To respond to issues of racism, whiteness, and epistemic oppression in the geosciences and the Canadian academe more broadly, there is a growing agenda of fostering equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). However, the pursuit of such an agenda requires greater understanding of how barriers to EDI exist in nuanced, discipline-specific ways. Additionally, while discipline-specific foci are crucial to understanding and addressing EDI issues, cross-disciplinary analyses can not only help to further identify unique elements of these issues within specific disciplines, but potential approaches to address them as well. Shifts in the social studies of science highlight conferences as sites in which science is ‘performed’, and where social aspects of how science is ‘done’ can be observed. This study uses event ethnography to observe three disciplinary conferences in Canada, including the Canadian Geophysical Union’s Annual Scientific Meeting. Through ethnography and a cross-disciplinary analysis, this study highlights some of the unequal power structures and dynamics that can disproportionately impact scholars from marginalized communities, particularly as they seek to contribute to scientific discourse in spaces such as conferences, where science is ‘performed’. Some of these structures include the connections between supervisors and their supervisees, varying access to spaces, and association commitments to EDI.