantly, on all scales for a long time.
Scotland is a very, very white country to start with, so the intersectional element of race doesn't necessarily play a huge role in the experience up to that point. But then, in undergraduate level half, if more of my class were women, and I had a number of women faculty members teaching me. When I moved into a PhD, eventually in Scotland, at the University, and a large number of my colleagues, postdoctors, and PhD students were also especially women. And then, as I began to climb further and further up that order into eventually a postdoc position I'd engaged with EDI work during my PhD, but once I moved to Canada, where there is a much greater racial diversity, there is multiculturalism in Canada there is obviously an Indigenous population that we don't have in Scotland, so, these are elements that we don't have to discuss necessarily within the concept of Scottishness, shall we say. Things become a bit more clear and a bit more obvious today about those social disparities as a secondary observer coming into that space from a very white, very privileged background.
Things very much change, and how you perceive society, or certainly the Geoscience Society, shall we call it, very much changed for me, and so I was very, very fortunate. I have, as a postdoc, worked with two PIs, or two bosses, who were both women, who, like Lindsay has said, had severe difficulties and barriers placed in front of them, and especially kind of growing up with two strong women – my mother and my sister – you start to recognize some of those issues and those barriers, and there's a deep desire to do something, and I think there's an anger that comes with it, and this is kind of where we're maybe heading here.
SJ: At the time it was difficult for me to do anything. I had no experience or anecdotal evidence to provide. There was no lived experience for me to talk about the issues that I had faced, sailing through as the privileged man I was. And so, eventually we get to a point where, as a postdoc, there became to be an interest in actually trying to look at the data that we have. I'm a quantitative geoscientist. I like looking at data – sadly, it's probably how my brain works is the best way, and beginning to spot just a real lack of it in trying to understand these things, which is kind of how we get to the point that we're talking about today.
CD: It's amazing that the two of you were able to carve this space out together, because I think this is a really interesting report. But so then this does bring me to what we're here to talk about today, primarily, is the report that you did in geoscience it’s called a “Demographic survey of Canadian academic Geoscience,” and you've already alluded to some of it, but the findings are quite stark, and I just wondered if you could define some of what this report has illuminated for you both, and particularly the results that took you by surprise.
SJ: I think it's maybe important to prefix some of this answer. I will try and make it concise. But there will be a lot of language we'll start using here that does have specific
terminology that I think will help in explaining some of this data.
It's very common for me now to be asked what DEI means – EDI, DEI, however you choose to organize it – because DEI has just become this abbreviation that people just throw around, to really encompass a wide variety of things, and I think it's important sometimes to define what some of those terms are off the bat which is doing diversity, which is effectively what we're doing here, is a metric: the ability to define if a room has a greater diversity or less diversity than another room, whether that's by gender, whether that's by race, whether that's by age. Equity is the door that lets people into that room and who is controlling that door? And ensuring that that is a free space for the individuals to move in and out of that space, if they are so qualified. And then inclusion is what happens when people are in that space? Do they feel comfortable? Do they feel safe? Do they feel part of that room and part of that community? And so those three are all very interconnected and very important.
But the data that we have collected is really defining diversity. We're measuring diversity at a range of scales and then using that to interpret if there are equity or inclusion issues based on that data. And I think what's important to contextualize this data and this report within that, we will be referring specifically to a couple of terms as a way of describing some things, and primarily a lot of these are based on Stats-Canada, who collect these data because we had to compare our data to Stats Canada. We have terms like “racialized,” which is effectively any individual who is not white, or [the term] Indigenous. We have LGBTQ+ which is a broad spectrum of terms relating to the sexual orientation that also change identity spectrum, and then we have “FNIM,” which we will be using as an Indigenous term, referring to First Nations, the Inuit, and Métis. And also “disabled,” I should bring up as well, which is anyone who identifies as having a disability or self identifies as having a disability. And I think those terms are just important to kind of set down before I start talking about the data itself.
SJ: So, within that some of the major things that we come across here. Firstly, is that none of this data is surprising. Much of the anecdotal reports and evidence of commentaries that have been written for a long time is just really this: data supports that we do have issues with gender representation, rate representation, LGBTQ+ representation, indigenous representation, across the broad field of geosciences as a whole. One of the major takeaways from that is that we see that within research students – so Masters and PhD students, we have a very diverse group. We have a very strong gender – we actually see a lot more women in those positions. We have a strong racialized population. LGBTQ+ representation is high, as well as FNIM, especially in Masters students. But when we move over into what we defined as “salaried researchers” – postdocs and faculty members – that just completely falls out and representation drops across gender, across race representation, across LGBTQ+ representation, across Indigenous representation, and disability representations. We see a significant drop in numbers as soon as we cross that line, with drops of around 40% in almost every category. And so that's a very stark and fairly well known problem.
