GESTAR II Seminar Series, June 13 at 11:00am

"The National Science Foundation-funded ADVANCEGeo Partnership aims to transform workplace climate in the geosciences through cultural change and individual development. Efforts to diversify scientific disciplines often focus on recruitment, yet hostile workplace climates create environments where not all scientists can thrive. Scientists from groups that have been historically excluded because of their gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability status report more negative interactions in the workplace compared to their colleagues. These include devaluation of work efforts, insulting remarks, bullying and intimidation, identity-based discriminatory remarks, and gender harassment. These behaviors can negatively affect wellbeing, health, professional advancement, and career success, with community-wide repercussions. The ADVANCEGeo Partnership program’s main interventions are a community-based model for bystander intervention education to respond to and mitigate the harm of systemic exclusionary behaviors in research environments, and the promotion of ethical codes that identify harassment, bullying and discrimination as scientific misconduct. The program’s emphasis began in the geosciences because of the importance of this field to societal outcomes, the persistent lack of diversity amongst STEM fields and the variety of places and spaces where geoscience work takes place (e.g. remote field environments). In collaboration with professional societies inside and outside of STEM, our model is already being adopted by other disciplines."