Effective policies promoting diversity in geoscience require understanding of how the values and practices of the community support the inclusion of different social groups. As sites of knowledge exchange and professional development, academic conferences are important culturing institutions that can alleviate or reproduce barriers to diversity in geoscience. This study examines diversity at a 2017 geoscience conference, the joint Canadian Geophysical Union and Canadian Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology annual meeting, through observation of participation, presentation content, and behaviour in conference sessions. Across 256 observed presentations, women constituted 28% of speakers, whereas women of colour made up only 5%. Participation rates differed between disciplinary sections, with the most populous sessions (Hydrology and Earth Surface) having the lowest percentage of women. Examination of presentation content reveals that the methods and scholarly contributions of both women and people of colour differed from the majority, suggesting an intellectual division of labour in geoscience. Examination of audience behaviours between presenters reveals how a “chilly climate” can be experienced by women and other marginalized demographics in conferences. We argue that there is more to be done than simply increasing numbers of women or other minorities in geoscientific spaces, and we suggest pathways to making geoscience a more inclusive and democratic pursuit.

The next section provides an overview of the conference, followed by a description of the methodology used in this study and the limitations of the dataset. “Benchmarking diversity in a Canadian geoscience conference” illustrates the disparity in conference participation across disciplinary sections, a disparity that would be obscured by looking at conference-scale participation numbers alone. “Characterising intellectual diversity” explores patterns in the use of different scientific methods and the framing of scientific contributions across conference demographics. Finally, “Session climates and behavioural dynamics” investigates how men, women, and people of colour experience differently composed and behaved audiences, and we consider whether a “chilly climate” ( Ratliff 2012, p. 28 ) for women and minorities exists in Canadian geoscience. The concluding section synthesizes the implications of our analysis for diversity research and policy.

Drawing on our results, we advance three interrelated arguments. First, the quantitative benchmarking of conference participation can be used to pose and answer questions about the inclusiveness of different fields in geoscience. Comparing where women and people of colour are more and less likely to be within these fields allows us to identify which environments may be more hospitable to diversity and ask why. Second, the content of conference presentations can tell us who is doing what within a given discipline, helping to understand the division of scientific labour in the geosciences. This information provides greater visibility into which elements of the scientific enterprise are accessible to women and people of colour and which elements may need deeper introspection. Third, examination of conference behaviours can reveal the mechanisms through which aspiring geoscientists confirm a sense of self, which can offer new priorities for diversity policy and practice.

The present study uses structured observations from a Canadian geoscience conference to analyse the participation of the Canadian geoscientific community across conference sessions and to observe behaviours within the conference itself. The conference—the Canadian Geophysical Union annual meeting—is one of the largest academic geoscience gatherings in Canada (with 516 registrants in 2017) and is likely reflective of dynamics in the broader North American geoscience community. This study examines how multiple aspects of identity (gender, ethnicity, career stage) affect conference participation, recognizing that multiple forms of power and bias may operate simultaneously to exclude particular bodies and identities from conference spaces. Although the observational nature of this study means that only crude indicators of identity (gender and ethnicity) are possible, limiting our ability to undertake a nuanced analysis, we believe attention to these aspects of identity is important given evidence that women of colour often face double barriers in STEM ( Ong et al. 2011 ).

The Canadian Geophysical Union’s annual meeting is primarily attended by academic participants, mainly from Canada and the US, and it is often partnered with a related organization. In 2017 the joint Canadian Geophysical Union and Canadian Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (CGU-CSAFM) conference took place 28–31 May 2017. The 2017 conference attracted 516 attendees and consisted of seven disciplinary sections: Biogeosciences, CSAFM, Hydrology, Earth Surface, Geodesy, Solid Earth, and Joint/Interdisciplinary. A total of sixty-four 90-min sessions generally consisting of six presentations each were held across all sections, with Hydrology and Earth Surface collectively containing more than half of all sessions. Topics with more than six speakers were therefore spread across multiple sessions (e.g., H06A and H06B for two sessions within the same Hydrology topic). A summary of sessions by section is shown in Table 1 . Oral presentations and plenary lectures occurred across seven different rooms in four buildings, with room capacity ranging from about 50 to 350 people. Within each room, up to four sessions occurred each day.

In general, data are reported at a population scale, and we do not statistically compare data between disciplinary sections because of low sample sizes in some sections. Where a statistical evaluation of data was possible and provided additional insight, analysis was performed using a Kruskal–Wallis one-way ANOVA.

This paper focuses solely on the formal spaces of an academic conference. However, social events, coffee breaks, and informal networking are all important places where both positive and negative conference experiences are produced. The ways in which these informal spaces and practices contribute to the culture and climate of the earth sciences deserve further investigation but are beyond the scope of this study.

