Academia is an ecosystem of its own. Your field is a small community and your reputation is global: if someone powerful puts you in the wrong light, there's no turning back. Academia has a strongly hierarchical structure and mostly "old guard" male management. It ticks all the boxes to be a favourable environment for sexual harassment to flourish.

That being said, it didn't shock me when I spotted this thread on my Twitter feed.

Now, the comments are the interesting part. While men mostly report fun or annoying incidents ("Having to sit in silence in a 'networking' lunch at Oxford because some random guy that no one knew was giving a retirement speech [...] which also ran on so long it cut all the sessions too short" or "Someone spitting taco and cheese all over me because she insists to not stop eating her lunch while talking to me at my poster."), women have a whole lot else to say. The thread is a collection of stories of sexual harassment and even multiple accounts of assault. Men stroll into academic conferences with the fear of being ridiculed at worst, but women walk into them like in a minefield, expecting inappropriate comments at best, traumatic experiences at worst.

A gallery of examples:

Harassment at conferences is a real issue. People behave at their worst when they do not feel the pressure of accountability of their usual habitat. On the other hand, imagine being a victim to something like this while you are on a work trip, far from home and your support network. Not fun. Yet little to no conference organisers even tackle the issue. Having a policy statement and appropriate instructions on the conference website and appointing a contact person to report incidents are seen as useless overhead.

You know what I'd like to see? For researchers of both genders, especially young ones, to take a strong stand.

Quit going to conferences that do not provide tools for gender inclusion.

Write to the organisers that since you cannot find any stand or guidelines on harassment on their website, you decided not to attend. Invite colleagues to do the same. Tweet about it. Conferences need you as attendants and supporters more than you need to sit half-asleep on a chair listening to content that is or soon will be public.

I cannot wait to see the day when most women will comment with fun episodes to a thread like that.

***
Edit. Further readings. Universities have spent 90M pounds in the past 2 years to settle harassment claims.
Edit. 20.5.2019 13.59. Clarification in the final part.

L'articolo This Twitter Thread Shows Why Academia Is Yet Not Safe For Women sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Why you should do it

I can give you plenty of reasons why. First of all, I personally find it weird that in today's academia, where a lot a mobility is required, we still avoid to acknowledge that most people have kids. Many of us - myself included - have children and it's crazy hard to fulfill parenting responsibilities - which require routine and stability - with all the travelling academia demands. All the trips and visiting periods (not to mention moving for a temporary position!) throw a great burden onto families and a lot of hard decisions must be taken. Offering childcare at conference does not solve all problems, but it certainly offers some practical help.

My first point was completely gender-free, but some situations occur more frequently or exclusively to women. Notice that for women the most popular (and better from fertility point of view) age to have kids coincides with the years of your PhD studies or your postdocs. In other words, the years when you are supposed to travel the most to present your work and network. Also, consider breastfeeding: OMS suggests to breastfeed for one year, and many people now go on even further. This is a long period to give up travelling, career-wise.

And what if one is a single parent and has to bring kids along? Or if both parents work in the same academic field?

We should keep it professional and not have kids around

I understand this worry, but I am convinced you are being pessimistic. Few people choose to travel with kids anyway. Taking the family along is stressful and expensive for everyone and people will try to avoid it every time they can. As an example, during AIP2015 we welcomed families and with about 500 guests, less than 10 kids came along with their family. There were spouses looking after them and they did not interfere with the conference at all. In the "worst case scenario" when one comes along with a small baby and the baby starts crying, it sounds implausible that they will not take the baby out, doesn't it? As any change, this also may bring some bad surprises, but it will mostly be positive to participants.

How can you do it

I am practical person, so I will now give practical guidelines on how you can help.

First of all, name a responsible person or group. One needs also to be the contact person on-site during the conference, so that child-carers know who to contact in case of difficulties or in search for advice. Also, make sure you choose the conference venue, the excursion and the conference dinner restaurant accordingly with the fact that someone may bring kids along (in particular, consider the "stroller-friendly" aspect).

