Much thank you so much the better it was very kind of you to invite me and I'm going to be talking today about a recent report that I'm a co-author of for the American Physical Society that is the professional society for physicists about the status of people in physics now I should confess that this is not the colloquium that I normally give and the colloquium that I normally give kind of goes something like this I would tell you a little bit about my work on connecting shape in order you know the reason that the better and I became friends was we both have this mutual interest in such systems and many of the same mathematical techniques are fascinating to us and it's delightful to see so better here and so successful and catalyzing her research group I would tell you about packings on curved surfaces and how changing the distribution of particles like it's all sorts of different phases I talk about change with liquid crystals I've always been very really admired a lot of the liquid crystal work that's gone on here at Georgia Tech with Alberto Fernandez needs and. People like that really stunning stuff connects to them talk about topology geometry and kinetics which I think if you've been to many soft matters seminars you'll have heard those words talk about how the dynamics of the process convince the assembly and I. Try to connect my work with jamming which is a fundamental transition to rigidity in in condensed matter physics so these are all things that I would normally be talking about and I hope this kind of single slide will give you an idea of who I am as a scientist and what sort of questions I'm interested in. I think that's really important because you know like my identity in so far as being a physicist is absolutely focused around these sorts of scientific questions so if I tell it showing you this I hope you convinced you I'm a scientist and. Maybe and I guess you can the other thing I should tell you is that I'm actually going to talk about all of this stuff tomorrow at four pm I believe so if you're interested in these things please feel free to comment ask me them but I was also co-author along with a whole bunch of stuff that I've done on education research I was co-author of this report I wasn't the only person there were a whole bunch of other physicists spanning all sorts of different institution types Johns Hopkins College of William and Mary not that far from here University in Japan the Osaka prefecture University University of New Hampshire that's a big public institution in New Hampshire Michigan State UN C. and of course some of the people from the A.P.S. themselves so a very wide variety of physicists worked on this report and mostly because I kind of helped out with the photography at the last minute we like a lot of top people are actually on the cover including me kind of in a pretty. Sort of I think illustrates things very amusingly. OK let me just briefly define a couple of terms I want you to feel free to stop me to ask questions if anything that I talk about. Seems like you'd like to know more so as we go along but I think it's just important to lay these two well so firstly L G B T plus is generally what I use but you'll see many other sort of permutations and many other acronyms G L B T L G B T Q L G B T Q Q A and I guess all of these all of these acronyms in some sense they're on browser terms the try to include many different kinds of sexual and gender minorities including like female female male male attraction attraction no more than one gender and people for whom their gender identity or their gender expression may not match their assigned sex so these are some of the some of the possibilities but I think it's important that you know one of the question I always get asked is Why are all that why all the acronyms and why do the acronyms keep getting bigger I think it's worth saying that all of these are you know all of these are trying to capture what are ultimately very complex human processes into words and that's not a very effective thing to do sometimes the acronyms and their evolution actually kind of represents in some sense our as our collective understanding of these things evolves the acronym is kind of an attempt to add in kind of new understanding as well so you know and again all of these things are like when you look at them they're much less binary and much more complex than I'm putting here but at least this can kind of help people who are unfamiliar and the second word in the report that is worth talking about is the climate so what does a climate mean I'm going to define it as the collection of the lived experiences that we have in a professional environment and you know like a Climate is the sum of many people our experiences might differ that might include things like who we. Talk to what they're AFAIK to is like how we feel about you know the things going on in our professional environment that's what I mean by climate so that's kind of what the report purports to try to describe so I guess it's worth me like backing up a sack and say Well actually how did I how did I even like you know get started on this and kind of why do I think it's important because actually you know what are the things I was reflecting on this morning I was reflecting on the time that I met Sabbat or at a Gordon conference on liquid crystals in two thousand and seven and. You know I have to tell you that at the time had you asked me what did my orientation have to do with my scientific identity or my scientific work I think I would have told you that it really had nothing to do with that at all I would have said at the time you know I think those are entirely separate for me I don't want my scientific work to be judged on my identity I still think that's true but you know I think I would have said something like You know I don't see how this relates and I'm raising that because I think some of you may have the same thought as well and I think I'd like to show you how I have changed my thinking kind of why and what evidence has caused me to change my thinking as well so I guess I want to separate out two kinds of things I want to separate out scientific products that is knowledge that is papers that is I guess grants all of these sorts of things that we produce as scientists and I claim and I still claim that I don't want any of that have to do with my identity shouldn't it probably does because of course there's a lot of processes by which things