Striving for equality, diversity and inclusion in scholarly research and communications podcast

Transcript

Striving for equality, diversity and inclusion in scholarly research and communications

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Rebecca Torr (RT): Hello, I'm Rebecca Torr and welcome to the Emerald podcast series. Academic publishing has taken steps to make research communication more equitable and accessible, but there are still noticeable barriers. In this episode, we're going to discuss how we can improve equality, diversity and inclusion in scholarly research and communications. We will explore how we can promote underrepresented voices, improve equity and research funding and ensure equity in reviewing. I'm joined by three special guests. Jakob Feldtfos Christensen, Director of Diversiunity, Sapna Marwaha, who is the board member on ARMA UK, and EDIS which is the equality diversity and inclusion in science and health. And Kim Eggleton, Head of Peer Review and Research Integrity at IOP Publishing. Jakob I was going to come to you first. And I thought we could probably start talking about Diversiunity, what it's about and what diversity and research means to you.

Jakob Feldtfos Christensen (JFC): Yeah, well, thank you for having me here today. I'm usually on the on the other side being the host of the podcast. So sitting here is a bit daunting! But anyway, yes, I'm the Director of Diversiunity. And we run as you said, workshops, and we started the company in back in January 2020. After we had Lachlan, who I work with, we started talking about this whole thing that when we were both working in research support offices, and there was a lot of talk about projects and how they sometimes failed. And we talked at an incredible amount of time about budgets and worked on budgets forever and ever. And one thing that certain when you work with budgets is that this is the absolute only way things are not going to play out. But projects didn't fail because of bad projects, they failed because of bad collaboration. And we are both openly gay men. And there wasn’t a lot of diversity at that point at least, was equal to more women in research. And that is, of course, important. I'm not saying that. But it's a bit more complicated than that. So that is why we decided to dive into this. And also because sometimes it's just easier when we have to talk about difficult topics like this, to have people from the outside to join in and say the uncomfortable truths. So, when we're talking about research, I think, diversity and research, I think that three main things around one is the team, and or the consortium if we're in an international project. And then of course, the research itself, the content of the research, that we consider diversity in that. And then finally, I think it's in management, and all the things surrounding the research, and that is important. And when we talk about research, we of course, talk about gender, and protected characteristics or personal characteristics more broadly - so race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc, etc. But also national cultures, because today, research is just international it is the New Black in, in research. And that's just the way it is. But that also complicates things. Because culturally, we don't have the same approaches to particular things like race, gender identity, and sexual orientation across the globe. And that makes this whole thing incredibly complicated, incredibly interesting, but also incredibly complicated. The moment you put you put human beings into the equation, things just get complicated. 

RT: Fantastic, thank you. I think it's really interesting to sort of hear how you sort of started Diversiunity, and sort of what you focus on and actually trying to make some sense of it for people. So where do you begin? And I know you've run lots of different workshops, I think there's one called How Diversity can Improve your Research Strategy. So I don't know if you can sort of talk a little bit about that and some of the aims of that workshop and what you really hope to achieve. 

JFC: Sure. I think the reason we develop this one is because it's a lot of focus on the application process because at the end of the day, money runs the show and all universities are dependent on external funding, it's just so incredibly important for research careers and universities from abroad to other research institutions. But when we do it like that, it easily becomes an add on. And particularly, universities are often incredibly conservative institutions. And to some extent, they probably have to be. But it means that in these when it comes to these topics, they often have to get pushed by funders. But funders are also a bit hesitant on some of these issues. And this means that we're sometimes going incredibly slow. But then when an institution or a funder decides to move things like Horizon Europe with the gender equality plans, even if it wasn't as great a thing as we had hoped, but now they require gender analysis in every project. And we can just see how universities and research are always a bit behind on these topics. So, the aim of this workshop was to put people a bit in front of these topics. So, it doesn't become a last minute thing you add on a try to solve or share or have a generic paragraph about what oh, yeah, we know the gender balance isn't really good. But we will try to do something about that by recruiting more women as PhDs, because that's, that's not good enough anymore. And as I said, it's, it's about more than this. So, this is trying to help people to look at recruitment strategies, gender analysis, or more broadly on diversity, because right now you can get away with gender. But if you look at the policy documents from particular Horizon Europe, but also private funders, particularly in Europe, the UK, US, Canada, gender isn't enough. So, it's coming. So this is a way to, for people to prepare a bit, some of these issues, and also because some of these issues are just so politicized, it, you really have to be careful about these things. And that's probably a good thing. But sometimes researchers don't just realise this, because in many ways, research on universities is just a parallel universe where things don’t work like it does in the rest of society.

