 So I've actually got some tables and figures in here with some data and I'm just not going to go through those but I uploaded this presentation and made very detailed notes about all of the figures but since I don't have time to kind of walk through them I'm just gonna just move through them so. But before we got started today I just kind of wanted to provide a context of why we all came together and the problem that we're trying to solve. So the United States is a very diverse country and when I'm talking about diversity I'm not just talking about ethnic and racial diversity I'm also talking about all of us as individuals and the perspectives that we can bring to these discussions based on our life experiences. But as you all know and again I'm not going to go through all the all the numbers here but STEM which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics I'll be using that acronym a good bit but we're basically seeing that individuals in STEM occupations are not representative of the U.S. population and the demographics of the U.S. population are changing pretty drastically and so that's something that we need to really think about. This is just a figure showing that women get paid a lot less than men in these occupations between 20-30% less. If you control for that that kind of goes down a little bit. If you control for education employment and some other demographics that goes down about 5-10% less but still something we all want to think about when we have our conversations this week and the Pew Research Center asked the U.S. adults what they thought were the reasons why we didn't have more minorities and women in STEM occupations and again I don't have time to go through all of these but I did want to point out that one that was brought up in for women and was not brought up for minority groups one that was brought up for minority groups was not brought up for women but you'll see more difficult to balance work, family and STEM jobs that 33% said that and then you can hear that a lot with women having children and being able to balance that as a you know go through these types of careers especially if you're trying to receive tenure and things like that it can be very challenging but another one that I would really wanted to point out for minorities was the top one 42% felt less likely to have access to quality education to prepare them for STEM fields and there's actual data that show show this that schools with high black and Latino enrollment have less access to some math and high level science courses than low black and native enrollment schools and so the NSF includes conference which is who's funding this conference and the reason that they were kind of developed was to try to start addressing these issues realizing that it's going to require collective action across a lot of different organizations with a lot of different expertise and that successful initiatives things that we have shown to be working how do we get those scaled so how do we get other groups adopting those practices and being able to utilize them in their programs and then we're also have not had very much success at determining whether or not all of these efforts have really been able to move the needle so how do we start determining whether we are being able to do that through all of this work that we're doing and then I wanted to touch just briefly on because we're looking here in this conference at the intersection of data science and environmental science I know Carolyn's going to be speaking a lot about the environmental sciences lately and since I have a short amount of time I'm going to skip through a couple of these slides but I did want to say that the ecological society of America which is the largest largest ecological professional society in the world they have been doing a lot of work and diversity equity and inclusion but they did a study in 2006 and found that only 26 percent of their membership identified as female and that although they have been trying to do all these efforts minority membership has only increased slightly so from 6.3 percent in 1999 to 8.8 percent in 2005 and this table that's here is basically showing similar data to what I showed for across STEM fields that we have a lot less representation from minorities in that organization so now moving on into data science I know this may be something that comes up a lot of what do we mean by data science and there are a lot of many definitions I know out there but for the purposes of this conference we're kind of trying to use a broad definition for it to just be the extraction of knowledge from data and data science is a rapidly growing field it's one of the focuses right now of the National Science Foundation in their strategic plan they've talked about developing ways to implement mechanisms to support the training and workforce development of data scientists and know we're going to be talking about that a lot this week but we're also seeing research coming out that we're going to need a lot more data scientists and there just are not enough students entering the field there's also this question of this data divide that separates individuals communities and also institutions so thinking about individuals who has the skills to make sense of all these data that are currently available who has the ability to make decisions and drive policies with those data and then thinking about communities who is collecting the data on these communities and how are those data being used and who has access to those data after they're being collected and do those communities that are data being collected do they have access to that data that's been collected and then specifically looking at institutions and research universities have been developing comprehensive data science programs for many years but Tableau did a study in 2006 and found that most of the larger national universities offer formal analytics programs but when they looked at two-year institutions they found that only two percent of them had those programs and that that was due to a lack of qualified instructors so we're also seeing that some of these institutions are lacking the necessary capacity and resources to develop some of these programs and then there's been some discussion too about what is the role of open data and open science and all of this the Obama administration proposed an American graduation initiative and then they were highlighting that open online education may be a way to improve recruitment and retention of minority students in STEM but a study that was done last year by GitHub which is an open source coding platform 95 percent of its users were male and then only 16 percent of those users that were surveyed identified as minorities and so we're really seeing that the open open data open science is really not moving that needle to continue to kind of use that term or phrase another right thinking about the democratization of science so open science is becoming more popular we have more open science publications like plus one open access data likes being provided by the National Ecological Observatory Network and there's also been a huge rise in citizen science citizen science actually has a professional society now the Citizen Science Association that's been developed to try to support researchers and practitioners because the field is growing so rapidly and there's another study that came out that basically talked about two challenges that they thought need to be examined to start addressing in this issue and one was the lack of individuals from these group attaining skills for these careers and then a lack of an organizational and professional culture that retains and advances individuals from these groups and I know that some people may not feel that these are the major challenges you may want to add to these challenges and again that's going to be a lot of the part of the conversation that we have this week as well this is just an image of kind of showing the differences in what we're meaning by equality and equity so the three people on the left they were all given a box so they could see the see the baseball game however there's someone that's a little shorter so even though they have the same box as everyone else they can't see over the fence but when we're thinking about equity we need to make sure that it's not just about giving everyone a box it's all about making sure everyone can see over the fence and there's been a report that came out keeping data science broad that that recently came out and I just wanted to let you know that there has been some work being done in this field and we've been trying to upload and provide these reports on the edson website so that you guys can all look at these and have access to them and we encourage everyone to continue open uploading those resources so that we can all share those with each other so the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network was started to try to start addressing some of these issues although we have everyone here in the room this is an open network we're inviting anyone that would like to join to please join us you can go to our website edson.qubeshub.org or edson.qubeshub.org to sign on to the network and we would love to have you especially those that are participating remotely and I finally wanted to end what we're hoping to achieve through the conference this week specifically we want to increase awareness of all the different initiatives and resources that are available to everyone we want all of you to identify collaboration opportunities that you can take home with you we want to think about developing shared goals for this network we don't want this to end after this conference so what are we going to try to work towards after it's over we want to think about how can we can continue to develop and expand this and again thinking about how we move the needle what sort of data should we be collecting to demonstrate that what we're doing is effective and we're also wanting to prioritize activities and new initiatives again hoping that's all going to come out of these conversations this week so you guys have heard way too much from me already but again I was just wanting to provide you with a little bit of context and these slides and detailed notes if you want to look at some of those statistics are all available