Towards Gender Equity in Ecology: Part One
We spoke to prominent female ecologists about the challenges facing women in ecology today (Image Credit: Shannon McCauley, Gretta Pecl, Marlene Zuk)
Tag Archives: gender
Celine Frere: Gender, Representation, and Cultural Shifts in Ecology
The lack of senior female researchers can be daunting to younger female scientists, but openness and honesty combined with a willingness to strive for higher positions can bring about a cultural shift in ecology, says Dr. Celine Frere.
During my recent trip to the Sunshine Coast in Australia, I sat down with Dr. Celine Frere and talked about her work with charismatic species, which you can read about here. However, Celine is also one of Australia’s Superstars of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), an initiative of Science & Technology Australia designed to raise the profile of female scientists in Australia. With this in mind, I had a chat with Celine about gender equality in ecology, and the advice she’d give to young female researchers.
Shannon McCauley: The Role of Gender in Authorship Bias
Who gets the credit in scientific articles is a pressing question (covered in a previous opinion piece), and deciding how to award authorship is especially relevant given the impact that papers in high-impact journals can have on the trajectory of a scientist early in their career.
With this in mind, I spoke with Dr. Shannon McCauley of the University of Toronto-Mississauga during her November visit to the University of Arkansas (more about Shannon can be found in our previous interview). In addition to giving a talk on some of her research, Shannon also led a workshop on authorship in science. I sat down with her afterwards to talk more about the subject.
Who Gets the Credit?
Scientific papers nowadays are written more on computers than with ink and paper, but no matter how you write a paper it is important to distinguish who gets credit for what. (Image credit: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0)
A huge component of science is the execution of successful experiments and then writing about those experiments. Consequently, a lot of weight is put on who did what, and what kind of credit people deserve for what they do. This can result in some arguments about how much so and so did for the project, and why they deserve authorship credit. In this article, I want to briefly cover some authorship issues and what kind of impact authorship can have on a scientist’s career.
Marlene Zuk: Gender in Science
Co-authored by Kate Layton-Matthews
As part of a two-day gender equality workshop for the Department of Biology at NTNU, Kate Layton-Matthews and I had the chance to interview Professor Marlene Zuk. Marlene is a prominent evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist, and a well-known advocate of improved gender equality in academia.
Her emphasis on bringing about more fact-based discussions on gender and how to attract women to typically male-dominated professions is unfortunately still necessary. People are still maintaining the view that women are ‘naturally less inclined’ to what are considered as ‘masculine’ disciplines, but as Marlene explains, it is impossible to disentangle culture from genetics. Her work is fundamental in the face of such dangerous over-simplification, for instance in the light of the firing of a disgraced professor at Cern, the European nuclear research centre in Geneva, where a male professor commented that ‘Physics was built by men’, which was unsurprisingly met with immediate backlash. In the words of another gender equality-advocate and professor in Physics, Jessica Wade, we need to fight against the ‘toxic and incorrect messages’ that such people are propagating.
Amy Austin: Closing the Gender Gap in Ecology
“I think that [traditional gender roles] are powerful and yet subtle in terms of affecting the choices that women make along their careers.” (Image Credit: Amy Austin, University of Buenos Aires)
