the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 09 Apr 2025
Towards family-friendly conferences in the geosciences: results from a first survey
Abstract. In the geoscientific field, building an academic career requires a high level of dedication to research, frequent publishing, and maintaining visibility within the academic community. Conferences are the central platforms for networking and knowledge exchange, making them keystones for a scientific career. However, the early stages of an academic career often coincide with family planning considerations. Many young researchers face the challenge of balancing professional responsibilities with family obligations. A balancing act that becomes particularly difficult during non-routine work events such as conferences. Such occasions tend to pose significant organizational challenges for families. As mothers still perform most caregiving, they are disproportionately affected. This conflict is an important factor inhibiting the rise of women through the academic career ladder. Hence, increasing the family friendliness of conferences holds a chance of diversifying the community, allowing more women to participate, while reducing the tension of the academic work-family conflict.
In this work, we present the results from an online survey among researchers from the geoscientific field. The required support of parents at conferences is analyzed and the acceptance of researchers without children for the implementation of new support offers is examined. Our key findings are that (1) parents wish for more support at conferences, (2) the majority of non-parents welcome family-friendly measures and (3) conference organizers can accomplish a lot in this respect with small adjustments. The responses we received from parents paint a qualitative picture of measures that can be taken to create a family-friendly conference experience, ranging from an increase of transparency and awareness for the challenges of parents to tangible offers like childcare and financial funding. This feedback invites conference organizers to join the conversation about family support and shows that new measures have great support in the geoscientific community. Our findings are distilled into guidelines for conference organizers, allowing them to better address the work-family conflict and transform their conferences towards more equity, diversity and inclusion.
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Status: final response (author comments only)
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CC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-1200', Heather J. Murdock, 05 May 2025
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AC1: 'Reply on CC1', Elena Päffgen, 07 Jun 2025
Thank you very much for your comment. You are absolutely right to point out that it is sensible to derive recommendations for future studies from the limitations of our approach and we will include a paragraph detailing the following suggestions: To reach a broader audience globally, it might be useful to partner with international scientific organizations, to advertise the survey at international conferences and workshops and translate the survey into additional languages. On the other hand a distortion of the sample group can be reduced by avoiding distributing the survey through personal/regional networks and events. We would also like to draw attention to the need to collect more data on parenthood globally to uncover links between parenthood and a scientific career.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-1200-AC1
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AC1: 'Reply on CC1', Elena Päffgen, 07 Jun 2025
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-1200', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Jul 2025
Please find attached a review of the manuscript. The majority of comments can be found directly within the manuscript pdf file.
- AC2: 'Reply on RC1', Elena Päffgen, 30 Sep 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-1200', Anita Marshall, 24 Jul 2025
Reviewer 1 left some excellent line-by-line suggestions and edits, which I agree should be considered by the authors. Here I will offer a few general suggestions to add to Reviewer 1's comments:
1. In the category groupings for your results (pg 6): “hybrid” seems to be an odd thing to include with other things that seem to be explicitly about on-site supports. With the importance this option was given by survey participants (76% of survey participants who are parents requesting it), it may be better to have this in it’s own category. Isolating it would emphasize it as a strong result and an important outcome.
2. One thing I think is missing from the Discussion is the feasibility of acting on the recommendations presented here. For example, one suggestion was to waive the fee for caregivers that accompany conference participants. Financially, this is a reasonable request. The caregivers aren’t participating in conference events, just watching a child for an attendee. The cost to the organizers to let these individuals access the conference building at no charge is extremely low. On the other hand, requesting child care while at the same time requesting no fee for children and travel support for families seems to be a bit of a financial paradox. How are the costs for childcare being covered in this scenario – higher fees for everyone? Some other source? In the middle ground is the family-friendly programming. If they are simple events, it is a feasible suggestion that only requires people who are willing to step up and organize the activities and conference organizers who are willing to allocate space for the event. However, more elaborate events that may require supplies or equipment (toys, activities, transportation) have costs involved and again the question arises as to who covers those costs. Then there is the hybrid meeting issue. As someone who champions this idea, the most common reason given for not supporting hybrid participation is cost. At many conference centers, there are outrageous fees associated with hybrid events and it simply costs too much to offer it at a reasonable fee to participants. There are likely other challenges beyond cost that would be easier to deal with. Even without a detailed discussion of these issues, acknowledging that some of these ideas have significant challenges that would need to be addressed would help further the discussion in a constructive way.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-1200-RC2 - AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Elena Päffgen, 30 Sep 2025
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Thank you for this much needed and insightful article. In the discussion (lines 304-306) you note that there is on the one hand an absence of detailed demographic data on the global scientific community and also that due to the distribution methods of the survey there is a strong emphasis on Europe and Germany. It would be helpful if the authors could include recommendations for future studies to capture perspectives on the family-friendliness of conferences globally and perhaps how they would improve their survey design and sampling methods.