We are a diverse group of geoscientists at a student level, but not at a salaried level, at a post doctor, faculty level, and that in itself is a problem for representation, for mentorship and for those in positions of power to acknowledge the experiences of other individuals, especially in that student public population. So, that's one of the most stark things that we see coming through this data.
The other second and probably easiest to define problems we see is within the context of tenure within faculty members. Tenure is that process upon which a faculty member will move into a more stable employment under a tenured position, and it can take five to six years for them to build a reputation, or build enough of a background, to be considered stable enough for that employment, for that tenured position. It's something I’m going through right now at Washington State. But when we asked individuals who were tenured in what year they received tenure, with a mix of their other demographic data, we find a year period between 2007 and 2017, where 54% of our white respondents achieved tenure and no Indigenous or FNIM, and no racialized persons received tenure at all at that time, and so that cannot be seen at face value. But it's
important to know that either that suggests that Indigenous individuals or racialized persons are not getting tenure, or that they are leaving the field. And there's a lack of retention that we are seeing from our respondents. And so, there is a way of climbing that ladder, and then entering tenure, could be seen as kind of a latter step that gets you into very secure employment, and we are just not really seeing that, especially for racialized and FNIM academics in the field.
CD: If I could just ask a follow-up, that I understand that this is the data. Does your research get into reasons why there is such a drop?
SJ: Across the from student to salaried researcher?
CD: Yeah, I'm just wondering if you can point to some of the reasons why there is such a disparity there.
SJ: So, I will open this up, and I'm sure Lizzie will have many things to say about this as well, where there is this rather, I would refer to as maybe a patronizing terminology called the leaky pipeline, which is referred to as generally related to a lot of minority groups, gender, race, etc. Where individuals are consistently dropping out of the academic pipeline, due to a wide variety of stresses – there’s family planning associated with especially being a Cis woman. But there's also just the general burdens that can come with an inclusive environment. The extra weight or responsibility that falls on, shall we say, racialized faculty to mentor racialized students’ work, to be on EDI committees and to lead EDI committees, and to do a bulk of the work to improve the department, and the leaky pipeline itself doesn't necessarily fit, I think, because it's a very passive mechanism, suggesting that there's just a small crack, and passively, these people are following the way. It was better described in a Nature comment recently by Vernon 2022, as the “hostile obstacle course,” where individuals like myself – white men – can easily ascend that ladder with very few problems in their way or barriers in their way, while anyone from a minority group is faced with a wide variety of issues.
And so, there's an equity issue there, probably of bias in hiring protocols, possibly, and I won't speak too much to that with a lack of experience. But then there's also maybe a lack of inclusion in that space. So, once you finally get into that space you will get microaggressions, saying that you're only there because of your minority status, because of certain things. Then that does not build a sense of belonging, that does not build a sense that you want to be there, and I am sure I cannot speak, obviously, from one experience, that over time, that will just erode away at your desire to be in that space, and that there may be issues there. That's what I can say from the literature as a white man. I'm sure Lindsay may have other things to add to that.
LS: Yeah, I mean, I think everything you said is huge. This slow wearing down of individuals and discouraging them from continuing on in the field. And I think, Scott, you opened my eyes to this quite a bit, and I think the study just backs it up really incredibly well. But I think that postdoc transition is really important. Now that in order to get a faculty position, you do need to pass through this purgatorial zone of a post-doc, and postdocs are difficult. Usually you have to move, and usually for a relatively short period of time, so it can be very disruptive to uproot whatever family or community you've established. You are not making very much money during that time, and so there's a lot of economic stress. And I think people from underrepresented groups often don't have the sort of resources or privileges that would allow them to uproot their life and continue to have less salary during that period. And so that's a problem.
