To celebrate Pride Month 2025, we are excited to share a series of blogs and podcasts highlighting useful articles and resources for LGBTQIA+ ecologists and researchers. In each post, the authors behind these resources explain what they are, how they came to produce them, and why they are important. 

Abbey Feuka (she/her) 

As conservationists, we tend to think a lot about biodiversity within the ecosystems we study and manage. More recently, more of us have been thinking about the diversity of people who work in, benefit from, or are affected by conservation actions. It’s not a surprise to most of us that the field of conservation has not historically been diverse by any measure. Conservation in the Global North especially has been largely shaped by white, cisgender, straight men, with the forces of colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia making it difficult for others to break into the field.  

These types of bias and gatekeeping are the opposite of inclusion. Without inclusion, there is no diversity, because even if marginalized groups join the conservation community, they likely will not stay if they don’t feel like they belong there or are not accepted for their entire selves. My colleagues and I wanted to break down these expansive forces and learn more about the specific barriers to inclusion in our field of conservation, and what practices are most supportive to people in marginalized groups. 

As members and allies to the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, questioning, intersex, and asexual, and more) community, my colleagues and I wanted to focus specifically on the experience of LGBTQIA+ conservationists in North America, where we work and live. We wanted to give members of the community an opportunity to share their stories from working in a field that often requires us to travel to remote locations for field work, interact with colleagues at conferences, and communicate with stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds. My coauthors and I had our own experiences (positive and negative) with inclusion as LGBQTIA+ conservationists, but we were curious how others’ experiences differed from our own and how those changed with intersecting identities. Our goal was to use this feedback from the LGBQTIA+ conservation community to create a clearer path forward for making conservation more inclusive to a diversity of identities.  

With this goal in mind, we developed a survey to determine the factors that influence feelings of safety, belonging, and inclusion in conservation and sent it out to both a general conservation listserv and a listserv for a LGBTQIA+ working group within a professional conservation organization to compare the experience of the LGBQTIA+ community against the cisgender and heterosexual conservationists. We were interested in non-LGBTQIA+ responses as well for a few reasons.  

First, we wanted to compare how LGBQTIA+ experiences working in conservation compared to those who do not identify as LGBTQIA+. We hypothesized that LGBTQIA+ conservationists would report lower frequencies of feeling safe, a sense of belonging, and being included as their non-LGBTQIA+ counterparts based on the historical makeup of the field. Second, we were curious how non-LGBTQIA+ conservationists felt about the state of the field itself, and how inclusive it was to those who hold LGBTQIA+ identities, to determine if there are disparities in perception of the problem of inclusion itself.  

The LGBTQIA+ community encompasses many identities, so we analyzed our results both from the perspectives of gender identity and from sexual orientation. We referred to conservationists who identified as genderqueer, gender nonconforming, questioning, nonspecific, genderfluid, transgender, agender, 2-spirit Indigenous, or intersex as gender expansive. For those who identified as bisexual, queer, lesbian, gay, asexual, pansexual, omnisexual, questioning, or non-heterosexual, we refer to these conservationists as queer+. We were curious how these aspects of identity affected feelings of safety, belonging, and inclusion, both independently and together.  

We found that non-LGBTQIA+ respondents overestimated the degree to which queer+ respondents felt included in the field of conservation by 5% and gender expansive respondents by 18%. We interpreted this to mean non-LGBQTIA+ conservationists may not fully grasp the experiences of those identifying as LGBQTIA+. As we suspected, LGBQTIA+ respondents’ feelings of safety and belonging were up to 50% lower in most conservation work settings compared to non-LGBTQIA respondents, with the lowest frequencies reported by gender expansive respondents. Holding both queer+ and gender expansive identities simultaneously had the strongest effects on feelings of safety and belonging when compared to race, age, workplace type (e.g., academia vs government, private, and nonprofit work), and political leaning of the respondent’s workplace.  

When asked about multiple workplace settings in conservation, gender expansive respondents felt the least safe at conferences. Gender expansive respondents reported feeling safe and that they belonged at conferences less than 50% of the time spent attending on average. Meanwhile, queer+ respondents felt the lowest sense of safety and belonging when being in public for work (e.g., fieldwork), averaging around 60% for both metrics.   

We gave LGBTQIA+ conservationists a chance to tell their stories regarding feelings of safety, belonging, and inclusion in long-form responses. They indicated the lack of safety and belonging related to direct experiences of bullying, concerns around safety in rural settings, and around not being able to express their authentic selves. Others reported colleagues not understanding their identities and not knowing how to discuss LGBQTIA+ identities respectfully at work.   

The most frequent support resources used by LGBTQIA+ conservation scientists included one-on-one support from peers, mentors and external collaborators, support groups, and wellness and counseling services outside of work. In summary, LGBTQIA+ conservationists preferred in-person support over virtual options, but virtual options should not be dismissed as a way of connecting conservationists to support resources when they lack in-person community.  

Surprisingly, we did not find race to be a strong indicator of feelings of safety and belonging in the North American LGBTQIA+ conservation community. In fact, we found gender expansive conservationists that were also people of color reported increased feelings of safety and belonging when working outside their office or campus. This is contrary to other research reporting feelings of lowered inclusion among people of color in conservation. This intersection of these identities was small in our sample size (<10), and the experience of LGBTQIA+ people of color working in conservation definitely deserves to be explored further.  

Though our sample size limited our exploration of intersectional identities, we were delighted by our 27% response rate, and the fact that 29% of those respondents were queer+ and 9% were gender expansive. Though we had to group specific gender identities and sexual orientations into these broad groups, we were able to detect strong differences between gender expansive and cisgender conservationists, as well as queer+ and heterosexual conservationists.  

Our work provides a small window into the experience of LGBTQIA+ conservationists in North America, giving voice to a group who has been historically silenced and informing paths for inclusion. We have a long way to go in making our field more inclusive to those who do not identify as cisgender or heterosexual, but the first step is a clear understanding of the problem at hand (which we found many non-LGBTQIA+ conservationists to underestimate).  

We hope our work serves as a conservation starter for laboratories, offices, and classrooms to start reflecting and discussing their culture of inclusivity or lack thereof. Our work is a drop in a sea of other work done by and about LGBTQIA+ conservationists, and we provide a table of resources in our paper for those looking to learn more about ways to support the LGBTQIA+ community. We also want LGBTQIA+ conservationists to know you are not only seen and heard, but that your voice matters, both in conservation decisions and in the larger conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion in conservation. We need your voice more than ever, and there are other conservationists working to make the field a better, more inclusive place for you. 

Check out more blog posts in our Pride series here. If you would like to contribute a post yourself, please get in touch.