Abstract
Abstract. Sexist behaviour in the workplace contributes to create a hostile environment, hindering the chance of women and gender non-conforming individuals to pursue an academic career, but also reinforcing gender stereotypes that are harmful to their progress and recognition. The Did this really happen?! project aims at publishing real-life, everyday sexism in the form of comic strips. Its major goal is to raise awareness about unconscious biases that transpire in everyday interactions in academia and increase the visibility of sexist situations that arise within the scientific community, especially to those who might not notice it. Through the website didthisreallyhappen.net, we collect testimonies about everyday sexism occurring in the professional academic environment (universities, research institutes, scientific conferences…). We translate these stories into comics and publish them anonymously without any judgement or comments on the website. By now, we have collected over 100 testimonies. From this collection, we identified six recurrent patterns: (1) behaviours that aim at maintaining women in stereotypical feminine roles, (2) behaviours that aim at maintaining men in stereotypical masculine roles, (3) the questioning of the scientific skills of female researchers, (4) situations where women have the position of an outsider, especially in informal networking contexts, (5) the objectification of women, and (6) the expression of neosexist views. We first present a detailed analysis of these categories, then we report on the different ways we interact and engage with the Earth science community, the scientific community at large and the public in this project.
Highlights
As in the rest of society, sexism is still pervasive in academia (Troy, 2019)
Most STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields are traditionally maledominated and the diverse expressions of gender bias tend to maintain this status quo (Williams et al, 2014; Asplund and Welle, 2018). This is the case for Earth and Planetary Sciences where women represent between 32 % and 42 % of the academic community (according to numbers on American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting participation from 2014 to 2016 (Ford et al, 2018), on European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly and AGU Fall meeting participation in 2018 (Popp et al, 2019) and a volunteer-based survey of the gender of abstract first authors at the EGU General Assembly 2019)
We chose to report on these sexist situations through comic strips
Summary
Most STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields are traditionally maledominated and the diverse expressions of gender bias tend to maintain this status quo (Williams et al, 2014; Asplund and Welle, 2018). This is the case for Earth and Planetary Sciences where women represent between 32 % and 42 % of the academic community (according to numbers on American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting participation from 2014 to 2016 (Ford et al, 2018), on European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly and AGU Fall meeting participation in 2018 (Popp et al, 2019) and a volunteer-based survey of the gender of abstract first authors at the EGU General Assembly 2019). It can lead to an underestimation of female achieve-
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