Episode 005: Dawn Bazely

University Professor Dawn Bazely, of York University, is a biologist and ecologist whose work on plants in the Arctic has shaped political discourse on climate change. She is a powerful advocate of women in STEM.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is biologist Dawn Bazely, one of my amazing colleagues at York University. Dawn is what's called a University Professor, with a capital U and a capital P. This rank may not mean much to muggles, but let me put it in context for you: there are only 25 University Professors at York and once you get this title, you get to keep it till you die. Dawn Bazely is a long way off from that eventuality. She's vibrant, powerful, energetic and decidedly unconventional. She's extremely well-connected in policy circles, using her research to inform political discussions about climate change and the effect it's having on the Arctic. She is a renowned teacher and a passionate advocate for women in STEM – which is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. She is an active editor of Wikipedia and keeps a Twitter following of almost 10,000 people engaged in her biology research. I'm very excited to be talking to her today. Dawn, welcome to the podcast.

Dawn Bazely: Good morning, Cameron, it’s lovely to see you in a really different surrounding off the York University Keele campus. I'm a biology professor at York University. I got hired in 1990. I’ve worn many different hats at York University—which is a great place to work because you can have multiple career arcs—but I'm very grounded in my research and teaching as an ecologist. So if you look at me on Google Scholar, what will come up is my work as a grass ecologist, looking at animal-plant interactions and toxic plant defences, the ways that plants have evolved to defend themselves against being eaten by a wandering sheep or goose. I've done a lot of that kind of thing. I then morphed into a forest ecologist when I came to York, ten years after I started my first fieldwork. That was because I had young kids and I needed a more local project, and we’re quite far from Arctic regions here in the southernmost part of Canada. So I’m also quite well known for that. I’m perhaps most famous as someone who tells the government park authorities how many deer to shoot, which has brought me into various interesting situations over the over the decades. But most excitingly for me, after having been forced by circumstances and family situation to move away from doing Arctic and Northern research, I reengaged with that 14 years after I started at York, when I got into doing human security work in the Arctic. I collaborate with a bunch of political scientists, combining ecology and science and policy these days.

Cameron: It's quite fascinating the way your research took off from the grassroots, quite literally, changing into something that is geopolitical. In this geopolitical project that you're involved with in the Arctic, do you still go looking for biology?

Dawn: I do, I do! Because at heart, I love plants. Growing up in inner-city London, very far from natural environments, I always loved nature and was really influenced by all those David Attenborough TV shows. That really is me: I always wanted to be a biologist. When I got to university, I was an interdisciplinary scholar, doing biology and geography. I then went on to do a master’s in botany, because with plant-animal interactions, you need to look at both sides. Then I did a doctorate in animal behaviour, in an ornithology institute at Oxford studying sheep. I've always done applied research. Back in the 1980s, applied subjects were pooh-poohed by everybody. It was all about pure science. But I was studying snow geese and how many should be shot every year, and how to manage sheep. So I was always being asked to deliver management-relevant results, whether to a farmer or a government scientist? Later on, when I got back into the Arctic, it was via a group of political scientists. At York University, I had been working on invasive species: the way people move animals and plants around the world with devastating, unanticipated consequences. The world as we know it, our civilization today, is actually built on the back of nonindigenous species. We've got chickens, which originated in Southeast Asia and now live in downtown Toronto. We've got wheat and other crops which are being moved around: potatoes, originally from South America. Ecology has this history. It’s got a political dimension. I've always included that in my teaching, and I've always been interested in it. But I was doing this invasive species stuff with retired York University professor Norman Yan, one of the world's experts on acid rain, when the Vice President of Research at York, who is a political scientist, was asked to represent York at a conference on climate change in the Arctic. It was about invasive species and global warming, and I was doing a lot of that kind of stuff, so when he couldn't go, he contacted me and said, “Can you go in my place?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, I'll totally represent York for a trip to Tromsø, Norway!” And that was where I really learned about human security as an international-relations and political-science concept. I made the linkage to invasive species and climate change and we talked about this intersection of science-policy-politics. I then wrote an application for International Polar Year about human security in the Arctic, which was a very controversial, contested concept, that global North wealthy countries could have issues that map onto the same issues as those in the global South. Yet lookee here, you have all these global North countries telling everyone in the global South how to do things, right? Many of those same issues are present where we live, in our comfortable global North, in the Arctic. I used that as a stepping stone to do all this collaborative work, but I still collected grass. Everywhere I go, I do grass biology when I'm on site. I even educate my social sciences colleagues to identify the grasses, to get them into the science. That has really informed my attitude to what authentic interdisciplinary collaborative research looks like, because it's about learning from everybody. You’re no longer the expert in the room. I know an awful lot about goose poop, and I know an awful lot about dead twigs. You can drop me in Scotland—I was there earlier this summer on St Kilda, hadn't been there for 20 years, it's the most remote place in Britain—and I could identify all these dead grass leaves. It’s an awesome skill to have, and I can teach it to other people, but I'm always learning from the people around me.

