Navigating Gender at Sea

Little is known about the climate of the scientific fieldwork setting as it relates to gendered experiences, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. We conducted an internet-based survey of field scientists (N = 666) to characterize these experiences. Codes of conduct and sexual harassment policies were not regularly encountered by respondents, while harassment and assault were commonly experienced by respondents during trainee career stages. Women trainees were the primary targets; their perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team. Male trainees were more often targeted by their peers at the research site. Few respondents were aware of mechanisms to report incidents; most who did report were unsatisfied with the outcome. These findings suggest that policies emphasizing safety, inclusivity, and collegiality have the potential to improve field experiences of a diversity of researchers, especially during early career stages. These include better awareness of mechanisms for direct and oblique reporting of harassment and assault and, the implementation of productive response mechanisms when such behaviors are reported. Principal investigators are particularly well positioned to influence workplace culture at their field sites.

LGBTQ STEM professionals experience more career limitations, devaluation, health issues, and attrition intentions than their peers.

There are over 1 million transgender people living in the United States, and 33% report negative experiences with a healthcare provider, many of which are connected to data representation in electronic health records (EHRs). We present recommendations and common pitfalls involving sex- and gender-related data collection in EHRs. Our recommendations leverage the needs of patients, medical providers, and researchers to optimize both individual patient experiences and the efficacy and reproducibility of EHR population-based studies. We also briefly discuss adequate additions to the EHR considering name and pronoun usage. We add the disclaimer that these questions are more complex than commonly assumed. We conclude that collaborations between local transgender and gender-diverse persons and medical providers as well as open inclusion of transgender and gender-diverse individuals on terminology and standards boards is crucial to shifting the paradigm in transgender and gender-diverse health.