We approached our Integrated Human Practices from two perspectives: the traditional, integrating the Human Practices into the lab project; and the unconventional, integrating the human practices into itself. We thought we could make the biggest impact in both Human Practices and the lab if we provided cohesive, reassured arguments for our methods.
Lab intergration
Lab Integration:
By interviewing academic and industry researchers about their understanding of kill switches, we could analyse whether they are effective biosafety mechanisms and if they are appropriate for use in either industry or academic research.
Dr Tom Ellis influenced the design of our kill switches by corroborating our theory that multiple kill switches in one system would reduce the error rate significantly - creating a fail safe, in the same way that broad spectrum antibiotics significantly reduces the chances of failure. We had planned on making an operon of KillerOrange and KillerRed, to both broaden the spectrum of light at which the reactive oxygen species are produced, but also significantly reduce the error rates of one. Dr Ellis argued that multiple kill switches in one system might have less than one in a billion escape rates.
Due to time restraints with our project we decided to focus on providing significant analysis on the kill switches individually, however advice from Markus Geshater of Synthase Limited indicating that multiple kill switches in one system would be unfeasible and the different systems would need to be truly orthogonal to be effective. He explained that if in an industrial setting your synthetic system is producing a protein, then having one or multiple kill switches that are reliant on protein production would reduce the efficiency of production of your desired protein. Furthermore these kill switches could potentially be circumvented by the overexpression of a useful enzyme that is being commercially produced. Consequently, we felt assured in dropping the idea for a multiple kill switch system because our kill switches relied heavily on protein production and thus would reduce the efficiency of the product in an industrial setting. Instead of looking at multiple kill switches in the same system we looked to design three distinct kill switches to test and compare the efficiency of enzymatic, metabolic and DNA degrading mechanisms
Student opinions
Outreach Integration:
We have extensive public engagement and education work in our Human Practices section. We focused early on how to best to influence the public in both lower and higher education with regards to engaging and understanding synthetic biology. For the equality and diversity section of the Human Practices, we needed to created a well reasoned and grounded project, which both highlights the work of academics at the university and shapes more educated opinions on equality and diversity in science. Consequently, we aimed to integrate each individual interview into the next, drawing from ideas from previous interviews, so we could properly discuss the problem of gender inequality and the issues raised by both academics and students. We found this to be the best way to create a discussion between the academics as they are providing analysis and personal insight on the opinion based on their experiences and the experiences of the previous academics. This approach also allowed us to discuss in depth issues such as the problems associated with maternity and paternity leave in science and whether there is a need for massive social and structural change.
We also wanted to integrate the public engagement and education sections into themselves and as a consequence evolve the project as we went. Our board game, BioMech, was developed through a series of prototypes to the version we have now. We plan on further it after this year’s iGEM is concluded. The insight of the teachers and students at both the schools we visited as well as the science fairs shaped the way we designed the gameplay of BioMech. We used the people attending these events as focus groups, testing all aspects of BioMech. For example, from our first test at The Judd School we realised that even though we like using 3D printed shapes as counters, they cluttered the board space too much. The teachers also brought up how the counters would be easily lost or how they were even potential choking hazards. As a result we got rid of them. Furthermore, the students found the original colour matching rules difficult to understand and so we simplified them.
Background
The fundamental reason we have for targeting equality and diversity within science, is that synthetic biology has the chance to be hierarchically and systematically equal from the beginning. If those working in the field can encourage the importance of diversity to younger generations, then when synthetic biology becomes better recognised publicly as a field of science, it has the possibility of being known for its progressive nature towards gender, racial and socio-economical equality.
We started our work on Equality and Diversity after we spoke to Dr Robert Smith of Kings College London, at the UK iGEM meetup in Westminster. He spoke to us about our progress with Human Practices and some of the successes we had already had. He emphasised that our idea for a study into diversity and equality in science had not really been performed, to his knowledge, at iGEM before, much like our work on the importance of understanding what a kill switch is. We therefore thought that we have the possibility of making a significant impact in this field by highlighting and addressing some of the issues surrounding a lack of gender equality and diversity in science overall.
The original plan was to create a short video highlighting the some of the issues surrounding a lack of gender equality in science and demonstrating what could be done in synthetic biology to address these issues. Dr Smith encouraged us to look more broadly at diversity in science as well, emphasising that the problem doesn’t just stem from gender inequality, but also from a lack of diversity in terms of ethnicity, religion, disability and background.
