A diversity audit of CSIRO’s Double Helix magazine

Double Helix is CSIRO’s STEM magazine for kids aged 8-14, reaching over 14,000 readers with each issue. Our goal is to inspire all of our readers to pursue STEM by showing diverse avenues of STEM inquiry led by diverse teams of researchers. This talk will describe and share the features of our diversity audit method, present our key findings and seek feedback from the ASC community on how we can all improve representation of diversity in STEM. While we have implemented policies to improve representations of diversity, what does the evidence say? To assess the diversity represented, we audited the visible gender, age, race, LGBTQIA+ and disability status of every person represented in the text and images of our 2023 magazines. We recorded whether each person was quoted as well as the contextual STEM field. We then used these data to compare representation in Double Helix to the general Australian population, known data about our readership, and statistics about different STEM fields.