Interventions to prevent pandemic-driven diversity loss
The Polar Early Career Conference held by the UK Polar Network (UKPN) in May 2021 presented an opportunity to discuss a range of issues affecting early career polar scientists. As part of this conference a panel was held on “Adapting a project post-lockdown”, bringing together PhD students from UK institutions, representing the full diversity of polar topics, from remote sensing, to oceanography, glaciology and social sciences. Writing this post in December 2021, the phrase “post-lockdown” seems rather optimistic in retrospect, however the panel event was well attended and raised a range of issues related to COVID-19 beyond the material impact on research. Panellists and attendees commented on their concerns about career progression, fieldwork cancellations, networking, funding extensions, and the disproportionate impacts on minority groups and international students. Following the conference panel, we noted how we hadn’t seen the issues we raised in the session mentioned elsewhere. The specific impact of COVID on early career scientists, because of the vulnerability of our career stage, meant that only we could accurately comment on how the pandemic had impacted us. To put it simply, if we didn’t speak out about how we had been affected, nobody was going to do it for us. As a team who had been brought together by the UKPN conference we decided to continue this partnership to turn our discussion in to a paper, as a permanent record of our concerns. Over several months we worked with an editor to draft multiple versions of the paper, which, with quite a small word limit, proved to be a rather challenging job. We also welcomed new authors to ensure we captured the full early career perspective by including postdoctoral researchers as well. Our comment “Interventions to prevent pandemic-driven diversity loss” was published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal in November 2021 and had been accessed over 1000 times in the first week! The authorship team are grateful to the UKPN for bringing us together from our individual disciplines to form a team and put forward this commentary, which we hope speaks broadly to the experience of all pandemic impacted polar early career scientists.
This contribution is a guest blog post from Ben Fisher & co-authors.
