Making conferences in the plant sciences more inclusive through community recommendations

Abstract

An unwelcoming climate and culture at scientific conferences is an obstacle to retaining scientists with marginalized identities. Here we describe how a number of professional societies in the plant sciences, mostly based in the United States, collaborated on a project called ROOT & SHOOT (short for Rooting Out Oppression Together and SHaring Our Outcomes Transparently) to make conferences in the field more inclusive. The guidelines we developed, and our efforts to implement them in 2023 and 2024, are summarized here to assist other conference organizers with creating more inclusive conferences.

Keywords: diversity; equity; inclusion; none; plant biology; research culture; scientific conferences.

Figure 1.. Inclusive Conference Working Group: demographic information.

Membership of the Working Group broken down by gender identity (top left), ability status (top right), race/ethnicity (bottom left), and career stage (bottom right).

Figure 2.. Timeline of the Working Group.

The Inclusive Conferences Working Group ran from July 2022 until April 2023. The report containing the group’s recommendations underwent three rounds of review: (i) internal review by the subgroups of the Working Group (November 2022); a strategic assessment by the ROOT & SHOOT steering committee, which contained at least one representative from each society (December 2022); (iii) a final evaluation by representatives from all seven participating societies, (January 2023).