EGU WEBINARS: Uneven ground: fieldwork accessibility for women

What are the challenges women face when working in the field? What needs to be done to overcome these challenges and make fieldwork safer, more accessible, and more inclusive?

Women encounter a host of challenges when engaging with fieldwork, many of which adversely impact how they navigate science or continue to pursue their career. This webinar featured three speakers who discussed the challenges and the actions needed to improve fieldwork for women: Anouk Beniest, who provided the perspective of a fieldwork educator, Florina Schalamon, who discussed how to challenge traditional narratives of what it means to be a polar explorer, and Nicolas Coltice, a representative of the “Did This Really Happen?” group, a project which highlights daily sexism in academia.

This webinar was moderated by Simon Clark and Öykü Koç.

The audience will hear of the challenges women face when engaging in fieldwork. The negative experiences of women were shared, including perspectives from the results of study to personal experience. The speakers also discussed how to approach overcoming these challenges, from communication strategies and challenging harmful perspectives of fieldwork, to identifying and inspiring needed change. Finally, the speakers shared examples of positive change that have worked in improving fieldwork for women.

This is the first webinar in a multi-part of series which examines fieldwork practices and accessibility.

The webinar lasted for one hour and concluded with an audience Q&A.
Speakers:

Anouk Beniest – Anouk is Assistant Professor in Tectonics at Department of Geology and Geochemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, and former Early Career Scientist Union Representative for the European Geosciences Union.

Florina Schalamon – PhD candidate in Centennial Climate Drivers of Glacier Changes in Greenland at Karls-Frazens Universitat, Austria.

Nicolas Coltice - Nicolas holds a professorship at Université Côte d’Azur in France. Previously, he served as a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Lyon. His research focuses on the history and dynamics of Earth's interior and planetary bodies. He is a recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant, and it was throughout a previous ERC grant that he founded the initiative didthisreallyhappen.net with Alice Adenis, Maëlis Arnould, Marie Bocher, Mélanie Gérault, Claire Mallard and Martina Ulvrova, dedicated to fighting everyday sexism within the geosciences.

Öykü Koç - Öykü is a PhD student at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) whose research focuses on the time-variable gravity field recovery to model mass changes driven by geophysical processes. More specifically, Öykü has been working on ways to mitigate temporal aliasing to capture more of the geophysical signal under the context of future gravity missions. Öykü is also the EGU Early Career Scientist representative for the Geodesy division.

Resources shared during this webinar:
- Network of women working in Polar Science: https://womeninpolarscience.org/
- Polar Impact: https://www.polarimpactnetwork.org/
- Snowflakes, Slack Channel for minoritized genders in the Cryosphere
- APECS (Association of Polar Early Career Scientist): https://www.apecs.is/
- Survey about lived experiences of women on polar fieldwork: https://forms.gle/vwfKmBbSQu7PWGqV9
- Did this really happen?: https://didthisreallyhappen.net/

For more information about future webinars visit: https://www.egu.eu/webinars/

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