Frontiers special issue “Driving Towards a More Diverse Space Physics Research Community: Perspectives, Initiatives, Strategies, and Actions”—McArthur Jones and Astrid Maute
Race/ethnicity distribution of the 2021 Annual CEDAR Workshop registrants in both total number and percentage. Note that multiple races/ethnicities were counted, and the number of unique persons are shown in red text. Percentages in 2022 are similar.
The Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) community is made of engineers, scientists, physicists, and students with a mission to understand the fundamental properties and predictability of the space-atmosphere interaction region, including the mesosphere, thermosphere, ionosphere, and inner magnetosphere. At the 2020 CEDAR annual workshop, community-wide feedback received on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in CEDAR warranted a grassroots effort focused on addressing the DEI issues raised which led to the creation of the CEDAR DEI task force. The CEDAR DEI task force identified as the top priority collecting demographic information on CEDAR Workshop participants. This paper reports the demographic information obtained for the 2021 virtual workshop and 2022 in-person workshop. In general, the demographics of CEDAR are consistent with those in the broader science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, that is, most participants identify as male, White, and/ or Asian/Middle Eastern. On average, women and historically underrepresented races and ethnicities in STEM fields make up roughly 30% and 10%, respectively, of all 2021 and 2022 CEDAR Workshop registrants over the past 2 years. We further discuss the demographics of CEDAR relative to reports published in recent years by other organizations, where possible.