By: Lynn Mattes “Adventurous Biologists Wanted” was the attention grabbing headline on a flyer I saw at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ career center part way through my last year of undergraduate. (A long-time colleague saw this same announcement at Wichita State University in Kansas about a year later.) This […]
Category: Discussions
This week we focus on one simple action that can have a huge impact: sharing your pronouns! Why share pronouns? Being misgendered sucks and has harmful consequences for folks. One easy action cisgender people (i.e., those whose gender expression aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth) can take […]
Women and folks of other underrepresented identities often get asked to serve on diversity initiatives. We volunteer our time for committees, panels, speaking engagements, mentorship programs, and more. These initiatives are super important, but time spent working on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is time not spent doing other work-related […]
It’s pretty easy to identify hostile, overt sexism. But what about its partner, benevolent sexism? Something that sounds so nice and well-intentioned must be relatively harmless, right? Wrong. Benevolent sexism is NOT at all harmless. In fact, research shows it may end up having more negative effects on women than […]
May is career month in our Women of Fisheries group! As we discuss careers in fisheries science, we thought it would also be a good time to return to a previous discussion in the private group: when is the best time to have kids? Not all people see parenthood as […]
You’ve just started a new field position. Excited, you step on the boat and head out for a full day of sampling. You look around the small boat and suddenly it hits you: where will you pee?? You realize that you are the only woman on the boat. Do you […]
My very first research project was an epic, total failure. As in, pretty much no data, no findings, absolutely nothing to show for it. I won’t bog you down with details about the project, but long story short it centered on trapping invasive rats on an island to look at […]
So here’s the thing: as a woman in fisheries, it can be super hard to navigate clothing, and we’ve had MANY conversations about it in our Facebook group. One of the very first and most popular discussions we’ve had was centered on this question: what does it look like to […]
Welcome to the first of our new blog series Discussion Highlights! Over the past few years we’ve had some great discussions and advice shared on our Facebook group. On the third Monday of each month, we will summarize one of the topic discussions here. This week, we tackle that sneaky […]