Scientific societies must revisit their mission statements to continue to support their membership

The data and analysis assess the extent to which scientific societies across North America have aligned their mission statements with the stated commitments to equity and inclusion principles. The mission statements and other formal documents were collected from 195 scientific societies that are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) or the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS)and coded across 10 areas of focus. We further assigned these areas of focus to supporting communities or practice (the meritocracy of science) or communities of care (our communities of scientists). Finally, we identified whether organizations had issues formal statements about commitments to DEI-related ideals.
, , # Data from: Scientific societies must revisit their mission statements to continue to support their membership

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.9cnp5hqz7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9cnp5hqz7)

## Description of the data and file structure

We used a current list of AAAS and AIBS members as our study set. Member societies were excluded if they had specific university affiliation (the group was associated with a single University) or otherwise lacked cross-institutional nature (e.g., some institutes or independent museums) (N = 44). We used missions/purpose/objective statements as stated in the governing documents for the organization. If the organization lacked any publicly-accessible by-laws or other governing documents, it was excluded (N = 39). This approach left 195 societies in the data set to be coded.

We searched for published statements about commitments to DEI both within the society websites and google searches using the society name + “diversity” “equity” or “inclusion”. We ..., , **Changes after Feb 17, 2026:** 

We added an additional column detailing the last revision or amendment date for the included governing documents. We corrected the information for the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, which had incorrect information entered for it, and we removed the data for the American Phytopathological Society because their governing documents were no longer publicly accessible. 

The revised R script revises column information to match this updated dataset.