Welcome to The Trant Team

@andrechemist I never made the connection of plumber with plumbum. As a classically-trained liberal arts high schooler with lots of latin...that's embarrassing. Always learning.

@LAIRUBC Yes, I agree they are tightly intertwined. To me inclusiveness takes the equity situation and involves putting systems in place to ensure we value the individual's experience and make sure they are not othered based on it. Perhaps more focus on the sense of belonging.

@ProfFJWilliams I know. This is not a revolutionary thought. Except when it is to some.

@RossLabUC So that you can say no? Might feel good to say no on your birthday...

But I worry that EDI might drift towards stamp-collecting. To their credit, the Tricouncil in Canada explicitly set up their criteria to prevent this. I hope they hold the line.

But diversity means fuck-all if the equity isn't in place. If you don't need equity to support your diversity, then you don't really have diversity. You have a bunch of people from similar backgrounds who might superficially be different.

I know I am not an expert. My thoughts on this are constantly evolving as I learn both from experts and from experience. But I am sure that I worry about EDI becoming a bean-counting exercise. Diversity is easy to count.

But that isn't automatic. They need to be supported as they get used to this. They often have holes in their training/education. This isn't on them. It's on the systems they went through. Addressing that is equity.

When suddenly they can focus on hard science problems instead of hard trying to figure out how to get the stuff to do the science problems (not to mention personal, political, bigotry or security problems), unsurprisingly they tend to be far more productive and creative.

Because, if I give that person access to X, and train them in X, they could likely blow my socks off with what they will be able to do with it. People who have faced nothing but adversity tend to thrive when some of that is removed.