Diversity and inclusion activities in Belle II
BBelle
BELLE2-CONF-PROC-2020-014February 9, 2021
Diversity and inclusion activities in Belle II ∗ H.M. Wakeling, † S.A. De La Motte, ‡ M. Barrett, § and K. Kinoshita ¶ (The Belle II Collaboration) Department of Physics, McGill University,3600 rue University, Montr´eal, Canada Department of Physics, The University of Adelaide,Adelaide South Australia 5005 Australia Institute of Particle and Nuclear StudiesHigh Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK),1–1 Oho, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305–0801, Japan University of CincinnatiCincinnati, Ohio, 45221, U.S.A
Abstract
These proceedings accompany the Belle II talk in the Diversity and Inclusion parallel sessiondelivered during ICHEP 2020. This marks the first external presentation by the Belle II Collab-oration, in which we present some of our data and self-reported statistics regarding diversity andinclusion. We also present Belle II’s current and planned activities to aid and improve diversityand inclusion. We find that there is still a lot to be done to improve the social working environmentand population representation within our collaboration and within high energy physics.
Keywords: Belle II, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, ICHEP ∗ Presented at 40th International Conference on High Energy physics - ICHEP2020; July 28- August 6, 2020;Prague, Czech Republic (virtual meeting) † Speaker; Electronic address: [email protected] ‡ Electronic address: [email protected] § Electronic address: [email protected] ¶ Electronic address: [email protected] a r X i v : . [ phy s i c s . e d - ph ] F e b ntroduction Belle II is a high energy physics collaboration based in Tsukuba, Japan. The Belle IIexperiment itself is a particle detector at an electron-positron collider, SuperKEKB. Theinstitutions that contribute to the collaboration span 4 continents. At the end of the 2019Japanese fiscal year (JFYear) Belle II had 1041 active members registered. This paper willintroduce the Belle II collaboration and our efforts to research and improve on diversityand inclusion within the collaboration and outside of it. Section 1 will present the statisticstaken from the collaboration’s membership registrations and will discuss results from amembership survey taken in 2018. Section 2 will exhibit some of the actions Belle II hasbeen taking, and will take, to promote diversity and inclusion.
1. THE CURRENT CLIMATE AT BELLE II1.1. Belle II collaboration demographics
This section analyses the demographics of Belle II registration data from the Belle IImember registration platforms from 2011 - 2019. In 2017, Belle II migrated from a previoussystem, maintained by the Belle II secretariat, to the Belle II Membership ManagementSystem (B2MMS), maintained by Belle II Collaborative Services; due to this migration,results for 2017 may appear anomalous and should not be taken as indicative of real trends.Within the B2MMS, it is compulsory for a member to submit their name, title, gender,email, institution and membership category (i.e. Ph.D. student, faculty, etc.). The possibleselections available for gender are: ’Male’, ’Female, ’Other’, and Unspecified. Here weacknowledge the issues often perpetuated in this form of data taking with respect to agender binary. Additionally, in the following figures it is necessary to combine ‘other’ and‘unspecified’ into one category as underrepresented persons are easily identifiable due tolow statistics. We as a collaboration wish to maintain and pursue true anonymity of ourmembership data.In recent years Belle II has seen a distinct membership increase, approximately doublingmembers between the years 2011 to 2019. Within this, the percentage of female identifyingmembers increased from 12.2% to 15.6%, shown in Figure 1. Though statistically significant,the difference of these two numbers shows the increase in the percentage of women membersto be approximately 0.4% every year. Women are significantly underrepresented (equalpopulation representation at 50% is displayed as a dashed line in the percentage plot ofFigure 1). The current rate of increase is too modest to reach gender parity by 2030, whenBelle II expects to have reached its target dataset of 50 ab − .We next compare the gender of collaborators by region they work in, based on their reg-istered institution. One particularly interesting takeaway from this Figure 2 is the compar-ison between two regions or countries with similar representation within the collaboration.Comparing Japan, which represents 16% of the collaboration, to Northern America whichrepresents 17% of the collaboration, we can see that Japan has a higher representation ofwomen than Northern America, 17% compared to 9% respectively. Within Belle II, therepresentation of women as a percentage drops as their career progresses from postgraduateto permanent faculty, shown in Figure 3. The under-representation of women increases withincreasing seniority.Figure 4 shows the percentage of women in recognized involvement in the collaboration2 N o . o f c o ll a b o r a t o r s ICHEP
Belle II
