Drawing everyday sexism in academia: observations and analysis of a community-based initiative

摘要

Sexist behaviour in the workplace contributes to create ahostile environment, hindering the chance of women and gender non-conformingindividuals to pursue an academic career, but also reinforcing genderstereotypes that are harmful to their progress and recognition. The Did this really happen?! projectaims at publishing real-life, everyday sexism in the form of comic strips.Its major goal is to raise awareness about unconscious biases that transpirein everyday interactions in academia and increase the visibility of sexistsituations that arise within the scientific community, especially to thosewho might not notice it. Through the website didthisreallyhappen.net, wecollect testimonies about everyday sexism occurring in the professionalacademic environment (universities, research institutes, scientificconferences…). We translate these stories into comics and publish themanonymously without any judgement or comments on the website. By now, wehave collected over 100 testimonies. From this collection, we identified sixrecurrent patterns: (1)?behaviours that aim at maintaining women instereotypical feminine roles, (2)?behaviours that aim at maintaining men instereotypical masculine roles, (3)?the questioning of the scientific skillsof female researchers, (4)?situations where women have the position of anoutsider, especially in informal networking contexts, (5)?the objectificationof women, and (6)?the expression of neosexist views. We first present adetailed analysis of these categories, then we report on the different wayswe interact and engage with the Earth science community, the scientificcommunity at large and the public in this project.