Low-budget initiatives

• Info page on the conference website (cost: only time). Make visible all information about the childcare services you will offer. Will there be grants?A nursing room? Also, make a section with useful information: emergency numbers, pediatric clinics nearby; children-friendly restaurants near the venue; kids facilities at the location (amusement parks, outdoor and indoor parks, libraries, ...); information on where to rent a stroller/carseat/baby items; highlight the children-friendly hotels; contact details of babysitting agencies or similar; the contact details of the responsible person you nominated.
• Nursing and childcare room(s) (cost: the rent of a room at your venue). Mothers who are breastfeeding may need a quiet, private place that is close to the conference rooms. Provide a comfortable chair (make sure she can rest her arms, not having to hold the baby up air). Other important things are: a microwave oven to heat up toddler's food; a changing table (this can be arranged in the toilets as well); a couple of highchairs; a potty in the toilets (both genders!). You may borrow many of these things from colleagues. Bonus items: extra nappies; extra babyfood; care products (soap, creams); table, chairs, some pictures to color (find them free online if you don't want to buy books) and pencils; if most participants are local, books for kids in the local language. Bonus premium item: some screen from which the parent can follow in streaming the conference talks she/he is missing.
• Offer a suitable registration fee for accompanying spouse and kids (cost: none). The fact that you are considering that family comes along brings already relief to a family. Make sure to specify how much the registration fee is for spouse and kids.
• Free lunch for kids (cost: depends on the cafeteria, estimate 15 euros/kid during the whole conference. In my experience you can expect 1-2 kids every 50 participants). This is a little something that sends a really positive message.
• Offer web-streaming of all events (cost: low). You don't have to do this for free! You can offer the option of paying a special fee and follow all events in web-streaming. This is good not only for people who have family limitations, but also for scientists from developing countries or junior researchers with limited travelling funds. It's good for organisers who get further fees and speakers who get more visibility. Going in person will always be better, because you can ask questions and network with other people, but this can be a good plan B for parents and not only.

Medium-to-high-budget initiatives

• Childcare on site (cost: depends on various factors). If you offer this, you definitely go in my hall of fame with honours. For this service you need to find a suitable space and some caregivers. If the conference is held during the school period, you can expect only kids under 7. If the conference is during the summer, that may be a different story. First of all, make sure people state clearly if they are bringing their kids and/or spouse during the registration process. Ask for the age of the children.
  You can decide along with the caregivers how to arrange the groups, according to the ages. If a professional agency is a too expensive option, get creative. Many countries offer ways to pay occasional workers and you may find students or young people who may want to have the job (many have previous babysitting experience, being it a popular side-job for young people).
• Grants (cost: depends, but you can set a maximum easily). Offer childcare grants to pay for care of the kids one leaves at home or for the expenses derived from taking a caregiver and the kids along. I never handles the bureaucracy of grants, but you may ask some advice from people who do (check my hall of fame). The hall of fame is good to check also to find the monetary source of such grants, since associations may offer grants to your organising boards or direct you to third parties. You have some choices to make regarding how much you offer. Is it better to give a grant to more people or fewer heavier grants? It's up to you.

Good luck with the planning!

(*) See my hall of fame of institutions and events and a previous post on the topic.

L'articolo Childcare at conferences: guidelines sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Why all this? Women are severely underrepresented in mathematics, especially in Scandinavian countries, even though they top charts for gender equality. Recently EWM collected data from the country coordinators to describe the single situations and filed a report. The situation in Nordic countries is too extreme to ignore:

L'articolo Women in Mathematics in Finland: Amal Attouchi sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

I am proud to say one of the speakers was my advisor and inverse problems researcher Prof. Samuli Siltanen. His talk was titled "How to defuse a photobomb" and showed some mathematical techniques for image enhancement and manipulation, in particular inpainting. Samuli was claimed winner at the end! You can enjoy his talk right here:

You can browse a photogallery of the event at this link.

It was great to see a mathematics talk winning the hearts of the audience. Congratulations, Samuli!

L'articolo Science Slam Helsinki 2015: a triumph for Inverse Problems sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Baby-wise it went much better than I expected: she played, slept and watched cartoon and I was able to listen to almost all talks. I could even present my own during her afternoon nap (slides to be found here).

Science-wise, I heard about many interesting projects. Inverse Days is the annual meeting of the Inverse Problems research community in Finland. Since it's a great chance to get to know all ongoing projects in Finland, there are often guests from abroad as well. Since 2010, I have been missing only one meeting, because of my parental leave. The dominant theme this year has been EIT, on which many groups in Finland are working at the moment.

For me, the highlight has been a nice presentation by Lauri Harhanen from DTU. He started last May in the huge ongoing project HD-Tomo and he's working on an interesting optimization of gradient descent minimization methods, based on physical modelling of material a priori information in CT. When I will upgrade to real data, this could be a fruitful improvement of my framework.