In this study we employed binary categories of gender and ethnicity, and we visually identified and classified people into these categories. The category people of colour therefore refers to individuals who appeared non-white (including presenters of Middle Eastern, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and African descent), and does not provide any information on presenters’ country of birth or education. Similar categories have been employed in other studies (see Ong et al. 2011 ). We recognize that binary concepts of identity may produce a feeling of exclusion for persons who do not fit these binary categories of identity, and that person of colour is a crude indicator of people’s lived experiences of cultural or racialized exclusion. Acknowledging these limitations, we feel that the reflexive use of these indicators for purposes of promoting diversity and inclusion is beneficial here.

We acknowledge an irreducible (and, for some topics, significant) level of subjectivity in terms of how observers described and classified their observations in the conference, which poses challenges for comparison. To address this we (i) endeavored to use objective metrics such as time, audience counts, and presence/absence tick boxes; (ii) made observations in stratified pairs to enable cross-validation of certain variables and reduce disciplinary bias; and (iii) discussed and revised our observational habits before, during, and after the conference to increase reliability and replication of categorical observations.

Templates were used for note taking to ensure the systematic and consistent identification of substantive and structural elements across presentations (see also Campbell et al. 2014 ; Corson et al. 2014 ). The templates used are included in Fig. S1 . Following Corson et al. (2014) , the observation templates were built through iterative brainstorming workshops among the research team, guided by intensive reading on social science methodology, and refined through conversation with social science faculty at our university. Draft templates were tested on departmental and faculty public seminars and were subject to minor refinement midway through the first day of the conference after being tested in the first block of sessions. The final templates embody a balance between (i) seeking comparable observations (using check-boxes for prescribed categories), (ii) allowing qualitative descriptions for unique observations, and (iii) reducing cognitive demand for the observers. From the template observations a data set was compiled that included demographic, substantive, and behavioural observations for each presentation attended by the research team.

In each session observed, one researcher collected observations about the substance of the presentations (e.g., visual content, research methods, intellectual contributions), and a second researcher made structural observations about the presenter demographics (gender, ethnic affiliation, career stage) and the behavioural dynamics of the room (e.g., total audience size, number of women in the audience, length and type of questions asked). Our eight-person research team consisted of both social and geophysical scientists, and to distribute disciplinary bias the geophysical specialists were paired with non-specialists. In sessions where one of the observers’ research interests were being presented, that observer was tasked with making structural observations rather than evaluating the substance of the presentation.

Structured observation templates were used by pairs of observers who attended four parallel sessions across the duration of the conference. Data were collected for 47 out of 64 conference sessions and 256 of 337 total presentations. With the exception of a few logistical rearrangements, the sample of observed sessions was chosen using a random number generator. The disciplinary breakdown of observed presentations is within 2% of the disciplinary breakdown of presentations for the conference as a whole.

In the online registration website for the CGU-CSAFM conference, registrants were asked (on a voluntary basis) to indicate their self-identified gender, career stage, and career sector. This database of conference registrants enabled analysis of the composition of overall conference attendees, including both presenters and non-presenters. For attendees who registered physically at the conference (41 individuals), demographic details were not collected.

Demographic data from conferences provides numbers by which efforts to increase diversity can be evaluated. Comparing disciplines within a conference can help to elucidate where women and people of colour are better represented, whereas registrant-level data can be used to compare diversity between different types of conferences and between geographic locations. Although meetings of the CGU tend to attract a more academic audience, it would be interesting to examine how the demographics of a more industry-affiliated conference may compare.

In 2001 in the US, only 3% of Master’s and 5% of PhD graduates in the geosciences were members of under-represented groups (ethnic and other minorities, NSF 2001 ), spurring widespread government-funded efforts to increase diversity in the geosciences. Although attempts to increase the number of women in the geosciences have been modestly successful (for example, between 2004 and 2014, the share of Earth Science PhDs earned by women increased from 33% to 43%), the same trend has not been observed across other under-represented groups; the proportion of white PhD graduates remained constant from 2004 to 2014 ( Falkenheim et al. 2017 ).

Women and people of colour were also unevenly distributed across disciplines, and were better represented as presenters in the smaller sections such as CSAFM. As a result, larger, less diverse sections, such as Hydrology and Earth Surface, had numerous sessions that contained no women presenters or no people of colour presenting. As will be discussed later in this paper, sessions without women and people of colour presenting can exhibit a distinct climate that makes certain people feel excluded.

