Introduction
I care deeply about how STEM fields can better attract and retain scientists from diverse backgrounds. I believe it is important to be informed about the invisible forces, both internal (e.g. stereotype threat, imposter syndrome) and external (e.g. a lab or department's climate, microaggressions, implicit biases, systemic racism), that decrease participation, performance, motivation, and belongingness. Over and over, studies have shown that academia is not a meritocracy (e.g. changing the gender of a name on a job application leads to unequal outcomes [1]), and that implicit biases perpetuate the low representation of women and minorities in science. My advocacy efforts are rooted in an enduring commitment to creating a scientific community that nurtures curiosity, freedom of self-expression, and a sense of belonging in all its members.
Acknowledging My Privilege
I am a cisgender woman and identify with the pronouns she/her/hers. I am able-bodied. I immigrated to the US when I was 11 and speak English fluently. I grew up in supportive homes that ranged from lower-middle class to upper-middle class. My family includes mostly Chinese, white, and biracial members, many of whom have advanced degrees. I acknowledge that these privileges have provided me with unearned advantages throughout my life.
Educating Myself
I am committed to learning and educating myself on systemic racism and the impacts it has on society's minoritized and marginalized members. I take full responsibility for seeking anti-racist and social justice resources. In the last section below, I list some readings that have been helpful to me.
Being Inclusive
Students learn best in safe environments where every student is respected, accepted, and valued. I will use research-based inclusive pedagogical and mentorship practices to create safe learning environments in my lab and classrooms. I will use these strategies to foster a growth mindset and communicate to students and mentees that their full selves are valued, not just their academic performance.
Getting Involved
I commit my actions to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. Below are examples of my advocacy efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in my home institutions.
Acknowledging My Privilege
I am a cisgender woman and identify with the pronouns she/her/hers. I am able-bodied. I immigrated to the US when I was 11 and speak English fluently. I grew up in supportive homes that ranged from lower-middle class to upper-middle class. My family includes mostly Chinese, white, and biracial members, many of whom have advanced degrees. I acknowledge that these privileges have provided me with unearned advantages throughout my life.
Educating Myself
I am committed to learning and educating myself on systemic racism and the impacts it has on society's minoritized and marginalized members. I take full responsibility for seeking anti-racist and social justice resources. In the last section below, I list some readings that have been helpful to me.
Being Inclusive
Students learn best in safe environments where every student is respected, accepted, and valued. I will use research-based inclusive pedagogical and mentorship practices to create safe learning environments in my lab and classrooms. I will use these strategies to foster a growth mindset and communicate to students and mentees that their full selves are valued, not just their academic performance.
Getting Involved
I commit my actions to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. Below are examples of my advocacy efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in my home institutions.
Service
Postdoctoral scholars lack the institutional support structure that is available to graduate students, and worldwide postdocs report great distress around their career prospects, workload, and workplace culture. On top of the challenges that affect all postdocs, women and URM postdocs face additional discrimination and bias that contribute to their disproportionate attrition in STEM. Thus, implementing more institutional support and access to diverse sources of mentorship for postdocs is crucial for retaining diversity further down the STEM pipeline. One initiative I am helping to implement is the “Postdoctoral Training and Advisory Committees (PTACs)”, akin to thesis committees for graduate students, that broadens mentorship and provides opportunities for self advocacy for postdocs.
As a postdoc, I have been thinking a lot about career choices and whether academia is the right place for me. While this thought process and soul searching can be emotionally taxing, I believe it is necessary for longterm future well-being. To empower postdocs to explore realistic career options, I am co-organizing a career panel series that has included panels on academia, industry (biotech and pharma), science policy, and data science.
I was a co-founder and co-coordinator for the Advocacy committee of the Yale Postdoctoral Association (YPA). The committee's mission is to advocate for postdocs at Yale. We collected postdoc demographic data, organized a public forum (see below), and hosted other events that catered to the needs of postdocs. This committee has since blossomed and taken on a number of issues (see left).
I co-organized YPA's first annual postdoc community forum. In the first half of the forum, invited administrators discussed resources available for postdocs at Yale. In the second part of the forum, small focus groups discussed specific issues and brainstormed actionable ways to improve the postdoc experience at Yale, such as increasing diversity and inclusion, access to mental health resources, and visa issues for international postdocs.
Forum slides here
Forum slides here
I worked with the YPA Advocacy and Professional Development committees to host a career forum for postdocs that not only offered insights from professionals on different career paths, but also showcased the diversity of scientists in STEM. Our panelists included women and underrepresented minorities working at liberal arts colleges, R1 research universities, and major pharmaceutical companies. In addition, we invited Dr. Cissy Ballen to speak about her research on equity in the science classroom.
Poster by Qianni Cheng
I worked with Yale's Title IX office to bring Bystander Intervention training to the YPA. In this workshop, participants learned how to disrupt disrespectful behaviors, and how to build a safe, supportive, and professional working environment.
I organized a forum for the department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology to introduce university resources to graduate students, postdocs, and research associates. Small groups identified a list of practical tasks to make the department more welcoming to incoming and existing members.
I organized a public forum for the Neurobiology and Behavior Department (NBB) at Cornell. We discussed various topics, including intersectionality (left) and microaggressions, before breaking into groups to identify actionable items to increase diversity and inclusion. This led NBB to participate in the first year of Diversity Preview Weekend.
Forum slides here
Forum slides here
With support from Cornell's Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) and Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CU-CIRTL), I co-organized "The Practice of Inclusive Teaching in STEM" workshop for Cornell graduate students and postdocs. Participants learned from presentations by Cornell faculty, graduate students, and postdocs on a variety of topics relevant to diversity in STEM and inclusive teaching practices. At the workshop, participants built inclusive teaching methods into their own course syllabus.