But from sort of a policy or a department-Chair perspective, we've spent a lot of time in the department, and I think, as a university, and really as a community, in thinking about our hiring practices for faculty. And everybody now is undergoing unconscious bias training before sitting on one of these committees, and we have a lot of support for implementing best practices when we do our searches, and when we are doing the interviews and speaking with candidates, and so on. So, I think we have done decently in terms of hiring more diversely. But we don't have a lot of candidates. And so, when we get people applying, I think we do a better job, I would say, than we have in the past of paying attention to diversity and to unconscious bias. But we don't have a lot of people applying and people really do have to have a postdoc. And we've paid attention to faculty hiring, but we have not paid attention to postdoc hiring at all. And so what good are we doing if we are missing that critical
step in not paying attention to that? So, it's both our hiring practices for postdocs, but also how we advertise them.
Postdocs are often found through word of mouth, and we know that white men tend to have stronger networks that connect them to opportunities like postdocs. They tend to be more privileged in a way they ask for those opportunities reaching out for those opportunities. So actually, just finding the postdoc, in the first place, is a pretty significant barrier. And these are problems that I think are addressable through policy, maybe through some money, but we could address them.
CD: And I have seen some funding opportunities that have cropped up over the past, I'd say 5 years maybe, that are specifically open to Black or racialized students, and specifically, sometimes postdoc, but also graduate funding to help.
So, that has been an amazing amount of information and I’m trying to process all of this. And I know that you did touch on this about your impetus for doing this study in the first place. So, I just wonder if you could speak a little bit more about that, because, as I understand, it was partly that some of this data did not exist in Canada. And so, Scott, if you wanted to speak a little bit more to that piece of just trying to find this data.
SJ: Yeah, there's kind of maybe three pieces that fit into this venn diagram a little bit. There's
One, which is through my PhD and through postdoc, up to that point I’d done a lot of representative work for EDI and DEI work, and one of my underlying qualms that I bring up is that there's a great weight, importantly, that's placed on faculty members generally versus a whole for faculty members to come up with solutions to fix these issues. And what I would argue, I'm a pretty okay tectonic geomorphologist, but my ability to come up with solutions for EDI is not what I'm trained in doing. And so, I was working in many of these committees, and we are really just kind of going, ‘well, what could we do?’ We do our reading, we try and engage with as much reading as possible, but then we don't really have any data to work out, ‘well, who should we be targeting?’ Is there a large number of racialized students in our undergraduate? Is there a large LGBTQ+ population in our student base that we should be
focusing on to make sure they feel inclusive and safe? And without that data as a foundation, it's very, very difficult to then really create solutions that are effective and help promote that inclusivity and that equity across a department. So, there's that lack of data. And then for a long time – I have a very good friend, Emily and she works in public health as an epidemiologist, and we've had many, many conversations over the years about how you collect demographic data and how to do it, and it got to a point where I was trying to write something along the lines of the postdoc experience in Canada, trying to get my thoughts on some of the stuff that Lindsay has already mentioned, and part of that was to try and back it up with some data, and as I started looking for data for the postdoc experience of maybe looking for the gender balance in Canada, or the racialized or Indigenous populations for postdocs in Canada, I found just not a lot.
SJ: There is the National Postdoctoral Association, which is a very, very good group, who work brilliantly, but they collect a survey, I think, every 5 years. But they did not have field-specific data; they just have for all postdocs in Canada. And so, I was trying to think about geoscience specifically. And I couldn't find any more data. And as I started to look for this data, I kept going down rabbit holes. In 2019, Statistics Canada did a survey of post-secondary researchers and faculty that did have field specific data. I reached out to Statistics Canada to ask for some of that data, and they were not particularly forthcoming with it. They were asking me for payment for some of that data and it was a significant amount of money. And I remember really sitting in my kitchen at one point after receiving my email and getting really angry. This isn't great. I need data to try and understand or try and make some of these arguments. I would like that data, and I, just at that point kind of went. ‘Okay, I'm going to. Let's do this then - let's collect that data.’
And if it wasn't for my friend Emily, who I was able to turn to and go, ‘Okay, how the hell do we do this?’ And then, with Lindsay's support as well to go, ‘okay, I'm going to do this. This
sounds a bit crazy. Are you okay with that?’ Which she was very forthcoming with, we then were able to build up the idea of disseminating effectively a voluntary demographic survey of about 24 questions across Masters, PhD students, postdocs, and faculty members at Canadian Geoscience Departments, of which I believe, is 35 in total. That's the moment upon which this nucleated, but very much built on kind of the foundations of many other things in my head.
