Drawing everyday sexism in academia: observations and analysis of a community-based initiative

Abstract

Abstract. Sexist behaviour in the workplace contributes to create a hostile environment, hindering the chance of women and gender non-conforming individuals to pursue an academic career, but also reinforcing gender stereotypes that are harmful to their progress and recognition. The Did this really happen?! project aims at publishing real-life, everyday sexism in the form of comic strips. Its major goal is to raise awareness about unconscious biases that transpire in everyday interactions in academia and increase the visibility of sexist situations that arise within the scientific community, especially to those who might not notice it. Through the website didthisreallyhappen.net, we collect testimonies about everyday sexism occurring in the professional academic environment (universities, research institutes, scientific conferences…). We translate these stories into comics and publish them anonymously without any judgement or comments on the website. By now, we have collected over 100 testimonies. From this collection, we identified six recurrent patterns: (1) behaviours that aim at maintaining women in stereotypical feminine roles, (2) behaviours that aim at maintaining men in stereotypical masculine roles, (3) the questioning of the scientific skills of female researchers, (4) situations where women have the position of an outsider, especially in informal networking contexts, (5) the objectification of women, and (6) the expression of neosexist views. We first present a detailed analysis of these categories, then we report on the different ways we interact and engage with the Earth science community, the scientific community at large and the public in this project.