Unspecified+otherMaleFemale % W o m e n FIG. 1: The number and gender ofBelle II Collaborators, from years 2011to 2019. Data taken from Belle IImembership declaration, where ‘other’refers to non-binary gender identityand ‘unspecified’ refers to undeclaredgender information. N o . o f c o ll a b o r a t o r s ICHEP
Belle II
N = 1041
Unspecified+otherMaleFemale J a p a n A s i a ( e x c l . J a p a n ) E . E u r o p e M e d i t e rr a n e a n N . A m e r i c a N . E u r o p e S . H e m i s p h e r e % W o m e n FIG. 2: The number of collaboratorsof the Belle II Collaboration by regionand gender. When compared tosimilar graphs produced by theATLAS Collaboration [2] we see thatwe have a much larger proportion ofcollaborators from Asian institutionsthan ATLAS. Japan alone contributes16% of the collaboration, so isseparated from the ‘Asia’ region forclearer presentation.by year. The trend in this figure shows, again, a small increase over the last 8 years of datacollection, but leaves a lot of room for improvement. Internal talks are often given by thosein leadership roles such as group chairs. These positions have a low percentage of femalerepresentation, therefore the fact that there are even fewer women doing internal talks isnot surprising. This figure does show that overall there is an upwards trend, but again thistrend is not enough to reach proportional gender representation of our collaboration in thenear future.
A Belle II membership survey for the physicists of the collaboration was conducted in2018. This survey was inspired by a survey performed by LHCb and is a climate surveyasking participants for qualitative and quantitative data. It took approximately 6 months toget 244 responses from the collaboration, approximately 30% of the registered collaborationmembers at that time. In conducting the poll, the gender representation and career stagewas monitored and strong efforts were made to get responses from our junior collaborators.This resulted in an approximately representative sample of responses. Figure 5 shows theposition representations for the 2018 membership survey, compared to the B2MMS FY2019.3 N o . o f c o ll a b o r a t o r s ICHEP
Belle II
N = 1041
Unspecified+otherMaleFemale u n d e r g r a d p o s t g r a d f a c u l t y : t e r m - b a s e d f a c u l t y : p e r m a n e n t t e c h n i c a l % W o m e n FIG. 3: The number of collaborators ofthe Belle II Collaboration by positionand gender.
JFYear % W o m e n ICHEP
Belle II
All MembersDelivered Talk (External)Delivered Plenary (Internal)Leadership:SeniorLeadership: Role
FIG. 4: The percentage of people in thespecified roles or recognised involvementwho identify as women.Due to the nature of surveys - especially optional surveys - sample biasing must be consideredwhilst analysing the results. Response biasing must also be considered due to the phrasingof the questions and answers.FIG. 5: The collaborators who replied to the Belle II membership survey (left)and the B2MMS 2019 membership (right) by position. The categories recordedare not parallel between the records, therefore there is overlap between somecategories.Belle II learned a lot from the climate survey, including the fact that approximately25% of those that took this survey have, at some point in their career, withdrawn fromconsideration for a leadership role at Belle II (implicitly or explicitly) because of the impactit would have on their family life. This leads to the conclusion that the Belle II collaborationshould work on being more inclusive towards family life.4 . BELLE II DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION ACTIONS
Being such a large, culturally diverse collaboration encourages Belle II to have a code ofconduct in which we describe how we expect our members to conduct themselves. Belle IIincluded the first iteration of the code of conduct in the Belle II bylaws in October 2017 andthen updated them in 2018. The code of conduct enshrines principles related to researchpractice and also fostering a diverse and inclusive collaboration and it reads as follows:”The Belle II collaboration is committed to fostering an open, diverse, and in-clusive working environment that nurtures growth and development of all, andbelieves that an array of values, interests, experiences, and cultural viewpointsenriches our learning and our workplace. Thus, members shall not engage inviolent, harassing, sexist, racist, or discriminatory behaviour.”The code of conduct is reiterated at the tri-annual Belle II collaboration meetings during aDiversity plenary and any diversity meetings. Alongside the code of conduct, two positionsof diversity officer were created in October 2018. Their positions exist: • To promote an inclusive environment within the collaboration; • To provide a safe and confidential point of contact for any collaborator to report anyissues, particularly those related to discrimination, bullying, or harassment within thecollaboration; • To ensure that persons from marginalised groups are appropriately considered forpositions of responsibility in the collaboration and are supported in their careers; • To encourage and publicize the collaboration’s events and