Toolbox for equal opportunities - work in progress

Note - this is work in progress

Three levels of actions

According to Schiebinger (1999 and 2008) you can divide actions for equality into different groups. They can be labelled as

  1. Numbers, where we focus on statistics and how to improve the balance.
  2. Culture or institutions, where we focus on how we interact with each other in academia.
  3. Curricula or research content, where we look at our subjects.

It is pointed out that the first approach might be in danger of focusing "fixing the women/minorities" or blaming the outside society.

We can translate this to our teaching and learning on three levels:

  1. Awareness training, to make people understand there is a problem and obtain arguments for work on equality and diversity.
  2. How do we teach? What methods do we use? What is the dynamics in the class room? Are all included or are some have a feeling of not belonging? How do we deal with anxiety?
  3. What do we teach? Are there excluding parts of our teaching (e.g. literature, metaphors, selection of topics, selection of examples, language, authors)

 

Topics and concepts

When approaching the subject of equal opportunities, there are a number of important concepts. We will try to organize this toolbox according to these:

Bias - implicit or explicit

Bias is about preconceived ideas of our performance, skills or behaviors based on which group we belong to.

Harvard Implicit Bias test

It is well documented that we are affected by bias, but to convince yourself you can take the  Harvard Implicit Bias test. Click "social attitudes" (you can use your email and country if you like) and accept the conditions. By clicking "take the test" on the top, you can choose which bias you want to test - sex/gender,sexuality, skin colour.

SPEAR project on bias awareness,

Recently a blog was published within the SPEAR project, lead by SDU in Denmark and with EU-financial support. It discusses Awareness and TL.

 

 

Dynamics

How we teach and what happens in the classroom is important. We can use statistics, filming or observers to monitor our actions, and become aware off them, with regards to e.g.:

  • who dominates the time and space in the classroom?
  • who is listened to, heard and not interrupted?
  • what is the dynamics of groups?

Some actions could be:

  • support some students by standing close to them, looking at them and giving them time.  Be prepared to intervene if some students take up all the time. Do not accept any derogatory remarks or actions.
  • find alternatives to the asking "are there any questions?" - use e.g.
    • group discussion and ask students to write down questions.  These can then be presented in a "not-my-question" fashion.
    • ask students to submit questions, possibly anonymously, and bring them up next time.
  • use inclusive teaching styles, with clickers and peer discussions (see Mazur - reference to be added), to make more students feel included.
  • understand and recognize Suppression Techniques (Lövkrona and Brage 2016) and how to counteract them as a by-stander.
  • create groups where you avoid that the same people are always minorities and understand counter spaces (Ong 2017)
  • Formalize groups by assigning tasks and roles within the groups, to break patterns and "share the tasks". Appoint a chair that has as a duty to make sure that everybody get the chance to speak.
  • When using more unstructured groupwork, in the form of e.g.  open labs, it is even more important to help structuring the work, since there is evidence that there are even more risk for uneven division of tasks - men collects data, women take notes and analyse data (Quinn et al 2020).

 

History of Science

Many historians have criticized how scientists describe the history of science or discussed a gender or diversity perspective on it. A recent thesis on the subject (in Norwegian) is:

In this you will find references to several work, e.g.

A more alternative (and critical) view of science is presented in e.g.

  • Wertheim 1997, Pythagoras’ trousers, Norton.
  • Vaino 2012, Hegemony, Contradiction and Gender …, University of Helsinki Press

 

Stereotype threat

Stereotype threat is discussed. One recent review discusses it from organizational point of view:

 

Anxiety

There are indication that stereotypes leads to anxiety and that some groups are more affected in the efficiency by anxiety, e.g. in test and exam situations . Some simple and straight forward remedies are

  • Spread the risk for the student, by implementing assessments that are not a single, all encompassing exam
  • Give enough time to complete an exam - avoid meaningless stress!
  • Discuss anxiety openly to make students aware of that others are anxious too.
  • Use values-affirmative actions (Beilock 2014) to make students aware about their anxiety.
  • Use role models strategically and counteract the feeling of not belonging.
  • Avoid emphasizing the groups, by cathegorizing students (e.g. don't use "ladies and gentlemen" type of gratings).
  • Avoid patronizing some groups - be aware on your habits, wordings, tone of voice - to avoid shortcutting the pedagogics.

 

Representation

To be updated

 

Language

Some examples of gender sensitive language:

  • move from Exclusionary (binary) to Inclusive (any gender):
    • from Every cast member should know his or her lines by Friday to   Each needs to learn their lines by Friday.  
  • even when in singular form: When the gender of a singular antecedent is unknown, allow and encourage students to use the gender-neutral singular pronounsthey, them, their, and theirs, rather than using binary alternatives such as he/she,he or she, or (s)he.  Ex: Alex needs to learn their lines by Friday.
  • A useful tool is the "Gender Bias Decoder Links to an external site.". This tool is adapted from Kat Matfield's Gender Decoder for Job Ads based on: Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen, and Aaron C. Kay (2011), Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements 

 

Content of teaching and research

An excellent source when approaching the "Fix the Subject or Content" question is the Gendered Innovation project Links to an external site.. Here you can find methods to use when to analyze and improve your content from a equality and diversity point of view. The project lists a number of methods here Links to an external site.. Examples are:

ACT has published a number of videos on this topic - gender dimension.

A classic reference is, which is discussed in Rogowska-Stangret, M 2018, Situated knowledges in New Materialism COST action.

  • Harraway, D. 1988, Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilige of partial knowledge, Feminist studies 14 575-599;

A more recent epistemological text is

  • Barad, K 2007, Meeting the universe half-way, Duke University;

which is discussed in Sauzet, S 2018, Phenomena - agential realism,  in New Materialism COST action.

A recent conference at Lund (GeDiMIRT) resulted in a playlist of talks related to gender dimensions in physics and maths.

Other STEM projects are represented in the Plotina project

Londa Schiebinger is collecting references - here is her list of references - ever growing.

 

 

Discrimination

Master suppression techniques is a useful classification of harassment, micro-aggressions and bullying, including also action against it both by the target and, more importantly, by-standers:

  • Lövkrona, I., and Brage, T. 2016, Master suppression techniques, counter strategies and affirmation techniques – concepts to understand and combat discrimination within academia, page 147 in Brage and Lövkrona 2016.
  • Ås, Berit, 1982, Kvinnor tillsammans. Handbok i frigörelse. Gidlunds.

More general material on discrimination can be found here:

Biology or Sociology?

For a general review, see Connell and Pears 2014 (reference below)

  • Rippon, G. (2019) The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain, Vintage.
  • Fine, C. (2011) Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, London: Icon Books
  • Saini, A. (2017) Inferior: The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows it, London: 4th Estate.

 

Organisation

To be updated.

 

Literature and resources

General on Gender and Science/Diversity and academia

 

Gender conscious teaching

 

in Swedish:

 

Resources from International projects

... and from a Nordic perspective:

EU, Horizon 2020 project