Astro2020 APC White Paper: Tying Research Funding to Progress on Inclusion
Dara Norman, Terri Brandt, Zack Berta-Thompson, Natalia Lewandowsha,, Karen Knierman, Nancy Chanover, Jena Whitley, Aparna Venkatesan, Kim Coble,, Adam Burgasser, Marie Lemoine-Busserolle, Kelle Cruz, Christopher S. Moore,, Kwame Osei-Sarfo, Sheila Kannappan

TL;DR
This paper advocates linking research funding to diversity and inclusion progress in astronomy and astrophysics, emphasizing the benefits of diverse teams and proposing metrics-based accountability for funding agencies and projects.
Contribution
It introduces a policy framework that ties research funding to measurable diversity and inclusion efforts, promoting equitable team composition in scientific research.
Findings
Diverse teams outperform homogeneous groups on complex tasks.
Current funding agencies lack incentives for diversity and inclusion.
Monitoring diversity metrics can improve research outcomes.
Abstract
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. Thus, if we want the best opportunity to make progress on and answer the research questions of the 2020s, we must employ diverse teams who bring different heuristics and perspectives to those problems. However,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInnovation Policy and R&D · Career Development and Diversity