CD: I know that you said that there were stats available in the U.S., and I think you warned me about you could go on a tangent about this. But can you say how we differ in Canada from the U.S. in this area?
SJ: Yes, so this is more stuff. As we've come to write up the report, there was a desire to compare our statistics to other international countries, especially colonial countries, like the U.S. and Australia, as well as European countries, without necessarily a history of recent
Colonialism. And what we discovered, is just this real mix back of data statistics, really piecemeal. What we have managed to collect was data from a very wide range of geoscience across a variety of demographic indicators – gender, race, Indigenity, sexual orientation,
tenure – a wide variety of these things – and what we found from some of the data is really just one piece of information, maybe from one area that you cannot connect to something else. And so, the National Science Foundation in America does, I would say, a fairly good job of collecting a lot of statistics. America is a very data, heavy country, and when we come to these kinds of things and National Science Foundation produces a huge amount of data
every year, outlining things like their graduate populations and their undergraduate populations, and they will do some breakdown of those populations. So, we have sex, for example, between males and females, we do have what they refer to as “ethnicity,” which is five categories, depending whether the individuals Hispanic, Alaskan, Native American, Indian, Asian, is a term, Black and African American, white, or more than one. Unfortunately, though, they only present data by field. So outside of just like the entire graduate population, they only present data from U.S. civilians and permanent residents, which is only 60% of the data, so that's ignoring 40% of that population entirely, which theoretically, would be probably a slightly more diverse category as well, coming from outside the U.S. perhaps. And then in the UK, we have some of this data. We have gender for higher education people – it's called geography earth science, which is again presented on a yearly basis. But again, we can't look
at any intersectionality, we only really have gender or race. We can't combine them. For example, we struggle to find any data from Australia. We can find some work that collected data passively through websites. But there are countries out there – Germany, France, Italy, Australia itself, as well at a national and federal level. Canada I would include into this that just don't collect racial data to all as a statement of policy, they do so under the guise of trying to stop “race science” or color blindness, which something, I think, is a noble goal. But it does open up a space for basically the inability to establish any kind of racial trends and data. And it has been argued in the medical community for a while that racial data is a really important way of highlighting some of these issues and disparities, but we are choosing not to do that in
places like Canada, France, and Germany. To ensure these minority groups are protected instead of trying to identify the issues that exist.
So, it's a quite a complex discussion about trying to compare data sets and trying to overlap these data sets, and it becomes very, very difficult. And then we move into really federal
government policies and decisions about collecting data as a whole.
CD: I think this does sort of lead into the next question I wanted to ask you, because you do state on the website that you plan on conducting follow-up study, I think, every three years, if I am not mistaken, and I am curious, like, what is the plan for this going forward? And how might you change the study as you go along, if at all?
SJ: Right, it's a great question. So, the desire to continually do it, I think, really comes from, again, any data that I found while doing this work was always very…a snapshot of time and a movement, like a photograph from the 1920s. For example, there’s one survey of graduates that have got a post-doctoral degree in Canada, and it's from 2009 just from that one time. And I think it actually went on for 10 years, but they stopped in 2009. So, we know what geoscience graduates looked like 15 years ago, but we don't see that now, we can't follow that. And I think it's important that if we're looking at a metric of diversity and of something to measure in our field, seeing how that evolves through time is an important metric, to begin to assess how this field is evolving through time. Are we creating a more equitable space? Are we creating a more inclusive space? And it's also important to see that if we are making changes, are those changes working? Is there benefits being made, and putting in an equitable policy in place now will not have ramifications for three different more years, so we will not see massive changes anytime soon by continuing monitoring the state of diversity in this field, we can begin to assess, are we moving towards a positive direction? Is there a reason to be optimistic about the way in which this field is going? And are these policies that we're putting in actually benefiting within the space of gender and race, and LGBTQ+, Indigenous, and Disability.
If I can then add to the way in which we changed things? One of the mistakes that we probably definitely made in the original survey, was poorly incorporating trans population, which was a mistake certainly on my part that I recognized, and that would have to be amended in the next survey. Another one that would be beneficial again, as a failure of mine was probably, as I'm non-Canadian, not having a French survey for Quebec. That's an inclusivity statement and so right that individuals in Quebec who obviously speak primarily French, should have had the opportunity for that to happen, and that is something that we can amend. It is something that you went for the first take. But yeah, absolutely should be rectified in the second approach.