are judged and the like but ideally our scientific products should have nothing to do with who we are the scientists but I think. Do you realize that scientific products are not actually the only part of science that in fact there is a process and that process is many people working together collectively. Sometimes across great distances there are mentoring and mentee interactions there are all sorts of human pieces to the way that we produce science I think then it becomes a little clearer how these sorts of identity and cultural issues can actually affect and so that sort of I think the first sort of distinction. And then like you know. When I was like you know when I was sort of I started teaching for the first time when I was a visiting assistant professor and I started I taught for a couple of years that case when I was doing that and then like you know I hadn't said a word to anyone either in the department or actually you know in my class I certainly hadn't said a thing in my class I didn't think it was relevant at all to say anything about my identity and I thought that's the way it's going to be and then at the end of the semester was the quantum to class and I don't know about all of the faculty here but if you've ever taught quantum mechanics is just a sheer joy to teach right it's a beautiful subject we had a great time Imagine my surprise that at the end of the semester I got this email this was the email I got it said Professor Atherton I want to thank you for an enjoyable quantum to class this semester that's a good start I really look up to the kind of want to. I'm not making this up both in my personal life your support of gay rights help me find the strength to start living in silence thank you for being the professor was a pleasure to talk to those professors are coming by Thank you for the incredible semester right now I am fairly certain that all of you who have been teaching long enough have had this kind of positive feedback on your. Teaching I sincerely hope so if you it's it's really I think you'll agree this is a really life changing email actually it was life changing to me mostly because I was like well how did the how the hell did he know. I didn't realize I was out I hadn't raised it it didn't seem relevant but nonetheless this student had told me the me being at least I guess visibly visibly gay like actually been a significant source of strength to him so that's great right so my second thought and I think this is the key one is that every student deserves to have the sort of experience every student deserves to have a good experience in my classes and I think it was this email me off thinking well how can I do the best job that I can as a teacher but also how can I try to kind of help you know like sort of keep this conversation going and even do a better and more intentional job. OK So that was what what did that for me and some of that what I started doing is when I was at conferences I would try to meet other queer physicists and various kinds of people and I met a whole bunch of other people who had had fairly similar experiences to me so here are a bunch of them Michael fork Johns Hopkins. Long as you are nature is a bunch of a bunch of people who have. You know some of whom are straight their allies but nonetheless a whole bunch of people who for various reasons became concerned about these issues. And they were similarly motivated but as we all know from science and we know from education research that like just an anecdotal data point like the email that I got really is not very useful we need actually kind of a systematic understanding of the issues in order to actually do anything meaningful or. About it and so. The kind of the pre the sort of started off we thought it would be helpful to kind of make a grassroots organization so a bunch of us got together that was very much catalyzed by Al's long. To just figure out you know provide a bit of a networking space for for businesses and we you know that's still going it still exists. And we started. Like one of the first things we did is we sort of collaboratively wrote guide for best practices trying to share some of the things we thought people other physicists ought to know about you can still download that today and we've just updated it I'll talk about the second edition in a bit so we got a bunch of people together and then we you know like we organized a meeting at the. A.P.I. We had meetings at the A.P.S. like a bunch of meet ups we work together to host a special session in March meeting we had the first ever invited session we talk to the A.P.'s and we sort of got them to write the report and we've started issuing awards for educators who are doing excellent work in this field and now we've got a new best practices guide so it's actually been going now for about a decade and you know I think we're making some progress so you can read more a bit about the early work I guess I don't want to. Sort of grow on it too much but you know we got together speakers on this issue and we surveyed the participants and the participants actually told us that they were really two crucial things that we needed the first is we needed large scale data collection and the second thing was we needed this best practices guide so we went and did the best practices guide the data collection. Took a little longer in fact it wasn't until the executive office of the chief executive officer of the A.P.'s Kate Kirby who many of you may have met because she runs the A.P.S.. Or certainly did at the time. She that was really her vision that this was a necessary expert necessary exercise and so she convened this committee gave a substantial funding to me and kind of do the research necessary and asking us to advise the A.P.'s on the current status provide recommendations and engage in laying the foundation for a more inclusive physics community I guess that's one of the reasons I'm here today to address this latter part OK So we gathered data in the following ways we did focus groups several A.P.'s meetings and we did a climate survey of three hundred twenty four individuals we used a method called snowball sampling so what this means is like I didn't make this I make a survey I send it to a bunch of people that I know like maybe I'll send it to like you know your people in the first row you'll send it to your friends and this way we kind of hope to get some sort of representation of the community of course it is