Building a Pathway for Diversity in Plant Sciences in Argentina: Highlighting the Work of Women Scientists through Virtual Activities ^†

Abstract

Encouraging the participation of a diverse workforce in academia increases plurality as it broadens the range of skills, ways of thinking, and experiences. Institutions and professional societies have been putting efforts on building plans that help make workplaces, conferences, education, and extension programs more relatable to a highly diverse population. Argentina has an overall gender-balanced workforce in the sciences (~53% women/total), with an even higher representation in disciplines related to plant sciences. However, media outlets and national conferences related to genetics, botany, plant physiology, ecology, and molecular biology, fail to reflect those numbers as the proportion of women invited for interviews, plenary lectures, and symposia falls below ~30%. As a way to increase the visibility of the wealth of plant science topics and experimental approaches in which Argentinian women work, and to facilitate connections among them across the country and abroad, we created the Argentinian Women in Plant Science network. This group has grown to over 200 members, representing a wide range of career stages and research topics. Since April, and taking advantage of the confinement situation, our weekly webinar series highlighting women plant scientists has reached an average audience of 60–70 participants, with a record of 100. Recently, we have begun a series of open professional development webinars to reach a wider public. Our first webinar, focused on scientific poster design, had ~250 participants, most of them undergrad and graduate students from all over the country covering a diverse range of disciplines, including the social sciences. Even though we have immersed ourselves in the plant science community with our weekly seminars, we have expanded our goals with activities aimed to reach out to a much wider audience with webinars and teacher training workshops, hopefully making plant science more attainable to all.

1. Introduction

A diverse, gender-balanced environment improves working and learning experiences in the science workforce as a whole, increasing collective performance [1,2,3,4]. However, according to UNESCO, women account for a minority of the research workforce worldwide [5]. The numbers reflect gender disparity in scientific society leadership, conference speakers, journal editors and editorial board members, professorships, participation in media outlets, etc., [6,7,8,9]. Many efforts have been made in recent years to overcome this problem and increase women representation in the sciences [10,11,12,13,14,15,16], but there is still a long road to break the “glass ceiling” [17].

Argentina has an overall gender-balanced science workforce (~53%) [5], with even higher proportions of women in disciplines related to plant science (Figure 1). However, many science-related activities, especially in conferences and media outlets, fail to comply with this representation. With a group of Argentinian women plant scientists, we created the ARG Plant Women network to increase women visibility and interaction across the plant sciences in the country. Our objectives are to provide a network that facilitates connections and communication among its participants, to develop professional development opportunities, and to show the wealth of subdisciplines and experimental approaches used at work. In this short manuscript we would like to summarize gender representation numbers in our country, actions taken by the network and its initial outcomes.

2. Gender Representation in the Plant Sciences in Argentina

Argentina is among the few countries in the world where gender parity in the sciences is reached [5]. Women represent most of the college graduates, doctoral students, and postdoctoral researchers (Figure 1a). After a transition to an independent career as researchers of the National Council (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Argentina), the most common path taken by academics in the country, we observe a sharp drop in the proportion of women as researchers are promoted to higher level positions (Figure 1a). This is a common trend in other positions related to education and science at universities and organizations in Argentina: fewer women in decision-making positions (data not shown). Particularly in the major research areas of the National Council that include plant biology related topics, both women researchers and fellows are always well-represented (Figure 1b). However, we fail to see this gender inclusivity in speakers at national conferences related to genetics, botany, plant physiology, ecology, and molecular biology, as the proportion of women invited for plenary lectures do not reflect those numbers, and falls below ~30% (Figure 1c).

3. ARG Plant Women: The Argentinian Network of Women in Plant Sciences

Even though plant sciences is a field with an overall good representation of women in our country, we observed that many seminars, conferences, and activities fail to represent such numbers (Figure 1c). With the idea of increasing visibility of the many women that work in the plant sciences in the country, we created the network of Argentinian women in plant sciences, or ARG Plant Women [20]. Facing the lockdown due to the pandemic, we started thinking about ways to gather members of our network, and to create a virtual space we could use to know each other. The network now counts with over 200 members, with an extended community of ~250 people. The first activity we embarked on was a weekly virtual seminar series in which we invite women plant scientists, working in Argentina and abroad, to present their research and other science-related activities (Figure 2a, Appendix A). From April to November, we have held 28 seminars with an average audience of 60 people, who stayed connected for most of the seminar (Figure 2b,c). Our speakers are scientists at different stages of their careers, and they work in many subdisciplines within plant science (Figure 2c). Appendix A shows a comprehensive list of the speakers, date of the seminars, affiliation and role, field of work, and seminar title.

