Various fields of science have made a concerted effort to better understand the unique experiences that LGBTQIA+ researchers face and how these shape their career trajectories in STEM, says David Pagliaccio, associate professor of clinical neurobiology at Columbia University and research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Biologists, physicists and chemists, for example, have turned their scientific inquiry upon themselves, but Pagliaccio’s own field has been slower to take up this work.
A new survey, designed and orchestrated by Pagliaccio and fellow neuroscientists Dori Grijseels, who is a postdoctoral scholar at Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior, and Eitan Schechtman, assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, canvassed LGBTQIA+ researchers from all over the world about their workplaces and the influence of institutional environment, whether they were “out” to colleagues, mental health, legislation and other factors.
The Transmitter spoke with Pagliaccio, Grijseels and Schechtman to learn more about their findings, and what institutions can do to create more inviting spaces for LGBTQIA+ researchers.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
The Transmitter: What inspired you to do this research?
David Pagliaccio: I had done a survey study a few years ago that centered around a similar idea. When I looked into the literature back then, I found that the neuroscience/psychology field that I’m in was very underrepresented, and a number of other disciplines were more advanced in understanding LGBTQIA+ scientists than neuroscience was. That initial study was really trying to fill that gap. After talking with my co-authors Eitan and Dori, I realized that the international piece is trickier to survey, and they have more expertise abroad. For this current study, we were trying to understand experiences outside of the United States. We typically don’t study the scientists themselves, and their experiences are not well documented with data.
TT: You surveyed more than 400 LGBTQIA+ neuroscientists for this study from all over the world. Tell me more about the recruitment process.
Eitan Schechtman: I’ll start with the first struggle that we faced, and that held us back about six months, which was getting institutional review board (IRB) approval. We wanted to do an international survey, so a big chunk of my initial contribution to this project was getting the survey approved by our IRB. That meant taking into account every single country in the world, each with its own guidelines and its own kind of set of rules. There are a lot of different intricacies at play that I wasn’t really aware of.
Once we passed those hurdles, we had many people, beyond even the three of us, who were instrumental in helping us spread the survey. We had people share it in their own communities through word of mouth, Slack channels and with support from organizations like the ALBA Network that helped us try to reach this very dispersed community. For example, we have a friend of ours who is a member of the ALBA Gender and Sexual Diversity subgroup in Germany. We asked him if he could help us recruit people, and about a week later, we suddenly got a surge of 100 or so responses from Germany. That’s an entire queer sub-community, connected through these social threads that we were able to reach.
TT: One of the core findings of your study was that U.S. participants reported a more positive institutional climate and higher likelihood of being “out” compared with their European counterparts. At the same time, however, U.S. neuroscientists reported more instances of negative workplace experiences. Can you explain this discrepancy?
Dori Grijseels: From my personal experience in Europe, there is kind of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture. If you’re not out, then you are probably less likely to get harassed, so I don’t think that’s necessarily paradoxical. I think with the institutional climate, that’s an interesting question because it depends upon so many other factors. For example, one of the items for institutional support we were interested in was healthcare. In Europe and the United Kingdom, whether or not you get trans healthcare is not dependent on your institution; that’s fully dependent on your state or at the country level, whereas in the U.S. it’s tied to what insurance you can get through your institution. Those kinds of provisions are more likely to be provided in the U.S. because they have to compensate for care that’s not available nationally or statewide.
I do think that the other part of it is that people in the U.S. tend to be more open about their private lives. This, unfortunately, invites a lot more harassment, whereas people in Europe seem to be more closed about their private lives. They’re less likely to share, and so that in some way protects them from harassment. But obviously this does not provide a positive climate, and this ultimately feeds back into what is available from the institutions.
When I spoke to institutions to ask them to share this study, I got different responses depending upon the location. I spoke to one of the biggest cognitive neuroscience departments in the Netherlands, and I got an email back saying, “Oh, we don’t have any queer people here, so I don’t see why we would need your survey.” It is very likely that there are queer people at that institution. But they don’t see the need to provide anything because they don’t know that those people exist.
TT: A little more than two-thirds of participants reported that government legislation had affected decisions about their scientific career. How has policy shaped LGBTQIA+ neuroscientists’ careers?
