CAN GEOINFORMATICS CATALYZE IMPROVED GENDER AND ETHNIC/RACIAL DIVERSITY IN GEOSCIENCE AND COMPUTER SCIENCE? (Invited Presentation)

Geoinformatics converges applications in geoscience and computer science to extract knowledge from data. It exists as a well-defined, trans-disciplinary boundary; the challenges of geoinformatics are a complex mixture of the issues of both geoscience and computer science. Speaking from an “outside” perspective primarily as geoscientists and education researchers, we observe that both fields have been experiencing robust enrollment growth and positive employment outlooks, yet they continue to struggle with engaging the entire population as potential future workers. Each discipline has their strengths and weaknesses; how those disciplines interact will be dependent on the ingress pathway of new graduates into the field: what part will be geoscientists working in computing and what part will be computer scientists working on geoscience applications? The geosciences struggle diversity: 8%-10% of geoscientists are racial or ethnic minorities and about 40% of geoscientists are women. While according to the Association for Computing Machinery, in 2014, only 14% of Bachelor’s Computer Science graduates were women, and 10% were conferred to African American or Hispanic students.

These systemic challenges persist in both fields regardless of the growing body of literature that demonstrates that our best science is produced by heterogeneous groups of people working together. Will the unique geoinformatics opportunities provide new incentives for minority populations to enter the field? We observe certain barriers to entry, including cultural challenges of increasing underrepresented scientists’ self-efficacy to break into a growing profession that is dominated by majority culture. We will provide examples of these instances. Finally, we would like to point to the geography community as a positive example. From implementation of the Geospatial Competency Model to well-established terminal Master’s programs, geographers have a long history of stronger alignment of their academic programs to the career opportunities in the field than do the geosciences. Does geoinformatics represent an opportunity for geoscience programs to improve their alignment with workforce demand, and thus represent a growth area of geoscience employment?