Workshop Outline Here
Workshop Outline Here
I attended the Inclusive Teaching Institute to expand my knowledge about issues surrounding diversity in STEM and practical ways to make classrooms and other higher education spaces more inclusive.
Interesting Reads, Quotes, and Thoughts
Ten Simple Rules for Building an Antiracist Lab (Chaudhary and Berhe, 2020)
Diversifying STEM: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender, Edited by Ebony O. McGee and William H. Robinson
I so love the following quotes about color-blind liberalism in STEM:
- "But building an antiracist lab goes beyond being kind, treating people equally, or taking a color-blind approach. Being antiracist means developing and supporting antiracist policies through intentional introspection and subsequent action."
- "Many current and future PIs are looking for clear advice on how to move beyond statements of solidarity and toward concrete achievable antiracist action in their labs. We share these 10 rules (Figs 1 and 2) to contribute to antiracist STEM discourse and help springboard scientists toward immediate achievable action in realms under their control. "
Diversifying STEM: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender, Edited by Ebony O. McGee and William H. Robinson
- "Widespread arguments for broadening participation in STEM fields that treat underrepresented groups as an untapped resource with value added warrant critique because they promote the advancing of minoritized groups in STEM in order to improve industry bottom lines and the nation's competitiveness (Baber, 2015). But diversifying STEM...affects individuals who have been marginalized in their attempts to receive training in science and engineering, and it enables them to have successful careers that align with their abilities and interests."
- "A transformative form of resistance refers to both a critique of the system and a desire for systemic changes to the structure. Transformative resistance is a level above forms of conformist resistance typical in postsecondary education--when activities around diversity fail to challenge structural inequalities, focusing instead on changing individual dispositions to better match current norms within the structure. Transformative resistance actively contests cultural integration or assimilation as requirements for inclusion."
I so love the following quotes about color-blind liberalism in STEM:
- "The apolitical, value-neutral aspirations of liberalism contradict everyday realities of racial oppression in the United States. Most notably, through color-blind rhetoric, liberalism seeks to compartmentalize the historical and contemporary consequences of racial injustice from the principles of American egalitarianism. Such bifurcation allows for a collective path of least resistance, situating racial injustice as an aberrational feature of American society that is generally meritocratic in the distribution of economic and sociocultural opportunity."
- "This value-neutral ideology protects inherited advantages, creates insider/outsider dynamics, and necessitates forms of cultural capital. Among students from traditionally marginalized populations, failure is viewed as an individual consequence rather than a reflection of systemic oppression."
- "Extending the rational characteristics of scientific inquiry to the social construction of a scientific community assumes that intellectual spaces are, by default, culturally neutral, with no group dominating in ways that serve to marginalize others. Conflating the element of objectivity with the action of objectivism, universalism masks the immutable role of institutional racism as a central feature of postsecondary STEM."
White Academia: Do Better.
- "If you are a White academic or higher education professional, there are some tangible actions you can take to support Black faculty, staff, and students."
- "Do not expect all Black people to do anti-racist work for you. If they volunteer to educate, make sure you properly reward and/or acknowledge them for their emotional and intellectual labor. Failure to do so adds to the assumption that Black people are your go-to racial expert and contributes to emotional fatigue."
- "Your Black students and other students of color need to actually see themselves reflected in class content. This leads to more engaging learning. It also helps broaden the education of your White students."
- "Furthermore, create conditions and environments where Black people can actually thrive in those positions. History tells us that Black academics in leadership positions have particularly toxic experiences."
- "Develop a task force or committee (without placing most of the labor on people of color) and create a corrective action plan that strategically shows how your unit will address systemic racism over the next year, 5 years, and 10 years."
- "It’s not enough to tout a diverse workforce when there is a systemic failure to create an inclusive environment where Black faculty (and other people of color), staff, and students can thrive, fully participate, and bring their whole self to their role."
- "If you notice a lack of racial diversity in your unit, call it out. Discuss this with your department chair and/or dean."
Nearly half of US female scientists leave full-time science after first child
Without inclusion, diversity initiatives may not be enough. Puritty et al., Science
A call for greater diversity in science in Scientific American on International Women's Day
Hope Jahren's On Point interview was a great listen! Aside from interesting stories from her career and advice for young scientists, here were some memorable quotes:
Check out this Science Friday episode: How Sexual Harassment and Bias Undermine Women’s Access to Scientific Careers
- "parenthood is an important driver of gender imbalance in STEM employment, and both mothers and fathers appear to encounter difficulties reconciling caregiving with STEM careers" - Cech and Blair-Loy 2019 PNAS
Without inclusion, diversity initiatives may not be enough. Puritty et al., Science
- "Simply admitting an URM student is not enough if that student feels unwelcome, unheard, and unvalued--all well-established consequences of structural and systemic bias in society and in science. These feelings influence the research we pursue and produce, yet are often unrecognized and underestimated..."
A call for greater diversity in science in Scientific American on International Women's Day
- "The reality is that science is riddled with sexism and racism and it will never have the best and brightest scientists as long as we fail to acknowledge and address these issues."
Hope Jahren's On Point interview was a great listen! Aside from interesting stories from her career and advice for young scientists, here were some memorable quotes:
- “as you get to positions of more influence and access…you find yourself in rooms with fewer and fewer women in them. It’s not just about the numbers, it’s about changing the quality for whoever is in the room”
- About her NY Times piece highlighting sexual harassment: “for some reason we want to subscribe to the fantasy that science is excluded from these very basic power imbalances…that lead to real harm. All I’ve really done is to stand up on my hind legs and say ‘it’s here’.”
Check out this Science Friday episode: How Sexual Harassment and Bias Undermine Women’s Access to Scientific Careers