ES: I think our work is just exposing the tip of the iceberg. If we were to run the same survey today, things would look a lot different because of the many policy and governmental shifts that have occurred since. This is something that I felt on a personal level and have seen through interacting with other queer scientists. Within the U.S., states such as Florida have become unsafe for some of us to travel to, let alone to consider residing in. That severely impacts our career trajectories and the options that we have. The academic community is unique in the sense that we’re very global. When I was looking for positions before I ended up in California, I looked everywhere, from Canada to the U.K. to almost every state in the U.S. When it came down to making my decision, the location of the institution played a major role. The two main offers that I had to choose between were California and Texas. The institution in Texas is a great one: super highly ranked, and in a lot of ways it had better working conditions, like better pay. But for me, a major part of my decision was the fact that I don’t want to live in a state in which I don’t feel protected. These types of decisions also impact trainees when they choose where to do their graduate work. It restricts their options in a climate that already has very limited options because of financial constraints. So I wasn’t surprised by how much that was a driving force behind people’s academic decisions.
TT: What are some concrete actions that institutions can take to support their LGBTQIA+ trainees and researchers?
DG: I think one really important thing that institutions need to do is to not only have very clear protective policies but also to also enforce them. For example, trans and nonbinary people should be treated with respect in the workplace, and that includes colleagues using their stated pronouns. So, what do institutions do when someone is consistently misgendered? These types of policies need to be established.
Another action that institutions could take is to have open discussions with their queer scientists and listen to what they are asking for. For example, one of my colleagues from the U.K. was saying that this year his university would not fly the Pride flag, even though they have done so for many years in the past. This gesture made a huge difference for him. I remember when my university flew the Trans Pride flag for the first time during Trans Day of Visibility in our city. Even if it sounds so small, it made a huge difference to me to see that visible support.
Institutions won’t know about these needs unless they talk to their researchers to learn what support they can provide directly. Those can be really small changes that make a really big, big difference.
TT: What are the future directions for this research?
DP: We’re hoping to eventually do a broader geographic reach to people in countries outside of the U.S. and Europe, where our responses mostly came from. To achieve this, we would focus on a stronger recruitment push. I think it would be interesting to dig into the local political experiences, like particular laws or experiences that people have outside of their institution, and see how that drives their likelihood of staying in an institution. I have also been hoping to do more longitudinal work, so asking people about their future plans and trajectories, and then following those people over time to see where they actually end up. It is difficult to do that, obviously, but really important. It could no longer be anonymous if we’re doing that, but there are strengths and weaknesses to each experimental design.
TT: How has this work affected you as a researcher?
DG: I did a lot of the qualitative aspects for this study, which included reading everyone’s open-ended responses. It is, at times, very depressing to see how much people are struggling. To be honest, it is very heavy and very personal. You’re trying to argue in a scientific way for your own identity, which is very different from doing statistics on animal behavior. This study also helped me redefine my love for science and feel like there is a space where we can do good. We now have some sort of authority in society where scientists are listened to. And so to be able to talk to people and be their voice is really a privilege. I come from a huge privilege to do this work, to publish it and to talk about it openly. This is a privilege that I really don’t take lightly, and it really fuels me as well.
DP: This study helped to bring concrete data to something that I knew was an issue, but as scientists we like to see the data, so having the numbers to back it up is great. It helps us to advocate when we go to our institutions or professional societies to bring evidence like these findings. I was particularly concerned by the rates of negative experiences, including anxiety and depression, which was about a quarter of our participants reported. I knew those disparities exist in the general population, but seeing it among my peers and colleagues is troubling. For me it reinforces the need to do this work.
ES: I think the main thing for me is, I’m already a PI. I have a family, and I’m out to everyone in my circle. It’s very easy, in this state of privilege, to not think on a daily basis of the struggles that I faced growing up, and that other people faced in their teens and 20s, which includes most of the students we surveyed in our study. Our work brought back memories, and it brought back some of the struggles that I personally faced, and that people still face to this day. That was critical for me because it highlighted the importance of the work, but then it also highlighted the importance of other endeavors that we are now working on together to actually make a difference. We’re just about to start a Slack workspace for LGBTQ neuroscientists worldwide that will be a source of support and community, especially for those who feel isolated geographically and identity-wise. We also want to start an international mentoring system to allow people to connect. The international aspect is key, especially for people living in countries or in U.S. states where they might not have the opportunity to interact with other LGBTQ folks. The data really were instrumental in driving my actions and will probably continue to drive my actions moving forward.
