Our Commitment to Inclusivity

IGEM Guelph has taken proactive steps to ensure a safe, inclusive space where all voices are valued. By incorporating mandatory diversity training, actively recruiting students from diverse backgrounds, celebrating and promoting the visibility of minorities in STEM, and advocating for accessible education, we aim to create a network of support and respect. Our projects focus on removing barriers in STEM, empowering every team member and scientist to contribute to groundbreaking innovation and advancing inclusivity in the field.

Our Team

This year marked the second year that our team required all members to complete training on inclusivity modules. These modules were “Principles of Belonging: Anti-Oppression and Anti-Racism” and “Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Awareness Training Module for Students”. The two modules were required to be completed by new members within one month of onboarding or before their first lab training date (if applicable), whichever came first.

Our inclusivity training follows the University of Guelph prioritization of openness, respectfulness and inclusivity in workspaces through their Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) framework ¹. It also reflects our team’s values of diversity, belonging and representing our community.

This value of inclusivity is further reflected within the university’s SERM (Student Events & Risk Management) training, which student groups are required to complete to host events. The training covers safe and responsible event planning so that student groups can host accessible and inclusive events. Several leads have also completed this training.

Furthermore, our team sent out a survey to members within the team which was completely voluntary and anonymous, and participants could choose which questions to answer. If they had any concerns, they could reach out to an executive. Here are some of the results:

This diversity is reflective at all levels (executive team, team leads, and general members) with more than half of the executive identifying as female.

It is our team’s hope to see minorities being represented and highlighted in STEM rather than silenced as minorities in STEM have historically been. To achieve this, we have implemented stronger protocols within our team to ensure that our team remains a safe space for minorities and remains diverse. We will not permit, under any circumstances, any sort of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc, and should any member participate in such behaviour that is not representative of the views of the team, they will immediately be removed from the team.

Recruitment Policies

In addition to team-wide inclusivity policies, iGEM Guelph thrives on the diversity of backgrounds, valuing the unique perspectives that each member brings to the table. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across the Arts, Sciences, Business, Agriculture, and Engineering, we take a more holistic approach to problem-solving, leveraging a wide range of viewpoints to drive innovative solutions.

With approximately 70 members from various colleges across campus, our team is stronger through this diversity.

Minority Focused Outreach

A theme in our outreach that we wanted to continue from last year is minority focused outreach and making STEM and synthetic biology accessible for minorities. We continued our PRIDE month series from last year, however instead of focusing on famous LGBTQ+ scientists and STEM professionals, we focused on LGBTQ+ professors and individuals at Guelph. We created a Happy Pride post that went up at the start of Pride month and will be kept up until next year, when that month’s PRIDE post will replace the pin. This pin will make our support of the LGBTQ+ community visible and make those who are in the community (or allies) know that we support them and that our team is a safe space, thus encouraging more LGBTQ+ individuals (and allies) to take part in iGEM within our team.

Furthermore, our PRIDE series directly combats the issue of lack of visibility and discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in STEM as we are showing their success and uplifting their voices by sharing words of encouragement to STEM students ^2,3.As part of our instagram outreach, we created a short post commemorating International Women’s Day.

International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8th and honors the achievements of women while raising awareness for the ongoing struggle for gender equality and women’s rights. As such, we believe that using our platform to celebrate the achievements of our female members and promote opportunities for women within iGEM is important to encourage more women to pursue STEM ⁴.

Project

We recognize that financial barriers often make science inaccessible, leading to misconceptions, especially in low-GDP countries and lower socioeconomic classes (Logullo et al., 2024; Salager-Meyer, 2008)^5,6. One aspect of our project was to target this inaccessibility barrier by providing accessible education over Instagram and through our other Education projects. We created online resources and short posts educating on our project field, synthetic biology and our ongoing research. These resources used common terminology and explained complex terms that science papers often use, which the average citizen may not understand. For more information about these projects, check out our Education page.

An important aspect of our project was addressing physical accessibility in lab environments. Our dry lab team developed lab designs aimed at modifying lab equipment to be more inclusive, as many labs present barriers for students with disabilities, leading to their underrepresentation in STEM ^7,8. Through our Human Practices work, which is more extensively detailed on our Human Practices page, our team brought awareness to the accessibility issues that some students and researchers experience and worked towards creating a more inclusive lab space. There was also an “Accessibility in the Lab” survey created and sent out to labs and students across campus to gain input from those directly impacted by lab inaccessibility. To learn more about the accessibility, focused designs, please check out our Hardware page.

Looking Towards the Future

At iGEM Guelph we are actively working towards dismantling barriers. As we plan for our future teams, we will implement the insight and feedback we received from our “Accessibility in the Lab” survey to improve our own lab space and create a more accessible and inclusive environment. Furthermore, we will continue to require our whole team to complete inclusivity training modules and tentatively require all leads to complete SERM training as it requires students to consider the accessibility needs of those who attend the events hosted by our team. This will be further supported by requiring all exec members to complete the accessibility provisions module offered by our university to ensure that our events and team activities are accessible for all to provide a more inclusive environment.