RAL SEMINAR SERIES: DAY 1 | CONVERSATIONS ON DEI IN SCIENTIFIC EVENTS
Channel: NSF NCAR Research Applications Laboratory
Date: 2021-12-08

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in scientific events including workshops, meetings, panels, seminars, and conferences positively contributes to science and innovation.

Despite its importance, DEI is often lacking in scientific meetings. For example, in the AGU Fall Meeting from 2014–2016, 93% of invited abstracts were from 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. In 2019, a group of scientists developed a guide for creating more inclusive  scientific meetings and that guide is now in the process of being updated.