Using the University of Exeter as a case study for universities in the UK, we want to highlight if there is a problem with diversity and inequality by exposing the issue to a wider audience.
We aim to achieve this by focusing on three distinct areas:
Firstly, the initial reaction of students and academics to the concept of gender inequality and diversity within science. With this we hope to gauge whether sexism in science is a widely recognised issue across the UK in higher education or if not enough is being done to publicise the problem. We also want to understand how the definition of diversity changes across the world.
Secondly, the work that is being done by academics at the University of Exeter to both publicise and change the problem of inequality within science. We want to use the statistics provided by the University Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity group and the Athena Swan group to understand how equality and diversity within science has changed over time. Furthermore we want to begin the discussion of what more can be done.
Thirdly, the role that students can have in promoting equality and diversity within various fields. We want to speak to student leaders about how they view the situation and what they think can be done to promote not just gender diversity but also diversity in terms of religion, ethnicity, disability and socio-economic background.
Through this work, we can open up the issue to a wider audiences, beyond just academics responsible for issues of equality and diversity within the department, to promote the fact that this is an issue that should be addressed by all.
Ultimately we want to leave a legacy that shows that we have made a significant impact locally but also opened up the discussion to a wider audience.
Does sexism in science exist?
Highlighting the issues:
We asked members of different iGEM teams their opinions and experiences of gender inequality in science to try to gauge, on a small scale, whether it is a widely recognised problem.
Although this is a difficult issue, it is one that needs to be resolved. We thought that by asking students without prior warning of the questions we could get a real understanding of their view of the issue without time to formulate a more PC version using data from the internet. We also wanted to capture their genuine reactions to the question of whether inequality in terms of gender in science exists to help us identify whether students are shocked by the idea of sexist biases in their field or if they have experienced it directly themselves. Obviously this is only small scale, but by asking students from across the UK we may be able to begin to understand how widespread the problem is known.
As a man, I have never experienced sexism towards me.
This was a feeling that was reflected in many of the interviews with male students, however for the majority, they still had more to say. Many of the male students interviewed, cited the gender inequality they observed as being prominent in the senior positions, with one student saying that “there is not enough female figures of authority in science, specifically in biology”. This is something that is easily observed within the university: when looking at professors in bioscience the majority of them are male. However this doesn’t mean that nothing is being done to change this, or that nothing has been done already to encourage more women into senior roles and this is something that we look into further with the second video.
Interestingly, male physics students had another view of gender inequality in science: one student saying “I was surprised by the amount of women in physics, even though it makes up a very small proportion” - they later went on to clarify by saying “I thought it would be less”. This is very poignant as it is an area physics governing bodies are trying very hard to address. There seems to be an innate understanding that fewer women are likely to take up physics at a degree level and we have heard stories of males being taken aside to discuss the prospect of physics degrees, with females not even considered by teachers.
The view that stood out the most came from a female student the University of Exeter’s team.
I definitely notice I get treated differently to some of the other males in the team.
Through highlighting the opinions of students in both our team and universities across the country, we have brought the issue of gender inequality home. There is no doubt that some students at University do not believe there is an issue, however the fact that there are people who have experienced it directly and students who have observed it indirectly, shows that there is at least an understanding of a wider problem. This initial understanding acts as a platform for us to talk to those at the university who are working on improving equality and diversity within Biosciences and Physics, as well as further emphasise the statistics that support the case for there being inequality in these fields.
On 14th October 2016, we held a panel discussion to open up the debate about equality and diversity in science to a wider audience. We collaborated with the campus radio channel, Xpression FM, and the campus TV channel, XTV in order to reach the widest audience possible. To conclude our work on equality and diversity, we needed to bring the work that we had highlighted from the academic interviews to the students that were represented in the first video (that highlighted students understanding to the issue).