During the conference, we also had the second meeting of Women in Inverse Problems, a small network started one year ago. We agreed that it would be nice to have some statistics (local or nation-wide) on presence of women in mathematics, and investigate on reasons why the disproportion is created. Let's hope we can follow up on this idea. At the moment our most active action is a small mailing list, where we share interesting events or discussion topics (drop me an email if you want to join, since it's closed).

It's been nice to be at Inverse Days once again and I also realised that this was my first talk at this event. See you soon, Lappeenranta!

L'articolo Live from Inverse Days 2015: baby on board sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Kirsi is a force of nature, as the picture she chose for the poster gives away. Her research is mostly in the area of differential geometry, but she goes beyond pure mathematics research. Last year she pioneered an interdisciplinary course at Aalto University about Mathematics, Art and Architecture, that was concluded by a final exhibition of "math-art masterpieces". She is passionate about teaching and never stops searching new ways to improve. You can read her recent interview on Kumpula Women blog, to have a taste of her views before the talk.

Only in the few years I spent here, I met amazing women working in science. Maybe I was lucky in my encounters, but I less frequently find the same passion and enthusiasm in men, as I found in many women here. I think of Johanna, who works so hard to improve mathematics teaching at any level; Anne-Maria, who has always been busy with research, training students for Math Olympiads and writing for the magazine Solmu; there's Martina, who's completing her postgrad studies and is a mother of three; Åsa, who does research with one hand and coordinates a doctoral school with the other; Hanne, on whom you can always count to get things done and well. I could go on for hours and these are only few of the amazing women I met at my math department (I apologise to all those who did not appear on the list: it was a brainstorming!).

Maybe I notice their achievements better because I feel I can relate to them, but I really need to feel this connection in my daily life. It gives me great courage to look at these close-by women and see that they are making it. At the same time, I have the privilege of talking plainly with some of them and of learning their difficulties and how they overcome them, another precious contribution.

In the spirit of sharing this opportunities with other girls who are in need of role models to relate better to, I started this series of seminars. Contents will be scientific (no policy making this time!), but accessible to undergrad students. Let's highlight women's contribution to Finnish mathematics!

L'articolo Women in Mathematics in Finland: Kirsi Peltonen sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Why bother

Quoting Martin directly,

L'articolo Giving more visibility to minorities in mathematics: practical guidelines sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

How to survive grad school was organised jointly with the Association of Doctoral Students at the University of Helsinki and sponsored by the Doctoral School in Natural Sciences. I gathered five professors, one for each department, to give undergrad and postgrad students the chance to ask whatever they want about worklife in academia, career perspectives and advice on how to handle their difficulties in research. The panel speakers will be:

Prof. Kaarle Hämeri (Dep. of Physics)

Prof. Samuli Siltanen (Dep. of Mathematics and Statistics)

Prof. Paula Vanninen (Dep. of Chemistry)

Prof. Jussi Kangasharju (Dep. of Computer Science)

Prof. Mari Vaattovaara (Dep. of Geography and Geosciences)

Afterwards, the popular (well, in academia) movie PhD Movie 2 will be screened (watch the trailer).

There is still little time to register: follow this link.

L'articolo How to survive grad school: event at HY sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

I am a young researcher with five great lucky cards: a husband who's always ready to help and has a flexible framily-friendly job, a financial situation that allows extra expenses sometime, a children-friendly society, retired grandparents willing to travel and a very cooperative sweet toddler. If one of these lucky cards would be missed from my hand, I would be in great distress. I can travel (alone or along with family) because my family has the money to afford it (funny-depressing fact: my babysitter hourly wage is only 3 euros shorter than mine). I can work and quite freely decide my schedule because the country I live in supports me with affordable childcare services and with good family policies. My daugther misses me when I'm gone, but she never went crazy. I even brought her to a couple of meetings. Balancing the two aspects means also trying not to deprive my kid of quality time and that is one of the reasons I take family often along in my trips or why I absolutely need flexibility in my working schedule.

Even those all these problems are gender-free, I am convinced they affect mostly women, and this is why:

• there's a different bond between a mother and her kids, than the one between a father and his kids. This is not a scientific fact, it only comes from my personal experience in observing my kid's reactions to my trips or my husband's. Several female colleagues of mine had the same impression. Basically my kid is much sadder when I'm gone, than when my husband is. Then add breastfeeding years to the mix.
• Women tend to have kids at the early stages of their academic career (that coincides with the last years of the peak of fertility), while men can afford to have kids in their late thirties, when they are on tenure track. Women miss out on the most important years of an academic career (and not always this is taken into account when hiring).
• Even though it's 2015, the social pressure of being a good present parent is much stronger on women than men. In US 96% of fathers take less than two weeks off when their child is born. Long parental leaves mostly taken by women also mean that a man researcher has more chances of going working abroad followed by the family, not affecting the household economics much nor the partner's job stability.