Cameron: You're still doing the grass pulling.

Dawn: Yeah, I can teach you! You know, there is this idea that if people are able to understand a complex issue, it must be because it’s being dumbed down. I absolutely refute that.

Cameron: I teach at the Schulich School of Business and one of the things I've noticed is that there seems to be a very strong correlation between people who are good researchers and people who are good teachers, because they're simply good at communicating what they know. Not every good researcher is a good teacher and there’s lots of great teachers who are not researchers, they’re full-time teachers. But that ability to communicate is at the core of what you and I do.

Dawn: Yes!

Cameron: So how does your teaching enter into this? Does it affect the way that you talk to the politicians? Does the way you talk to politicians change the way that you present ideas in class, or the kinds of processes that you get your students to engage in?

Dawn: Gosh. Okay, let's wind back again to the 1980s, when I finished my undergrad and then went on to do my master’s and my doctorate and then some postdocs. I was constantly getting these messages that if you are a good researcher, why are you wasting your time teaching? Whether you're talking to the public or talking to students. And I would always say, they are kind of on the same page, aren’t they? My favourite professors and mentors were excellent researchers and excellent public science communicators. So that whole discourse about, when you're the priest of research and arcane knowledge, you have to talk in gobbledygook, and you must have other people who interpret for you – I've never had any truck with that. I've had the privilege in the last 10+ years of working a lot with Indigenous people—First Nations and Inuit colleagues and elders and students—for whom I have the utmost respect, They don't speak in arcane academic gobbledygook, but they know a lot more about certain things that I do and they're very happy to share that knowledge with me.

Cameron: Is there a different--to use gobbledygook--is there different mode of inquiry amongst indigenous people compared to academics?

Dawn: God, I have to think about that. Can you explain “mode of inquiry” for me, Cameron? [laughs]

Cameron: The way of going about developing knowledge.

Dawn: [hesitates] Nah! No.

Cameron: No?

Dawn: No, no, and I think this is another way that many academics try to arm themselves with importance. But we also need to touch on what is expertise and what is not expertise. To be a little bit careful here, “modes of inquiry”: asking questions, asking questions about everything around you and observing carefully, and remembering. So I don't think there really is. I think real experts follow some kind of method of proving their expertise. In academia, it's about peer-reviewed research literature.

Cameron: What you're talking about is a very social process of developing some shared understanding? That peer-review process of putting your article in front of other people to read, and getting them to comment on it and critique it, that can take months and months and months, sometimes years.

Dawn: Years, years, for me!

Cameron: Years, to get an article published. The cycle time for that way of developing shared knowledge is very different from what happens in a political context.

Dawn: Yes, so I have advice for everybody engaging in all those communication forums, which is just always be doing your homework! A good example, a good case in point, was this Washington Post editorial [Dawn’s recent editorial on Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland, from Waterloo University]. I got told by somebody, “Oh, you're in the phone book!” I laughed about it and said, “Well, after five years of running Wikipedia editathons for women in STEM, I think I've just proven to my fellow academics at the university that this was a worthwhile endeavour.” Because people have been saying, ‘Why are you doing that?”

