Resources

Share stories of events that actually happened, but that, we think, do not have their place in a professional environment (or in any environment, for that matter). We want to show daily sexist comments and behaviours, not to point fingers at specific people, not to show what is the right way to act, but to encourage discussions between coworkers, and, hopefully, to make people think how, as a group, we can do better.

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, many people still mistakenly believe that sex-related characteristics are ‘determined’ by our genes and ‘immutable.’ Part of our job as educators is to give students a deeper understanding of the true diversity of sex and gender in the natural world.

Resilience is often invoked to address systemic marginalisation (e.g. racism) in academia but inadvertently maintains harmful systems. We argue that the ability to transform systems, as opposed to persevering within them, must be prioritised to make real, lasting change.

Studies of researchers globally suggest there is a mental-health crisis in academia. Depression and anxiety are particularly acute for early-career researchers, who uproot their lives every few years, have few long-term job prospects and must cope with the relentless pressures of science’s ‘publish or perish’ culture.

Rebecca Calisi Rodríguez writes in Nature that higher-education establishments in the US must not be bullied into abandoning their mission of diversity, equity and inclusion. “Higher education must not back down. But to win this fight, universities need a plan.”