Organisers:
Sreelaja Nair
Associate Professor, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT Bombay, Powai, 400076, Mumbai.
Suhita Nadkarni
Associate Professor, Department of Biology, IISER Pune, Pune, 411008.
Radhika Nair
Faculty, Centre for Human Genetics, Bengaluru, 560100.
Rashna Bhandari
Head, Laboratory of Cell Signalling, Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, 500039.
Krishnaveni Mishra
Professor, Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 500046.
Preamble to the meeting
It is a well-documented and acknowledged fact that there is a general paucity of women in leadership roles across all fields. Over the past several years, a couple of collectives of women have taken focused efforts to highlight absence of women in institutes as faculty, in leadership roles, as speakers at meetings, as recipients of awards etc. These efforts from BiasWatchIndia (https://biaswatchindia.com) and The Life of Science (https://thelifeofscience.com) have successfully collected data on the absence of women and also provided a database on where to find the women, if one is keen to practice inclusivity in Indian academia.
The organizers of this meeting belong to a related collective of Indian women in Academia, the POWER-Bio group. One of the main objectives of POWER-Bio is to enable participation and inclusion of women in leadership roles in Indian academia. To achieve this, POWER-Bio aims to conduct sensitization training, leadership workshops and dialogue meetings to train women and men to think and act inclusively.
Overview of the meeting
To practice inclusivity, one must appreciate the problems at hand first. For women, it is important to know what impressions they convey when they are being assessed by their peers or by those already in leadership roles. For the peers and assessors, it is about knowing how their queries can indicate implicit bias to the women who is being assessed.
Towards this objective, the 2-day meeting aims to bring together women and men at various stages of academic seniority and leadership to have dialogues with early and mid-career women academics. The meeting will be a series of panel discussions and brainstorming roundtables focused on the following topics:
- Recruitment in Academia
- Establishing a Research Group in India
- Navigating Promotions in Academia
- Leadership Roles – Perspectives on Suitability and Visibility
Each session is planned as a two-panel discussion: one panel being representative of the men and women who form the assessment committee and the second panel the early and mid-career women who are being assessed.
Goal of the meeting
To sensitize women and men already at various stages of academic seniority and leadership on how they can enable equitable opportunities for women in their spheres of influence. The meeting also aims to make aware early and mid-career women what they can expect when they embark on a career in Indian academia. This awareness may allow women to be better prepared for questions and judgments when they encounter them from an assessment panel. The panel members will be women and men who are leaders in Indian academia and the format of the meeting will be a networking opportunity for early and mid-career women to meet and discuss with their potential future mentors.