Disturbing findings from coastal science fieldwork survey

New research published in Cambridge Prisms: Coastal Futures looking at the experiences of women working in coastal sciences worldwide has unearthed what have been described as "important and disturbing findings". As she explains to Chris Smith, they're the result of a survey carried out by Wollongong University's Sarah Hamylton and her colleagues...

Sarah - A group of us set up something that we call WICGE, which is the women in Coastal Geosciences and Engineering Network, which was a group of female academics, largely based in Australia, but we've grown into much more of an international network. And one of the first things we did as a network was to set up an online survey to try and work out what the status of the discipline was in terms of coastal geosciences and engineering. So we put out this online survey, had a few questions in it, which people are publishing in journals, whether or not people were represented on editorial boards, in conferences as keynote speakers, that kind of things. Have you experienced or witnessed any gender discrimination? We did it kind of as a paper survey at a conference, and then we followed it up as an online survey and we got I think 314 responses. Responses to that open-ended question about whether or not people had experienced gender discrimination focused quite overwhelmingly on field work. So something that was an unexpected finding from that survey was that people's behavior and the experiences that people have when they go to the field, if they get to the field, can often give rise to various forms of discrimination.

Chris - And so that was what inspired you to then follow up, was it; that initial survey?

Sarah - Yes. That finding of the fact that a lot of people brought up field work as an issue. So field work is something that is really critical to the careers of people who are doing work in the environmental sciences. It gives people an opportunity to collect data, to collaborate with people to start analyzing that data and to write it up in the form of research papers to apply for grants to, to get out into the field in the first place. And so we realized that if there was, if there was a commonality to people's responses who are highlighting field work as an issue, this in turn would be quite a big issue for people's careers.

Chris - What sorts of difficulties did people say they ran into?

Sarah - Actually getting into the field in the first place was quite an issue for a lot of women. This was brought up by several of our respondents and the reasons it was hard to get into the field in the first place, sometimes people are quite selective if they dream up a field trip and they've got a few aims and objectives and they send out the invitations to their probably established team of collaborators - and often that's something that can be quite exclusive - women don't receive invitations. Another thing that prevents women from going into the field is that they tend to have a lot of responsibilities within their profession. They might take on governance roles as well, sitting on committees that run universities. So women often have quite a disproportionate share of those other tasks that sit alongside research. And then outside of a work environment, women often take on a disproportionate share of caring responsibilities either for their children or for elderly parents. And we found also that when they get into the field, they face discrimination around expectations of what they physically might be able to achieve in the field. And then if you are outside of your typical day-to-day work environment, so outside of say, an office on a on a university campus people's behaviour starts to change. And if you are not necessarily bound to any sort of code of conduct, then people can start to act in ways that influence women unfairly. So things like microaggressions, bullying often comes up in the field; if you're working in a field camp or on a boat, your sleeping situation might be quite different to what it is normally, and women can be exposed to things like sexual harassment.

Chris - To what extent, Sarah, do you think there might be a, a recall bias here or one has to be conscious of the fact that this is a survey which was voluntary for people to participate in and therefore might it be a subset of people not withstanding the fact that the things they're saying are very important, but could it be that the vast majority of people are not having this problem and these tend to be the tip of the iceberg that are particularly problematic? What's being highlighted. Or do you think this is more general?

Sarah - So we've done a breakdown of our respondents. There was quite a few male respondents. We also looked at the different sort of institutions that people are working at. And we had a breakdown by sort of level of seniority. So we've got a good spread between sort of other scientific institutions, be they government departments or consultancies or university sector. And then be they fairly early career versus mid or more senior people. There's a fairly diverse range of respondents. And then I suppose thinking more broad broadly about people who've encountered, I suppose more sort of serious discriminatory offenses such as sexual harassment, I'd imagine that statistics seem to, to show that actually people who have had those experiences in their lives often don't talk about it. So if anything, I'd expect that some of those more extreme circumstances would be under sampling them.

Chris - And what do you think could be done to change things then? Because I'm also conscious that this is historical data and that since you gathered this data, we've had quite a lot of change. We've had things like "Me Too" and that kind of thing, which I think has focused minds quite a bit. To what extent do you think that this does not reflect the present? And also assuming that some of it still will, what could be done to improve things?

Sarah - Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say that things had improved since we did that survey work. We're working on a follow-up survey to try and answer that question more precisely. If we can try to publicise female role models in the field. Get things like magazines, social media pictures of, of women lifting heavy equipment out in the field. And that is quite effective at shaping the people's personal views. One paper looks at the fact that often, you know, this isn't just men having expectations about women in the field. This is also, you know, at at school level age girls often believe that they sort of lesser able to carry out physical tasks in the field. So this is something that starts early for a lot of women. And it would be good to try and subvert that by reshaping those public views.