The Working Group Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (WG-EDI) of the SOMMa Alliance organized this workshop at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. It was a succes, with 245 people inscribed to participate, both presentially or remotely.
SOMMa is the alliance of Severo Ochoa Centres and María de Maeztu Units to promote Spanish Excellence in research and to enhance its social impact at national and international levels. The SOMMa Alliance currently has seven working groups made up of professionals from the 62 members, dedicated to topics such as open science, technology transfer, research project management, communication and management. One of those working groups is the WG-EDI, coordinated by Lourdes Fàbrega, from ICMAB.
The workshop had the goals of knowing what biases are and how gender biases are present in research, explaining their most frequent modalities, as well as offering tools to lessen and hopefully eliminate them in the research work itself and in related academic tasks (evaluation of projects and articles, personnel selection, treatment in teams, etc.). Some of the most common biases mentioned by Capitolina include confirmation bias, selective search for evidence and persistence of ideas.
Capitolina also introduced the following strategies to combat biases:
Introspection: Perform implicit association tests to identify biases.
Mindfulness: Reducing stress and practicing mindfulness.
Perspective taking: Consider experiences from the stereotypical person point of view.
Slowing down: Reflecting before acting to avoid impulsive responses.
Individualization: Assess people for their individual characteristics.
Revise messages: Use language that does not hierarchize genders.
Institutionalize equity: Foster a culture of diversity and inclusion.
Persistence: Continue to work on resisting implicit biases.
Capitolina's talk invites us to reflect deeply on our own biases and the need to continually work to counteract them and become aware. Only through introspection, education and the implementation of equitable structures that fight against the tyranny of the lack of structures, can we aspire to a society that is more just and aware of its biases.
