New paper on gender equity

In case you missed it in my February 2023 science summary, a new paper I co-authored on gender equity came out recently (James et al. 2023). Here's a quick summary:

James et al. 2023 asked over 900 science & conservation staff of The Nature Conservancy about their careers and influence, and how they perceived their gender as impacting that. We found that women had less influence, experienced many barriers to their careers (including harassment, discrimination, and fear of retaliation for speaking out), and that men overestimated gender equity. Only have 5 minutes? Skip to the recommendations on page 7 (you need to read the text for this list to make sense, but we ask orgs to: show public leadership on equity, improve transparency and accountability, diversify teams and improve career pathways for women, be flexible, include training and mentoring as part of broader change, help women connect, address sexual discrimination and harassment, and consider intersectionality). 

If you have 15 minutes more, read the quotes in Table 2 (p5-8) because they're really compelling and illustrative. Or if you're with the half of men and 3/4 of women in our sample who think we have more to do on gender equity (rather than that we've already "gone overboard" or that it's not an issue as some men reported), just read the whole damn paper because there's a lot of interesting detail and nuance in the results. If you're a man and don't think this is an issue at your organization, it's probably worth asking a few female colleagues about their experience to see if there's anything you're missing that you could help to improve. I learned a ton while helping out on it, and I'm excited to start advocating for the recommendations. 

You can read it at: https://bit.ly/TNCgenderpaper and there's a short blog at at https://blog.nature.org/science-brief/gender-bias-holds-women-back-in-conservation-careers/