Gender and career-stage distribution at EGU General Assemblies

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is the leading organisation for Earth, planetary and space science research in Europe. The annual EGU General Assembly is the largest and most prominent European geosciences event, attracting over 16,000 scientists from all over the world in the year 2019. 
This presentation aims to present the results from gender and career stage distribution at the last (2015 to 2019) EGU General Assemblies (GA).  Data and statistics will be presented not only on the attendance, but also to the role in the general assembly, i.e. author, convener, presenter.
As expected, given the academic history of the geosciences as a male - dominated field, a gender gap is observed, with an overall gender breakdown of EGU GA’s attendance of about one third of women and two thirds of men; on the other hand, the fraction of female attendees is very slightly but constantly increasing in the years (and not only among early-career scientists). The percentage of female attendees in fact passed from 32.6% in 2015 to 33.8% in 2018 (the percentage in 2019 was even greater, but in that year the number of those who provided gender information dropped from 17% to 30%, so we consider the last year the less informative for the gender analysis).
In addition, when looking at organisational roles, much steeper is the increase in the fraction of female conveners: in fact the percentage of female conveners was 30.1% in 2018, that is much closer to that of the overall female attendees, whereas it was about 25.9% only 3 years earlier.
Looking at career stages, the percentage of early-career scientists among the overall attendees is substantially increased in the last years (from 43% in 2015 to 52% in 2019), and also in this case, the fraction of early-career conveners steeply raised too (from 30% in 2015 to 43% in 2019).
The analysis on the number of conveners, even if there is still a skew towards male and mid-career or senior scientists, shows that there has been a noticeable improvement in the balance of gender and career-stage over the last years in terms of key-roles in the organisation of the main EGU event.
Despite such improvement in term of convenorship, more can certainly be done inside the Union, and an attempt to provide constructive indications to further steps to the target of giving equal opportunities to researchers across gender and career-stage will also be given.