One of our team members, Jack, hosted the panel alongside both student and academic representatives who were qualified to give an informative understanding of the issue of gender inequality and a lack of diversity in science. There were two student representatives: Alec James, the current VP Welfare sabbatical officer for the Students Guild at the University of Exeter. His role as VP Welfare includes providing the students with a voice for making the university accessible and inclusive as he could communicate student’s issues with the leading academic boards. And Laura Howard, the University of Exeter academic representative coordinator for undergraduate students, specifically in STEM. Her role involves liaising with the student staff liaison committee (SSLC) in which STEM students who have issues with the quality of their experience get their voices heard. There were also two academic representatives: Dr Alison Hill, a senior lecturer in chemistry at the University of Exeter. Dr Hill has taken programmes like the Aurora leadership programme and is considered a mentor and role model to many, shown by her nomination for the teaching awards in 2012 and consistently high feedback ratings. Dr Rob Wilson, head of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity group in Biosciences at the university and senior lecturer in conservation biology. Dr Wilson was one of the academics we interviewed and he gave a really interesting, grounded perspective on the state of affairs at the university and how it should be improved. Through this discussion, we were able to establish a two way communication with the public with questions from the floor for our expert panel. The event was shared both on Facebook, with over 200 people interested in attending, and by the university, and as it was streamed live and broadcasted live on XTV and Xpression FM respectively, we were able to reach people from all across the country.
The audio file can be found here:
The video link can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIWHUrHcjoc
Key Points:
We tried to cover the key points that were discussed in the section that highlighted academics work on improving gender equality and diversity in their fields. Consequently we talked about issues related to the massive social and structural change needed for there to be a significant difference as well as specific points like the importance of role models, mentors and the problem of gender distribution at higher levels of science.
We began the discussion with the relatively simple question of 'what is diversity?’. Many people have a very narrow view of what diversity is, mostly commenting on gender, ethnicity, religion and socio-economic background. Laura viewed the definition of diversity as:
Getting representation from people of all different backgrounds, whether that be racially, sexual orientation, gender, socio-economic background. It is just representing people who are different
This goes further than organisations like the Royal Society of Biology and the Institute of physics who, whilst declaring they want to make their fields as equality, diverse and inclusive as possible, predominantly represent gender, ethnicity, disability and socio-economic background as diversity. Alec went further saying:
It is the whole core of who we are: where we come from, our background, gender, religion, our sexuality, but also hobbies, interests, friends and families
This is more in line with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s definition which includes: age, marriage/civil partnership, pregnancy, first language and geography amongst the more inclusive definition of diversity. We wanted to understand whether universities are doing enough to promote this kind of inclusivity and accessibility but individually what both the students and academics were doing to make university accessible.
The universities are responding both to the opinions of the students and the staff in (scientific) bodies, but also the top down drivers...Are they doing enough? They are starting to improve the amount they are doing -Dr Rob Wilson
This echoes much of what we heard from academics previously, that there is a significant improvement to equality and diversity, but there is still a long way to go. Alec James emphasised these points saying: It’s the responsibility of the university to remove those barriers, so that everyone has the opportunity to come here and the university has Widening Participation high on their agenda. What was interesting is that Dr Hill highlighted how the university is changing the way it takes new students into the university considering the socio-economic status, in an attempt to make the university more diverse, which is a very positive, forward perspective. However, Laura had a stark opposing view:
I would disagree in saying the university does enough to drive diversity. I was one of two other black girls on my course, and that is quite sad to see
Laura did go on to say that she recognises the university is working hard on Widening Participation activities and there is improvement, but her opinion stands out as shocking, and a reminder that we have to have a significant improvement in inclusivity for the effects to be widely shown and felt. The discussion went on to talk about whether the university was excluding students through events like the recent Snowsports White T-shirt social in which offensive comments were exposed, and conclusively both academics and students completely condemned this behaviour, and encouraged that measures were being put in place to prevent this from happening again.
Dr Rob Wilson reiterated the importance of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity group especially at changing the gender distribution between the stages from undergraduate to professorial roles. Dr Hill highlighted another problem with this distribution, in that part time academics find it very difficult to progress to the professor level. There is a large number of women who are on the education and scholarship route, which makes it very difficult to be promoted to associate professor, because staff need to have a senior management role to be promoted. Therefore Dr Hill argued that:
The lack of leadership roles for women that prevent them from being promoted to the senior positions
The discussion went on to talk more about the unconscious bias and whether attitudes growing up significantly affected people’s opinions now. Laura highlighted that it is not being taught well enough in schools so people need to do it themselves, meaning that we all should be more conscious and more aware of what might offend someone, because society has not progressed to the point where acceptance and understanding is taught to a sufficient level. Dr Wilson went on to argue that the path we map out for ourselves depends very much on the people we see as our role models and so he emphasised the importance that the University has a large number of diverse role models for students, which echoes what Dr Dixon and Prof. Ryan had said in their interviews.
