What does the postponement of a plant genetics conference in the Australian tropics have to do with the death of a Black American at the hands of US police?
They couldn't seem further apart, but there's a thread that connects them — a thread that became a lit fuse.
In late January, an Australian organiser of the International Congress on Plant Molecular Biology (IPMB), due to be held in October in Cairns, tweeted a poster.
It showed 94 faces, made up of headline speakers and session chairs.
While some people were impressed by the line-up, there was also swift criticism.
"International and no Africans!" tweeted one science communicator from Africa.
When the Congress organiser tweeted back "Look harder" and provided a link to the one African on the collage of faces, a storm of protest kicked off.
African-Americans and other people of colour, in particular, labelled the response "disrespectful" and "tokenistic".
The tweet was deleted, and profuse apologies were made, but two weeks later a key US-based organisation involved in the conference pulled their support.
And not long after, the meeting — expecting thousands of attendees — was postponed.
The organisers say the main reason for the deferral of the Congress was COVID-19 restrictions on travel. But the withdrawal of support didn't help matters.
Some suggest Australian scientists are feeling the heat of what is now a global movement against racism — and that they're "on notice" to take cultural diversity more seriously.
The backstory
The man in the hot seat of the Twitter storm was IPMB conference committee chair Josh Mylne, from Curtin University in Western Australia.
He'd been working on the conference since the start of 2018 and was proud of the diversity of faces shown in the poster he tweeted.
"We had one of the best gender balances I'd seen, career-stage diversity with younger and older scientists, so much different science — more than ever before — chairs from all around the world, including for the first time Africa and India," he told ABC RN's Science Friction.
Ros Gleadow, from the Global Plant Council, which wrote in support of the bid to have the Congress in Australia, happily retweeted Professor Mylne's poster of faces.
"They weren't all white and there was a reasonable representation from Asia," says Professor Gleadow, based at Monash University.
Most importantly, for her, there was a good proportion of women.
But then came criticisms about the representation of South Americans, Black Americans and Africans.
When Professor Gleadow looked a bit closer herself, she noticed there was no acknowledgement of country on the Congress website — an oversight she says was soon rectified.
Before Professor Mylne tweeted his poster he says he had shown it to hundreds of others, and only received positive responses.
So he was not expecting the criticisms he got.
One day as Professor Mylne was cycling home from work, his phone pinged.
When he arrived home he checked his phone and saw the tweet about there being no Africans on the poster.
Distracted as he walked into the garage, he hastily tweeted his fateful reply to "Look harder".
It was meant as a point of clarification, but instead these two words triggered a chain of events with huge ramifications.
Followers of the Congress on Twitter were angry at what they perceived to be a disrespectful tone, and started letting the organisers know.
"The problem is we had to look real hard," read one tweet.
"One from Africa (!) Inclusive, this is not," read another.
"End your tokenism," demanded another.
Another read: "Australia. Gotta love it. My god. What a joke."
In the morning, Professor Mylne realised his mistake and deleted his offensive tweet. He only found out later that this made matters even worse.
Instead of pacifying the concern, the tweet and its deletion missed the underlying concerns of the critics, and appeared to shut down any dialogue about diversity.
Was the conference leadership diverse enough? Were organisers making it affordable for people from low-income African and South American countries to attend? And were people of colour being actively prioritised over white speakers?
Professor Gleadow says "unhelpful" responses are all too easy to make on Twitter.
But others have been less forgiving.
The fallout
The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) had hired out its staff to organise the conference logistics, although they weren't involved in selecting speakers.
President-elect Gustavo MacIntosh became aware of the Twitter exchanges, some involving ASPB members.
And he was also alerted to a follow-up email the Congress leadership privately sent one Twitter critic – he says it gave the impression that it was up to people of colour to fix any problem with the diversity of speakers.
"Again it's not understanding the problem, and then compounding the problem, by just keeping the same attitude that is aggressive towards a person of colour," he says.
"I can only talk about perception," Professor MacIntosh adds. "This is how people perceive the communication. Is the person that did it trying to be aggressive? I don't know."
By this stage, things were pretty tense.
Professor Gleadow and colleagues were called in to mediate, and help the Australian and American parties issue public statements.
For its part, the IPMB's official apology acknowledged "poorly conceived responses" to the critics, and a failure to adequately include under-represented groups.
And it vowed to do better in the future.
But by this time, the damage was already done.
The American Society of Plant Biologists was under pressure from its members to take action and on February 10 it withdrew support for the Congress — citing obligations to advocate for "members from groups that have been historically marginalised".
Professor MacIntosh says the ASPB's problem was not with the diversity of speakers, but with how the Congress leadership responded to its critics.
"The criticisms could have been valid or not, but independent of this, the problem we have is what happened afterwards," he says.
"This exchange, both public and private, violated our code of conduct and our values of how we treat members and how we want to create an inclusive society for plant biology."
Scientists on notice
Using affirmative action and other measures to increase cultural and gender diversity in professions is an area of heated debate.
But for Anna-Maria Arabia of the Australian Academy of Science, diversity in science is a "no-brainer".
Besides, she says, it's "the right thing to do", and scientists are now being put "on notice" to be more inclusive.
She cites the recent case in which Australia's largest medical research foundation suspended tens of millions in funding to the University of Melbourne because of concerns over gender and cultural diversity.
"We are starting to see organisations put their money where their mouth is."
But Ms Arabia believes Australian scientists need more guidance on cultural diversity — and the Academy hopes to get government funding to help.
The complexity of diversity
Making large scientific meetings more culturally diverse is a work in progress. And getting there may sometimes be a rocky road.
For a start, there are different views on what cultural diversity means and how it should be achieved, as Professor Mylne discovered.
For example, he says some German colleagues were offended by the idea of selecting speakers according to ethnicity.
"[They said], 'We remember the last time in Germany somebody was selected based on ethnicity. We are not touching that one with a barge pole.'
Diversity Council of Australia chief executive officer Lisa Anesse says "local context matters".
She also points to the different demographic make-up of Australia compared to places like the United States.
"Lots of Asian faces is relevant in Australia."
And cultural diversity is more than just skin colour, she says.
"I think when people are making judgements about whether something is diverse enough, what they're really saying is, 'I'm looking for visible difference' … that visible difference in phenotype is one aspect … but not the only aspect."
Still, Ms Anesse says, there's "no question" that those with darker skin generally experience more significant "marginalisation, exclusion and racism".
And this is the reality behind the Black Lives Matter movement, which has triggered a global push for racial justice.
In 2020, the shocking murder of George Floyd by white policeman Derek Chauvin brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the world's attention.
The angry worldwide protests that followed compelled even scientists to get on board with rooting out "systemic racism" in their own patch.
But, Ms Annese says, despite this, Australia is lagging behind countries like the US when it comes to talking about race.
She thinks the "shame of the white Australia policy" is behind this.
And that matters when you're organising an international conference.
"When you don't have an agreed language, how do you then convene a panel of experts at a conference that is going to meet the demands of the audience who all have varying expectations?"
For Professor Mylne, the experience with the IPMB Congress has been a big learning curve.
“Diversity is incredibly important," he says.
"They’re obviously very sensitive about it in the States.
"It's going to be an increasingly important feature of meetings and their organisation in the future.”
With all that in mind, he hopes the Congress can go ahead in Cairns next year instead, with a raft of new measures to include under-represented groups.
"I think IPMB has a chance now to demonstrate best practice for organising a truly international conference," he says.