Cameron: Absolutely worthwhile. Let's recap the [Donna Strickland] situation, then, and correct me if I'm wrong on this: Donna Strickland recently received the Nobel Prize for …?

Dawn: For physics.

Cameron: There's two women recently won the Nobel Prize. One was for …

Dawn: Chemistry.

Cameron: Chemistry, and Donna’s was for physics. And it became quite a bit of a cause célèbre in the papers that, number one, she didn't even have her own Wikipedia page, and number two, she's an associate professor, not even a full professor. We can talk about the associate professor side in a bit. Tell me about the Wikipedia side. You were asked or you approached the Washington Post to do this editorial. What happened there?

Dawn: They asked me.

Cameron: So they approached you because they knew you were involved in …

Dawn: It was a tweet, a tweet that I sent out in response to the immediate controversy that broke on the Wikipedia page, just a random tweet. I tweeted, “Every page about women in STEM that I have created for Wikipedia has been queried as to whether they were notable enough. Every one.” Okay, its a very small sample size, let's be clear. And that got retweeted. A lot of people saw it. So then I get a direct message saying, “Hello, I'm a journalist with the Washington Post. We’d like you to write an op-ed, because we've checked you out and it looks like you are somebody who does women-in-STEM Wikipedia pages.” And I'm like, “Awesome! This could actually justify all the time I've spent on this non-peer-reviewed activity of editing Wikipedia. Yes!” So we start with an interview, which makes me late to the NSERC Athena SWAN consultation [an inquiry about equity, diversity and inclusion in education] because I'm being interviewed by the Washington Post so that we can write this op-ed piece about Wikipedia and editing and the culture and everything. I get there and someone goes, “That’s Donna Strickland!” I get into introduced to her and I’m like, “My daughter graduated from Waterloo. I'm a fellow Waterloo mother, blah, blah, blah.” And someone goes, ”Dawn edits Wikipedia.” And [Donna] turns to me and the first thing she says is, “My children's names aren't on my Wikipedia page. I want them on there. I've been told that we’re not allowed to have them.” We chatted and she says, “I want this.” I said, “Number one, you can have your children's names. Number two, let me see what I can do about this.” So then the whole thing just took off. Bottom line, just let me say, we fact-checked that article. I gave them so much copy that referred to the peer-reviewed literature. And I did not go online and say that whoever rejected her original page was clearly motivated by misogyny and bias, because the evidence was not there for that particular person. I was very careful.

Cameron: Right. The issue is notability. There is this notion in Wikipedia, particularly for biography pages for academics, that this person must be notable, and they have, I think, eight different…

Dawn: Nine.

Cameron: Nine. Nine different items that if you check that box, you are considered notable.

Dawn: You just have to check one.

Cameron: One. Any one of those. But, each of those boxes is socially constructed.

Dawn: Yes!

Cameron: Each of those boxes is shaped by decades and decades and decades of exclusion.

Dawn: Yes!

Cameron: So if you want to say, “This person is notable because they are the editor of a major journal,” it’s very difficult for women to get those positions.

Dawn: My approach to raising the profile and the retention of women and people of colour in STEM, and other minorities, is multipronged. This is something I've developed since over the last five to six years. I discovered that all of these 1990s and 1980s policies to diversify, to make science and technology and the academy more inclusive, were basically failing. My political science colleagues have really educated me about the policy-politics nexus. That's what I've learned since 2004 from hanging out with these folks. So I looked at all of this when I came back into the biology department after administrative secondment, and I said, “Wow, there's a whole bunch of stuff in the newspapers, in the New York Times, saying that misogyny and sexism in science is really alive and well and flourishing, along with wholesale sexual-harassment. Right, what do we do?” So the first thing was Wikipedia, getting pages for women who are notable but who have been passed over. My pages would meet more than one notability requirement, but they were still being flagged as not notable.

Cameron: So that's a second level of challenge, right, because you’ve got these “objective” criteria which are in themselves based on categories that are subject to the exclusion of women. And then even when you satisfy them, you have people coming along and saying, “Well, actually you know, that's not quite enough.”