not a very we can't really make any comparisons we can't do population comparison because it's not going to give us necessarily a statistically relevant sample but nonetheless since the goal of this case the. Really just to kind of understand what the issues are I think that's OK for the first step snowball sampling and then we did like follow up interviews with a few participants as well we also did we also use the A.P.'s membership survey many of you any of you who are A.P.'s members receive that that got about two and a half thousand responses we got like some information two point five percent identified as all G B T and that was you know so again this is not really necessarily telling us how many businesses there are but it's kind of at least a relevant data point what was really interesting is that if you broke this down by age actually quite interestingly a much higher fraction of the eighteen to twenty five. Age range seem to identify as that way I was very big error bars on that number but nonetheless it's sort of quite an interesting observation so this is the this is the sources of data that we've had so let me tell you what we found OK So firstly. You know. Physicists are facing very Why the differences in like the amount of support they feel they're getting from legislation and policies so I want to mention these are these are campus or workplace policies so we're not talking about the sort of wider society and. You know so some people indeed are seeing a highly supportive environment. There's another fraction are kind of uneven to lacking. One of the things that we've done and we will do this on some other questions as we look specifically at Trans individuals because we had reason to suspect that experience may look very different and so we broke out the. And you can see that there's a bit of a shift it seems that they're sort of seeing their perception a slightly more negative than the rest of the population so that's kind of sort of somber what. You see people protesting. I guess what I want to say is that because this was in two thousand and fifteen and this is continually kind of an evolving like story I think it will be really interesting to see how this number tracks with time when we read through the survey you know we sort of soar in two thousand and sixteen sort of various stories that suggested that it might be a more negative perception and you know we aim to gather the status so we can again so we can make a comparison. So the second one and I think this is sort of really speaking to what climate is is that a lot of is that the person is the experience is actually very variable right like so fifteen percent of men. Found the felt that they were uncomfortable I mean as a just want to say fifteen percent seems like quite a small number right but that's not the less a lot of people who feel uncomfortable in their workplace I think most of us would agree that as professionals Nobody should feel uncomfortable in the workplace right that should be zero should be the number but nonetheless the fifteen percent. And that is what is very interesting is that there is a very significant gendered effect to this feeling of comfort so twenty five percent of. Women felt uncomfortable and for gender nonconforming people which includes trans people but it's like the slightly slightly broader group that's actually thirty percent so we're saying like a gender effect which I think it's quite interesting. We're also seeing that of people who've observed harassment will sort of return to this issue. Again you are seeing thirty one percent of the team and have seen have observed harassment this is increasing the forty four and sixty seven for women and gender not conforming so there's a I think these are very troubling statistics actually because I think you know these are very high numbers they suggest that the amount of harassment that's going on actually might be quite high. Of course zero is the acceptable level. A lot of physicists are closeted there is a sort of a fairly reasonable fraction who feel like they need to stay closeted. And. One of the things that I think was very interesting is the sort of correlation between outness and comfort and so if you were outs you were more likely to feel comfortable the people who were not the people who were not if you were not out you were more likely to feel uncomfortable now I have to say because there's just a correlation we don't really know which way the causal arrow is pointing but nonetheless like it seems like a relevant observation that these two correlates some of that I mean like the some of the anecdotes are kind of quite helpful sort of the. Spoken information and the written information. Like we're sort of showed that these experiences can look quite different Someone said that they were in the closet about their identity and because they passed they were actually quite comfortable so that was sort of interesting. Another said that they were very afraid to mention the other people they felt that they were surrounded by very traditional people a very common sort of refrain and this was certainly true of myself when I was a grad student said I don't know of any other out physics grad students I know that a lot of them are very conservative I feel like they respect me right now. I don't know that they would respect me if I came out to them so you know this is the sort of thing that people who are not out to kind of wrestling with the thinking about their decision to be. Isolation was a very common theme so people were saying things like you know I don't feel comfortable outing myself there are no other L G B T plus individuals. And this was quite interesting. Like it's a hard time networking because mostly male colleagues find it uncomfortable to invite a gay couple for things. Like. I guess I have a fun anecdote here like it my only institution like Quite often I get like my Some of my colleagues get asked like how are your wife and kids by administrators and they never asked me that it was actually became so common that some of my straight colleagues actually kind of pointed it hope so and said that they found it funny that I would always be there would always be kind of break silence when when when similar things were going so fine. And then coming back to like in the in the in the sort of the public thing we say we use this term exclusionary behavior which is kind of short of harassment it's kind of like it's kind