Gender Representation of Speaking Opportunities at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting

Implicit and explicit biases impede the participation of women in geoscience. Documented biases include the quality of postdoctoral recommendation letters and opportunities to review research articles. Across career stages, attending conferences and presenting research are ways to spread scientific results, find job opportunities and funding, and gain awards and recognition. However, biases in geoscience conference presentations are currently unknown. Here we present an analysis of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting abstract dataset from 2014 to 2016 of invited authors and oral and poster presentations. Our results indicate that overall, women were invited and assigned oral presentations less often than men for the AGU Fall Meetings. However, when we control for career stage, we see similar rates between women and men and women sometimes outperform men. Women also elect for poster only presentations more than men. Male primary conveners (from students to more senior career stages) allocate invited abstracts and oral presentations to women less often and below the proportion of women authors. Our results show the need to provide equal opportunity to women in speaking roles at scientific conferences as part of the overall effort to advance and retain women in STEM fields.

隐性和显性偏见阻碍了女性参与地球科学领域。已记录的偏见包括博士后推荐信的质量和审阅研究文章的机会。在职业生涯的各个阶段，参加学术会议和展示研究成果是传播科学成果、寻找工作机会和资金来源、以及获得奖项和认可的方式。然而，地球科学会议中的偏见目前尚不明确。在本研究中，我们分析了2014年至2016年美国地球物理联合会（AGU）秋季会议的受邀作者以及口头报告和海报展示的摘要数据集。我们的结果表明，总体而言，女性在AGU秋季会议上被邀请和分配口头报告的频率低于男性。然而，当我们控制职业阶段时，我们发现女性和男性的比例相似，有时甚至超越男性。女性选择仅进行海报展示的比例也高于男性。男性主要会议组织者（从学生到更高级别的职业阶段）在分配受邀摘要和口头报告时，对女性的分配频率低于女性作者的比例。我们的研究结果表明，为了推进和保留女性在STEM领域的地位，有必要为女性在科学会议的演讲角色中提供平等的机会。