Like many STEM academic disciplines, geoscience has a base rate problem with respect to diversity (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018). Undergraduate majors who are underrepresented (UR) are conspicuously missing, constituting only 18% of majors – the lowest of all STEM fields (American Geosciences Union, 2014).
Even fewer graduate students and tenure-track/tenured (TT/T) faculty progress: 10% of PhD degrees in geoscience are awarded to students of color, and they represent less than 4% of TT/T faculty positions (NSF, 2016). Despite recent gains in gender balance (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018), Black and Hispanic undergraduate and graduate students, and those with disabilities (Feig et al., 2019), continue to be left out of geoscience (Goldberg, 2019).
