Working to make ELSI an inclusive and supportive workplace

ELSI’s Agora is a space to encourage a collaborative and inclusive environment. (Nerissa Escanlar)

During a 2016 Goldschmidt conference in Japan, two ELSI researchers attended a session on gender equality, diversity and inclusivity, and came out determined to set up an ELSI coalition based on what they had learned. 

Also at the conference was Associate Professor Christine Houser, who was quickly convinced to join. An early addition to the ELSI staff, she knew the difficulty of achieving those goals at the institute, just as they are often difficult to achieve in innumerable scientific settings. 

The group returned to Tokyo and began to assemble researchers and other staffers at ELSI who similarly wanted to make sure that the issues were being taken seriously, and that greater gender equality and greater inclusivity were clear goals.

And they wanted to provide a supportive and proactive setting for ELSI employees who might feel they had not been treated fairly.

"Our goal was to be an entity where people at ELSI could approach us if they have some issue that makes them uncomfortable and do not know how to begin to address it,” said Houser, a deep-Earth researcher and now leader of the ELSI task force.

“We wanted to deal with situations before they became a problem, where some action or behavior is seen as concerning or unfair. We provide insights and advice.”

Christine Houser and Julien Foriel, two of the originators of the ELSI gender, diversity and inclusiveness taskforce. (Nerissa Escanlar)

The initial ELSI group was founded by Houser, Coordinator of International Initiatives Hanako Ricciardi, and ELSI researchers Julien Foriel, Yutetsu Kuruma, Yayoi Hongo and Marine Lasbleis. (Foriel and Lasbleis were the two initial proponents at the Goldschmidt conference.)  

The group was initially called the Gender Equality Team (GET) and later became the Global Environment Team. It is not a decision-making group, but rather an advisory one.

It is one of numerous initiatives, groups and policies at ELSI and Tokyo Institute of Technology that seek to make the workplace supportive, diverse, safe and intercultural.

For instance, at ELSI, attendance is required at yearly gatherings aimed at bridging cultural divides. Numerous efforts are underway to bring together ELSI scientists and those from other WPI institutes, and ELSI has a formal code of conduct describing the behavior expected at the institute.

At the request of ELSI Executive Director Mary Voytek, GET put together the code of conduct that is now being circulated and signed by ELSI staff members. It calls on staff to, among other things, “Report experienced or observed misconduct to prevent future misconduct,” to “Be mindful that perception of misconduct varies from person to person” and to “Be considerate of different cultural backgrounds that may have different social codes.” (A full copy of the code is at the bottom of this story.)

Class in Mishima Hall, with Houser, Brasser and Eric Smith. (Nerissa Escanlar)

Houser said that GET was set up to be a “nimble entity,” more taskforce than a committee, that could address issues before they adversely affect the ELSI workplace. Additionally, they set out to collect and promote best practices for reaching and maintaining their goals.

The group pretty quickly concluded that they needed to collect data on gender and other diversity to have an impact. ELSI’s goal is for one-third of the science staff to be women. The recent ELSI extension proposal reports that the institute has sometimes exceeded and sometimes missed that goal.

Houser and GET have also focused on diversity in the institute workshops. They sorted through past gatherings to see how many invited speakers and attendees were women and they were not particularly happy with the results.

“We found that although we feel as if we are making progress, these numbers have hovered around 30%,” Houser said. “This is our minimum goal, so it’s not something we are especially proud of. However, it does give us motivation to find out why and how to improve it.”

And Houser’s recent experience with the speakers at the ELSI February symposium was encouraging.

Initially, she said, “each session organizer selected speakers for their session, and the first round was dominated by western males.” Asked about their selections, the session and event organizers replied that the top people in their fields were often the western men, and so they were just trying to get the best speakers.

Houser was not swayed. “I reminded everyone that the best practice for diversity was to think harder and come up with suggestions for who to invite.” 

The organizers then proposed a diverse shortlist of speakers that would best fit their sessions, and chose who to first invite from the shortlist as opposed to instinctively inviting the most famous persons in their fields.

Almost all of those speakers who were invited agreed to attend and speak, and Houser said the meeting organizers appeared to be quite pleased with the results.

Japan as a nation has significant gender imbalances in the sciences, greater than in many other highly developed countries (which certainly have their own issues as well). And while that gender imbalance exists at ELSI, there is anecdotal evidence that ELSI does comparatively well when it comes to hiring and including women and international researchers – as its government funder, the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), explicitly requires.

Marine Lasbleis with colleagues in the Agora.  (Nerissa Escanlar)

Local cultural norms can also lead to issues unexpected by the international staff, and GET has played a role in trying to mitigate some of them. 

For instance, a few years back ELSI researcher Marine Lasbleis, who studies the Earth’s inner core, had been promoted and was looking for a new and better office for herself. She knew there was space in a desirable two-person office that had a male researcher and asked if she could move into the open space.

But she hit resistance that she could not understand. Nobody directly told her, but there was a general protocol in place that mixed gender two-person offices had better be avoided. Lasbleis eventually shared an office with another female researcher and she was fine with that. But she was upset that her gender would influence which office she could occupy – an issue with implications in terms of making contacts in her field and learning from a nearby colleague. So GET approached the ELSI administration office on her behalf to register their concerns about such a custom. 

The ELSI administration office explained their reasons for the policy – both cultural and pragmatic – and GET members replied that the practice did not seem fair and was out of step with international norms. After several meetings, at least the administrators acknowledged the point. Houser said, it remains a challenge to assign a female and male researcher in the same office.