Dawn: Yes, but I'm a woman in STEM and I'm used to people mansplaining me and telling me that I'm not good enough. It’s like water off a duck’s back at this point. The other thing I have done in the last few years is nominate women colleagues for prestigious awards, because it’s the easiest way to meet the notability requirement. And this is a grey area about Prof. Donna Strickland. She actually did have significant award from an optics society. Let me come back to that in a sec. I spend a lot of time these days writing all kinds of letters and leading nomination packages for deserving women in STEM in Canada to get these prestigious awards, and I have a pretty good track record for two or three people. So when your Wikipedia page comes out, I know you’re going to nail that notability requirement and we're going to keep pushing through. With respect to Donna, the Wikimedia foundation wrote a blog about this, and I got tweeted at by a whole bunch of people about this: it appears that it was a junior, newbie editor who wrote that page that got declined. I probably, with my experience in hand, would have constructed the page differently, knowing it was likely to be declined. I do a lot of mentoring, so it's not just about me writing and creating Wikipedia pages, it's about me teaching and mentoring a diverse group of new Wikipedians, which is what people who contribute to Wikipedia are called. I got into running Wikipedia editathons in India, because Wikipedia is trying to promote pages in languages other than English. So my focus isn't always just on the women. It's on diversifying, the whole inclusivity thing. To help more women to get these awards, you have to be right at the forefront. You have to lead the nomination packages. So there's that. The other thing with women in STEM that I do a lot of is calling for keynotes, keynote speakers, because that also rolls into notability and awards. Please, let's have gender balance and more diverse panels. What got me onto this was an event that happened in our own university in 2013, when I was still the Director of the Sustainability Research Institute. The Council of Ontario Universities and the Ontario Research Chairs organized a symposium at Glendon College on green chemistry and green energy, non-fossil fuel energy. It featured eight out of eight males. I was so outraged, I wrote to Lorna Marsden, our previous [York University] president, about the fact that it was all men. I wrote to the Council of Ontario Universities. I spoke to every one of the panelists, which included the former mayor of Toronto, David Miller. Our kids were at daycare together. His daughter did engineering. I was like, “David, WTF?” And he was like, “Yeah, you’re quite right. I'm just a moderator. I didn't need to be here. We could've had a woman.” The pushback that I got from those men—you can go on my blog, I have named names, I have written letters—was outrageous! They were like, “Oh, but I talked about all the women in my lab who do research.” I was like, “No you didn't, because I sat through your talk. You didn't mention any of them by name. Stop it!” So these delusional male research chairs and academics, who are not allies, I called them all out. And you know what? The next year, the Council of Ontario Universities held the identical event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Hello? At that point, I wasn't a University Professor, but I was a full professor and I was like, “Wow, I'm screaming into the void.”

Cameron: So it was all men the second year as well.

Dawn: Yes. Same people. So I reached out to the Council of Ontario Universities. At the time they had a woman president. They offered to talk to me about it. I said I want to have a conversation about your implicit bias and what you are demonstrating to Ontario about who does what scholarship. I was there at the event, as the Director of the Sustainability Research Institute. I was horrified. I had raised issues about it ahead of time, but the local Glendon organizer said, “It wasn't me.” What I got from everybody was, “It wasn't me! It’s not my fault.” It’s not my institutional fault, it’s not my individual fault. I was like, “Shut up, all of you!” The only person that responded to me with appropriate outrage was Lorna Marsden who has known me since I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and she knows my record. She was horrified and asked me to check back in with her. And I said, “Lorna, it’s like talking to a wall.” That was five years ago. I then reprinted that blog post for the Canadian Science Policy Conference, International Women's Day. After that, “manels” and the nearly all-male panel became a big thing on social media. But I proposed policies: individual policy, institutional policy. Everyone can take action. I'm glad to say that many science societies have now brought in those kinds of policy about inclusivity and having more diverse keynote/plenary speakers, because that contributes directly to notability and the likelihood of getting a Fellowship of the National Academy of Sciences. Invited keynotes and plenaries burnish your reputation. But I was actually the first person, certainly in Canada, calling people out and proposing policies. I'm not going to say that everyone who has now jumped on that train should be acknowledging little old me. But actually you should, if you're out there listening to this podcast! I'm about giving credit to everybody. Science is a collaborative group enterprise and everyone should know who had that idea or was talking about it beforehand. And I hate it when people don't do that. I've gotten to huge fights with archivists about them not wanting their names on a published chapter, in a book where I want to have them as co-authors. I’m like, “I didn’t do this myself. I don't care if it's your cultural norm to not have your name as an author. You did all this work with me.” But I haven't been able to shift that in archives and history. [pauses] That was a good rant. Sorry.