RT: I mean, listening to you is just such an eye opener to sort of, you know, the world that, that you're obviously you're in and you know, people that are in their own silos don't necessarily understand the breadth of all these different issues. So, I think it's really, it's really interesting just to sort of hear sort of what you do focus on what you train or teach people to look out for? And in terms of making a difference, how do you think these workshops really sort of feed into ED&I in research? Have you seen many sort of impacts?

JFC: We've decided our motto is that we are ambitious in goals, but pragmatic in approach. So we try to be quite hands on. Because when you talk around, it's not like, it's not because people aren't particularly evil, and don't want to do anything about these topics. They just don't know how. So we try to be quite hands on with some of these topics. And if you look at international culture, for example, asking such a simple question is, what is a meeting? What is the purpose of a meeting, we said, differ tremendously around the world. So just opening these conversations, because you can't solve it all in a two three hour workshop. We're not that naive. We are quite naive, but not that naïve! But we can try to open some of these conversations. Because often it is a question of people not having a vocabulary, and not knowing to ask questions. So we have been part of some really interesting conversations where people come afterwards. We've never talked about these things before. But I also say often when we run workshops, we don't have any questions. And not because people don't have them. But it's just a lot of this is so new to people that they just don't really know what to ask it. So I think we're in the infancy of this topic and how to deal with it in in many ways. And then of course, being I think it helps if you can be pragmatic, and so tell people, you can't solve it all. And that's okay. But you have to start somewhere, have some easy wins and do some, some stuff and also say that we understand them that this can be triggering, and also understanding that this is a complex world. I think one of the problems have built before and this is not because of anything against bias training, because bias training is a tool among many, but I think bias training has worked for us for a while been seen as the solution. And it's not that easy. And it's about career paths. And it's about incentive structures in academia monoculture because of publication patterns, grants…. it's oh so, incredibly complex, so many things we have to change to, to make this work. But we have to start, start somewhere. And we have decided where we want to, is to help and give researchers and research managers some tools to start working with this.

RT: I think it's absolutely incredible, the work that you're doing. And, you know, we do definitely need more sort of initiatives like this. And it sounds really interesting. And I definitely hope to hear a little bit more about that later on. And I want to thank you for that, then move over to Sapna. And yourself, I mean, you've worked on various campaigns aimed at improving ED&I in the research sector. And I'm thinking specifically, you could talk about the name change campaign. I mean, this is something that Emerald has implemented and, and quite a lot of publishers, and I'm sure the numbers are growing now. And starting to implement this. And I just wonder if you could sort of shine a light on what that name change campaign is all about, and sort of some of the impacts it's had so far.