Analysing both the registration and presenter data revealed that despite higher registration numbers at the CGU-CSAFM conference than reflective of the wider geoscience community, women were under-represented as oral and invited presenters and over-represented as poster presenters. Given that oral and invited presentations tend to be more highly valued and reach a greater audience, women’s contributions are thus less visible in the more prominent fora of the conference.

Session-level differences illustrate the effects of this unevenness. Although 36% of registrants and 28% of speakers at the conference were female, a quarter of conference sessions had no female presenters at all. Similarly, although 21% of conference presenters were people of colour, almost a quarter of sessions (23%) had no people of colour presenting, and in five sessions more than 50% of the presenters were people of colour. Although these numbers might be expected statistically speaking, materially this lack of representation produces conference spaces where women and minorities, although present in the audience, are absent from the discussion on stage.

Across all sections, people of colour composed 21% of all presenters and 19% of female presenters. This suggests that people of colour, in particular women of colour, were poorly represented at this conference, just as they are in STEM in the US ( Williams et al. 2014 ). Data are not available to compare these proportions to other geoscience conferences; however, the geosciences have the lowest ethnic diversity of any STEM discipline ( Huntoon and Lane 2007 ; Williams et al. 2014 ; Clancy et al. 2017 ). Figure 2b shows that differences in the participation of people of colour between sections are more pronounced than those of gender. At the upper end, people of colour comprised up to 60% of speakers in Geodesy (one session) and 41% in Solid Earth (nine sessions), although both of these disciplinary sections contained fewer presenters overall (see Table 1 ). Conversely, sections with very low proportions of people of colour, such as Biogeosciences (9%) and Earth Surface (6%), tended to have greater total numbers of presenters.

Analysis of section-level data found profound differences in diversity among the disciplines of geoscience represented at the conference ( Fig. 2 ). Although women constituted nearly half of the presenters in smaller sections such as CSAFM, in the more populous sections, such as Hydrology and Earth Surface, women made up only one in every five presenters ( Fig. 2a ). That women made up so few of the Hydrology presenters is significant because, with 41% of all speakers, the Hydrology section was also the largest section at the conference. Our findings corroborate other studies that identify how women are particularly poorly represented in Hydrology relative to the Biogeosciences and other geoscience disciplines, indicating persistent disciplinary differences ( Luzzadder-Beach and Macfarlane 2000 ; Holmes and O’Connell 2003 ).

Invited speaker positions at conferences celebrate the important work of individuals and also expose that researcher’s work to a wider audience. At the CGU-CSAFM conference, two of the four plenary lectures were given by women; however, only four of the 21 invited non-plenary speakers (see Table 2 ) for the oral sessions were women, a proportion similarly observed in ecology and biology symposia ( Schroeder et al. 2013 ; Farr et al. 2017 ).

A total of 337 oral presentations (excluding plenaries) were given at the conference, and 149 posters were presented. Conference attendee demographics by presentation type are shown in Table 2 . Based on the conference program, 39% of poster presenters were female and 62% were students. Of the 256 oral presentations we observed, 28% of speakers were female and 39% were students. Relative to the registration numbers, women were over-represented as poster presenters and under-represented as oral presenters. Although women were over-represented at the student level (62% of women registered as students) at the conference, this does not appear to explain the higher proportion of women presenting posters: 41% of all female student presenters (oral or poster) presented posters compared with 46% of male students. Hence, women in more advanced career stages are either more likely to ask for poster slots overall or are disproportionately assigned posters relative to men. Data about the ethnicity of poster presenters were not collected.

The majority of conference registrants who volunteered their demographic information originated from the academic sector (83%). Only 9% of these registrants identified as government affiliated and 5% as affiliated with the private sector. The dominance of the academic sector at this conference likely reflects how this meeting is traditionally pitched towards highlighting research advances, attracting a specific subset of geoscientists in Canada. Professional and industry conferences may provide a useful comparator to see whether ethnic minorities are better represented up the career ladder in nonacademic organizations.

A total of 516 people registered for the conference (including 1-day attendees). Registrants were asked to self-report their gender, institutional affiliation, and career stage; however, information on registrant ethnicity was not collected. Women comprised just over a third (36%) of the 84% of registrants who indicated their gender. This number is slightly higher than the largest North American geoscience society, the American Geophysical Union, which has a membership of around 60 000 and reports an increase in female membership from 15% in 2000 to 27% in 2015 ( Leinen 2016 ). It is also higher than for the CSAFM’s general membership, wherein women constitute 22% of the 117 email listserv members and 30% of the 30 current members in good standing (A. Glenn, personal communication, 2017). Membership data for CGU were not available. The representation of women at the CGU-CSAFM 2017 conference is also similar to the US geoscience workforce and higher than observed in the Canadian workforce. Wilson (2017) reported that women made up 34% of the geoscientists in the US, whereas Canadian census data from 2011 shows that women make up 23% of employed geoscientists ( Statistics Canada 2011 ).