Cameron: Let me make this very practical, and you can teach: we’re launching a podcast where I'm interviewing academics. I want to highlight the work of women academics. Should I make my podcast all women guests?

Dawn: Nooo! Definitely not.

Cameron: Why not? What's to lose in that?

Dawn: Other voices, that are valuable voices. So for our Aida Lovelace Day annual invited lecture, our first speaker was my amazing friend and former Chair of Biology at York, founding Dean of Science at Ryerson, Imogen Coe, now known as NSERC’s champion of equity, diversity and inclusivity. She was our first speaker, but our next year’s speaker was Brian Gaensler, radio astronomy Canada Research Chair, Director of the Dunlap Institute, who has brought in mountains of policy to make his research institute and physics more inclusive and diverse for women. He had a lot to say about recognizing his own privilege and using it as a platform to diversify his field. Some people said, “Why are you having a man?” And I said, “’Cause, like, men have daughters?”

Cameron: Well, let's that's a bit of a trope right now in the Twittersphere, how men always default to saying, “Well, I've got a daughter, so I understand what's going on with women.” As if it depended on your immediate family connection to a woman to have any ability to empathize. So I’m not sure that's the direction I would go.

Dawn: Okay. Brian doesn't have a daughter, he has a son, but he is someone who has taken really concrete, policy-based action, institutional steps, and he's an activist. He is a true ally and activist. Last year, our speaker wasn't even a scientist, it was a young woman, a communications expert, Elly Zupko, who had launched a successful Kickstarter campaign a few years ago, in response to the Hawaiian shirt featuring “Barbarella babes” worn by Matt Taylor, the head of the European Space Agency team who landed the Philae lander on the comet. He spoke to Grade 6 students around the world wearing this incredibly sexist “fun” Hawaiian shirt. Completely out of place and irresponsible. What was he thinking? Clueless. Elly photoshopped a picture of him with the heads of Mary Curie [and other women in STEM], using snaps from the Internet. She turned that into a Kickstarter campaign, and into a nonprofit that supports girls in STEM.

Cameron: Does that shirt now exist?

Dawn: Yes. You can buy it. It’s fabulous. I'm not wearing it today, I should've been wearing it today, but we give it away as a prize for our Wikipedia editathon.

Cameron: I'll have to post a link on our website.

Dawn: You will. It's amazing. And by the way, she has been retweeted by Hillary Clinton. She is a communications expert, she is an author, but she's not notable enough for a Wikipedia page, or so I am told. I'm working on that one. She’s not an academic, so as an author and a write she has a different set of notability criteria. [sighs] I’m not happy.

Cameron: When we talked about notability and the goal of diversifying the representation of women in science, you said STEM, science, technology, engineering and math. I would include accounting and those kinds of things, as well, that I research. It has the same issues in terms of gender diversity. Underlying this is a question I have, which is, do women researchers conduct research differently? Do they ask different questions? When you say we need diverse voices, what is it that women, in your opinion, are adding to the conversation that us guys are ignoring.

Dawn: Do women do science differently? Yes, I would say that when I work in teams with male colleagues and teams with women colleagues -- and I work in many teams of diverse academics and ecologists -- women always bring a different perspective. I would say that everyone brings a different perspective, but I'm always struck, when I have women colleagues in the room, that they have a very different take on basic science that was discounted for decades but is now being acknowledged as probably the most important.

Cameron: Can you give an example?

