During the 2019 Annual Conference of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand in Hamilton last week, WOMEESA hosted a lunch time session focused around celebrating women in science! While there are still many issues and challenges faced by women in science, we thought it would be good to focus on the positive side of things and talk about some of the amazing achievements of women in earth and environmental science in New Zealand. The image below summarises some of the recent successes for women from all over New Zealand. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but hopefully this helps to highlight some the great work that is being done!

During the session we did a little brainstorming, asking attendees to answer the following questions and share their ideas. The aim of this was to kick start some conversations, get people sharing ideas, and hopefully start the development of online resources that are useful for WOMEESA members.

Best outreach activity, website, resource?
What’s your favourite mineral/element? (Inspired by MinCup!)
Best software/code - and where do you go to get help if you need it?
Favourite software for collaborative research? e.g., working on a manuscript, proposal with co-authors
Who’s your science heroine?

I’ve collated the answers we got onto the image here (the software ideas are combined) - thanks to everyone who came along and took part, hopefully you found this useful and got some new ideas! There is also a list at the end of this post for some of the resources that came up in the discussion, along with a list of grants that are available for women in science in New Zealand. If you know of any others, please let us know and we’ll add them to the list.