Scientific Societies Fostering Inclusive Scientific Environments through Travel Awards: Current Practices and Recommendations

Abstract

This essay compares the approaches that scientific societies in the ACCESS meta-organization use to implement and assess travel award programs for URM trainees and presents a set of recommendations, including both short- and long-term outcomes assessment in populations of interest and specialized programmatic activities coupled to travel award programs.

The SciCommDiversity Travel Fellowship: The Challenge of Creating a Sustainable Intervention

“…Much research needs to be done with respect to understanding our conference travel intervention itself and the psychological/sociological dimensions of the fellowship experience. Future work can draw from the studies about interventions that encourage minorities to pursue STEM careers (Fagen and Labov, 2007;DePass and Chubin, 2009;Segarra et al, 2020). Research has been conducted about conferences as interventions specifically examining the SACNAS (Chemers et al, 2011) and ABRCMS events (Casad et al, 2016).…”

Accomplishing Career Transitions 2019: facilitating success towards the professoriate

“…Scientists from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM or from MSIs tend to have less access to mentoring than their peers from well-represented groups or their institutions are under-resourced and cannot provide relevant mentoring and professional development activities, respectively [ 1 , 2 ]. The ASCB MAC has a long history in creating professional development programs to help relieve these disparities in access to mentoring and professional development resources [ 3 – 6 ].…”

Beyond Ticking Boxes: Holistic Assessment of Travel Award Programs Is Essential for Inclusivity

“…All member societies that participate in the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity on STEM Success (ACCESS) do so to some degree. Members of this metaorganization recently came together to share different approaches (4). The practices of the Biophysical Society (BPS), one of the ACCESS member societies, may be of particular interest to The Biophysicist readership.…”

“…Moreover, it was not clear whether the CID travel award was attractive to URM scientists, given its specific labeling. As pointed out by Segarra et al (4), there are multiple motivations beyond the monetary value of the travel award that drive people to apply. The receipt of a travel award is often viewed as a mark of distinction (5,6) but can be accompanied by a stigma due to the widespread perception that programs that support URM are lifting up less competent individuals who could not achieve success without affirmative action (7,8).…”

“…Surprisingly, compared with the number of URM individuals who self-identified by applying for the CID award in 2018, the number of URM travel award applicants in 2019 nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the success rate for these applicants remained comparable, and, apparently, more URM scientists received awards under the centralized application system than did under a system with a certain number of awards set aside for this group (4). The change to a centralized application system for BPS travel awards was accompanied by a change from a system of several named awards to all recipients receiving an award with the same name: the BPS travel award.…”