But, broadly speaking, as far as questions go, if the consistency is important, if you change the question, it may change our results.
CD: I'm also wondering, then, because you're focused specifically on geoscience. Could your survey serve as a sort of template or model for other areas of research to go forward and try to define their own gaps?
SJ: Absolutely. So, this is one of the things that we wrote up as well is that I don't think I would have done this had there not been the involvement of my friend Emily in this scenario, someone who I could talk to on a regular basis of how to design surveys. I've become a bit
of a survey nerd. Now they are very complicated and they have to be done correctly, and they require ethics approval, and you have to really work hard to ensure that your questions are not loaded, whether you're using terminology that's not offensive or incorrect. And we spent a lot of time going through things like nonprofits reports, and how best to ask about sexual orientation or using StatsCanada specific terms, so that we would be consistent within these
things. And it is the challenge. Someone who is a data-driven, tectonic geomorphologist, this was a big step away from what I was doing, and had Emily not been a part of that, I can definitely say, this project probably never would have gone ahead. It probably would have, but it would have not gone ahead well, I think, is maybe the best way of putting it, and so there is definitely a model for it, and there has to be an impetus and drive to it. But things like writing out an ethics approval is a complex thing, especially in the field you don't understand, and
there has to be a desire for that, and then probably a partnership with someone who knows what they're doing to help you along with that.
And so absolutely, there is definitely a model there. Every time I get the opportunity to do surveys now, I'm very heavily invested because I kind of enjoy it. But yeah, there's a model there, but there's a lot of work that has to be done as well.
CD: Absolutely. I know the ethics – having to get things fielded through a committee, and
make sure that you've got everything considered, treating your participants with the most respect, and it’s a lot of work.
LS: I might add just a tiny bit to that maybe from coming back to the need for data. I think that, anecdotally, or like looking at departments at UTM, or looking within CPS, or just looking at my experiences in the sciences, that physics tends to be a field where there aren't a lot of women. Certainly, at UTM, it's a little bit more diverse, but our science tends to be stereotypically a very white field. Because there's this outdoor component. There's economic barriers and safety barriers that often keep people from marginalized groups from participating in that. But that's all anecdotal, and it can be dismissed because it's just about my personal experience, which is probably biased by confirmation bias. I want to see problems, and so I do. Or it's small numbers. For example, we only have two faculty members in astronomy, and they both happen to identify as women in our department. So, we're at 100% women in that field, but that's certainly not representative of the field in general.
LS: And so, I think you had a question earlier about whether or not this survey was surprising, and it really wasn't. It confirmed all of the dire things that we're aware about in this field, and I'm sure we would find the same things if we were to extend this study would be extended to other disciplines. So, it's not surprising, but it's important to have those numbers because they can't be dismissed. It can't be ‘well, that's just that one department,’ or ‘that's your bias creeping into the observations.’ And so just a shout out for collecting data like this, and doing surveys, and also apparently, they're very fun.
CD: They would not give that woman a tenure position. She was the expert on giraffes, and had done the most study, and everyone said her book was the Bible, but she could not get a faculty position anywhere where you see instances like that. It's just so maddening. How could this have happened?
LS: I think it's the combination of data and the stories, right? Because the data you can't dispute, and then the stories bring it to life and give it a face and give it that emotion and make you see the impact of the data of the numbers
CD: Absolutely. And so this is my last question. But this season of the podcast is “UTM in the Community.” And I think the work you've done highlighting these disparities in geoscience ties in with that sense of community and community support. And so, I'm just wondering, based on this work that you've done, and your expertise in EDI. Is there anything that the broader public could do to mitigate or reduce this gap? And who do you feel is the most responsive really for offsetting some of these disparities, and how to achieve more of a balance?
SJ: So, to come within that kind of first part about mitigating that gap and that disparity. I have to always prefix this answer by saying that I don't think there's a need to close the gap statistically, if that makes sense, with quotas and making sure everything is even. It's about ensuring that that door into the room is as equitable as possible. And there's some work coming through about how treating this very statistically, about what happens when we
hit 50. It doesn't really matter about 50 things like gender. It just matters that everyone has a fair shot, and that's kind of clearly not the case at this moment in time. There's a desire here for me especially, to ensure that everyone who wishes to participate can. And we need to make that space as inclusive as possible with a great sense of belonging. There's a really good quote, which I can't remember now who said it, which talks about ‘belonging
being the opposite of fitting in.’