Dawn: Yes, I can give a very, very concrete example. So Lynn Margulis, Professor Lynn Margulis, who passed away a few years ago, came up with a theory called the endosymbiotic theory of the cell. You and I, we have eukaryotic cells which are cells with clear organelles in them, like mitochondria, or if you are plot, a chloroplast or nucleus. You know that they’re an organelle because they have a double membrane. When you look at them microscopically, they are completely different. Bacteria, which are prokaryotes don't have that same level of structure. So back in the 1970s, Lynn Margulis advanced a theory that eukaryotic cells came about because back in the early times on earth, the microbes were eating each other. Photosynthesis didn't exist for a long time. We now rely on photosynthesis but that came later. So at one point, some bacteria ate some other bacteria and they didn't digest them completely, because the bacteria that they ate carried on functioning and produced enough resources to make it worthwhile for the eating cell not to completely digest it and kill it. This is the origin of our eukaryotic cells. It took a long time for Lynn's theory to be accepted. I remember when that was put forward. She spoke at my university in the 1970s. That was a view of biology as being symbiotic and collaborative, as opposed to competitive. Interspecific competition, intraspecific competition, where we’re all fighting for resources and it’s do or die! Someone's going to throw some food over there, or money, and I’m going to kill you on the way to getting that million dollars. The importance of collaborative, very high-level events in the evolution of living organisms is more accepted now, but it was disregarded for decades. It’s a woman’s thing.

Cameron: I have a colleague in accounting who pointed out to me many years ago that our understanding of the economy is a myth, because we talk about competition, competition, competition. His point was that inside any substantial organization, the degree to which competition penetrates into the organization is very minimal. The salespeople who are competing for an account are perhaps aware of who the other competitors are. But if you talk to the vast majority of people within the organization, many of them won't know who the competitors are. They simply have a job to do. So, competition does not drive our economy nearly so much as cooperation does. I can see the link here between what you're talking about at the cellular level and what I think about at the organizational level and economic level.

Dawn: Yes. And the organization is an organism. I just want to say to all economists out there listening to this podcast, because my doctorate was actually on the marginal value theorem as applied to animal behaviour: ecology, my area of expertise and research, is the mothership of everything! Sometimes I have to remind engineers of that, because we cover everything in ecology. You have to look at the system. You have to look at the population level. You have to look at the individual. And if you don't do it all at the same time, you miss what's driving a system or an individual. Just saying. That's my plug for ecology. [laughs]

Cameron: The two Nobel prizes that were awarded recently to women, in physics and in chemistry, are actual Nobel prizes. The economics prize, the “Nobel Memorial Prize,” wasn't instigated by Nobel himself. The economists are very good at creating self-congratulatory mechanisms for recognizing their work. Is there anything to be learned from economists by women in STEM about how to build these structures of recognition for the work you're doing.

Dawn: [laughs] Do you know about the research on women who are professors in economics? Do you know about the research on getting cited, getting respected more if you publish solo versus if you're in a team? The peer-reviewed research on this is quite recent. The research showed that if you are a young woman or man going forward for tenure in economics, there is consistent devaluing of the contribution of women in teams, collaborative research teams where there are men and women present. The men's contribution is valued more than the women's.

Cameron: You’re talking about a paper that might have four co-authors, for instance?

Dawn: Yes. Going up for tenure, how much credit do you get for that? So the research showed that if you're a young woman, you should publish alone so it's clear that 100% of the credit comes to you. or on all-woman collaborative, multi-author teams. Ugh. Which for me directly tracks on to the number of times I have seen in conferences and talks where a woman, particularly a woman of colour, has got her hand up to ask a question, and the person at the front is constantly ignoring that person and doesn't invite them to ask that question. So anyway, I just think it's funny that economics is where that research has been shown. Economists are super self-congratulatory. Yeah, I know that because I have quite a few friends who are economists. I have quite a few friends who were ecological economists, so I know that mainstream economics doesn't really accept them. I believe that the economists who won the Nobel Prize, or whatever the prize in economics is called, actually were doing alternative economic research. They weren’t mainstream.

Cameron: Yes, there's been more recognition in economics of some of the alternative approaches, the behavioural approaches to economics.