of like a sort of umbrella term that sociologists use to kind of describe sort of like you know hostile behavior but short of short of harassment and again we're seeing we're seeing a strong gendered effect whereby women and gender nonconforming individuals are increasingly more likely to see either observe or experience the cynic and trans individuals are more likely to in fact the most likely. Observer Experion. Exclusionary behavior. Another thing that I think and we're sort of coming to the end of the findings is that. You know we often think of diversity and certainly the way it's talked about in universities it's to do with things like. Race and of course BT issues tends to be seen as a compartmentalized version people tend to talk about these issues separately we notice that actually for people who have more than one of these identities actually it can be really hard to know where the discrimination is coming from like so this one was really there were some really interesting quote I guess I'll come to it here. I don't know if it was based on my gender or my orientation so I think that's really interesting that the like additional marginalized identities can really create a. Very different experience. Yup so maybe go back to that sexual harassment sexist jokes Sextus assumptions tokenization in my orientation and my impression that faculty are silent bystanders hearing comments made by faculty I know there are negative attitudes and stereotypes towards BT people and people of color so I think we can all agree that these are not things that should be happening in our workplace. OK And then finally just to kind of underscore some of the things that I sort of touched upon earlier we found this very strong effect the trans transgender and gender nonconforming physicists are often encounter in the most hostile environments. You know some of the ways that this plays out is like not having their pronoun respected by colleagues and these these affect them on an emotional level and affect their ability to work I thought that was a really really kind of interesting thing if you're putting up with that. And that's really going to impact your scientific productivity. One unfortunately so they were harassed by a professor while going into the bathroom the first week they were on campus which is obviously unacceptable. And as a result of these hostile climate the hostile climate some people are facing not all people but some you know about thirty six percent considered leaving physics you know which is which seems likely I don't think we actually know what the comparison is amongst non algae people so it does require a bit of you don't have to be a little careful interpret in this but it seems like a fairly high fraction to me. So you know I apologize for this nonsense on the back blackboard behind me it just realize that probably is very accurate but never mind. OK. And indeed like Iran this was the case for me as well trying to identify people to help mitigate these feelings of isolation is very tough. So for example finding professors who are OK working with queer people it was pretty hard for them to find and they found them because they had a little rainbow sticker on its window so I'd like to see some of these and that was kind of a cue for me to be a little more comfortable around them so it seems that where people show even kind of a fairly small signature that people at least open to working with. People that actually it can really lead to quite a big benefit and terms of their well being so I think that's kind of a nice thing to know that maybe we don't have to do that much to shift some of these feelings this was a program that I'll talk about a little bit and kind of put in context for you. Now I realize that that last little bit seem very very negative and so. I think one of the good things that we found is that very many people feel felt that the climate was improving and so I think that's latch on to that and think about what can we do because you know I personally feel and I think physicists generally feel that we would want anybody who feels they want to study physics and has the aptitude to do so we would want our discipline to be welcoming we want to welcome them and in fact you know I think we are all united by the realisation that physics is a very challenging subject and if we're not drawing upon the full poll or put the full pool of talent in society if people are like I don't see a place for me we may be missing out on wonderful talent than can help advance the scientific endeavor as well so I think this is something that should concern all of us OK So one thing was to worst. Abolition welcoming a virus that A.P.S. meanings and now we've done that we have a code of conduct for A.P.'s. We have now got a change we're sort of this is something that I think a lot of public publishing houses are kind of working towards that like for transgender people like if they change their name it can immediately out them as transgender on their C.V. and that that means that they may have to miss like publications off their C.V. which could really reduce their job prospects there are many other good reasons to change your name as well and so actually in this era of like digital digital manuscripts I mean I don't read paper copies myself very often it seems like it should be pretty easy to retroactively change your name for perfectly good reasons you know and this is something that most publishing houses realize that they are going to try to address it is quite complicated because it also links to databases and we know that data but it's the publications are not always that accurate so this is quite a challenging issue but it's one that I think the community is working on. Developing advocacy effect so the A.P.'s now has a statement on inclusion we should update A.P.'s policy is A.P.I. should advocate in the international community for L G B T physicists you know and indeed like where where possible like the A.P.I. should or should lobby federal funding agencies to include L.G. BT demographics in STEM education where where where possible and this was actually a topic that cake Kirby really pushed for us to include she felt this was something that they could actually do. We can publicize disseminate use the best practices guide all talk about that in a moment develop training for physicists helps people in. Recruit allies and the Opera should help physics departments like actually