Inclusivity in STEM
It is widely acknowledged that minorities in STEM tend to be underrepresented. For instance, Hispanic and Black people represent respectively 8% and 9% of the workforce in STEM [1] . In terms of underrepresented genders, women account for only 41% of STEM employment in Europe [2] . However, diversity in the scientific community is fundamental because creating an assorted environment allows different perspectives, experiences, and ideas to be brought together [4] . For this exact reason, a more inclusive group appears to succeed more than a homogeneous one [4][5] thus making companies and teams more innovative and competitive [3] .
Our team is primarily composed of women (4 out of 7), which sets an example for all young girls who want to pursue a career in Science . In fact, often women are not incentivized to pursue any STEM career due to a lack of role models and examples to follow [6] . Our goal is to show that pursuing a career in a scientific field is certainly possible for women and that their input is often fundamental when developing projects and working in teams. Additionally, despite being an iGEM team based in the Netherlands, we are a mix of different nationalities. In fact, 1/3rd of our team is international, which proved fundamental in the development of the project as different points of view were brought together.
Inclusivity in SPYKE
Since the start of project SPYKE, we made a great effort to be as inclusive and unbiased as possible (i.e not addressing only a certain target group to obtain the desired result). For example, despite it being well known from news and media that most victims of drug-facilitated sexual assault are women, we opened up our project to men as much as possible too. We shared our survey to men and women equally and took into account every opinion, as men can also fall victim to drink spiking.
To have a broader view than only our “Dutch perspective” and therefore allow stakeholders with different origins and backgrounds to contribute to our project, we translated our survey into several different languages. Indeed, with the help of other iGEM teams we translated our survey into Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and Danish. (if you want to read more about this, go to the collaborations page ). We valued these collaborations highly as not only were we able to work alongside multiple other iGEM teams, but it also allowed us to gather the opinions of people from other countries and with differing backgrounds, including people that do not have access to higher education or are regularly not involved in science.
In addition, to overcome language barriers, we also translated our promotional video to Dutch because, as a team based in the Netherlands, we could involve more laymen in our project and simultaneously introduce them to synthetic biology.