Remembering a champion for justice in academia and emulating his approach

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Remembering a champion for justice in academia and emulating his approach

We offer a tribute to Dr. Ben Barres, whose groundbreaking science and refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice served as an inspiration to many. This piece and its companion piece by David Lipton are the final installments in our series about inequality in STEM.

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Strategies addressing a “chilly climate” transform women’s experience, relationships, and achievement in engineering

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Strategies addressing a “chilly climate” transform women’s experience, relationships, and achievement in engineering

In STEM fields women are underrepresented both in numbers of senior faculty and participation metrics [1,2,3]. Women leave STEM fields at all transition points, a phenomenon known as “the leaky pipeline.” … In this post, we highlight a study by Professor Gregory Walton and his colleagues, where they characterize feelings of exclusion, and attempt to mitigate these feelings through the development of simple intervention strategies [6].

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White People in Black Bodies: How to Reduce Implicit Bias for a Long Time

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White People in Black Bodies: How to Reduce Implicit Bias for a Long Time

From courtroom sentencing to graduate school admissions, from voting on the president to choosing who to sit next to on the bus, our biases play a role in the decisions we make and the actions we take. Most interventions designed to combat implicit bias do not hold up over time or simply do not reduce bias. Amidst these unsuccessful interventions, Mel Slater’s group at the University of Barcelona found one method that did reduce implicit bias of white people against black people and whose effects persisted for an unusually long time.

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