change their climate because when they do they can do a site visit and help people look at their climate that L G B T issues kind of need to be part of that I think this is actually there's a broader point to make here and that is that you know having seen this kind of very important piece of Lake multiple overlapping identities whenever we make diversity programs whenever we try to do a diversity intervention we should really take care to think about Do other people with overlapping identities like how will that play out because it seems if we don't address the needs of all identities that some person carries our program probably won't work for them you know so for example if we do a program intended to help representation of women in physics if that neglects that neglects whether the race or possibly their orientation and those sorts of climate things are not addressed in intervention that intervention is unlikely to work for all of the people so it's kind of a really crucial thing that diversity efforts kind of pay attention to the sort of evidence OK. We should build L.G.B. to see inclusive mentoring mechanisms to kind of address the lack of mentors and invisibility so I could include best practices for mentoring disseminating those to program leaders and we should create a professional network of mentors and mentees I have to say we haven't the A.P.'s has not done this yet but it's like something that I think is very worthwhile doing and the A.P.I. should continue to sponsor networking events so next time you go to March or April meeting you know feel free to drop by and say hi to the community there are those have been every year for the past eight years at. March both meetings so they're well worth dropping by to say hi. Everyone has told us they've been very very useful over the years. I've been finally like kind of again thinking about the fact that different under-represented groups or different marginalized groups you know have different needs but nonetheless there are issues that affect them all like there was this idea the there should be a forum on diversity inclusion that would kind of in some sense help join together the efforts of the various the various structures within A.P.S. So someone came up with this animation I'm not sure how well it worked but nonetheless we have all of these different groups and all of them would continue to exist as normal but there would be an umbrella to kind of help facilitate interactions OK. I get it I want to focus on that really great finding from the survey. Sorry about this animation my goodness I want to focus on the good thing ninety percent of people think that the climate is improving and I think we can we can continue the improvement because since the report which was released a couple of years ago. We now have gender neutral bathrooms that A.P.S. meetings we now have this code of conduct and the forum and diversity is now at its organizational stages so it looks like that's going to be happening very soon. So the A.P.'s. The A.P.S. board accepted our reports and is working on implementing it. And I think the A.P.S. and sort of started this trajectory the question is what will the community do I guess so I want to kind of take a step back again and I want to say well OK physics has actually dealt with. Changes in the face of evidence before and on multiple occasions so this is a very famous paper there are plenty of other papers that make a similar point but I just picked this one because it was a fairly early review everyone recognized these graphs. Good Excellent OK Well let me tell you the so how many of you have heard of physics education research loads of The Right well this is kind of why it's affective or how we know it's effect right so this is a whole bunch of this is a matter analysis of courses the high schools colleges and universities that were taught either with interactive engagement or they were taught in a traditional lecture based manner and they're all plotted on the same graph I have to tell you this graph is not the easiest to read but it's kind of helpful this is the pretest score they did like there's a test that you take before and after the whole point is you look at the difference between the two that gives you the gain and of course you hope that you have gained something from the course you can see from this graph that the traditional lecture course gave fairly modest increases and the interactive engagement gave much higher increases so this is kind of the thing mapped out to a slightly easier to read graph here are the interactive engagement courses here are the lecture based courses it's very clear that interactive engagement which is quite a wide umbrella term you know click that you may have seen click is prepare instruction many of the faculty here probably use these techniques Georgia Tech has a very admirable reputation in physics education research itself and so you know some of these were developed to Georgia Tech but the point is is this graph is the reason why many physics faculty have chosen to not let and instead use interactive techniques and we've done so in the face of very supportive evidence again this is an old paper that's much more recent There's much better didn't so they lable But nonetheless I think it's kind of nice to kind of show the basic skills. Unity has actually responded to these sorts of things before and I think the response to P.R. is a very helpful kind of model for what might be needed here so what can we do OK Well as I was wandering around talking science to people all day which was so much fun I sort of quite a few of these. This is a program run by your center there are actually plenty of dates coming up where you could go take this which is supposed to kind of help people who are unfamiliar with issues kind of learn a little bit of the vocabulary and kind of think about how they might try to make their office kind of them like an inclusive place but it's basically like you know the way I had a we had a similar program at Tufts and a very good friend of mine who's a math professor. Like took this course I kind of made him. And I said to him as we were driving up to Vermont to go skiing they gather I was like well what did you get out of that and he said that he said he said you know he said I think what I got out was very simple I'm not going to know everything but I'm going to try not to judge everyone who comes in my room office and I'm going to try and