Who has benefitted from outreach in the geosciences?

Outreach efforts over the past few decades have sought to bring the geosciences into K-12 classrooms, engage undergraduates in research, and offer career support and mentorship to budding professionals. One motivation of such efforts is to increase representation of women and minority groups in an otherwise White, male-dominated field.

Whereas recent work has shown that participation of underrepresented minorities has improved very little at the PhD level in the past 40 years¹, some groups have made significant advancements toward representation and inclusion in the earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences. Particularly, women have gone from earning 21 PhDs in 1973 (out of 474), to 354 PhDs in 2016 (out of 434)². White women have increased representation the most, earning 81% of the PhDs awarded to women in 2016. In contrast, women of other ethnicities make up only 8% of the total PhDs earned in 2016. Similar trends are present in BA/BS and MS participation. A 2017 demographics survey by the American Geosciences Institute report that women slightly outnumber men at the BA/BS-level, but then the demographics reverse with men slightly outnumbering women at the MS-level.

Improved representation is also seen in Hispanic/Latino and Asian-Americans earning PhDs. However, these increases fall short of (or barely keep up with) the growth of these groups in the US population. Similarly, ethnic demographics amongst BA/BS and MS degree-holders in 2017 remain dominated by White people, with ≤ 12% earned by underrepresented minorities.

While current and on-going efforts to increase diversity and inclusion have clearly made a tremendous impact on representation of women at all degree levels, we have not yet seen significant gains in representation of non-White groups. We welcome the opportunity to discuss current outreach strategies, in order to elucidate what has worked for some groups and not others, and re-imagine our efforts moving forward.

¹doi:10.1038/s41561-018-0116-6

² Survey of Earned Doctorates, data for U.S. citizens and permanent residents only