Combining registration data and observations made in the oral presentations enables the description of the composition and character of the geoscience community as represented by this conference. This provides a quantitative benchmark against which future conference participation may be compared, and compares participation in this context against other conferences, run by other societies, in other countries, and in other disciplines. This section explores the demographic characteristics of the CGU-CSAFM conference at the level of overall registration as well as within the disciplinary sections.

Characterising intellectual diversity

Although many studies have examined the participation of women and people of colour in science in aggregate, few have examined how their participation varies in terms of the types of research they undertake (see Luzzadder-Beach and Macfarlane 2000). If we want to achieve diverse representation across the geosciences, we need to not only make efforts to increase absolute numbers of women and people of colour, but also to value their distinctive contributions. However, although difference should be celebrated, previous research has highlighted that this can result in some researchers being excluded from particular fields. For example, women are reported as under-rating their own performance in mathematics due to learned biases (Skibba 2016), feeling alienated from computer sciences due to an increasingly masculine culture (Cheryan et al. 2017), and lacking access to laboratories due to funding (Luzzadder-Beach and Macfarlane 2000). By analysing how intellectual diversity relates to demographic diversity, we can identify whether different social groups tend to make different types of scientific contributions, use different methods, and connect their work to society in different ways. Here our aim is to both celebrate differences in strengths and interests as well as to identify existing under-representation in particular fields as an area of collective concern and remedial action.

The intellectual diversity of oral presentations was captured three key ways: (i) according to the methods used in each study, (ii) based on the type of contribution each study made to its field of research, and (iii) from the presenter’s articulation of the real-world significance of their research (see Fig. S1). The observation template included tick-box categories for primary methods, contribution types, and clarity of real-world justification. These categories were created through discussion among the research team, drawing on the collective experiences of the team with geoscience presentations as well as their detailed knowledge of the conference program and abstracts.

Observers systematically recorded each presentation’s main method(s), contribution type(s), and real-world justification according to the predefined categories, and provided a short description of the study’s scientific and real-world contribution(s). The freehand descriptions of each presentation’s contributions were later coded and compared with the categorical data to check for consistency in categorisation and to identify any unexpected contribution types. The data were analysed to identify key trends in research methods and contribution types and broken down by presenter demographic variables (gender, career stage, ethnic affiliation, sector) and session type.

Overview of intellectual diversity in oral presentations The data reveal the intellectual dominance of specific methods and contribution types in the geosciences, but also highlight that this dominance varies by section. For example, field methods were more common in the Biogeosciences, CSAFM, and Earth Surface, than in Hydrology, Solid Earth, Geodesy, and Joint (Table 3). Modelling, in contrast, is most prominent in Geodesy, Hydrology, and Solid Earth and far less common in other section types. Remote sensing was commonly used in only the Solid Earth and Joint sessions (which included a named remote sensing session). Laboratory research and social methods stand out as approaches that are not commonly utilised in the geosciences and, therefore, as opportunities to improve intellectual diversity. Research method (%)a Total number of presentations Field methods Lab methods Remote data collection Modelling Social science Disciplinary section Biogeosciences 33 82 18 9 24 0 Canadian Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 15 87 7 7 13 0 Earth Surface 64 56 11 27 27 6 Hydrology 102 44 8 20 61 3 Solid Earth 29 45 7 48 48 0 Geodesy 5 0 0 20 100 0 Joint 4 0 0 100 25 0 Gender of presenter Female 72 64 14 17 39 3 Male 180 49 7 24 42 3 Ethnic affiliation of presenter Person of colour 52 40 10 23 52 4 White 200 60 11 25 38 4 Career stage of presenter Student 98 56 11 18 47 2 Early career 59 51 8 25 51 5 Mid-career 59 46 5 27 41 2 Late career 31 68 16 32 26 0 Retired 3 0 0 0 33 33 Similar trends are observed in the intellectual contribution data. Field methods remain prominent, with 44% of all presentations contributing “new observational data”. Other common contribution types were “new method” (31%) or “applied solution” (18%); all other categories occurred in fewer than 15% of presentations (Fig. 3). Disciplinary groupings of contributions are also evident, with “new observational data” standing out as the dominant contribution type in Biogeosciences, CSAFM, and Earth Surface sessions. “Applied solutions” were also common in Earth Surface and Biogeosciences sessions. However, in Hydrology, Solid Earth, and Geodesy, “new method” and (or) “reanalysis of existing data” were much more common, competing with “new observational data” as the key contribution type. Fig. 3. Percentage of female (n = 72) and male (n = 180) presenters by type of intellectual contribution. Many presenters made more than one type of contribution. Numbers above bars correspond to count of presenters making a given intellectual contribution. The majority of presenters connected their research to real-world issues in a substantive way, with just 26% providing no justification. Justifications ranged from “vague” assertions of potential applications (e.g. findings might have implications for drainage water chemistry), to “clear” descriptions of how the research enhances understanding of a specific problem or solution (e.g., earthquake early warning systems).