be open to learning new things about that I know it's a pretty good description of what the sort of thing means that doesn't mean that you're an expert in L G B T issues I have to tell you that I myself I'm not but I'm continuing to learn nobody is it seems like a really admirable thing to do if you want your students to know that you're going to create you know an underage mental space this seems like a really cool program many universities have a similar one one of the things I really like about the Georgia Tech one actually is that it has a really explicit statement saying what it actually means because quite often safes own program they're often called safe so that other universities often they just say save and it's not clear what it's supposed to be so this one actually has completed safe. It's training and it's committed to practicing ality ship to the L G B T Q I community Georgia Tech so that's kind of a really explicit statement and for those of you the already put out there is stickers and that thank you so much I think that was really great to see as I walked around the Smalling. The second thing is there is a wonderful national organization called stem which is out in science technology technology engineering and mathematics this is a organization for undergraduates and graduate students to kind of network and gain community gain access to mentors and all of these other things I was talking about that were kind of seem to be lacking for L G B T People this is like a really helpful organization and I know that your university has a chapter it seems a very active chapter so it seems like a good thing to do if you. Encounter an elegy BT student who is looking for resources this might be another great resource to point them in the direction of. We have just written a new best practices guide we updated a lot of the advice kind of based on the thing I didn't make the art but the art of the cover is really beautiful and kind of mixes all sorts of stuff. In the background I guess. But it has a lot of advice and I'm not going to try and summarize that but I'll give you a couple of brief sort of snapshots so you can get advice on creating a welcoming Department classroom practice mentoring advising hiring and promotions travel and advising and creating a welcoming institution I'm happy to field questions on any of these and in the questions section of course. To kind of highlight or give a sense of some of the advice I'll actually talk about the chapter that I helped co-write and that is the classroom practice so let me just mention a few things. It's for those of you who will be teaching So one thing that you can immediately do is just include some welcoming language in your syllabus kind of it's the sort of recommended language in our guide but just it's a simple sort of syllabus statement like you encourage people to welcome people of all different sort of backgrounds many colleges encourage you to put this sort of information in another thing and this is sort of this really depends how your interactive learning system be it black four door or whatever is set up sometimes these can actually get allow students to put in there how they wish to be identified so their name and pro Dowd's that's actually really helpful information for many different groups there are many students that have names in the official record that are not actually the names they use for all sorts of reasons and I always sort of know it was used to get very tripped up on it because like I would try to learn a few people's names before the class and then I would discover that person is not cold they're called something different so kind of actually that's really helpful but if you don't if you're if your version of blackboard or whatever you use doesn't support that a pretty coarse they can be a really good way to do it I often stand around. To ask people what their background is for the class and get a sense of what the classes looks like before it's a helpful thing using inclusive examples and analogies so for instance there was a beautiful sequence of papers a few years ago kind of showing how many like you know in a very well known test called the force concept inventory there were an awful lot of men in the questions and in fact like all too many you know lots of the questions had like two guys and maybe they thought it might be. Nice if we didn't have all guys in the examples you know like maybe we could have a mixture of people seem like a good idea. The GO thing and this is actually really hard to do and I'll tell you a bit of a moment it's like if you see something problematic happening in your classroom try to do something about it this happened to me that had a student in my class who. You know Blake I saw another student calling them with the wrong pronoun and I have to tell you that the first time it happened I didn't do anything because I did I kind of processed it slowly you know I was like well that just happened and then afterwards I was like OK what do I do so I emailed the student and I said Look I'm really sorry I notice this happening and I apologize and I'll make sure that it's done differently next time and in fact I did that but actually the thing that was interesting is even though my intervention was very imperfect nonetheless it had a happy result because the student reach back to me and say you know like I was really upset at the time but thank you for kind of knowledge ing that that was the problem and kind of trying to do something about it so one of the things I want to say is that like our ability to intervene in problematic scenarios is often very imperfect because they happen rarely but trying to do something is better than trying to do nothing so it's quite a useful thing and some campuses provide training on how to do that like I had a student a few years ago say something that was really sexist in my class and kind of it was quite helpful to know how to kind of have a productive conversation after that. You know it's very challenging because fortunately these things don't happen too often but they can be very hurtful to other students in the classroom. Another thing I do and I think is a good practice is when you know it's always a good idea to give a mid-semester. Survey figure out how your class is doing you can always include a climate question on that survey something like How comfortable is this classroom we have model language in the report you can just cut and