Diversity, equity and inclusion in science

Racism is still rife in predominantly white universities. These will not be safe for Black students until the collective mindset of white campuses changes, argues Walter P. Suza.

Academic freedom is increasingly threatened by homophobic legislation. Stella Nyanzi describes how this affects queer African scholars, and calls for resistance.

Positionality statements describe how researcher identities shape research processes. We must consider how these statements can enact harm upon marginalized researchers.

Drawing on her personal experience as an autistic scientist–practitioner, Eloise Stark explores how we can empower neurodivergent populations in academia.

The stories that US universities tell about diversity, equity and inclusion do not translate to actions, explains Neil A. Lewis, Jr. Instead, their actions disadvantage the people they allegedly support.

Scientific fieldwork can involve travel to countries where disclosing LGBTQ+ identity is unsafe. This is a significant challenge faced by LGBTQ+ scientists, writes Christina Atchison, and should be part of risk assessments and fieldwork support.

The world’s population does not split neatly into two groups, WEIRD and non-WEIRD people, argues Sakshi Ghai. Because the non-WEIRD brush does not do justice to the complexity of human lives, she calls upon behavioural science to ensure that samples represent human diversity.

Oliver Rollins is a sociologist interested in how neuroscience research deals with and is informed by racialisation, racism, and other social processes of inequality. Here, he discusses how (neuro)scientists can engage in antiracist research practices and contribute to an antiracist science.

Maxine Davis’ experience as a Black academic in an overwhelmingly white department took a heavy toll on her mental health. Here she argues for an active examination of anti-Black practices in organizations to promote the health and well-being of all academics.

Belonging is an essential part of human identity. But with belonging comes ‘otherness’ — the tendency to label ‘others’ on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, ability or some other dimension. To advance science, we need to recognize how otherness affects research and implement interventions to overcome the biases that it creates.

Biobanks have emerged as valuable resources for studying behavioural and social genomics, but are not representative of global populations. Thus, current research findings do not generalize, and exacerbate knowledge and health inequalities. We call on researchers, publishers and funders to address barriers to biobank diversity.

Most scientific prizes and medals are named after men, and most of these are also awarded to men. The very few awards named after women or not named after a person at all are more frequently awarded to women, although parity between the gender of recipients is still not achieved. We call on the scientific community to rethink the naming of academic awards, medals and prizes, their nomination and selection criteria, and to diversify awarding committees and procedures to ensure greater inclusivity.

On the basis of decades of cognitive science research into the nature of lexical concepts, we argue that gender categories that reflect the reality of the experiences of transgender people are more useful and cognitively natural than sex-based category definitions.

The African Union has committed to gender equity for the continent. Yet women are underrepresented in education, in the workplace and in leadership positions. We must act now to achieve gender equity and combat existing structures of discrimination. We propose actions to help women to get there, stay there and thrive as leaders.

Behavioural science involves understanding humans. However, it fails if it develops a limited understanding of humanity — 17% of whom who live in Africa. Africa’s voice must therefore be included in behavioural science research. Collaborations with African researchers should be grounded in respect.

US universities have made public commitments to recruit and retain faculty of colour. Analysis of three federal datasets shows that at current rates diversity in US faculty will never reach racial parity. Yet, colleges and universities could achieve parity by 2050 by diversifying their faculty at 3.5 times the current pace.

The low representation of academics with disabilities is a longstanding problem on which progress has been slow. Drawing on my research on disability-related barriers and my experiences of disability, I make six practical suggestions for how academic staff and people with disabilities can help make academia more disability inclusive.

Mental health, neuroscience and neuroethics researchers must engage local African communities to enable discourses on cultural understandings of mental illness. To ensure that these engagements are both ethical and innovative, they must be facilitated with cultural competence and humility, because serious consideration of different contextual and local factors is critical.

Failure to consider the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion in biomedical and human behaviour research harms patients, trainees and scientists. On the basis of experience and evidence, we make actionable, specific recommendations on how equity, diversity and inclusion can be considered at each step of a research project.

Women are underrepresented in prestigious science roles in many countries. This is also true in China, where they are less likely to succeed in election to the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering — for reasons unrelated to scientific merit. Reform of election procedures is needed to foster gender balance.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy amongst Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups has recently been well observed, and is symptomatic of wider health inequalities. An approach that unites insights from sociology and medicine is the only way to address this pressing issue.

Science is still an enterprise in which positions of power are mainly held by white, cis-gender, male academics. We discuss how the legacy of science’s exclusionary past still persists in scientific structures and propose concrete changes to open the system to a more diverse future.

Research centres in low- and middle-income countries are routinely circumvented in the production of cross-cultural research on human behaviour. Where local contributions are made, collaboration is rarely equitable and often uncredited in co-authorship. Efforts to decolonize the social sciences will remain inadequate until these norms are overturned.

Doctorate recipients with disabilities experienced early in life (at age <25 yr) working in STEM at academic institutions earned US$10,580 less per year than non-disabled workers and were underrepresented in higher academic positions.

A Registered Report field study by Nichols et al. finds little evidence that images of organizational diversity change the volume or quality of minority applicants. Stronger commitments to diversity may be needed to increase recruitment of minority applicants.

Data suggest an inverse relationship exists between where plant diversity occurs in nature and where it is housed. This disparity persists across physical and digital botanical collections despite overt colonialism ending over half a century ago.

Algorithmic gender and race/ethnicity inference tools based on author names have very high error rates in marginalized communities. This may result in misleading results in many computational social science and sociology projects.

Using publication and editorial team composition records from more than 1,000 journals, Liu and coauthors uncover pervasive gender inequalities among academic editors. Only 8% of editors-in-chief are women. Nearly 6% of editors publish one-third of all their papers in the journal they edit, and this self-publication pattern is stronger among men editors.

Studying socioeconomic backgrounds and intergenerational transmission in the US academia, Morgan et al. find that faculty have a parent with a Ph.D. degree a striking 25 times more often than the general population.

Gomez et al. study international citation and text similarity networks across 150 fields and find that some countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and China, increasingly receive more citations despite researching similar topics as others.