EGU24-9557, updated on 08 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-9557
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Diversity at a Small Geoscience Conference

Alice Lefebvre1 and Renée Bernhard2
Alice Lefebvre and Renée Bernhard
  • 1MARUM, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany (alefebvre@marum.de)
  • 2Faculty of Geosciences, University of Bremen, Germany

Conferences are places where intellectual and communication standards are shown. Ultimately, they can contribute to create a sense of belonging or inadequateness. However, several analyses of specific diversity measures have demonstrated that large conferences often lack diversity in terms of gender, geographic location or race. The present contribution presents an analysis of the gender, country of affiliation and student status of the participants and presenters during four instances of a small European geoscience conference, as well as the length of presentation and number and tone of questions of the latest instance of this conference. We found that women make up about one-third of participants, session chairs, invited keynote speakers, and presenters (oral and poster) on average, but percentages vary greatly from one year to the next. Students represent around 30% of participants, but over 40% of poster presenters and 28% of long presentations. In total, only half of the participants asked a question, and most of the questions were asked by senior men. Around 25% of the questions were asked with a friendly tone; the remainder were neutrally asked. Friendly questions were asked more frequently after keynote lectures and long presentations than following short talks. We suggest concrete actions that can be taken to promote the development of an inclusive and supportive environment at small conferences.

How to cite: Lefebvre, A. and Bernhard, R.: Diversity at a Small Geoscience Conference, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-9557, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-9557, 2024.

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supplementary materials version 1 – uploaded on 15 Apr 2024
  • CC1: Comment on EGU24-9557, Christine Bingen, 19 Apr 2024

    Wonderful presentation, thank you for this !

    It is really useful to have your recommendations, and as the coordinator of the G&D team of our institutes, I will propose to use your recommendations as guidelines for the organisation of conferences.

    Again, thanks for this. 

    Christine

    PS: Overall, I have the feeling that the interest for promoting G & D in geosciences has decreased with respect to the previous EGU assemblies, but the session was incredibly interesting !

    • AC1: Thanks, Alice Lefebvre, 19 Apr 2024

      Thank you for your feedback. Feel very welcome to ask if you need any more infos on the paper.
      The session was really very interesting this morning and gave me lots of ideas of new things to do.
      I am not sure if there are really less EDI interest or if the different presentations and activities are just not so well linked. I found it very hard to find our where ad when relevant EDI sessions were happening.