paste you don't have to make up your own question I finally as I said there's loads of other things you can do in the best practices guide but I hope that this kind of gives you a little bit of a flavor of the sorts of advice that we now have in there OK. So as I said you know from my own experience like you know I am an ally of some identities because I haven't lived the experience of you know quite a whole of a whole variety of identities and you know what I try to be to those people as an ally but nonetheless it's a process not a destination we have to keep trying to do a better job and hopefully that will collectively improve the community and our sort of sense of this OK so this is where I think I want to finish I want to thank all of my co-authors of the report I certainly want to thank all of you guys for inviting me or all of you all for inviting me and I'm very happy to field questions and sort of think about these things as well so thank you for your attention I really appreciate it. Thank you. OK So there's the next survey is currently at the planning stages I suspect that it will be done with and it will be done within the next couple of years we would like to do a comparison. I think there I would also draw your attention and I didn't cite it that there's actually quite a lot of fairly recent sociological research on the scientific community as well so we're getting more data from other disciplines how we're getting better kind we're getting like interview date I should say the community not Not me specifically but I think this is sort of the current plan is to try to do it again in the next couple of years. There was a cost of the back and then and then so yeah. This is a very good question so the question is like Has there been research on the interaction of national your national origin and how that might impact with your. Various other kinds of identity so it probably doesn't surprise you I am also from a different country and in fact like I don't want to the reason I say that is I actually like one of the things that is really that will. Ought not to be shocking but is absolutely true is that although Britain and the United States have a common language who are extremely different societies like I in fact like the very sort of the values. Like you know how the society is structured how like you know various kinds of thing a really really different between the two so some look very similar you know and then like you know if Britain in the US which have quite a close relationship are really different than how different we are all sorts of other things so I think this is a fascinating question we don't have dates around that but my my my having sort of heard a lot of people from other countries are immediately. Sort of there in the kind of descriptions of their stories I think that tends to problematize assumptions and so like when you come if you're a. Person from another culture. Because you're currently figuring out how the culture works it's even harder to figure out who's like a good person to talk to or not or who might be supportive or not it sort of tends to make. This seems to be what I've heard from a bunch of people is that it tends to sort of make things even more complicated so I think it's a good research topic we don't we don't have any data on it unfortunately but you're right. You know. Well I think there is a lot of methodological deficiencies in our first iteration actually and you're certainly right that that kind of like that that snowball approach is somewhat limited The second thing is that I don't know if you've noticed this but all of the authors of the report other thing Arlene are why and this is a huge limitation I think we're really understand pulling those experiences that now we know are probably very important to look at so so so I think I think this is something that we're collectively working on I don't think we have a simple answer but part of the story is we've been building a lot of relationships with other affinity groups and so have a much broader range of starting points and we're also thinking much more intentionally about our interviews like we kind of pick people at the intersections of various identities because we thought it was interesting now we actually can really try to probe around that so I think that I think that your question is an excellent one because it's a genuinely very hard problem this is by far not the end of the story it's just the first step so I agree with you and of course also gestures are welcomed because this is coming out of the community you know one of the wonderful things is that I think people with better ideas and expertise come in and start helping out with the research effort we may actually be able to solve some of those challenges Sorry if that's not a great answer yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yup yup. Right. Well it's certainly true but I certainly agree with you so the point is that it's a good idea to look at subfields and I would completely support that I think that's something we should definitely try to do but then on the other hand something that I found something that I think is quite interesting is that a lot of our preconceptions about safe good good environments and not good environments are actually kind of based on on much larger length scales that I think actually matter right and I think there's one thing I can try So for example you would assume the Boston is a great place to be an out. Person sure in some places but absolutely you know some real horrors I've heard some real horror stories from. The grad students in Boston for example and so I think the key thing is climate is very much a micro level phenomena and it really is firstly like what your lab like then what your department like and what your institution like and then what's the sort of broader context you know and so I think that subfield could be a really crucial thing and particularly for you know but nonetheless I think the main story is right now is that we have to start by creating our individual you know for for professors we actually really have to start by creating supportive research groups and and supportive departments and then our field is there hopefully we can carry some of those along but again agreed it's worth collecting the data. Any other questions. Yeah cheers. Yeah. So this is yeah this is any A.P.'s concert event so like it would be it would include like a division