The evolving diversity of the geodynamics community: Ada Lovelace workshop participants from 1987 to 2024

STEM fields in Europe and across the globe are not balanced in terms of gender, ethnic and racial groups, sexual orientation and other aspects of diversity (e.g. Fry et al. 2021, Freeman 2018). For example, in 2018, women made up over 40% of European academic staff, but in 2019 only 26.2% of full professors were women, less than 25% were heads of institutes, and only 31.1% board members (EC She figures 2021). This under-representation has caused academic institutions to implement new hiring practices, unconscious bias training, and intervention programs (e.g. Palid et al. 2023), as science and innovation thrive on diversity in expertise and experience. However, diversity varies across fields, and understanding field specific data is critical to propose and evaluate effective measures. Here, we wish to look inward and assess our own scientific discipline of computational geodynamics. We specifically use a recurring international conference in our field—now called the Ada Lovelace Workshop on Modelling Mantle and Lithosphere Dynamics—as a proxy for our field. This conference series has taken place in various European countries at a roughly two-year interval since 1987. 

For all listed attendees, we have collected gender, year of highest degree obtained, primary country and institute of affiliation at the time of the conference, presentation type and organisational role in the conference based on information available online, such as the workshop program booklets and institute, ORCID, Google Scholar and social media profiles. Using this dataset, we analysed the diversity in gender, career stage and country of affiliation of each conference overall, of the local and science organization committees and of the invited speakers. Based on the available data, we cannot make any inferences about other aspects of diversity. 

We show that over the last 38 years, the participation of women has increased from about 10% to about 35%. The percentage of women attendees has increased across all career stages, but fluctuates for established scientists. The number of invited woman speakers has also increased: whereas between 2000 and 2010, three out of the five conferences did not have any woman invitee, from 2015 to 2024, consistently more than 25% of the invited speakers were women. The number of primary countries of affiliation has approximately doubled over three decades. As expected, the majority of attendees work in Europe and a substantial fraction of participants is from North America, but contributions from scientists in Asia and Africa have increased. Given the rate over the last four decades, we project that gender equality in participants will be reached in 2040.

 

European Commission RTD, She figures 2021—Gender in research and innovation: Statistics and indicators, 2021, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/06090.

Freeman, J. (2018). LGBTQ scientists are still left out. Nature 559, 27-28.

Fry, R., Kennedy, B., & Funk, C. (2021). STEM jobs see uneven progress in increasing gender, racial and ethnic diversity. Pew Research Center, 1.

Palid, O., Cashdollar, S., Deangelo, S., Chu, C., & Bates, M. (2023). Inclusion in practice: A systematic review of diversity-focused STEM programming in the United States. Int. J. STEM Educ., 10(1), 2.