Creating More Inclusive Scientific Events: Seminar Series

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in scientific events including workshops, meetings, panels, seminars, and conferences within the broader scientific community positively contributes to science and innovation. Despite its importance, DEI is often lacking in scientific meetings. For example, in the AGU Fall Meeting, 93% of invited abstracts are comprised of senior scientists–a career stage with fewer women overall (Ford et al. 2018). Women from underrepresented minorities have even less of a chance of being invited or assigned a talk than non-underrepresented women at the AGU Fall Meeting (Ford et al. 2019). Feelings of exclusion, barriers (i.e., safe space bathrooms and childcare centers), and a lack of keynote talks by women in scientific meetings is all too-common (Pendergrass et al. 2019; Kappel & Thompson 2014). Given the persistent lack of DEI in scientific events within the geoscience community, it is critical to educate the scientific community about this issue in order to ameliorate it and create more inclusive scientific events in the future. 

The goals of this seminar series are to:

1. Educate members in the scientific community about the lack of DEI in scientific events

2. Provide a forum to discuss these issues

3. Provide tools to improve DEI in scientific events

Resources:

• Inclusive Scientific Meetings, 500 Women Scientists, Pendergrass et al. (2019)

• Gender inequity in speaking opportunities at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Ford et al. (2018)

• Women from some underrepresented minorities are given too few talks at world’s largest Earth-science conference, Ford et al. (2019)

Contact

• Erin Dougherty, PI, doughert@ucar.edu

• Naoki Mizukami, mizukami@ucar.edu

• Yifan Cheng, yifanc@ucar.edu

• Rachel McCrary, rmccrary@ucar.edu

• Andrew Newman, anewman@ucar.edu 

• Ethan Gutmann, gutmann@ucar.edu