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Accelerating DEI: Have the Data? Use the Data!
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Accelerating DEI: Have the Data? Use the Data!
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
SUSAN SPILKA: Hello, everybody. Welcome to session 3B, Accelerating DEI. Have the data, use the data. I'm Susan Spilka from TBI Communications. And I'll be introducing our panels shortly. But I have some housekeeping matters to discuss at this point. And then we'll get to the program.
SUSAN SPILKA: First of all, the conference hashtag is #ssp2021. It really helps when people tweet and put social posts up. So please do. You can view this session full screen by clicking on the Theater Mode button in the video player. Instructions for closed captions or in the pathable chat. For this session, we ask that you put all questions in the pathable chat box to the right of the video player.
SUSAN SPILKA: We will not be using the built in Zoom chat function for this session. Additionally, there's a document in with all of our email addresses and a link to a survey, which I'm going to tell you a little more about shortly, that's available for download in the Files tab, which is to the right of the video player. So anyway, just to start, today is an anniversary that a colleague reminded me of this morning, a solemn anniversary.
SUSAN SPILKA: It's been a year since George Floyd was murdered. So I think one small way that we can honor his legacy is to take a look at what our community has been doing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our focus this morning will be on research. William Edward Demings, who's an engineer who helped design the US Census, remarked once, without data, you're just another person with an opinion.
SUSAN SPILKA: Observations that are supported by data separate the experts who really actually drive change from the rest of us regular folks with opinions. Today's panel brings together a group of such experts to talk about their research on gender, ethnicity, and other factors as it impacts the research enterprise and publishing workplace. They'll share insights and lessons learned for you to bring back to your workplaces.
SUSAN SPILKA: Our hope is that the sessions will inform best practices, expedite progress, drive cultural change inside our organizations through the research pipeline, and into society at large. As scholarly publishers, you see we have a superpower. We're the data stewards who share research with broad audiences. And so we have the power to make an impact way beyond our organizations.
SUSAN SPILKA: And by sharing, we multiply that impact. So before we move on to our panelists, I'd like to ask each of you to complete the Vital Signs survey that TBI Communications launched recently. We are conducting this very brief survey to take the pulse of DEI in our community. It's adapted from the 2018 Workplace Equity Survey. And we will benchmark against it for change.
SUSAN SPILKA: The survey runs through June 4. And we will share our findings openly this summer. You can access it at http://bit.ly, B-I-T period, L-Y, /tbi-dei. The link is in the document in the pathable File tab. So please fill that out.
SUSAN SPILKA: We've also put a few questions in the polling function of the conference. And there are multiple choice questions, they'll take you a second to answer. And it will be interesting to gather a segment that we can compare to the broader survey. So if you can answer them, that would be great. I'll try if we have time to report on the results at the end of the session.
SUSAN SPILKA: OK, time for our panelists. First order of business is for everyone to introduce themselves and describe what their organizations are doing with DEI research. First up, Emma Tregenza, who is the general counsel and EDI lead at Emerald Publishing. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, Emma?
EMMA TREGENZA: Hi. Thank you, Susan. And hello to everyone. I'm really excited to be here. I think this is going to be a really interesting discussion with some great thoughts from people who are involved in this area. As Susan said, my names, Emma Tregenza. I am the EDI lead at publishing. And we commissioned last year our first inclusivity report.
EMMA TREGENZA: And what we did with that was we took 1,000 members-- we surveyed thousands of academics across the UK and the US, and 1,000 members of the general public. And we looked at comparing the views on diversity and inclusion between academia and the general public. And what that showed us was some really interesting differences, not least the academics see significantly more issues than the general public do in terms of their respective workplaces.
EMMA TREGENZA: So we found that 60% of academic participants felt there was a universal culture of recruitment bias for example within academia compared to just 17% of respondents in wider society. So there were some big differences there. And what that told us was that there's a whole raft of homegrown issues, as I'm sure many of you know, within academia that's leading to significant underrepresentation of various diverse groups, including, if you look at that through a gender lens or through an ethnicity lens.
EMMA TREGENZA: And whilst that's true of other industries as well, I think we have to reflect on the importance that academia plays actually in society in general and really question whether that can be allowed to continue for much longer. The other thing that we have done is quite substantial research amongst our own employees to look at what expectations are around diversity and inclusion. And we're finding that increasingly this is becoming an employer critical issue that people expect to see handled well.
EMMA TREGENZA: But we also see that there's real sensitivity to inauthenticity here within the workforce. People are really don't want to see box ticking. They want to see action and they want to see change. And that can be incredibly difficult to deliver. So it takes some courage and some tenacity, I think, to make this change. But we need to do it together as an industry to move forward. It's such an important issue for us.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Emma. Laura. Dr. Laura Norton, who's the senior program manager for inclusion and diversity at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?
LAURA NORTON: Yeah, of course. Thank you, Susan. Yeah, hello, everybody. Really lovely to be here with you today. So I think I'm coming at this maybe from a slightly different angle today from some of the other panelists. As well as being an international publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry is also a professional body for the chemical sciences.
LAURA NORTON: And so much of my work on inclusion and diversity is about our work for the chemical sciences as a whole as well as our work on inclusion and diversity in publishing. So I think a slightly different angle there to some others today. To give you a little bit of a flavor of some of the work that we've been doing, I think the Royal Society of Chemistry has a long standing history caring about and wanting to improve inclusion and diversity within the chemical sciences and within publishing.