efforts promoting equity.Belle II uses its active social media platforms to raise awareness of diversity and inclusionevents such as International Women’s Day, LGBTSTEM Day, and Colour Blind AwarenessDay. The posts are always published in both Japanese and English. Belle II aims toalways post images that show the diversity that we have within the collaboration and infuture plans to publish a series of posts on our collaborators: their position, passions, andexperiences. In 2019, Belle II became an official supporter of LGBTSTEM Day, throughunanimous endorsement of our Institutional Board. Belle II changed its profile picture forthe day to a logo with an LBGTQ+ rainbow flag background, and also made a skin availablefor profile pictures on Facebook. We encourage other research institutions to support eachLGBTSTEM day.In our efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in our collaboration, we must alwaysconsider the safety of our members. A collaborator voiced a legitimate concern about havinga photo of members alongside the LGBTQ+ rainbow logo in the same post which could beunderstood as promoting LGBTQ+. This could be detrimental for the safety or situationof participants originating from countries with laws against LGBTQ+ actions. Belle II doesnot post faces with logos without explicit consent that it is safe for them to do so on socialmedia.Belle II has been working to improve certain language used in computing and physics.In general, we wish to avoid anything that might cause distress or feelings of exclusion toour collaborators. In particular we are considering words used with severe racial overtones.Our computing and software groups have taken steps to remove and/or phase out the use5f the words ‘slave’ and ‘master’ from our code. This has not been straightforward due toexternal software use, but we have been able to remove ‘slave’ for our build machines fornew operating systems and code releases since the beginning of 2020, and we are revisiting‘master’ now that GitHub is replacing their use of this word. It is now possible for anyone tochange personal repositories to use more inclusive language[1]. Belle II is also encouragingalternatives for the terms ‘blacklist/whitelist’.The planned procedure to record collision data between February and July 2020 at BelleII changed rapidly due to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to continuecollecting data and still broke the world instantaneous luminosity record thanks to the hardwork of the local and remote workers [3]. Belle II tried to alleviate some stress caused bythe pandemic, the extra work hours and the isolation in the form of snacks and ready mealsto show appreciation for shifters and to also increase safety by mitigating the need to go tosupermarkets between shifts. We also held some remote social events for example an end ofrun party on Zoom to celebrate our work and boost moral.Other important actions worth noting: • Implementing colour blind friendly screens in our control room. Encourage analystsand users to use colour blind friendly colours in plots. All plots in this conference notehave used colour blind friendly colour schemes. • The Belle II Secretariat worked to make childcare easier to find as it has been histor-ically difficult to find in Japan. • KEK has improved the bathroom provision for women in the dormitory and is workingon improving the situation in experimental areas. There was a request submitted bythe International Board of Belle II for a gender neutral barrier free bathroom by ourcontrol room; COVID-19 delayed progress but construction started in September 2020. • Belle II members help proofread Japanese to English translations. Often translationsor cultural connotations evolve quicker than KEK document revisions and there maybe archaic or outdated terms used. • Belle II has asked external food providers for more inclusive food options for dietaryrestrictions and requirements during collaboration meetings. There is pushback asthese meals generally do not sell as well.We will continue to raise awareness within the collaboration through social posts andemails. In particular we wish to normalise making things accessible, for example by en-couraging colour blind friendly plots, or recommending to turn cameras on when speaking in video conference calls; more of us are experiencing zoom fatigue but video conferencingis particularly trying without facial cues for some with, for example, dyslexia, autism andADHD. Finally, we will continue to encourage and normalise putting self care first.We thank the Belle II Secretariat, Belle II Collaborative Services, and the Belle II Speak-ers Committee for their invaluable assistance and for maintaining Belle II membership andconference statistics. 6
1] Renaming the default branch from master. https://github.com/github/renaming . Accessed:19.10.2020.[2] Studies related to gender and geographic diversity in the ATLAS Collaboration. TechnicalReport ATL-GEN-PUB-2016-001, CERN, Geneva, Jul 2016.[3] Matthew Chalmers. KEK reclaims luminosity record. https://cerncourier.com/a/kek-reclaims-luminosity-record/ . Accessed: 19.10.2020.. Accessed: 19.10.2020.