We have to be careful with benevolent sexism, where we think that maybe this person wants to spend more time with their family so let’s give them some roles that don’t give them opportunity -Dr Rob Wilson
This was in response to questions about maternity leave and how attitudes need to change in order for there to be an increase in the number of women at higher roles. We previously heard Dr Santos in our meeting with her talk about how academics use maternity as an easy excuse and Dr Wilson is reiterating that this kind of attitude is present among academics and it needs to change.
In questions from the floor, a student asked what the university has lined up as a long term solution to prevent offensive activities like the white T-shirt social scandal from happening again, and excluding students from the university. Alec James responded by saying the staff at the Students Guild (the Student Union) are starting a research project looking into the diversity of their leadership and why it is what it is. Laura Howard went on to say:
We can do as much as we can to try to educate and inform people
Interestingly this brought an alternative reaction from the academics. Dr Wilson said that the staff need educating as well. We need to know what is acceptable to say, which could indicate the beginning of the social, structural change needed for there to be a difference. It is interesting that an offensive act like this one, could act as a catalyst for both staff and students to reevaluate why the university is as diverse as it is, but also it acts as a platform for significant change in attitudes, highlighted in Dr Wilson’s comments.
A second question from the audience asked:
How do you think that universities, in particular Exeter, can reach out to local communities to make sure that disadvantaged people can reach A-levels and Open Days?
Dr Hill responded by emphasising the University of Exeter’s role in the Exeter Maths School saying that since then, around 25% of students are going to Oxford and Cambridge. This action in setting up a maths school, which gives the students the opportunity to attend top class universities, is excellent because it shows how institutions are trying to get more students interested in physics, maths and computer science.
Conclusively, this panel discussion brought forward some of the opinions and ideas that we discussed with the academics, in highlighting their work on improving gender equality in their fields. Furthermore, we managed to establish a dialogue with students and gave them a platform for further discussion on this issue, which will continue to have lasting effect. The youtube video of the talk has over 90 views, as of the 16th October, and is expected to continue rising. This work, whilst concluded for our iGEM team, is far from over. We have highlighted the issues of gender inequality and lack of diversity at our University, however, the situation may be significantly worse at universities across the country and the globe. We hope that future Exeter iGEM teams take up the mantle, and try to make a significant difference in gender equality at the University. We hope with more discussions like this, and more work that shows the academics and students trying to make a difference, we can kickstart the social and structural change necessary for there to be a significant improvement in attitudes in the UK. The more people that are made aware of the issue, the more potential for action to take place.
We hope that future iGEM teams will look at the is research and approach more Universities, scientific bodies and even the government, to ask what they are willing to do to make a difference?
Future
The Gender Study - A Future Project
Paris Bettencourt in 2013 provided a detailed study of gender distribution in synthetic biology and iGEM. They found that women were not as represented as men within iGEM and equally there were fewer female supervisors of iGEM teams. They provided data to suggest that there is a significantly higher proportion of women to men in teams that win prizes compared with teams that don’t. They concluded their study with suggestions of how to improve the gender distribution within synthetic biology and iGEM, proposing that bonus points could given to teams with female supervisors, and iGEM should promote larger teams with more female judges, in the hope that this would improve the gender distribution within teams.
Our aim was to conduct a follow up study, looking at the distribution of male to female students and supervisors in iGEM teams in 2016. We wanted to compare the statistics to those gathered in 2013 to determine whether Paris Bettencourt’s Gender Study was successful in improving equality within iGEM. Then, if our study showed that there was a significant balancing of the distribution then it could indicate that small, impactful studies, like Paris Bettencourt’s, could be the key to improving gender distribution and diversity within the field and thus more teams should take up the mantle and work to improve equality and diversity. If, however, there was no significant improvement, then we would have to question whether this is due to a lack of follow on studies compounding the data, or if small scale studies, performed by iGEM teams, can ever be enough to make a significant change in the field.
Due to time restraints, we will be unable to undertake this follow-up gender study, however we challenge future iGEM teams, who struggle with Human Practices, to look at the impact they could make locally and nationally in equality and diversity, and perform a follow up study to Paris Bettencourt’s from 2013. We believe that iGEM teams have a fantastic opportunity to make a significant difference in this areas by highlighting the work of academics and researchers at their university working to achieve greater equality in their field of science, or in science as a whole. We also challenge iGEM to look more at ways of improving and encouraging greater diversity, so that synthetic biology can be recognised as a positive, progressive field of science and one that acts as a representative to the individual core subjects that make up it.
