Astro2020 APC White Paper: Tying Research Funding to Progress on Inclusion

Understand

The US professional astronomy and astrophysics fields are not representative of the diversity of people in the nation.

• For example, 2017 AIP reports show that in 2014, women made up only about 20 percent of the faculty in astronomy and physics departments, and the numbers for under-represented minorities (men and women) were, and remain, low.
• However numerous studies have demonstrated that diverse groups (in both cognition and identity) outperform groups that are more homogeneous, even when the homogeneous group is comprised of all "high achieving experts." (Hong and Page, 2004, Kleinberg and Raghu, 2018).
• This has been shown to be the case on a variety of complex tasks.