Welcome to my third and final post about Breakthrough Discuss 2019 (here’s Part 1 and Part 2)! It’s time to get ~meta~.

As scientists, we spend a good deal of our professional energy on conferences. We prepare (never early enough) for talks and posters, we spend packed days in conference rooms frantically networking and scribbling notes and eating pastries, and we build and leverage those professional connections and collaborations over time. Conferences are important. And that’s why conferences need to be equally accessible to all professionals in the field regardless of their career stage or identity.

In addition, we take days out of our very busy research, teaching, and outreach schedules in order to attend these events. Ask any scientist anywhere: neglecting your inbox for even a few days is a virtual disaster when you return. So these events need to be productive enough to offset the lost time, spent money, and additional stress of travel.

For both of these reasons, I wanted to reflect on the conference from a meta-level. How can conferences be more inclusive, and where did this one fail to be? How can we make more scientific progress in the couple days most conferences allow us? I don’t have full answers to these questions, but here are a few of my thoughts.

Lack of Inclusivity

Specific to Women in STEM

• I recently saw an article that referenced an unfortunate inverse relationship between the way women in politics are perceived – you can be seen as charismatic or competent, but rarely both. This happens at conferences as well. When a female speaker is enthusiastic and emotive, the question section is full of “mansplainers” who seem to equate this openness with a lack of competence. This is incredibly unfair, especially for those of us who are very passionate about our work and enjoy sharing our excitement with technical audiences. It’s insulting to the speaker and wastes everyone’s time (see Terrible Question Bingo below).
• Panels where female experts are constantly interrupted, talked over, and interrogated produce an extremely uncomfortable environment for me as a watcher. This provides a huge distraction from the science at hand (completely apart from the content that is lost by exclusionary behaviour towards the speakers). How hard is it to wait to start talking until someone else has finished?
• There was a lot of adulation for Francis Crick, without a mention of Rosalind Franklin. I’m not that familiar with Crick’s work outside of the great DNA bamboozle, maybe the particular mentions were entirely unrelated to Franklin’s work… but I’m not convinced.

Other

• For a conference about concepts as lofty as this one, we sure put a lot of ugly, embarrassingly human biases on display. For example, in discussion of panspermia, space exploration, and planetary protection, colonialism metaphors were everywhere. The immense problems with colonialism? Barely discussed. Here are some others I noticed:
  • Teenagers assumed to be male
  • Inventions assumed to be a product of western civilizations
  • Mothers assumed to take care of children
  • All species assumed to want other species to be like them
• This conference was very, very white. Which is true of many astronomical conferences, but I feel like this is one of the places where that contrast is particularly ridiculous and stark. When we’re thinking about these huge questions in astrobiology – the origin of life, the development of intelligence, the future of humanity – it underscores how ridiculous it is that such a homogenous group is deigning to speak for our entire species. How ridiculous it is that we’re pondering these global questions about biodiversity as if we are trying our hardest to answer them when we haven’t even included the diversity of Earth’s human population? And how ridiculous it is that many people in that room still refuse to acknowledge that this problem even exists? We need to do better in SETI and in astrobiology as a whole.

Loss of Productivity for Other Reasons

• The biologists, astronomers, and chemists are all awful about using jargon from their fields. This conference is interdisciplinary – we want to talk about big picture ideas and we need to all understand each other! Astrobiology in particular is a very tough field to work in because of this issue. I wish there was a way to provide feedback after conference presentations about the level of understanding from the audience, to help shape these conferences in the future and really be able to make headway on interdisciplinary issues.
• I found that the discussions of ethics were too few, too cursory, and too dismissive. Often, when they happened, it was only because of a prompt from a female conference participant. Everyone needs to think about the ethics and societal impacts of their work and the assumptions behind it. Acting ethically is not gendered!

Terrible Question Bingo

Questions are vital to a healthy conference. They help clarify things from presentations, inspire avenues for new work, spread knowledge and expertise, and create connections between people and ideas. However, we all know that most conferences run behind, so only 1-2 questions usually get asked per talk. And those questions, per Chelsea Troy’s world-changing blog post on caucus-style meetings, usually get asked by people who raise their hands the fastest and talk over anyone who tries to stop them. The worst part is: these questions are usually not even good.

As the conference progressed, I began to make a list in my notebook whenever a particularly useless question was asked. Then I grouped them into the following “Terrible Question Bingo” categories.

Terrible Question Bingo

• “I fail to see how… [condescending, skeptical question]” (just because you didn’t understand something on first pass doesn’t mean the speaker is wrong – can be useful as clarification and much shorter if worded politely)
• “Well, actually [possibly correct correction about minor point that isn’t the focus of the discussion and derails interesting dialogue]”
• “This is a comment, not a question…” (save these for the speaker in private, they’re the one presenting not you)
• “[Sharing your opinion, bonus points if you don’t specialize in the work]” (wastes the audience’s time)
• “You should look into X person’s work” (given without context, this is probably technical enough to be a waste of most of the audience’s time – save these for the speaker in private)
• “[Very technical question that takes a full 2 minutes, entire audience has stopped listening]”
• “If there’s anyone in the room that doesn’t know this… [condescendingly explains relatively general concept before asking a question]”

Ending on a Positive Note

Just wanted to shout out a couple things I loved seeing at Breakthrough Discuss 2019. We have a lot of work to do, but it’s not all bad!

• I heard a response I loved to a “do you know x author’s work?” question. The speaker immediately said “yes, and for the rest of the audience, here’s a summary what the questioner was referring to”. It brought the audience into the conversation, took the haughty questioner down a peg, and established the speaker as an expert. I hope to be able to respond to questions with that much poise in the future!
• Not all questions were bad! Here were some of the classes of question I found particularly useful at Breakthrough Discuss.
  • Clarification of main points or assumptions that the work is based on
  • Asking the speaker’s opinion on work that was presented during the conference, or big recent results
  • Continuing the logic from the speaker’s presentation into a new domain and asking their opinion
  • Asking for numbers, applications, next steps of their work

I’m still distilling this useful/useless question dichotomy in my head, so keep an eye out for further discussions on the topic!

In summary: I learned a lot from Breakthrough Discuss 2019, and I had a great time. I think there are many ways to improve the atmosphere of the conference for future years, both in terms of productivity and inclusivity (which is also productivity by the way), and the best way to start that is by talking about it.