Research students are diverse, while those in salaried positions are not: results from a survey of Canadian academic geoscience
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite recognition that academic geoscience lacks diversity to an extent beyond that of other disciplines, demographic data from academic geoscience departments is not routinely collected. This inhibits the ability to address disparities and make improvements. We aim to address this gap by establishing the demographic make-up of academic geoscience in Canada and identify communities that may be underrepresented. A 22-question survey was disseminated to all geoscience departments at Canadian universities ( N = 35) between September and December 2022 asking specific questions related to identity. Research students, faculty, staff and instructors in these departments were eligible to respond. Responses were analysed for proportions and compared with relevant national data. In total, 482 respondents completed the survey, representing approximately 21% of the academic geoscience population in Canada. Responses indicate marked reductions in diversity between research students and salaried researchers for gender, race and LGBTQ+ representation. Men outnumber women in all tenured faculty positions (64.9%) and tenured positions were overwhelmingly held by white respondents (84.6%). Indigenous identities are poorly represented in this population, with only 2.3% identifying as First Nations, Inuit or Métis. A higher proportion of students than faculty identified as disabled, with the greatest representation among PhD students (12%). These data support previous studies finding low diversity among those in academic geoscience. The drop in diversity between students and faculty suggest barriers for those not historically represented, and the dominance of white men in tenured positions indicates further barriers for those who do pursue careers in geoscience. Addressing these barriers will require broad-scale efforts and engagement with communities that continue to be excluded from academic environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.102 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.035 | 0.284 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it