Now let's go back to the gender-free big picture. I bet the frequent travelling is not all joys for fathers either, especially divorced and single dads. It's no fun for the partner who follows with the kids and it's not nice to leave the family behind for several weeks (if not months) a year either. All the above reasons motivate my commitment to promote childcare services in the academic life. Often implementing childcare services is a limited effort that can make a sensible difference for many. It's a leap forward gender equality and equal opportunities.

This post is my personal hall of fame of institutions, events and conferences that offer childcare services or grants. I deeply thank all people who sent and will send me information, I hope this list will be useful for many. If you know of other links, do no hesitate to comment below or contact me. Feel free to copy, share and distribute the list or portions of it. In include a map below, to show how these resources are geographically distributed (it doesn't work on all browsers, unfortunately).

Conferences: childcare on site or childcare grants

last update: 4.11.2015

Mathematics

AIP 2015 - Finland

SIAM MI09 - USA    SIAM meetings guidelines on childcare   SIAM CSE15 - USA   SIAM IS2016 - USA

EWM meeting 2007 - UK    EWM meeting 2015 - Germany

JMM 2016 - USA    JMM 2015 - USA

Workshop on Analytic Number Theory 2014 - Germany

MAA MathFest - USA

Finnish Mathematical Days 2016

Biology and chemistry

ESEB2015 - Switzerland

SMBE 2016 - Australia

Entomology 2014 - USA

ASCB 2015 - USA

Physics and Astronomy

MRS 2015 - USA

AAS 2016 - USA

AAPT 2014 - USA

Geophysics and Geoscience

EGU 2015 - Austria

AGU 2014 - USA

Miscellanea

American Historical Association 2016 - USA

Grants

Microbiology Society - Europe

Mathematical Institute - University of Oxford, UK

London Mathematical Society - UK

Franklin Women - Australia

Australian Mathematical Society - Australia

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada - Canada (search "childcare")

American Institute of Mathematics - USA

USC WiSE programme - USA

CELL - USA

Society for Systematic Biologists - UK

American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology - USA

American Physical Society - USA

Institutions & others

Cornell University - USA

Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics - USA

University of Marburg - Germany   link 2   link 3  link 4

University of Minnesota - USA

Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing - USA

University of Edinburgh - UK

University of Groninger - The Netherlands

University of Regensburg - Germany

UCL voucher scheme - UK

University of Darmstadt - Germany

Blog posts & other

(I include some posts found online on the topic. I don't necessarily share all the views of the authors of the following posts)

Balancing Parenthood and Academia Work/Family Stress as Influenced by Gender and Tenure Status - Elizabeth M. O’Laughlin and Lisa G. Bischoff

Association for Women in Mathematics: childcare statement

Making Conferences Easier for Families by Evelyn Lamb

Matilde Lalin on Attending conferences with small children

Grants aim to help women by Karen Kaplan

Women in sciences get help balancing academic career, family by Cynthia Lee

New initiatives offer child care solutions to traveling scientists by Elisabeth Pain

Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia by Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee

AAUP: Balancing Family & Academic Work

The baby penalty by Mary Ann Mason

Map

L'articolo Childcare in academia: hall of fame sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

I had the chance to work closely with Prof. Martin Burger and Lena Frerking on a joint project. The code was not our friend, but I am hopeful that we'll get something nice in the next months. No spoilers yet! I gave a talk at the local Imaging Group seminar, it was my longest talk up to now... but I got positive feedback and I am happy about that too.

The summer school is very interesting. If you missed it, you can download the slides from here. I particularly enjoyed the lectures by Dr. Michael Möller about regularisation techniques, image enhancement and applications. Thumbs up for the excellent teaching skills! I got a lot of inspiration for future posts on some basics about inverse problems. It's funny how sometime you tend to forget the basics when you do not review for a while. Especially in the first lecture he mentioned a lot of concepts I knew already, but thanks to his talk I managed to put them back in the right logical order in my mind.

Hopefully I will visit Münster again next year. For now, I will leave you with some pics I've taken at the local LWL Museum, definitely worth visiting.

L'articolo Live from Münster: summer school on inverse problems 2015 sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.