WHY DIVERSITY IS ESSENTIAL TO SOLVING THE CLIMATE CRISIS

In 2010, 13% of full professors in the field of geoscience were women [1]. By 2020, that number had risen to 19% [2] - yet it’s estimated that gender parity will not be reached until past mid-century. What do these, and the even greater inequities related to race and ethnicity, have to do with climate change?

Climate change is the defining challenge of our age. Understanding its impacts and quantifying and implementing solutions is of paramount importance; and when decisions are made by a more diverse group of people, they are more likely to lead to benefits such as better outcomes [3] and greater innovation [4]. To put it plainly: when it comes to solving climate change, we need all hands on deck. And the greater the variety of expertise and informed perspectives we have to work with, the better off we’ll all be.

[1] Glass, Jennifer. 2015. We are the 20%: Updated Statistics on Female Faculty in Earth Sciences in the U.S. In: Women in the Geosciences: Practical, Positive Practices Toward Parity (Mary Anne Holmes, Suzanne OConnell and Kuheli Dutt, eds.) American Geophysical Union. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119067573.ch2

[2] Ranganathan, Meghana, Ellen Lalk, Lyssa Freese, Mara Freilich, Julia Wilcots, Margaret Duffy and Rohini Shivamoggi. 2021. Trends in the representation of women among US geoscience faculty from 1999-2020: the long road towards gender. AGU Advances. parityhttps://www.essoar.org/doi/10.1002/essoar.10506485.2

[3] Cloverpop. 2017. Hacking Diversity with Inclusive Decision-Making. https://www.cloverpop.com/hacking-diversity-with-inclusive-decision-making-white-paper

[4] Cristina Díaz-García, Cristina, Angela González-Moreno and Francisco Jose Sáez-Martínez. 2014. Gender diversity within R&D teams: Its impact on radicalness of innovation. Innovation: Organization & Management, 15(2), 149-160. https://doi.org/10.5172/impp.2013.15.2.149