meeting or if there's like I presume that like like a southeast A.P.S. group or something like that so anything any A.P.'s sponsored event any event that has the A.P.'s logo on it really is covered by this code of conduct Yes You know I don't actually wish I could look to that I don't think that the measures are quite so. So so I think there is a sort of there's a process so I think it would only be for for a very clear and says so I can would have to look at that I don't actually remember the exact wording but it was quite important that we got that I'm happy to do you and then you go for. I think it's a great question the question is could we compare with data from the A.P.S. groups and I think I think again we are trying to be very conservative in our interpretation. I think that it's it's fair to say that it's not clear that people are underrepresented in physics but they still may be and this is definitely it's very odd because again we're talking about in some sense about statistics of small numbers it's not so clear that we have the resolving power in order to kind of answer questions like that but again one of the other things I would say is rather than using the language of under-representation we tend to prefer the word marginalized because it's very clear that these you know some of these activities that I think we all agree are not don't belong in a professional environment or some of these behaviors that don't belong in a professional environment those are those are very clear those are clearly extant and that's what we should try to change that makes sense yes. We don't have good data on that but the current sort of you know these these figures are not commensurate with the reporting levels that we generally see in higher education so I think the analysis suggests that these things are being quite dramatically under reported So again like I think every institution legally has to have reporting mechanisms but it's very clear I think that they're not always very effective. And there are all kinds of reasons for that is not a subject that I'm an expert on but it certainly is recent is certainly a an object that should be looked at much further much more closely yup yup yeah get the up Correct yeah the air. Right. So I think so my understanding is that asking people how they want to be identified as that is how do you want to be introduced you know I mean that's what my understanding is that's a totally legitimate question to ask people I don't think that would words to my knowledge I don't know if anyone has a contrary opinion I think that would what one of the one of the best ways to kind of handle this is this was how like you know when I was applied I went through the faculty job search fairly obviously and and it became very clear to be which were good institutions to work out of which were not good institutions to work at actually I refused an offer because they weren't they weren't very old G.B.T. friendly. So you know like it definitely you know I guess they lost I hope they feel they lost but. You know. One thing that was very helpful to me is that some institutions actually kind of provided the same resources to everyone and like and here's a bunch of resources that you might be interested in so I'll allow the candidate to kind of reach out and get the info for themselves so in my case like I contacted the L G B T center for all of the schools that I was interviewed that I said Tell me about the climate institution X. and I got some very frank and revealing answers from some institutions so I think that kind of thing is a good way to kind of do that but to be perfectly honest I tell you what the freakiest experience I had as an interviewee that is that a university that I won't name and one of the things that amazed me is like like you know like a lot of faculty have pictures of their spouses and kids in their office that's a good thing it shows that the faculty are human right that's a good thing right like you know like it's a better institution if the faculty have their spouses and or. Maybe kids if they have kids or the like and or maybe if the you know the straight ones don't have kids that's equally great you know like it's good to see anything that gives you evidence that the faculty are human beings it was one institution I interviewed at where there was no evidence whatsoever that the faculty had any life whatsoever and I was like This is just weird these people are robots and I didn't I didn't I declined their offer so because I was like just to we were so so so I think that kind of I think small you know people notice small things so like just the fact as I was going round today like the fact that a few people had these safe space stickers to me that kind of was like actually the climate can be you know it's hard to know but that was like a good sign kind of being given if you give all candidates like the same information that seems like a reasonable thing to do if you ask you know how would you like to be introduced that seems like again a reasonable thing to do it's most about signalling you're like intent on very small things kind of matter does it does that answer your question Good thank you for the question I see two people here can I have you first and then you. Well OK. You're actually. Right. Yeah. Indeed. Right. There. Right. Now. I think Paul thank you for sharing that that's absolutely wonderful and I think often this sort of illustrates that none of us have the all the answers so let me try to just summarize what you said if I got it wrong forgive me and maybe we can discuss that but basically the point is just asking people pronouns kind of forces them to actually out themselves or make a decision to out themselves so maybe saying what pronouns to use is a bad practice but choosing to say something like I use he you know he serious pronouns could be like a good way of saying I'm open to this conversation one thing that a lot of people do is put that on their e-mail in their e-mail footer and that's kind of a helpful kind of signal to people for the person sort of actually understood like what like I think you know generically it sort of becomes clear who might the supportive people be it does that sort of summarize your contribution it was a very good contribution thank you for sharing that one more I guess we're running out of time OK great thank you for that OK I think we're probably out of time. We thank you so much about it thank you.