Author: Gracie Enticknap
Photo Courtesy: A group of queer scientists wants to raise LGBTQIA+ visibility in STEM. Lauren Esposito, founder of 500 Queer Scientists, has fostered a community where people “support and find each other.”
They say we’re in an era of ‘science for all,’ that we’re in a time where no one is limited in their access to scientific information, education and career opportunities. Whilst in the past few years, diversity and inclusion programs have gained awareness, importance and increased adoption, I think we still need to ask whether the culture of science itself has adequately adapted to welcome and support this inclusivity. Visibility of LGBTQ+ scientists is gradually improving, but the academic culture within STEM is still experiencing some foot-dragging when it comes to confronting issues of LGBTQ+ inclusion and acceptance in the workplace.
Of course, I should make the disclaimer that there is not just one experience across all queer scientists, and many people might herald that they don’t experience these same issues. Some people have unproblematic work lives, much down to their lab colleagues, and that’s fantastic. After all, we are seeing increasingly more LGBTQ+ centred media in sciences, such as targeted networking events, inclusion of trans and non-binary people in women and minority gender events, activism projects like 500 Queer Scientists raising online visibility, and LGBTQ+ scientists beginning to be more explicit about their identities on professional socials. These acts for visibility are great, but they aren’t happening in tangent to a wider academic culture that is committed to addressing the intrinsic silent issues, so inequalities and disadvantages still frequently exist for queer people in STEM.
We scientists are fortunate to exist in an international and multicultural field which presents us the opportunity for working globally and with people from all over the world. But while that means wonderful things for some types of diversity, it does also present a consequential melting pot of cultural, generational, and personal intolerances, stereotypical epithets, and discomforts towards queer people. People from various cultures and contexts can respond differently to LGBTQ+ individuals, and this opens avenues to workplace tensions, discrimination, bullying or harassment and silent passive aggressions. In fact, research surveys, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, in the last half-decade have revealed that non-heterosexual, transgender, and gender nonbinary STEM professionals are far more likely than non-queer colleagues to experience structural barriers like limited career opportunity, hiring and wage discrimination, and other more casual expressions of both overt and subtle biassed treatment by co-workers, peers and supervisors. But when offences and tensions occur, there is often little acknowledgement of them from colleagues who might consider themselves allies, and this is set within a professional culture that rarely encourages the intolerant to learn acceptance. This can create a sense of social isolation or distancing from colleagues and even work friends, but importantly it reinforces an expectation for queer people to censor, adapt or manage ourselves in order to prevent others’ discomfort, and thus perpetuates loud and more quiet bigotries. There’s a complex inner negotiation of ‘how to be’ that most non-LGBTQ+ people don’t have to grapple with.
The most significant institutional barrier to overcoming these issues is an apparent depoliticisation in the culture of STEM at the academia level; whereby discussions of social and political issues (like diversity and inclusion perhaps) are often discouraged, side-lined, and bracketed as topics to stay outside the lab and separate from day-to-day work. This excuses the resistance to altering prejudiced attitudes and enables a culture of ignorance around LGBTQ+ sensitive topics for the many who are not prejudiced but simply unaware. This ignorance to the silent issues faced by queer people, malicious or not, exposes the apparent lack of awareness raised and lack of inclusion training provided by scientific institutions for their staff. These days, a lot of institutions are becoming better at training staff in approaching certain types of people and in promoting ideas that normalise diversity such as asking for pronouns, not assigning gender roles in same sex relationships, not making assumptions of gender etc. However, these best practices appear currently reserved to industries that are more customer-facing, like hospitality, law, and perhaps business whereas we scientists are slightly more tucked away in our own spaces only to interact with the public on outreach. So how do we make this cultural shift more effectively trickle through into STEM culture?
The emergence of LGBTQ+ networks in many organisations and academic institutions is a promising way to go, but not without flaws. These networks were originally intended as social groups for LGBTQ+ colleagues to build community – a space where self-management isn’t necessary – and to combat the social isolation some may experience by making ‘like-minded’ friends. But while they may often succeed in encouraging friendships, it can feel incredibly forced, especially when the people within that group will be different ages, from different places, having very different interests. The more recently emergent benefit of these groups, though, is their vitality for raising awareness and fostering conversation about LGBTQ+ inclusion and intersectionality in the context of their specific field of work (and thus lifestyle). This is yet to be fully taken advantage of in many places, as so often, engagement with any message they put out is optional to non-queer people. However, they do typically hold enough collective voice to propose better training and more appropriate responses to misconduct from HR departments.
Implementation of this idea at more institutions, in more effective ways, would hope to see instances of subtle discrimination and judgement decrease, and the visibility of LGBTQ+ scientists increase as STEM develops itself a culture that makes it safer and more encouraging for queer individuals to come out in their workspaces. It’s about time queer youth were given more LGBTQ+ role models and mentors, and it’s an overdue expectation that we should be able to break into the workplace without needing advice, mentorship or considerate contemplation about how to present and manage ourselves in ways that don’t pose an immediate disadvantage. We’ve come leaps and bounds in the last couple decades for LGBTQ+ acceptance, so we are getting there. Science is and will increasingly be for all.
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