Sara E. Cannon, PhD

I’m taking a quick break from posting updates about fieldwork in Kiribati to announce that a study I co-authored has been published!

Some colleagues and I attended the 2017 Canadian Geophysicists Union meeting in Vancouver with the goal of examining diversity through observations of participation, presentation content, and behaviour in conference sessions.  We found that women and people of colour participated in the conference in different ways than the majority (white men), which suggests that there is an intellectual division of labour in the geosciences. We also examined audience behaviors when women and people of colour were presenting and found that a “chilly climate” exists for women and other marginalized demographics. This work suggests that just bringing minorities into the geosciences isn’t enough to make the field more inclusive, and we suggest pathways that may help to make the geosciences more welcoming for everyone.

I’m really proud to be a coauthor on this paper and to have had a chance to participate in the study. Science has historically been dominated by white men, and the geosciences are the least diverse of all scientific disciplines. The other authors and I are hopeful that this work will help to make the geosciences more welcoming for women and people of colour, in particular women of colour.

The paper is open access, so you’re welcome to download the full thing here. If you find this interesting, I would also appreciate if you would share it with your networks, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! If you’d prefer not to share your thoughts publicly, please feel free to reach out to me by email at secanno@gmail.com.