One session I was really looking forward to attending was on Tuesday, focused on nurturing inclusive STEM enterprises through understanding our biases. A key point of the session was the leaky STEM pipeline—where women and other minorities are discouraged from or perceive scientific careers, especially academia, are not for them or unattainable—is due to bias.
Dr. Karen Fleming from Johns Hopkins University led us through a very illuminating and informative session about understanding our implicit bias and how small acts of bias can build up over time to result in the leaky STEM pipeline, which she referred to as “discrimination by a thousand acts of bias.” A main message of the session: it is up to us to fix the leaky pipeline. We each have our own bias, conscious and unconscious, which originates from personal experiences and culture. Unconscious bias is not always bad, we use what we know about our world to guide us through our environment, but unconscious bias is bad when it results in errored decision making when evaluating other people. A great example of bias is the well-known study from Moss-Racusin et al published in PNAS in 2012, which found both male and female professors prefer male candidates over female candidates for lab positions, despite the only difference between CVs being the name on the top. Dr. Fleming recruited a great group of undergraduate and graduate students from Johns Hopkins to take part in sketches which emphasized bias in academia. While some of the situations presented were easy to label as a biased encounter, other situations acted out where instances of bias which might not be as obvious or are extremely pervasive in society and normalized. Every audience member could relate to the various biases shown, as evident through the personal stories and experiences shared by attendees.
To conclude the session, Dr. Fleming emphasized it is up to us to change the leaky pipeline. It is up to us as students, teachers, professors, postdocs, researchers, etc. to create an inclusive STEM environment that allows everyone to succeed. Diverse teams are more innovative and creative, which is only possible through inclusivity and respect of every person we encounter. Going forward, Dr. Fleming provided several action steps, including: knowing your bias, hosting journal clubs focused on literature about bias, bystander intervention training, researching how and conducting unbiased hiring, and practicing inclusive pedagogy. Overall, this session was fantastic and informative for all attendees, no matter their career stage. I really enjoyed this session and will be looking to implement what I’ve learned into my interactions and lab practices going forward. I’m hoping BPS will continue to have similar sessions at future national meetings!
-Danielle