Sapna Marwaha (SM): Yeah, of course. Thanks, Rebecca. So, the inclusive name change guidance, has come out of EDIS. For those of you who aren't familiar with EDIS, as it is, it’s EDI in science and health. It was originally a coalition that was brought together between Wellcome, Glaxo Smith Kline, and the Francis Crick Institute. And it's now a coalition of over 20 members who have come together from different aspects of the sector, with a passion for reducing inequalities in science and health. So, we know that if we want to make a difference in terms of reducing inequalities and health outcomes, we have to make a difference reducing inequalities at every stage of the process. I really support what Jakob was saying about it being a very holistic approach. So, everything from careers to participation to patients, we've got to look at the whole lifecycle. And the inclusive name change guidance was developed in collaboration with the trans name change policy group over in the US. 
Now, this project had a focus on trans people, what we were trying to do was reduced people being dead named being exposed to harm because they were being outed as trans when they hadn't outed themselves. And so that was really our focus. But I've got to say it's, it's a policy that's had benefits for a whole lot of groups who changed their names for all sorts of reasons. We know that, for example, in academia, a lot of people will choose not to change their name, not because of any particular belief, but because actually, it could impact their record their publication record. So now that we've made that easier; whether you've got married, whether you've got divorced, whether you're somebody, an international colleague, where your name is represented differently, depending on where in the world you are - obviously in the UK, we present our names in a particular format that isn't followed elsewhere. There are lots of reasons you can change your name. And now people are able to, to keep a hold of that track record much easier, they're able to claim credit for the work that they've done much more easily. So it's had benefits for lots of groups. And it's really important, I think, to make sure that we are going in for the complex problem and not just trying to go for the easy wins as well. I think this has had really wide-ranging impact for a lot of groups. And it was absolutely a ground up campaign that came from lots of groups who had a passion in the area. And we worked really closely with lots of groups in the sector to make sure that we were including them along the way.

RT: I love the idea that an initiative like this has really benefited many more groups than you originally thought it would do. And actually, for equity, just in general, that is amazing. I think such a contribution, and probably the benefits will continue in so many ways that we would never have even thought about and it's such a big contribution. And just talking about the different groups that you're a board member of, what would you say that these organizations are doing to promote equality, diversity and inclusion in research in other ways? 

SM: Yeah, absolutely. So I think I'll maybe go to my work with ARMA. Again, people who aren't familiar, ARMA is the Association of Research Managers and Administrators, and I'm the deputy chair there. And I’m also chair on our EDI advisory group. We really have started with a lot of introspection within ARMA. For us, it was really important that we were able to approach this with authenticity with leadership, and to recognize that as a membership association, the reality is we don't have a lot of staff. We're not a very large organization, but actually our ability to change things comes from that network that we've built. We've got less than 10 members of staff, but we've got 3000 members across the country and we link in to our international sister associations all over the world. So we started with some real introspection and putting the board through some quite strong training on things like on EDI in general, but also anti racism, anti-ableism. And we eventually brought in all of our volunteers who participate in our various governance and working groups, and so on. And we've also done initiatives like the most recent policy we approved was our inclusive Recruitment Policy, which was all about transforming how we recruit people into ARMA and that includes not just our staff, but also all of our volunteers. So we we've made a conscious effort to remove those barriers to participation, to make sure that we do in future become a more representative organization than we are now. Things like making sure we are sharing questions in every interview process in advance, making sure that we assess candidates on the basis of skills instead of experience, making sure that we are running a process, making sure that everybody who participates in that process has been through the training I was describing there. So we've made lots of changes to how we operate, when we brought in an EDI policy. And I think one of the really important things for us was that the work that we were doing needed to be informed by a balance of lived experience and professional experience. I think often that's a balance that can go wrong. I think in organizations often there is a tendency to have this work as an add on, and going back to what Jakob was saying earlier, it gets shoved on the side of someone's job, it's something they're doing voluntarily on top of the day job. Organizations often don't put the resource behind it. They rely on people's lived experience. But people may well have lived experience of the barriers, but no experience of actually removing those barriers, which is a completely different ball game. So it's important to have that balance, make sure we have our advisory group of experts that we also were talking to our members. We had some really interesting conversations, for example, in the run up to the anti-racism training, as we were talking with members about what their experiences were. And I think that's really important to bring people's real-life experiences together with, you know, people's real-life experience of getting things right and getting things to a better place.

