Fri, October 22, 2021 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM See description. Strategies for increasing the representation and success of Black Women in Oceanography – lessons learned from the Ocean Womxn programme in South Africa
Speaker: Dr. Katye Altieri is the Lead PI of Ocean Womxn, and a Senior Lecturer in the Oceanography Department at the University of Cape Town.
In 2018 the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town (UCT) created and funded an Advancing Womxn Initiative designed to build research capacity among Black South African womxn. The Ocean Womxn Fellowship program was developed in response to this call. Despite South Africa being a country with a majority Black population, at the time of the call only 12 out of 73 postgraduate students in the Department of Oceanography at UCT were Black South African womxn, and the academic staff was 100% white. The vision of Ocean Womxn is to be a prestigious research and leadership training program for Black womxn that recruits, retains, and enables the success of the next generation of Black womxn oceanographers. Here, I will present an overview of the program, with an emphasis on key lessons learned thus far. I will also discuss the key barriers to success that were identified – classified as financial, professional, and personal –, as well as the strategies implemented to overcome these barriers. Interestingly, the barriers and their potential solutions are not all unique to the South African context. Instead, many exist across the Ocean Sciences and as such, the lessons learned are broadly applicable to other programs and Universities.