CD: I looked it up: this is a quote from Brené Brown.
SJ: Because fitting in is fitting a mold, fitting what people decide for you. Belonging is
being yourself in a space, and that's the goal, I think, for me, anyway, to ensure that we create academic spaces or a field that ensures everyone gets to be who they are and do the work that they love with their own unique perspectives. Certainly, right now, that isn't the case, and that needs to be improved. And closing and reducing these issues is really important, but an initial prefix of saying that there are people who would suggest that we need to hit a number. And I don't think that's right. I think that's the wrong way of thinking about these kinds of issues.
As for that, within the kind of spaces, there is a litany of literature that talks about this about how we can begin to improve many of these things from things like the hiring policies that
referred to and the regulating of hiring of postdoctoral films like Lindsay pointed to. We do have that bottleneck in place for individuals to move into faculty positions. We also have a greater improvement for improving tenure systems that account for things like family planning for Cis women or individuals who can have children, including reviewing how we do that tenure process because we have our barrier to get into the job. And then there's the secondary barrier that comes five or six years later.
And then things like mentorship and representation. We have a field here that seems to be dominated by white men. We need to ensure that they are, or at least have the ability to mentor and support Indigenous students or racialized students and understand their experiences will be different to other students, and how we supervise and mentor those people will be different to ensure that they feel inclusive, or a sense of belonging within that space, as well as embracing things like Indigenous science or Indigenous technology into the work that we do, as well as making it as accessible as possible. And that's kind of a problem for geology a little bit at this moment in time, where fieldwork plays a significant role in geology, especially in training undergraduate and even graduate level. And this creates barriers for individuals with self-identified mobility issues. And there are some who would
suggest that fieldwork is an absolute necessity in becoming a geologist or entering geoscience when we don't see a lot of people with disabilities, designing fieldwork because there is that barrier in place and doing so is not that difficult. I would suggest it is just a
requirement of thinking about the problem a little bit differently, so that we are getting maybe full experiences through just adapted to ensure everyone can access them, and also things like bringing the cost of these things down.
LS: Something that just struck me as you're talking is that there's no shortage of ideas on how we can address these problems. And there is a long list of programs that have been tested and published that we could be adapting. And, Carla, you also asked about who's responsible
for the change, and the answer is everyone: there's nobody who is not responsible.
And in particular, the people who have the most power in the system are the white men. It's structural historic power, and so I think they are in a tremendous position to be advocates and allies. And I think Scott is a really great example of somebody using their power to help improve the situation. And I read this really kind of transformative study. It's Dancy and Hodari 2023 in the International Journal of STEM Education. It has a sort of provocative title: “How well intentioned white male physicists maintained ignorance of inequity and justify inaction,” and they surveyed, I think, 27 white male graduate students and faculty, who all selected as people who care about equity, diversity, and inclusion, and they interviewed them, and they found that, I think, this is very uncomfortable for people. Like I said, I'm a white woman of great privilege, and I think it's very uncomfortable sometimes to think about my own privilege and examine it and think about the things that I have done that I'm ashamed of in the past. We all carry problematic beliefs. It's about unearthing them and trying to deal with them. But
anyway, the study was fascinating, and some of the respondents talked about things like, ‘well, yes, I mean racism, sexism – this exists, but it doesn't happen in my classroom,’ or ‘it doesn't happen in my laboratory/in my department/in my institution/ in my region.’ I imagine, sometimes Canadians look south to the U.S., and think about the massive problems there, and it's a way of shrugging off responsibility and also being blind to the problems that certainly are happening in their classroom and laboratory and department, and so on. There's often a tendency to blame other institutions that are sort of too big for this individual to
deal with.
LS: So, talking about K-12 education being where the problem starts, we're talking about class dynamics or about historical problems that are beyond the power of the individual to do something about. And while those problems certainly exist, it doesn't mean that the individual can't take action. And then there's a sense of helplessness sometimes. So, these problems are just so big. What I'm going to do couldn't possibly help. Or there might be negative consequences for the person. If I see somebody experiencing harassment or discrimination. If I speak up, there could be negative consequences for me or for the victim, or, strangely enough, for the perpetrator. And so those are all barriers to action for everybody, but I would particularly call it white men who can really have a tremendous power and can make a really positive difference. And also, just one last thing: a plug for access programs. Or in this case, we've developed a program that's really intended to address this leaky pipeline or hostile obstacle course, which is aimed at excellent Black students from Canada. And it's an intensive mentorship program, a cohort building program. And the intention is to mentor these
students through to graduate school and ideally, eventually to a faculty career. So, access programs in general are important, but particularly mentoring programs that focus on increasing the pool in Canada when we attempt to hire into faculty positions right now. And so, I think those sorts of programs are really important. And I'm glad that UTM and U of T has been supporting that.