Gendered intellectual contributions Results reveal notable gender differences in the methods used, intellectual contributions made, and real-world justifications articulated by presenters (Table 3). Higher proportions of women use field and lab methods relative to men, and accordingly, contribute new observational and experimental data more frequently than men. In contrast, remote sensing and modelling methods are slightly male-dominated. However, the gendered use of methods varies by section, with Earth Surface sessions containing greater percentages of women using modelling (37% female vs. 22% male) and greater male use of field methods (53% female vs. 58% male). This variability suggests that the gendered differences indicated by our results may be further differentiated across specific types of methods (e.g., numerical vs. statistical modelling)—nuances that are not reflected in our broad method categories. Comparing intellectual contributions between men and women showed that “new observational data” were the most common contributions for both genders (Fig. 3). However, applied solutions are almost twice as common among female presenters compared with men, which is notable because applied sessions drew audiences with the highest percentage of females. The relative dominance of women in the applied solutions category is consistent across all disciplines (with the exception of Geodesy and Joint sessions, where 1 and 0 presenters contributed an applied solution respectively), although the degree of dominance differs. Men are more likely to contribute a new method, especially in CSAFM, Hydrology, and Solid Earth, and to make data- and theoretical/literature-based contributions. The prominence of applied solutions among female presenters is also reflected in the real-world justification data (see Fig. S4). A higher proportion of female presenters provided a real-world justification for their research relative to male presenters (80% vs. 72%), and a higher proportion of justifications by women were recorded as “clear”. This gender difference appears to exist across career stage, sector, and disciplinary section, although the size of the justification gap varies. For example, Fig. 4 illustrates that in disciplines with above average rates of real-world justifications (e.g., Biogeosciences), a substantially larger proportion of female presenters provided a vague or clear justification for their research. Among Hydrology and Solid Earth presentations, however, women and men both communicated a real-world justification less frequently and at similar rates. Fig. 4. Percentage of presenters who provided a real-world justification for their research, broken down by section and gender.

Intellectual contributions and ethnicity Our findings also indicate that the use of methods, intellectual contributions, and real-world justifications differ substantially between people of colour and white presenters, and with the opposite trend of gender differences. For example, 52% of people of colour use modelling as a primary method, which is considerably more than white presenters (Table 3). People of colour also have markedly lower representation in field methods but use remote sensing and lab methods with similar frequency to white presenters. The intellectual contributions of people of colour also differ substantially from those of white presenters. For this group, new methods are the most common intellectual contribution, followed by new observational data and reanalysis of existing data. As illustrated in Fig. 5, applied solutions (which were common among female presenters in general) are notably less common among people of colour. Similarly, people of colour provided a real-world justification for their research less frequently than white presenters (60% vs. 78%, see Fig. S4). Fig. 5. Percentage of presenters identified as people of colour (n = 52) and white (n = 200) by type of intellectual contribution. Many presenters made more than one type of contribution. Numbers above bars correspond to count of presenters making a given intellectual contribution.

Intellectual contribution and career stage Analysis of the intellectual diversity data revealed mixed relationships with career stage. Although the use of methods and real-world justifications showed clear differences according to career stage, contribution types did not. When analysed by method, the use of remote sensing increases consistently with the presenter’s career stage, from 18% of students and 25% early-career scientists to 27% of mid-career and 32% of late-career scientists. In contrast, modelling is more common among student (47%) and early career (51%) scientists compared with mid-career (41%) and late-career (32%) scientists, suggesting that interest in modelling may be increasing generationally. The career stage of the presenter does not clearly affect the contribution type. New observational data, new method, and applied solution are the dominant contribution types across all career stages, with the exception of early-career presenters who are more likely to make a theoretical contribution or perform a reanalysis than provide an applied solution. Students are much less likely to make theoretical or literature review contributions than other career stages, but they are more likely to justify their research with reference to real-world problems. The proportion of presenters who did identify a real-world justification for their research generally decreases with career stage, from 22% among students to 35% among late-career presenters (see Fig. S4).