Dawn: So I'm in favour of carbon taxes. That’s a topic for another episode. That’s on the record, I tell many people that. I think what women can learn from the self-congratulatory behaviour of many of my male colleagues, bless them, is that they need to be better at becoming rampant self promoters. So if you ever see me tweeting RSP, #RSP, you’ll know. And I have witnessed that for 40 years

Cameron: Rampant self promoter, right. This gets back to the other aspect of Donna Strickland situation. We've talked about Wikipedia and the rejection of the page that had been created for her because she wasn't notable enough. The other aspect of her situation is that she is an associate professor, not a full professor. Just to explain to her listeners, if you want to move from associate professor to full professor, it's up to you to apply. The tenure process, getting from assistant professor to associate professor, is a little bit more mechanized: there's a clock on it, an expectation that your file will be presented whether you want it or not. But after that, once you’ve got tenure, to get recognition as a full professor, it’s pretty much entirely up to you to initiate that. What pressure does that put on women? What message or what behaviours does that mechanism induce in women in science, technology, engineering, and math?

Dawn: Can I just say that, in addition to STEM, as I pointed out to grade 9 students yesterday, there’s STEAM. I just want to throw out some more acronyms.

Cameron: What’s the “A”?

Dawn: Science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

Cameron: I still don't see accounting in there. I'm very disappointed.

Dawn: We could make the “A” accounting. We could make it whatever we want.

Cameron: I feel so token.

Dawn: STEMM is science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine. All I say to people is STEM is a code word, really I mean everything. I want to get back to what this does. Frankly, it's that the tenure-track ladder disincentivizes, in my opinion (all my colleagues at the law school tell me to say that, “in my opinion”), in my opinion it disincentivizes many women for three main reasons. Number one, women, I believe, often hold themselves to a higher standard in their fields. There is actually research on this, that women feel they're not good enough until they …

Cameron: So they look at their own work and feel that perhaps that's really not enough to deserve being a full professor.

Dawn: Yes, and I see this playing out with my male versus female students, when they're applying for jobs and my male versus female graduate students. The men will just apply for everything, even if they’re completely, grossly underqualified. They just go, “What have I got to lose?” And then sometimes mud sticks, you get something. Whereas the women are like, “Am I really the perfect candidate for that?” And then of course, what happens is they’re not applying for a whole bunch of [lesser] things, and when they apply for something that is a big competition, with lots of worthy recipients and then they don't get it. And then they're like, I'm really not good enough

Cameron: I was right about myself. I'm really not good enough.

Dawn: It reinforces negative stereotypes. They have to stop it. Anyway. Dunning-Kruger, you know all that. There's men who are like totally guilty of Dunning-Kruger, which is where you have a overinflated opinion of yourself. (I learned that from my psychology colleagues.) What I see is a lot of my male colleagues going forward for full professor just two years after they became associate professor, and I'm like, “Huh!” And then they get it just because they’re ballsy.

Cameron: That's an interesting gendered word.

Dawn: Oh yeah, I shouldn’t say that. Gutsy!

Cameron: [laughs]

Dawn: No, ballsy. Because if you have that … Maybe I could defend that, but you’re quite right. I think the third thing that's playing into this is the old boys network and we haven't really talked about this. I just want to mention, in passing. I grew up academically in really old institutions. I'm an institutionalized person, I've been at so many universities and colleges and schools that are super old, super prestigious, and I'm very familiar with how the old boys network functions, and it’s “you pat my back, I'll pat yours.” It’s a quid pro quo economy of favours. So often what you get with this full professor thing is you get people saying, “While, I’ll write to your file if you nominate me for this award.” Sorry boys, if you're out there, I have been party to dozens of these conversations. So, I'm simply doing that now for all the women. I just contacted a woman, who is not an academic, but she still under 40 and she leads her family business, and I said, “I’m going to nominate you for the Top 40 Under 40 in business!” And she's like, “Oh yeah, somebody in the company was going to do that last year, and I still have a couple of years, but then they missed the deadline.” I'm like, “Right!” So that was the first thing I did when I got back on the Internet, back on this side of the digital divide. I was like Kermit the frog in the GIF, typing away. So and so is going to write letters, you have to signal your intent, and I was like, “We’re really going make this happen because you are incredible!” And this is someone who is a mother of two young children. I mean she has other priorities, but the window to get this prestigious award is closing.