We have also started a series of free open professional development webinars with the objectives of providing useful tools and reaching out to a wider public. The first two webinars (science poster design and effective presentations part I) counted with over 200 registrations each, an average of 100 active participants during the webinar and continuous participation in two dedicated Slack channels. The audience exceeded the plant science field as we had participants from the life sciences in general, but also some from the social sciences and even high school students. We observed great interest in the webinars and participation from undergraduate and postgraduate students, showing there is a need for this kind of courses that complement scientific training and personal development. We have scheduled two more webinars for before the end of the calendar year 2020 (effective presentations part II and effective communication skills). We have received many requests to repeat our webinars and to develop new workshops on other topics (public policy, student-mentor relationship, grant and fellowship applications, etc.,). In addition, and if the pandemic allows in-person conferences, we will join scientific meetings to offer a shorter version of these webinars, potentially increasing the audience reached.

4. Outcomes and Self-Evaluation

To measure the impact and level of acceptance of our seminar series, in July 2020 we conducted a survey among members of the network and seminar attendees. Our weekly virtual seminar series is highly rated among our network (Figure 3a). Half of the respondents considered the seminars changed their point of view about topics covered and the majority considered that change to be positive (Figure 3b). Many of the respondents have also taken actions as a result of attending the seminars, such as contacting speakers to explore new collaboration projects (Figure 3c). People highly valued different aspects of the seminars, like their format, the speaker selection and interaction with them, and also the availability of the recorded seminars on YouTube [21]. We have received an outstanding number of optimistic reviews and encouragement for the work we have done so far (Figure 3d). Nevertheless, we are still thinking about new ways to maintain the interest for the seminar series, increase diversity of themes and geographical representation, and at the same time to take into consideration the potential effects of the eventual re-opening of the workplaces for the next cycle 2021.

On a similar survey, our webinars have received an average rate of 9.5 out of 10 points. The audience positively valued the duration, contents presented, and format of the webinars, as well as interaction with and clarity of the speakers, extra material provided, and proposed activities, plus communication through the Slack channels. In average, 97% of the audience considered that they would apply the knowledge acquired in the webinars in their work. The large acceptance of these webinars shows we found a niche that needed to be covered for the career development of scientists, not only in our discipline, but in the whole Argentinian scientific community.

Engagement with our social platforms is active, with many followers and subscribers, as shown by the metrics indicating interaction with our posts and publications (

Table 1. Engagement in social platforms: statistics from our Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram accounts by November 2020.

Social Platform	Subscribers/Followers	Impressions	Likes	Other Metrics
Twitter	666	31.5 K/month	~340/month
YouTube [21]	94	34.3 K total	~120 total	~1800 total views
Instagram	508		~280/post

). The seminar videos, uploaded to the YouTube channel after the presentations, gathered over 1800 views.

5. Next Steps

Our aim is to make this network grow larger, reaching to many more places and scientists in our country that we have not previously reached. We will keep working on increasing geographical representation and creating connections between speakers and audience, building stronger connections with Argentinian women plant scientists that are residing abroad, and developing more tools for personal development and knowledge of the intricate scientific system in our country. Even after re-opening of workplaces in 2021, we will keep working on a weekly seminar schedule in which graduate students, postdocs, and researchers can show their work, as well as monthly webinars on different topics. We will develop teacher training workshops with the goal to incorporate more plant sciences in schools, hopefully encouraging more children and teenagers to pursue a career as plant biologists and botanists.

6. Conclusions

Despite of the ongoing pandemic, we have built a pathway to increase diversity in the plant sciences in Argentina. We believe there are many ways to promote the engagement and visibility of the work performed by women scientists, and we are delighted to see our work helps reach this goal. From this southern part of the world, we encourage to extend our planification to other countries and communities with the hope that this could be applied to further communication in science.