Did this really happen?! Analysis of a two-year initiative to draw everyday sexism in academia.

Abstract

<p>Like any other workplace, academia is not free from everyday gender stereotypes and sexist behaviours. They participate in the feeling of insecurity and devaluation of women and gender non-conforming individuals, which ultimately contributes to a persisting gender imbalance in this environment. Building on this observation, the Did this really happen?! project, born in 2018, aims at reporting real occurrences of everyday sexism experienced within the scientific community. Using comic strips, we raise awareness about such behaviours and their pernicious consequences, which are often difficult to notice. Through our website www.didthisreallyhappen.net, we have now collected more than 100 contributions from researchers all over the world, describing sexist biases that they have faced or witnessed in academia. We have already turned 25 of them into anonymous comics that we publish without any comments on the website. In hindsight, we have identified six repeating categories of sexist behaviours: 1) those that aim at maintaining women in stereotypical feminine roles, 2) those that aim at maintaining men in stereotypical masculine roles, 3) those that question the scientific skills of female researchers, 4) those where women have the position of an outsider, especially in informal networking contexts, 5) those that objectify women, and 6) those which express neosexist views. Here, we present our project in more details, propose a detailed analysis of these sexist situations, and we are happy to discuss further ways to engage with the scientific community on this topic.</p>