In recent years, our group has remained continually dedicated to enhance our collective awareness and improve the overall literacy on inclusive workspaces through the efforts of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accountability (IDEA) task force. Our primary motivation in setting up such a working group is to promote a shared vision of what our research group viewed our workplace as, i.e., a safe space where ideas, suggestions, and conversations are always welcomed.
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During the Women's Day celebration event 2023-03-10, all the women scientists in the group gave short presentations on their research work. They also discussed some systematic challenges faced by a woman scientist in academia. These shared experiences were followed by a longer discussion within the group on how we could make our workplace safe for everyone. These discussions were the primary motivation to start a grassroots movement to support this vision of an equitable and representative working group. And thus, the IDEA taskforce was born through our collective need to improve our research group's commitment to these IDEAls (pun intended!).
Some of our motivation also stems from our observation that many of us are trained to be researchers within academia. Still, inadequate (and sometimes completely absent) training is centrally provided as part of the hiring process for a researcher [Nadine: I don't follow your point in the last 2 sentences]. Additionally, academia's hierarchical structure and power distribution limit democratic decision-making. By discussing these and other pressing issues pervasive within most academic institutions, our motivation is to re-educate ourselves and make small but consistent changes in the right direction.
While the working group continually promotes the IDEA topics within the group, we recognize that we are not experts in these areas. We have consistently requested feedback from the research group that has helped us in more ways than we could have imagined. Our experience has shown that such an ongoing push would not have come to fruition without this support from within the group. We have continuously improved, adapted, and learned how to bring about the best possible change with the smallest actions/events.