Are we entering a new planetary era? A working group of scientists met in Berlin last week to start answering this Earth-shifting question. Is it farewell to our home-sweet-home of the Holocene, the past 10,000 years or so of benevolent conditions on our planet, and hello to a new geological era – tentatively named the Anthropocene – that is being forged by the environmental impacts of human activity?
It’s a fascinating question, and one that deserves a fantastic team of brains bringing their diverse perspectives into the two-year discussion process. But if this first Berlin meeting of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was anything to go by, the matter might as well be settled now: just call it the Manthropocene. Of the 29 scientists the working group listed on its website as members at the time of the meeting, only one was a woman — although the number has now been increased to five women among 36 members. And, as the map below shows, only four are based in countries outside of the OECD – tempting the nickname of the Northropocene, too.
There is more than a little irony here. Leading scientists may have the intellect to recognise that our planetary era is dominated by human activity, but they still seem oblivious to the fact that their own intellectual deliberations are bizarrely dominated by white northern male voices.
This bias is widespread, and the recently awarded Nobel prizes for science help to reinforce it. Since 1901, when the first physics, chemistry and medicine laureates were announced, 575 men have received scientific awards compared with just 17 women. This year, out of nine scientists winning science awards the physiologist May-Britt Moser was the only woman.
The Nobel memorial prize for economic sciences is even worse. Decided by a committee of nine men and one women, this year it was awarded – as so often before – to a man. Indeed, of all 75 economics laureates since the prize’s creation in 1969, only one has been a woman: the brilliant Elinor Ostrom, who powerfully challenged conventional economic wisdom. And of those 74 male economists, only two have come from outside of North America and Europe: St Lucia’s Arthur Lewis and India’s Amartya Sen. No wonder the international student movement for rethinking economics is gaining momentum.
The rewards of embracing diverse intellectual perspectives have already been proved in other arenas. After the 2008 financial crisis, it turned out that companies counting women among their board members had tended to pursue less risky strategies, much to their ultimate benefit. And, as all smart organisations know, diverse teams – in terms of gender, ethnicity and social background – take more effort to establish at first, but are more likely to be high performing, whether in business or in academia.
Is this irrelevant when it comes to the erudite world of scientific expertise? No. All scientists are, first and foremost, people. Along with their top-tier training, they bring personal experience and unique perspectives. Diversity will enrich their collective insights, too. The biggest questions deserve the best teams, and there are plenty of smart Earth-system scientists out there who happen to be women or come from the global south. If their scientific opinions are brought into the mix, the results will benefit us all.
The AWG plans to meet regularly over the coming two years, deciding in 2016 whether or not it thinks humanity’s dominance has led us to a new planetary future. Let’s hope that by then the group itself will have become far more diverse, leaving the dominance of white northern male voices in the past – buried in the fossil records of a previous geological era.