Cameron: Yes, the biological clock is ticking on the Top 40 Under 40.

Dawn: Yes.

Cameron: So you’ve got this kind of shift going on in academia, through these low level mechanisms for recognition. And you can instigate those, I as a male professor can get behind those and add my voice to these things. So there are ways for women to develop recognition now that might've not have been there before. On the other hand, the precarity of work in the university sector and in higher education is growing, and what I mean by that is, there is more and more reliance by universities, because they are under budgetary pressure, to hire contract workers. Because then if there's the enrolment, they can pay the contractor to teach the course, and if there isn't the enrolment, they can not hire them. That variable labour is a very important component, a really important component of managing a university. But what it's done is pass on the risk to the academic in the university, and it makes it much more difficult for anybody to get tenure. Do you feel that someone starting out in your field could have anything like the career path that you've had? What would be different about it, going forward

Dawn: First of all, I do think those career paths are open and some of my graduate students are on those paths. The graduate students that have gotten onto that path are my male students, who have really benefited very explicitly from my mentorship and my advice and my working with them. I've been very disappointed, for decades now, that the women grad students have often taken themselves off that table and out of that equation. But I do say, to all of my former female graduate students and postdocs, it's never too late. And I'm thrilled that two of them have gone back and are going to be tenure-track in their late 40s. It's never too late, never too late, ladies. Come on, you’ve just got to keep going back. So there is that. On the other hand, the casualization of labour in universities is definitely growing. I have blogged and written about this as something that is grossly unfair, in my opinion, to everybody, because when you've got more contract faculty, they don't have the time to do the kind of pedagogy and curriculum development, that you and I have. They live with anxiety and uncertainty, which incentivizes some kind of behaviours that are not good for them or for anybody else, including their students, their undergraduates that they’re teaching. So I think that the casualization of labour, if you did a game theory analysis--and maybe someone has done it, and I'm not necessarily the person to do it—but I would say it like a lose-lose situation for everybody. And I'm pretty sure we could put some numbers around that. We probably could. I'm not sure people would want to pay for those numbers, though, because it would push universities to reverse their hiring trends and give more permanent jobs.

Cameron: What does the career path look like for someone who's entering? Your students who are doing PhDs right now, what are their prospects for tenure?

Dawn: So I don't have any because I’ve discouraged people from doing PhDs with me for the last few years, since we had the Harper government cutting all the jobs of my former students who were working in science positions in government. I basically have been telling my students not to carry on with research. We do a lot of research in my lab with undergraduates and master’s students still. But I'm very concerned about people doing these PhDs. I give pretty strong career counselling about transferable skills and jobs you can do, and you can have these careers, but they’re shrinking just because of numbers, because of the demographics. But I would like to see a really informed public conversation about the precarity of work, and I don't think it's happening within the Canadian academic community. It's not happening.

Cameron: I know, but I tell you where we could have that conversation: on Twitter.

Dawn: Excellent. I'll be there for that

Cameron: I'll see you there. Thanks, Dawn.

Links

The Bazely Biology Lab York University.

Dawn Bazely on Wikipedia.

Dawn Bazely on Twitter.

Books by Dawn Bazely

Ecology and Control of Introduced Plants, with Judith H. Myers

Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic, with Hoogensen, Goloviznina and Tanentzap.

Other links

Elly Zupko’s women-in-STEM shirt.

The formerly contentious Wikipedia page for Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland.

An explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Credits

This episode was recorded by Ryan Freeman at Lossless Creative in Toronto. Podcast or Perish would not have become a reality without Ryan’s expertise and generosity in recording this episode. Having this episode to show people made all the difference in obtaining funding. Many, many thanks, Ryan!

Host: Cameron Graham
Recording engineer: Ryan Freeman
Post-production: Bertland Imai
Photos: York University Media Relations (Bazely close-up) and Canadian Science Publishing (Bazely holding flowers).
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: October 11, 2018
Location: Lossless Creative

Dawn Bazely’s photo from Women in Science (click to read article)