RT: Fantastic. Thank you. It'll be interesting to see what Kim says, as well as from a publishing point of view, because I want to turn now to what publishers can do to further positive change. And it's very similar to ARMA in terms of just looking for what we can do, not just externally with our publishing practices, and how we can change things there, but also internally; what can we do to make the organization a more diverse and inclusive place to work, that runs through everything that we do. I’ll just talk a little bit about what Emerald has been doing and then we'll come on to Kim, from your perspective. So a few brief things that we've done; one was to appoint an EDI lead, which this was last year. They’re full time, it's not just an add on, it's a proper job and a very busy one. The person that does that role has got a lot of initiatives underway. From an internal point of view, we really wanted to look at what we could do to support our people. So we've done things like supported grassroot employee movements, so we've had things like the menopause Cafe, and neurodiverse panel groups, and training and awareness events like yourself at ARMA. Looking, externally what we can do, organizing, collaborating with cross industry groups, we're on various boards, a couple of them are the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, and Business in the Community. We're really just trying to play our part to have a voice there and actually bring the learnings we can from what we're doing to them, and vice versa. From a publishing point of view, we've tried to reassess what we're doing with our authors, to see if our guidelines meet those accessibility needs and if they're working for neurodiverse authors, and so that's another area that we've looked at. We've looked at, like you were saying Sapna, we've looked at our recruitment and performance processes as well, and where we can improve those. Like Jakob said, this doesn't happen overnight. It's not something that you can just click your fingers or have this training session or this workshop, and it's all going to be fixed, it is an ongoing process. And then sometimes it's things that are obvious, maybe should be obvious but maybe aren't and when it's going back and actually thinking, Well, what can we do? What can we do, even in small ways to change things - it could just be a small tweak, which would have a massive difference. Last year, we supported various groups that are underrepresented in research. There's been a lot with gender, we supported the Women in Academia Support Network and we collaborate with them on various campaigns and helped them with a book they were publishing. And then we had this huge commissioning focus on indigenous research. That's been fantastic to work on - I personally was involved in that quite a bit and we've had reports that we're focusing on them, we commissioned the research, and we were having advisors, and we're just putting them in the spotlight in any way that we could be involved in, in various campaigns, whatever we were doing. And I just think it'd be wonderful if we can just continue to do more and more of these initiatives to have a positive change. But like I say, there's so much more that we need to do. And I'd be very interested to come to Kim now to give us some idea of what IOP publishing is doing in this space and what challenges there might be and the way you see this heading. Thank you.

Kim Eggleton (KE): No problem. Thank you so much for having me. And it's already I've learned so much from listening to you all. So thank you for sharing. We kind of began our diversity journey as a company around 2019, when we first actually made it officially part of one person's role. And that was a part time person. And it was just a bit of their role. So very much like everyone else said, it's kind of it was an add on, you know, if you have spare time be great if you could get to fix the world's problems. But we really found that as time progressed, there was a real desire for change from the ground, like from the staff. And what they were really feeling was that some of the processes that we had in place were not fair or equitable to the customers that we were serving. So thinking about our authors and our reviewers. And then the murder of George Floyd really kind of brought everything to a head for us and for wider society. And it really became a talking point for almost every member of staff now is, how can we be part of a positive change, we need to do more, we need to invest more, we need to put some resources behind this. And what we didn't want to do was put out any kind of performative statement that made it sound like we, you know, taking these issues really seriously, but not actually doing anything really of substance underneath it. 

