WiC 7-year anniversary!

Posted by Penny Maher

WiC 7-year anniversary!

Happy anniversary Women in Climate network. To celebrate, the founders of WiC, Penny Maher and Freya Garry, gave a presentation about how WiC evolved over the years, why they founded it in the first place, and their highlights from the well over 80 WiC events.

When Penny joined the University of Exeter as a Post-Doc in 2017, there were few women in the Mathematics department. Only one full professor was a woman. Penny’s interview panel consisted of 6 men. Freya joined the University as a Post-Doc soon after. Both saw the lack of representation of women and lack of community as an issue, so they decided to create a network. They called it Women in Climate based on their identity, however, the idea was and is to welcome everyone, be intersectional, and understand “climate” in broad terms. In addition to creating the community, their aim was to increase visibility of women – on the University’s webpage, on Twitter, through blog posts that summarise the discussion of WiC events, or for dates such as the International Women’s Day (IWD).

The first WiC event in April 2018 was a discussion about “What challenges lie ahead?”. In the early days of WiC, the events took place on a Friday afternoon, for which people gathered in person in the common room to discuss a topic and which included snacks and refreshments. When Freya moved to the Met Office in 2019, the network started to include more Met Office employees, who joined events and gave presentations. However, the distance between both locations remained a challenge for in-person participation. During the Covid-19 pandemic, WiC events moved fully online to keep the community going. More frequent meetings such as “Shut up and Write” sessions were added. Since the end of the pandemic, WiC events are hybrid with in-person meet-ups at both organisations as well as online participants. Penny and Freya reflected that it was difficult to get the in-person component going again, but on the other hand that the hybrid format is more inclusive and strongly increased the number of participants per meeting to often more than 50.

WiC has run a range of events over the years, including group discussions, socials, trainings, film screenings, or book discussions. On our website we write about all past events and provide blogs after the events. For example, here is our blog on raising kids and doing science and Discussion on the Gender Pay Gap. There have also been special events and engagement for example for IWD including WiC members’ stories or a panel discussion run at the COP26 Science Pavillion about “What women bring to climate science”. Freya’s personal highlight was having Dr. Kate Marvel as a speaker in the Inspiring Science Inaugural Lectures.

WiC events involved many guest speakers to share their experiences, answer questions, and lead discussions about topics they felt passionate about. This was essential to achieve this diversity and variety of WiC events. This was also highlighted by the different WiC events that participants of the 7-year anniversary flagged as their personal favourite. There have been recurring topics over the years, such as mentoring and allyship, which continue to matter to the WiC community.

Apart from the contribution of our wonderful guest speakers, WiC also had support from both the University of Exeter and Met Office, for example through funding from the institutions, winning Researcher Led Initiative funding, or by creating joint events with departments. The increase in impact by the WiC network can be seen in the high number of participants and lively engagement in events. WiC has thus contributed to both organisations’ EDI efforts. For Freya and Penny personally, the impact has been two-fold. On the one hand, organising WiC events has created the community they wish existed when they joined the University and enabled them to broaden their impact. On the other hand, organising events reduced the effective time spent on research, which may in the long run have negative effects. For many years, Freya and Penny led the WiC events with 1-2 helpers, until in 2024 they formalised a WiC committee consisting of 8 people (5 at the University, 3 at the Met Office). This spreads the time spent on organising events on more people and enables all committee members to better focus on individual events.

The anniversary event was followed by in-person networking with cake separately at both organisations. Thanks to everyone who joined the celebration of 7 years Women in Climate and everyone joining and contributing over the years!