Increasing Female Attendance and the Geo-INQUIRE Training Program
Tuesday, June 10, 2025 3:00 PM to Thursday, June 12, 2025 4:00 PM · 2 days 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)
Foyer D-G - 2nd floor
Women in HPC Poster
Diversity and InclusionEducation and TrainingGeosciences and Energy Generation
Information
Poster is on display and will be presented at the poster pitch session.
This poster shows the means and measures taken to increase female attendance in the Geo-INQUIRE training program and their impact. Geo-INQUIRE is an EU-funded Earth Science project that focuses on the integration and homogenization of many different kinds of services (data, software, HPC, etc.) to facilitate (interdisciplinary) work in fields such as seismology, tsunami research and volcanology, risk assessment, and analysis. Geo-INQUIRE addresses both big data challenges and HPC software challenges, offering access to high-end machines in Europe (e.g., Leonardo@CINECA, MareNostrum5@BSC, SuperMUC-NG@LRZ). The aim of the training program is to increase awareness of the Geo-INQUIRE services, show how they can be used interdisciplinary and provide training to support proposals for the Transnational Access (TA) Calls that Geo-INQUIRE is issuing regularly.
At the start of this 4-year project, an ambitious goal was proposed by Geo-INQUIRE’s Equality and Diversity Panel (EDIP): to aim for at least 40% female engagement. Recent studies (Ermert et. al, 2023) have shown that females are still underrepresented in Earth Science, especially in authorship of publications, a key factor of career advances. Many Geo-INQUIRE services focus on High-Performance Computing and Big Data analysis, leading to skepticism if this goal could be reached.
We implemented several targeted measures to increase female engagement including a) making asynchronous training options available by providing recordings, b) ensuring that trainings were lead by female lecturers to provide good role models and increase female visibility or c) to explicitly state in the training announcements that “Geo-INQUIRE promotes diversity and inclusion within the scope of the project”. We have managed to attract one third female applications in 90% of all trainings, and surpassed the 40% goal in 60% of the training events, going up to 65+% for the first two “FAIR” training events that Geo-INQUIRE also offers. In total 43% of of the more than 3.000 registrations to the 35 events are from females.
We believe that setting ambitious gender balance goals and putting targeted effort into achieving these goals has substantially increased female engagement in Geo-INQUIRE. We hope that the trainees from today will become the trainers of tomorrow and propose to extend this approach to other HPC training programs like the PRACE training program to increase the number of female researchers in High-Performance Computing.
Geo-INQUIRE is funded by the European Commission under project number 101058518 within the HORIZON-INFRA-2021-SERV-01 call.
References
Ermert, L. A., Koroni, M., and Korta Martiartu, N.: Quantifying gender gaps in seismology authorship, Solid Earth, 14, 485–498, https://doi.org/10.5194/se-14-485-2023, 2023.
Contributors:
This poster shows the means and measures taken to increase female attendance in the Geo-INQUIRE training program and their impact. Geo-INQUIRE is an EU-funded Earth Science project that focuses on the integration and homogenization of many different kinds of services (data, software, HPC, etc.) to facilitate (interdisciplinary) work in fields such as seismology, tsunami research and volcanology, risk assessment, and analysis. Geo-INQUIRE addresses both big data challenges and HPC software challenges, offering access to high-end machines in Europe (e.g., Leonardo@CINECA, MareNostrum5@BSC, SuperMUC-NG@LRZ). The aim of the training program is to increase awareness of the Geo-INQUIRE services, show how they can be used interdisciplinary and provide training to support proposals for the Transnational Access (TA) Calls that Geo-INQUIRE is issuing regularly.
At the start of this 4-year project, an ambitious goal was proposed by Geo-INQUIRE’s Equality and Diversity Panel (EDIP): to aim for at least 40% female engagement. Recent studies (Ermert et. al, 2023) have shown that females are still underrepresented in Earth Science, especially in authorship of publications, a key factor of career advances. Many Geo-INQUIRE services focus on High-Performance Computing and Big Data analysis, leading to skepticism if this goal could be reached.
We implemented several targeted measures to increase female engagement including a) making asynchronous training options available by providing recordings, b) ensuring that trainings were lead by female lecturers to provide good role models and increase female visibility or c) to explicitly state in the training announcements that “Geo-INQUIRE promotes diversity and inclusion within the scope of the project”. We have managed to attract one third female applications in 90% of all trainings, and surpassed the 40% goal in 60% of the training events, going up to 65+% for the first two “FAIR” training events that Geo-INQUIRE also offers. In total 43% of of the more than 3.000 registrations to the 35 events are from females.
We believe that setting ambitious gender balance goals and putting targeted effort into achieving these goals has substantially increased female engagement in Geo-INQUIRE. We hope that the trainees from today will become the trainers of tomorrow and propose to extend this approach to other HPC training programs like the PRACE training program to increase the number of female researchers in High-Performance Computing.
Geo-INQUIRE is funded by the European Commission under project number 101058518 within the HORIZON-INFRA-2021-SERV-01 call.
References
Ermert, L. A., Koroni, M., and Korta Martiartu, N.: Quantifying gender gaps in seismology authorship, Solid Earth, 14, 485–498, https://doi.org/10.5194/se-14-485-2023, 2023.
Contributors:
Format
On DemandOn Site