ELSI has, however, had some success in attracting and keeping women with scientist husbands.
 “It is known that the majority of women in science (~70%) have spouses who are also scientists,” the extension proposal reports. “However, both of them may not be able to find employment opportunities in the same institution or geographical area, and hiring married couples is unusual in traditional Japanese work places. So far ELSI was able to employ 5 married couples, which shows the success of ELSI in establishing work environments capable of attracting and supporting world-class scientists.”

Data on ELSI researchers and support staff.  (ELSI)

A range of other considerations have come before the six-person GET team, which includes Ricciardi and director of science communications Thilina Heenatigala as ex-officio members.

For instance, Matthieu Laneuville, a planetary scientist from France, said that “as far as diversity at ELSI is concerned, on top of gender diversity I've been trying to push for ‘country of affiliation’ diversity.” By this, he said, he does not mean the researcher's nationality, but rather in which country they do their scientific work.

Matthieu Laneuville. (Nerissa Escanlar)

Laneuville said that he thought data gathering is the most important GET initiative at this stage, as well as the ability for staffers to anonymously report issues of concern. But because data gathering often requires some very labor intensive work, he said, he wished there was a pipeline that was automated and in place to easily get overviews of the diversity (or limits to diversity) present on the ELSI campus.

He said that in a positive development, the code of conduct is now commonly implemented for ELSI events. “Making sure that our guests know our values – and that we indeed enforce them – seems like progress compared to some years ago,” he said.

ELSI has a history of working on intercultural issues that arise from having a significant number of scientists from abroad in a Japanese institution.

Earlier, the institute had an in-house facilitator who helped to ease the divides, but in FY2018 ELSI organized a series of seminars conducted by Link Global Solutions for intercultural sharing and education. This consists of a series of meetings where researchers talk about their experiences and work to come to some consensus about the best ways forward.

Houser said that in the most recent Link Global workshops, she and ELSI lab manager and Specially Appointed Assistant Professor Tony Z. Jia were part of a skit where they played golf but were breaking the rules and manners. The goal was to show the group how off-putting it is when people expect to play normal golf but someone comes in with their own rules. 

“We were given ‘golf’ to describe situations where each person is very polite and quiet and takes turns and ‘rugby’ to describe situations where everyone is interrupting and brainstorming. Some people prefer one over the other but they are both useful and have their place, so it is good to be clear about what is expected rather than claiming that one style is right or wrong,” she said.

A continuing challenge is the WPI requirement that English be the primary language of ELSI and the other WPI institutes. The thinking was that English is largely the language of science worldwide, and for Japanese researchers to extend their global presence they will have to publish in English.

This is a hardship for some of the Japanese researchers and, not surprisingly, it is not uniformly spoken in labs and some classrooms. It is, however, the formal language of the yearly symposia, formal ELSI gatherings, and most interactions with the public.

As a recent International Astronomical Union (IAU) symposium in Japan on diversity, gender and inclusiveness highlighted, the issues that ELSI struggles with exist broadly in the scientific communities of Japan and globally.

The gathering was the first of its kind hosted by the IAU, and will lead to formal IAU resolutions on equity, equality, diversity and inclusion policies in astronomy as part of the organization’s 100th year anniversary.

Describing the scope of the problem, featured speaker Yuko Motizuki, Director of the Astro-Glaciology Research Group of RIKEN, and a professor at Saitama University, wrote that “Women represent only about 18% of astronomers globally, and are not immune to inequalities such as gender-based discrimination and a lack of equal opportunities. Bullying and harassment are among the obstacles that women often face in their professional careers.”

To change that kind of harmful atmosphere, the symposium introduction describes the aim of producing “a roadmap to action, highlighting the role diversity and inclusion play in producing better science, contributing competitiveness and innovation, and focusing on specific steps leading to change in the field.”

ELSI’s Science Communications Director Thilina Heenatigala was on the local organizing committee for the meeting; he introduced keynote speaker Motizuki and chaired that session. He said there was a lot discussed at the symposium that was pertinent to ELSI.

The ELSI Code of Conduct:
ELSI aims to be a safe and productive environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. 

To achieve this goal, you, as a member of ELSI, take on the following responsibilities: 

1.    Behaving in a professional manner when acting in a professional capacity: 

1.1.  Treat everyone with dignity and respect, in a fair and equitable manner.  

1.2.  Be mindful that perception of misconduct varies from person to person.  

1.3.  Be considerate of different cultural backgrounds that may have different social codes. 

1.4.  Maintain/help maintain positive group interaction during discussions. 

2.   Responding to experiences, observations or claims: 

2.1.  Know what constitutes misconduct. When in doubt, ask. 

2.2.  Report experienced or observed misconduct to prevent future misconduct. 

2.3.  Acknowledge that not reporting observed misconduct normalizes and perpetuates this behavior. 

These guidelines apply to ELSI members at all times and places when acting in a professional capacity and to anyone hosted by ELSI, on the ELSI campus, or attending an ELSI event. 

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Marc Kaufman has written books on astrobiology and Mars, has been a longtime reporter at The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and writes the NASA-supported online column Many Worlds (www.manyworlds.space)  He has also had the good fortune to visit and work at ELSI numerous times and he wrote "ELSI RISING" -- the story of ELSI's origins and evolution -- in 2017.