Page 42 - Plant Canada 2024 Proceeding

PLANT CANADA 2024

As a society, we continue to strongly promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Some of our
recent accomplishments that have been implemented are,

Enhanced diversity of CSPB-SCBV Executive: Compared to the composition of our executive
committee in 2021 (42% women and 0% members of a visible minority), our current Executive
(50% women) is quite diverse and is made up of a mix of BIPOC (33%) and Caucasian (67%)
members. We have changed from 0% representation of visible minorities to 33%. Our aim was
to achieve 22% representation from members of visible minorities by 2030, and we have been
able to exceed the 22% target in less than one year. Representation of BIPOC in the 12
committees of CSPB-SCBV has also increased from 17% to 28%, exceeding our proposed 22%
target by 2030.

French versions of the CSPB-SCBV bulletin, emails and conference communications: Through
the Executive’s efforts, new opportunities for graduate students and post-doc involvement in
CSPB-SCBV were created by introducing a column dedicated to their voices in the bi-annual
bulletin, offered in both official languages. The bulletin is in both French and English and we are
also striving to send out emails and conference communications in both languages as well.

New EDI-informed conference handbook that includes a collection of guidelines and resources
to promote more inclusive conference planning. This handbook will be posted on the CSPB-
SCBV webpage and will also be provided to the conference organizers during the planning
stages.

New inclusive guidelines for judging posters and oral presentations at both national and regional
conferences to reduce any potential bias while judging. These guidelines were implemented in
the 2021 ERM, WRM meetings, 2022 joint ASPB/CSPB-SCBV PB22 meeting, the 2023 CSPB-
SCBV AGM at Laval University, WRM 2023 and ERM 2023 meetings.

Reformed nomination process for several society awards, so that candidates are also able to
self-nominate without a need for seeking their nomination by another member of the society.

First ever EDI plenary session at Plant Biology 22: At PB22, CSPB-SCBV actively participated
in the first ever Joint CSPB-SCBV- ASPB EDI Plenary session entitled, Science Without
Borders. Our CSPB-SCBV speakers, Edel Pérez-López (Laval) and Allison MacDonald (Laurier)
certainly made us proud with their exceptional EDI-focussed seminars. CSPB-SCBV EDI
committee chair, Marcus Samuel, chaired the plenary session which also included other
science-based talks from ASPB members on species migration, domestication, and culture.

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