The IDEA Speaker Series is a collaboration between the IDEA Office and our 9 employee resource groups or
ERGs, and our purpose is to bring a diverse array of speakers to Berkeley Lab who have deep expertise in issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, often specifically in the workplace and in STEM, and particularly to bring in speakers who work at the intersections of opportunities and challenges that many of our ERG communities face.
A Conversation with Angela Saini
“We all have some commitment to the idea of race…we all think about race to some extent…we value our racial heritage, our ethnic heritages, our cultural diversity…we have to be careful about when we conflate those with biological ideas about who we are.” ~ Angela Saini
Join the IDEA Office and Global ERG for a conversation with Angela Saini, award-winning science journalist, author, and broadcaster and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science. Although research has repeatedly shown that race is not a scientifically valid concept, it persists throughout the scientific community and continues to influence politics and policies around the world. We’ll talk with Angela about the history of racism in science and scientific institutions and the practices and behaviors of scientific institutions that enabled the codification of these ideas.
Date: Wednesday, November 9, 20022 (add it to your calendar)
Time: 11 am – 12 noon PT
Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist, author, and broadcaster. She presents radio and television programs for BBC, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in New Scientist, Prospect, The Sunday Times, Wired, and National Geographic.
Angela’s latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was published to enormous critical acclaim and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Foyles Book of the Year. Her previous work, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, was published in 2017, winning the Physics World Book of the Year.
In 2020, Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect Magazine, and in 2018, she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. In 2015, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about birdsong and human language. She has also received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers.
Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is the founder of ‘Challenging Pseudoscience’, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, an advisory board member of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and she sits on the Lancet Covid-19 Commission Task Force on Global Health Diplomacy. Angela has given distinguished and keynote lectures at Yale, Princeton, Oxford, among other notable institutions. In 2019, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association.
Order Angela’s books from Pegasus Books in Berkeley
Creating a Culture of Advocacy, Inclusion, and Allyship with Emily Ladau, Disability Rights Activist, Communications Consultant, and Author
This fireside chat-style conversation hosted by the IDEA Office and the All Access ERG, held in recognition of National Disability Employment Awareness Month will address how to advocate for yourself and your colleagues; how to be a thoughtful, informed ally to disabled people, including actionable steps for what to say and do (and what not to do); and how you can help make the workplace more inclusive and accessible for all.
Date: Thursday, October 20, 2022 (add it to your calendar)
Time: 12 noon – 1 pm PT
Join us on Zoom
Emily Ladau is a passionate disability rights activist, writer, storyteller, and digital communications consultant. She is the author of Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Emily’s career began at the age of 10, when she appeared on several episodes of Sesame Street to educate children about her life with a physical disability. A native of Long Island, New York, Emily graduated with a B.A. in English from Adelphi University in 2013 and now serves on their Board of Trustees. In 2017, she was named as one of Adelphi’s 10 Under 10 Young Alumni. In 2018, she was awarded the Paul G. Hearne Emerging Leader Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities. In 2022, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism honored her with their Disability Advocate of the Year Award and the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities honored her with the Frieda Zames Advocacy Award.
Emily’s writing has been published in outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Vice, and HuffPost and she has served as a source for outlets including MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and The Washington Post. She has spoken before numerous audiences about disability, from Microsoft to Comcast/NBCUniversal, and from the U.S. Department of Education to the United Nations. And, she co-hosts The Accessible Stall Podcast, a show that dives into disability issues. Central to all of Emily’s work is harnessing the power of storytelling as a tool to engage people in learning about disability.
Order Emily’s book from Pegasus Books in Berkeley
Why Women Can’t Write Code: Challenging gender stereotypes in STEM
Date: Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Time: 11 am – 12 noon PT
Watch the recording of this event
(If you are unable to open the video, log in with your Berkeley Lab credentials and verify third-party cookies are enabled on your browser.)
Related Journal Articles:
Ambivalent Sexism Revisited – Psychology of Women Quarterly, 35(3) 530-535, 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0361684311414832
Join the IDEA Office and the Early Career ERG for a conversation with Dr. Siân JM Brooke.
The programmer is a young, university-educated, white man. This is the stereotype that dominates how we see people who write code and work with computers. Women are continuously discriminated against in professional and informal technical settings, they are underrepresented, underpaid, and underestimated. In this talk, Dr Brooke will draw on her research into programming and technical cultures to offer valuable insights into how we can work toward greater diversity in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Dr. Siân JM Brooke
Leverhulme Fellow in Computational Social Science
www.sianbrooke.com
@SianJMBrooke
Dr Siân Brooke (she/her) is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford), based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the Department of Methodology. With a background in political philosophy, sociology, and data science, she focuses on how technologies perpetuate gendered inequality and what interventions are effective against online discrimination. Siân’s passion for diversity in computing extends beyond her academic work, to activism, and engagement with outreach programmes focused on greater diversity in programming.
Black History Month Celebration with Candace Doby
“Courage at Work”
Date: Thursday, February 24, 2022
Time: 12 noon
The African American Employee Resource Group (AAERG) and the IDEA Office are pleased to announce that Candace Doby, speaker, author and coach, will join us for this year’s Black History Month Celebration.
Now, more than ever, organizations need leaders to act with courage. They need leaders who are willing and able to take worthwhile risks, navigate through uncertainty, and withstand challenges in order to position their organizations for growth in a constantly shifting corporate and non-profit world. According to research, courage is an essential leadership quality. But, when emerging leaders consider potential failure or rejection in the workplace as outcomes, they can find it difficult to choose courage — opting instead for safety and limited growth. That’s because they don’t know how to evaluate risks or leverage the internal resources they already have to face them. In this presentation, speaker and courage coach Candace Doby helps audience members discover what’s stopping them from stepping outside of their comfort zone at work and how to begin dismantling those barriers so they can take more risks — risks like having hard conversations about diversity and inclusion, showing up authentically for themselves and their teams, and challenging old systems that do not serve new workplace realities.
About Candace:
Candace Doby is an Atlanta-based speaker, author and courage coach who works with universities and organizations to help emerging leaders activate their personal courage in order to perform to their potential in school, work and life. Candace combines a decade of research on courage with her experiences leading marketing teams at Chipotle Mexican Grill, solo traveling to more than 20 countries, writing a book and starting a business. This unique combination equips her with the implementable strategies she shares with audiences to help them get out of their own way and put their mission in motion.
Candace is known for delivering those strategies with a blend of truth, love and a bit of shade to match the realness of courage, which prompts clients to refer to her in-person and virtual presence as “captivating”. Candace holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication and a master’s degree in Technology and Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also ran track.
Watch the recording of this event: BHM Celebration 2022
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