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Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 149–156 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Conferences disseminate research, grow professional networks and train employees. Unfortunately, they also contribute to climate change and present barriers to achieving a socially sustainable work environment. Here, we analyse the recent impact of transforming in-person conferences into virtual conferences on improving diversity, equity and inclusion in science and engineering conferences. Factors including cost, gender, career stage and geographic location were evaluated. Virtual conferences demonstrated a clearly discernable and, in some cases, orders of magnitude improvement across nearly all metrics. On the basis of participant survey results, this improvement may be attributed to a combination of reduced financial and personal-life burdens. However, despite this clear impact, further development of virtual networking features and poster sessions is necessary to achieve widespread adoption and acceptance of this new format.

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Fig. 1: VCs increase overall attendance and geographical diversity while reducing costs.
Fig. 2: VCs increase gender diversity.
Fig. 3: VCs increase participation by early career scientists (students and postdoctoral researchers) and from non-research-intensive institutions.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study have been deposited on Github28 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5567764). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The custom code used to process and analyse the data for this study has been deposited on Github28 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5567764).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge G. Ragusa’s contribution to designing the pre- and postsurveys used for the POM 1 and 2 conferences. The work in this paper was supported by the NSF (award no. CBET 2029219 and CBET 1946392). We gratefully acknowledge access to data and consultation support provided by NAMS, ICLR, POM and IWA meeting leadership. K. Marvel’s input on AAS data and trends and his role in providing access to AAS meeting data is also acknowledged. This material is based on work supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant no. DGE-1610403. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Matthew Skiles, Euijin Yang, Diego Robalino Muñoz, Kasey M. Faust & Manish Kumar

  2. Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Orad Reshef

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Diana Cintron

  4. School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Mary Laura Lind

  5. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, NY, USA

    Alexander Rush

  6. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Patricia Perez Calleja & Robert Nerenberg

  7. Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Andrea Armani

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  1. Matthew Skiles
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Contributions

M.K., K.M.F. and M.S. conceived the idea. M.K., M.S., D.R.M. and D.C. collected data. M.S. and E.Y. analysed data. O.R., M.L.L, P.P.C, R.N., A.R. and A.A. provided access to data and provided insights on data. M.K., K.M.F., A.A. and M.S. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Andrea Armani, Kasey M. Faust or Manish Kumar.

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Competing interests

M.K. and M.L.L. were organizers of NAMS. A.R. was an organizer of ICLR. P.P.C. and R.N. were organizers of IWA. A.A. and O.R. were organizers of POM. All other authors have no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Meagan Mauter and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion, Tables 1–21 and Figs. 1–15.

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Skiles, M., Yang, E., Reshef, O. et al. Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms. Nat Sustain 5, 149–156 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2

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