To address participation for meetings supported by STScI, the recommendations from the Institute's Women In Astronomy Forum (WIAF: see article in this newsletter, see also De Rosa et al. 2019) were heeded for two fall 2020 meetings, the Symposium on the Local Group: Assembly & Evolution, and the Conference on Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This article is a progress report—an accounting of how we implemented the guidelines with the added complexity of the COVID pandemic. Techniques for anonymous review of abstracts, stimulating online discussion through Slack channels and behind-the-scenes exchanges (surrogates for hallway chats—also on Slack) were included. We believe both meetings succeeded in engaging a wide variety of diverse individuals and produced lively dialog and interactions. Many lessons learned far beyond those related here will be adopted in the future, and modified and improved.

Symposium: The Local Group: Assembly & Evolution

P. Zeidler (zeidler[at]stsci.edu), A. Calamida (calamida[at]stsci.edu), E. Sacchi (esacchi[at]stsci.edu), and S. T. Sohn (tsohn[at]stsci.edu)

The Local Group: Assembly & Evolution Symposium was held August 31–September 4, 2020 (see the Symposium event webpage). This Symposium is usually organized for the spring of each year, but for 2020, the meeting was deferred and reorganized as a virtual proceeding. The detailed logistics of the program, including the roster of talks, posters, and the infrastructure adopted to support the virtual meeting are described in the related Symposium article in this Newsletter.

The abstract selection process was completely anonymous, to avoid any potential biases the reviewers might have had. The data were submitted by the community through a Google form, whose answers were accessible only by the Symposium's chairs. After the submission deadline, all this information was collected and fed into a Python pipeline we created; this pipeline hid everything but the title and abstract and assigned random SOC members for the review. We collected grades from three SOC members for each abstract and then rescaled them to take into account the possible biases in grading used by each evaluator. We then divided the abstracts into the various topics of the Symposium and selected the top ones for talks, giving to the remaining ones the possibility to present a poster.

The anonymized abstract selection method allowed us to have a very balanced and diverse pool of speakers. For example, we had more than 35% female speakers and about 50% male speakers (15% preferred not to identify); 38% of the talks were given by graduate students, 33% by postdocs and 29% by staff or faculty members. For comparison, the pool of abstract submissions was: 65% male and 35% female (identified by us from the first name); 42% graduate students, 30% postdocs, and 28% staff or faculty. The Scientific Organizing Committee served as Chairs for the sessions. We think that this was an outstanding achievement and confirmed that a blind selection process vastly improves the diversity of speakers. A similar anonymized abstract selection process should be used in future conferences.

Conference: Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

S. Deustua (deustua[at]stsci.edu), R. Ryan (rryan[at]stsci.edu), M. Mutchler (Mutchler[at]stsci.edu), N. Hathi (nhathi[at]stsci.edu), A. Petric (apetric[at]stsci.edu)

The 2020 Roman Conference on Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was held on 5–9 October 2020 (see related article on the Conference in this Newsletter and the Conference event webpage). It was initially planned as a 3‑day in-person meeting, but due to the COVID‑19 pandemic, it was restructured as an entirely on-line (virtual) symposium over five days with one 2‑hour session and one 1.5‑hour session per day. Oral presentations consisted of 14 30‑minute invited talks and 36 15‑minute contributed talks. Of the 129 submitted abstracts, 102 were for talks and 27 for posters. Contributed talks were selected using a double-blind approach, based solely on the submitted abstract and talk title. Identifying information (name, institution, etc.) were removed before the SOC reviewed the abstracts for sorting. To the best of our ability to judge, the final selection of contributed speakers was representative of the pool. Authors of abstracts not selected for talks were invited to present a poster or a pre-recorded talk; the final tally was 61 posters/pre-recorded talks.

Demographic information on presenters (gender and career level) were obtained by searching public websites and publications; and while not an ideal approach to gathering this kind of data, it provides an approximate determination. This approach is arduous and results from institutional privacy policies. By necessity, this process limited us to binary sex identification—male, female—based on names and images. Gender identity is more difficult to gauge, except in the few cases where individuals have publicly indicated such, e.g., on the Outlist. Nationality and cultural and ethnic identity is extremely difficult to ascertain with any accuracy without directly asking individuals, e.g., via a survey, which we did not carry out. Thus, the statistics for this conference are limited to gender and career level.

Participants

More than 300 people registered for the conference, including international participants (Fig. 1).  Since the conference was online, all interactions were "two-way," accommodating wide participation in the conference. Due to high interest in the conference, the registration limit was actually altered several times to accommodate more participants. In addition, where possible, streaming on Facebook (without the necessity of a FB account) allowed viewing the proceedings without a registration fee. Webcast files of the proceedings are available through the Conference website. Daily active participation ranged from 240 on the first day and dropped to 150 on the last day. Questions for each speaker were posted in threads to the dedicated Slack channel for each oral session. Each poster/pre-recorded talk also had a dedicated channel to enable discussion (see Fig. 2).

 

Presenters and the Abstract Pool

Of the 102 abstracts submitted for contributed talks, the distribution by gender is: 37% females, 63% males; and by career stage, 29% students, 42% early career, 20% mid-career, and 9% senior level.

From these 102, 36 were allocated contributed talks using double-blind selection, resulting in 44% females and 56% males, with the distribution by career stage: 28%, 33%, 28%, and 11% by students, early, mid, and senior levels respectively.

Of the 27 abstracts specifically requesting posters, by gender these were 30% females, and 70% males. By career stage the breakdown was 52%, 19%, 11%, and 15%.

All of the individuals who were selected to give contributed talks did so, the others were invited to present a poster or pre-recorded talk. Of these 66 persons, 25% opted out of all presentations. Overall, the rate for females declining to present is higher than that of males, though our sample is not large enough to provide robust statistics.

The statistics for all presentations are provided in the following four tables.

Tables 1–5: Roman Galaxy Conference Diversity Statistics

Presentations by Gender	N	F	M
Contributed talks	36	44%	56%
Invited talks	14	43%	57%
Posters	61	25%	75%

 

All Talks by Career Level	N	F	M
Graduate Student	10	30%	70%
Early Career	14	64%	36%
Mid-Career	13	38%	62%
Senior Level	13	40%	60%

 

All Posters by Career Level	N	F	M
Graduate Student	25	12%	88%
Early Career	24	38%	62%
Mid-Career	6	40%	60%
Senior Level	6	17%	83%

 

Presentation by Career Level	Invited Talk	Contributed Talk	Poster/Pre-recorded
Graduate Student	0	28%	41%
Early Career	14%	33%	39%
Mid-Career	21%	28%	10%
Senior Level	64%	11%	10%

 

Session Chairs 10 sessions 11 chairs	Statistics
F/M	7 / 4
Early/Mid/Senior	5 / 3/ 4