How small acts became big movements towards inclusivity
By Morgan Crowley Ph.D. candidate at McGill University
If you’re a woman or from an underrepresented group in the geosciences, you become used to encountering barriers as you try to gain support for your work. As I wrote in an earlier Google post, the battle for recognition and support can be lonely. When we manage to find and connect with other people like us, it’s a powerful moment.
The people behind the five geosciences inclusivity groups profiled below sought to create these powerful moments through shared experiences — raising the profiles of women and underrepresented people doing groundbreaking research, creating spaces to safely share experiences and advice, and using social media to create community, even when they’re oceans apart.
In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, I invite you to check out the groups’ Twitter feeds and websites to find out how you can participate, or lend a hand to uplift their work.
Women in GIS Kenya
Women in GIS Kenya’s journey started in 2017 after the first-ever meetup for the geospatial community in Kenya. It was while hosting this session that co-founders Sophia Murage (Chief Technical Director), Caroline Otiwa (Operations and Advocacy Director), and Yariwo Kitiyo (Strategy and Development Director) realized the potential for connecting women from Kenya through these meetups.
“We know lots of women in geosciences, but why aren’t we seeing them?” Kitiyo says. “How could we make them welcome? That was our aha moment for creating our group.”
Advocating for women and building geospatial capacity in Kenya is the group’s main focus. The group offers a student-focused technical training event every quarter, a mentorship program, and other public events. Members are currently running a #DataViz Challenge dubbed #CACXDataviz to commemorate Cervical Cancer Awareness Month, using spatial and non-spatial data to increase awareness about screening and treatment of cervical cancer. Later in the year, the group will launch a hackathon dubbed #Hack4her to find solutions for female genital mutilation, gender-based violence, and sexual reproductive health.
SERVIR
SERVIR, a joint initiative of NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), uses satellite data to help developing countries improve decision-making capabilities. Emily Adams, the Regional Science Coordination Lead for SERVIR Eastern & Southern Africa, wears another hat. She works toward women and gender-inclusivity at the global SERVIR level and with the U.S. State Department’s WiSci (Women in Science) Girls STEAM Camps, where girls from Africa, the United States, and across the world come together to attend science, technology, and math camps in Europe and Africa.
“Women and girls are routinely left out of the picture,” Adams says. “When decisions get made this way, women become even more disenfranchised in their communities. We work to make sure their voices are represented in the work that we do around the world.”
With five regional hubs in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, SERVIR Global works across very different cultures with similar goals to improve diversity and inclusivity. “We really want our efforts to be decentralized, while we track key metrics overall,” Adams explains.
The approach is working. In every hub, local teams are coming up with innovative ways to shine a light on gender inclusivity — like launching a mentoring project for high school girls with SERVIR West Africa, creating an app to visualize and monitor gender gaps in Cambodia and Vietnam with SERVIR Mekong, and dedicating an entire session to gender and social inclusion at the SERVIR Annual Global Exchange meeting.
GeoLatinas
GeoLatinas’ mission is to embrace, empower, and inspire Latinas to pursue and thrive in careers in Earth and Planetary Sciences. It’s an inclusive, member-driven organization, and while only recently co-founded, it’s already connecting “Latinas in geo” across 23 countries.
The inspiration for the group came when Dr. Clara Rodriguez, a senior exploration geoscientist and one of the co-founders of GeoLatinas, saw Adriana Crisostomo-Figueroa, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leeds (and also a co-founder of GeoLatinas) receive an award at a UK conference. “When I saw Adriana I felt so proud of her — I wanted to tell the world about her,” Rodriguez says. “I thought I’d just create a Twitter account and highlight Latinas who are successful.”
“Clara invited me to develop this initiative in the Summer of 2018,” adds Crisostomo-Figueroa. “We wanted to create a space where people could track Latinas’ achievements in industry and academia.”
In August 2018, Dr. Rocío Caballero-Gill, a postdoctoral research assistant at George Mason University, joined the GeoLatinas. Together, the founding members executed one of GeoLatinas’ main social media initiatives, #FridayFeatureInGeo.
From that modest beginning, GeoLatinas now includes leaders, ambassadors, and local teams worldwide, sharing responsibilities for mentoring, professional development, social media outreach, and more.
In the next few years, the GeoLatinas hope to have more leaders, local teams, and ambassadors at universities around the world to provide support for Latina students in Earth and Planetary Sciences. “I’d also like to see GeoLatinas get to the point where people around the world consult us on matters for improving diversity and retention in our field,” says Caballero-Gill.
Women in Geospatial+
“I knew women were disheartened, as I was, when we weren’t fully valued professionally in male-dominated workplaces,” says Julia Wagemann, a geospatial data consultant and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Marburg in Germany.
On International Women’s Day in early 2019, Wagemann tweeted a shoutout asking who else wanted to get a group going to promote gender equality in geospatial. Almost 200 people raised their virtual hands, and Women in Geospatial+ was born. Wagemann quickly started a mailing list and Slack channel to get the conversation started. “The idea as a group was to share strategies, but also just to network and connect each other to opportunities,” she says.
At the 2019 Living Planet Symposium, Wagemann organized a well-attended panel about careers in the space sector and met up with Sabrina Szeto, a geospatial consultant from Singapore, who kicked off a year-long Women in Geospatial+ mentorship program.
A little less than a year after its founding, Women in Geospatial+ now has nearly 1,000 members. The network plans regular meetups at geosciences conferences and just opened up registrations for a Women in Geospatial+ speaker database. The full platform will be launched in May. “It’s about young people seeing more examples of women as scientists — and recognizing the contributions of underrepresented people in our field,” Szeto says.
Ladies of Landsat
“In science-related meetings, there’s always a deficit of women,” says Dr. Kate Fickas, an Adjunct Professor at Utah State University and a member of the research faculty at The University of Utah and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Her launch of Ladies of Landsat at the Landsat Science Team meeting in early 2018 was a way for women remote sensing scientists to find each other in the wilderness, made possible by support from key allies along the way, including Landsat Science Team members like Dr. Michael Wulder.
The conversations that started on Twitter are now turning into solid opportunities to uplift the work of underrepresented genders, including organizing in-person networking events at ForestSAT and Geo for Good; a special session with ISPRS Student Consortium (SC); an appearance in the Scene From Above podcast; and a feature in the ISPRS SC newsletter.
Another effort, the “Manuscript Monday” program, highlights new research papers with women as lead authors. “There’s a known disparity in lead-author citations between men and women,” Fickas says; the hope is to eventually create a database of papers led by gender minorities. Eventually, Fickas notes, the aim of the group is to increase representation and support at all levels in the field of remote sensing, from university classrooms to the Landsat Science Team itself.
(Read more about Ladies of Landsat in the previous Google Earth Keyword post.)