And so we moved reasonably quickly with some of the ideas that had really just been sitting sort of on desks, not getting much airtime, we were able to actually put some of those in place really quickly, because suddenly everybody cared and everyone was really interested. And one of the first things that we did was we looked at our journals, which are physics journals, and they follow the single anonymous or single blind as it used to be known process, which is that the reviewers know who the authors are, that are writing the work that's being reviewed. And we actually said, a number of us came from a more of a social sciences background. Why are we doing it like this? Surely there's bias here. Because you're not just assessing the research, you're also assessing the person that's written the research. And then we went away and did some literature reviews and looked at what had been published. And we were like, wow, yeah, there is definitely some bias here. And so we trialed, giving authors the option to anonymize their work. And very quickly, it became clear that it was popular and it was going to make a difference. And so we actually committed very quickly to rolling that out across all our journals, that now all authors have the choice if they want to put their name on their work, they can, but they are under no obligation to. And we're now at a point where we're about 18 months into that where all our journals have had this opportunity available. And we can see what difference it's making. And it's so interesting. There definitely is bias in the single anonymous system. And what geographical is, is the one where I see the biggest difference. So if I can take two regions, as an example, authors from Africa, and authors from the Middle East, have double the chance of their articles being accepted, if they take their name off their work, double. That is, to me, like head exploding. I think that's absolutely fascinating. And such a compelling, evidence based reason to say this is why we should be doing this. We know from other industries recruitment, for example, we should be trying to take things like names and ethnicity and age of CVs. We know that, why we haven't applied that to scientific research and you know, the way we assess that kind of research, we're really now just starting to catch up. So that data's been really, really interesting other things that We've been putting in place, and it's all linked together really is, trying to change the demographic makeup of our gatekeeping community. And by gatekeeping community, I mean the people who are making decisions on what we're publishing, so the reviewers, the editorial boards. And what we know, again, more from the published literature than anything else, is that the demographics of the gatekeeping community influence what gets accepted and what doesn't. So people typically are more likely to recommend accepting work if it's done by people that have the same demographic characteristics as themselves. And of course, like the vast majority of the journals, and publishers, most of our editorial boards, you know, middle to senior management, white males, working in the western world on very traditional kind of research, themes and topics. And it really, that reading that kind of literature about the homophily. And in that kind of assessment really made us think we need to make a change. And this isn't a performative change, we need more representation from a wide range of demographics, on our editorial boards, and in our reviewer pools, because they're influencing what we're publishing, you know, we absolutely need that representation. And that's something we've really focused on, we've put in a few technological steps to make it more easy for us to do it. So we've actually built like a reviewer finding system, which is just internal for us, but it helps us look for people from minority groups. So we can sort of search we're not displaying those people's characteristics, but we can ask for our search results to be people from lower to middle income countries or, you know, women or any kind of underrepresented group that we collect data on. So there's some really great work that we're doing there. But we've combined not only that technological initiative, with training, and that's absolutely critical to it, all our staff now go through mandatory unconscious bias training, it's also available to all our board members, we've rolled out a reviewer training program as well, which is free for all our reviewers, but again, considers things like how to assess a manuscript fairly and not be distracted by who wrote it, and so on. And a little bit about the theory of bias. And that combination of tactics is proving really successful. And we've seen our invitations to researchers from lower to middle income countries, for example, our reviewer invitations, I mean, double in the last three years, you can't do that without making a real conscious effort. And that's something we've, we've still got a very long way to go. But it's a really, really promising first step.

RT: That's really exciting, isn't it to feel that you've seen in a very short space of time, you have made such a difference, and you can already see the impact that it's having on those communities, and it's only going to grow. And I think sort of just more collaboration and just discussing how you've done it, I think is really helpful because it is, you know, taking the advice or the guidance or you know, what's worked, what hasn't, the challenges, that we can just learn from one another? Because it's about that, if we can share that knowledge, and why wouldn't we, because we want to make this, you know, want to make research publishing practices and, and you know, wants to improve EDI in research. So if we could, we can share this this wealth of knowledge and knowhow it'd be really helpful. And I'd like to ask all of you, starting with Jakob, if you could name one thing, small or big, win to improve EDI. And something that you could do sort of soonish, what would you do?

JFC: I think, this is stolen from Kevin Guyan and his book Queer Data. I think it's in every context, ask who's in the room, because that will help a lot, both when it comes to the team and when you think about management, but also when you think about, because I think that's talked a bit about it here, I think the idea of open science, and particularly open data will give some tremendous challenges. And it's not only about publishing, but in the end, I think publishers deal with a lot of the problems when things go wrong in this area. And I think sometimes asking the question, who's in the room. Representation won't solve it all and we can't have everybody in the room. If people aren't in the room, we need to develop competencies to look at data and everything else in order to do this. So yeah, who's in the room?