And then at the departmental level, I think we've done a lot of work, and Scott's highlighted some of the things that are common and well known that we've tried to adopt. And I'd just also add that we've tried to change the tone and sort of normalize discussion of equity, diversity, and inclusion within the department. So we do training sessions biannual. We have a weekly post on equity, diversity, and inclusion that's included in our weekly digest, and I don't know how many people read those posts. I hope they do. They're usually quite interesting articles, but just the fact that it shows up every week after week, reminds people that this is important and, like, I said, normalizes discussion of it. And I think that's been valuable in changing the tone.
SJ: Only to underline some of the things that Lindsay has said, but no great desire to try and co-opt them as my own in any way. There is university policies that are necessary, and there's great work that Lindsay does at a department level. But there are efforts that require institutional change that the Department has no control over.
But there's kind of the two big statements that they said that everyone has responsibility
here, but certainly as a Cis white man who grew up in that environment, kind of raised in that ether to then step out of it. You see how simple things would improve, if white men engaged. I have a great friend who said once, as a woman ‘I could tell my problems to a man or tell my problems to the void, and the void won't tell me I'm making it up or overreacting.’ There is almost a desired deception that always seems to exist whenever someone presents anecdotal evidence that they are trying to take power away, they are just trying to look for their part of the plate, their part of everything, an equal share of it. With engagement, especially from those in power, especially those able-bodied men, there is a much faster way of improving this by just listening to those who have these things to say, to believe them,
importantly, and then just to support them in what they are trying to do, and it is very easy. It is not a hard thing to do. It requires very minimal effort, and it would dramatically improve a lot of things very quickly. That would just be to add to what Lindsay has already said.
CD: I think that's great – a good, positive note to end on. And you just had me thinking about how important it is to have that support from the white men, who have some power, but also just even about people at the top, because I'm thinking about our principal, Alex Gillespie, who's very supportive and trying to undo some of these things that we've just lived with – the disparities – for so long. And also, I live in a very audio-driven space. But even just in you, speaking, both of you, I think I had this visual in my mind of a big, colorful patch on that leaky pipeline. But we're headed in the right direction, anyway, with some of the things that you're doing. So, it's amazing. Thank you. That is great. And I'm so appreciative of you both for having the time to chat with me today and to provide all of this great information. I
just really want to thank you both for your time.
LS: Thanks, Carla, for taking the time to talk with us highlight this work.
JS: Yeah, cheers. This was great.
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CD: I would like to thank everyone for listening to today's show.
I would especially like to thank my guests, Professors Lindsay Schoenbohm from the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences at U of T Mississauga, and Scott Jess from the School of the Environment at Washington State University.
I can't thank Lindsay enough for, first of all, flagging this report for me, and to both Lindsay and Scott for being so generous with their time.
We spoke for over an hour, and for chatting about their important work in Geosciences and EDI, but also for their patience, for how long it took me to get this episode out into the world.
All episodes VIEW to the U are produced, written, edited, and interviews conducted by me, Carla DeMarco, Academic Communications and Outreach Manager in the office of the Dean at U of T Mississauga.
This is a bittersweet episode for me. It will be my last one for a while, as I embark on a two-year secondment that starts in February 2024, as Communications Manager with the Office of the Vice-Provost, Students at the University of Toronto. Stay tuned for my closing remarks to come in February.
But I have to say, chatting with Scott and Lindsay was really wonderful with so many important notes and interesting insights that I'm grateful to be going out truly on a high note VIEW to the U will continue to be available on all streaming platforms. So, your opinion still matters. If you can take the time to rate or review the podcast on whatever platform you are using today, it helps others to find the show and hear more from our great UTM academic community and please stay tuned: the podcast may be returning in some new format as yet to be determined.
Lastly and as always thank you to Tim Terrific for his tracks, tunes, support, and
everything.
Thank you!
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