RT: Wonderful love that. We can keep that in our heads. Sapna, what would be yours?

SM: I would say, don't go it alone. I think there is a lot of work going on out there. There are a lot of people who can help. You know, for example, I know that the Royal Society of Chemistry, who are one of our EDIS members have got, have led on the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing, that has brought together 56 different organizations. So there is a lot of work going out there, they've developed minimum standards, you don't have to start from scratch just because that's where you are, actually look at the people who are that stage ahead of you. Ask them for help. You know, we often pair up members and things like that to help them learn from one another. Go join movements, go join the people who are already working in this space, and collaborate. This is not an area where we need to get competitive.

RT: Wonderful, thank you. And Kim what would be yours? 

KE: Probably because I work with a lot of scientists, but data is so critical to getting movement in this space. You can go in with a feeling and a perception. But until you actually have data to back it up, it can be quite difficult to change some mindsets. So I would say as evidence based as we can make it let's collect and share data, obviously, in an ethical and legal way. But let's make sure that we're actually collecting data and showing the impact of some of these changes that we're making.

JFC: I think I'll actually challenge that a little bit. Because I think a lot of universities will actually use that as a as a way of excusing, they can't do anything, because they can't collect data on let's say, sexual orientation and gender identity and race, stuff like that. And the moment they can't collect data, then we can't do anything, I would actually say, action comes first. Because this is about, it's about building trust here. And you don't get trust by asking people who don't trust you for their data.

KE: You’re right.

JFC: But I see your point.

SM: We had a really interesting experience on this with ARMA. Because essentially, our initial attempts to gather data from our community failed, for various reasons, we couldn't. And we had a really strong conversation about the fact that we did not want that to hold us up. It was something that was happening in tandem. But, you know, essentially, our first attempts for technical logical reasons, we weren't able to gather it the way that we wanted. And I do think data collections are incredibly important. EDIS have done a whole project around the DAISY guidance, around maximizing the responses that you get, how to build that trust that the Jakob is talking about. But it really shouldn't stop you from acting. But I do think they go hand in hand, you need to be building your evidence base for the next stage as you're acting on the first one.

KE: You're absolutely right, it really can be used as an excuse for not doing anything. And that's some of the resistance we've had actually, when we've been trying to persuade some of our board members and journal communities that this is the change we want to make. And here's why. And they've sort of said, you know what, we'll do it in a year when you come back and show us what happened. And that's what I mean, when I say data is useful for changing and weathers resistance, I think it's incredibly useful in changing the mindset. A lot of people are very willing and open to making a lot of these changes without any kind of robust evidence, you can literally just say, this is the right thing to do. And they agree with you and you can press forward. So no, in no way should it be used to hold things up. But it can be a very, very powerful tool when you meet resistance.

RT: Amazing. Thank you. So we've got there, just you know, if you can't do anything else, but you can do, who's in the room, make sure you’re represented, collaborate, start, you don't have to start from scratch. So get together. And if people do need to be persuaded, you know, some people will act but if not, get that evidence, get that evidence base in there, if you can, and, you know, why not? If we can gather that information. I want to thank all three of you for joining me today. And it's been really interesting to speak to you. I think we could probably talk on this for another three hours, easily, just straight here. But hopefully, we'll talk a bit more about the progress that everyone's making. And I wish you all the success and in everything that you're doing and to make a difference and you really are making a difference. So thank you.

SM, KE, JFC: Thank you for having us.

RT: Thank you for listening to today's episode. You can find more information about our guests and a transcript of the episode on our website. I'd like to thank all of our guests for today's episode, along with Podcast Producer Daniel Ridge and the organization This Is Distorted.