LAURA NORTON: And we really believe in data and evidence led approach. And that's evident in our new inclusion and diversity strategy, which runs to 2025. Our work where we've really focused on the data and evidence began back at the beginning of 2018 where we launched our report, the diversity landscape of the chemical sciences, where we looked at just that. What does the diversity of the chemical sciences look like?
LAURA NORTON: Not surprisingly, we found that it was not representative of wider society, that we were certainly lacking in areas such as socioeconomic background, mental health, LGBT plus representation, race and ethnicity, and of course gender. And that led us on to a big piece of research that we released in November of 2018, our breaking the barriers report, that looked at women's retention and progression within the chemical sciences.
LAURA NORTON: That involved large scale surveys, focus groups, and interviews with people within the chemical sciences, policymakers, people who were chosen to leave the chemical sciences. And it pointed to three main areas where we needed to see change, academic funding structures, the academic culture, and balancing work with other responsibilities. Now of course, publishing falls heavily there within an academic culture.
LAURA NORTON: And we saw that one big piece that was missing from that research was looking at whether there was any bias or any gender differences within our own publishing portfolio. And that led us on to our report, "Is Publishing in the Chemical Sciences Gender Biased?", where we analyze the gender profile of authors of over 700,000 manuscript submissions across all of our journals between 2014 and 2018.
LAURA NORTON: I think I can talk a little bit more in some of the other questions that Susan may pose to us throughout the session on the findings of that research. But I think none of us will be surprised to hear that we did see that there are gender differences across the publishing pipeline as others have also seen when they've analyzed their own publishing portfolios.
LAURA NORTON: And some of the other panelists, I think, will talk about that today as well. So much of our work is really focused around data and evidence. That's where we think everything, the actions that we implement, the changes that we make, really should come from the data. Thank you very much, Susan.
SUSAN SPILKA: You're welcome, Laura. On to Matt Giampoala. Also, Dr. Matt. And I think everyone here has a doctoral level degree except for me. Matt is the VP for publications at the American Geophysical Union. Would you tell us about your work?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Hi, thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to be here as part of this panel. AGU's been doing a lot of great work in this space and is accelerating that. So similar to the Royal Society of Chemistry, we are a member organization. And we have not just publications, but lots of member activities. And our diversity and inclusion efforts really do focus through that membership in a lot of ways.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So we recently last year updated our strategic plan. So over the next five years, we've got three main pillars to that plan. And one of them is really around promoting and exemplifying an inclusive scientific culture. The other two are focused in-- they all are sort of interdependent with each other. But focusing on taking discovery science and moving that forward to address societal challenges.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And the third is around partnering. So the truth is that the interplay there is so important because we can't do any of this work alone. So AGU has been leaning into its work with diversity inclusion. We have an Ethics and Equity Center that has been sort of the backdrop of a lot of our operations. But we with our new strategic plan instituted a diversity and inclusion committee.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And they are partners to all our different committees and all our different programs. So our meetings, our publications, any sort of governance structure. And in that, we're accelerating our collection of data and revising the way we collect it, which I think we can talk about a little bit later. And I just want to say that within our publications program, we've been tasked to do an assessment of where we are on inclusion.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And we're finding that the more we use our data, the more we can actually convince our editors and our editorial boards to change their behavior because they know it's important. But when they actually see, when you can give them a measurement and say, well, you're here, submissions are here, and the acceptance rate is here, and the number of reviewers you have from a certain region are here. And they can see that there's an imbalance and then address those issues.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA:
SUSAN SPILKA: People with data versus people with opinions, right? OK, last but not least, Dr. Holly Falk-Krzesinski from Elsevier. Holly is the VP for research intelligence in Elsevier's global strategic networks team. And she's also co-chair of the company's Gender Equity Task Force.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for being here. As many of you probably are aware, Elsevier is a global publisher. We have a little over 2,500 journals in our portfolio. And that includes journals that are owned by lots of society partners. And we are their publishing partner. So we work with a wide range of stakeholders in the community. For us, we think about the importance of equality and equity in research on a global scale.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: We know that bias, discrimination, and exclusion as well as a lack of diversity and inclusion in research negatively affect both opportunities for individual researchers to be able to advance and excel in their careers. And then on the flip side of that same coin, then it also negatively affects the equitable and impactful outcomes of research. Really, the only way that we can make sure that research has a lasting impact on societal challenges of our times is by harnessing the full contribution of all stakeholders in the global research community.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And from Elsevier's perspective, we contribute to this effort by promoting diversity and inclusion in research through an evidence based approach and a coordinated set of actions and initiatives that follow along with that. And I want to add something about just how important it is that we are thinking about these things especially, and I'll talk a lot about our efforts with regards to gender equity. The World Economic Forum just at the very end of March released its global gender gap report.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And according to that report, closing the gender gap went from 99 years to 135.6 years. As if five generations wasn't already bad enough, almost two more now. Two more full generations. Moreover, the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Academies, and in a very large study that we did it Elsevier looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of these show that it has had a disproportionately and quite negative impact on women researchers.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Now I was aware the gains for women in STEM fields are fragile. I guess we just didn't realize how fragile and the order of magnitude of setback that could result over such a short period of time. So what I am emphasizing here is that there is a need for accelerated progress. And in fact, that need is really, really quite urgent. And I don't see any other way that we can proceed with that unless we're guided by data and think about things on a global scale.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: So at Elsevier, these DEI principles are coming right from the top. Our CEO is deeply invested in inclusion and diversity in research, and just last year launched an external I&D advisory board. Internal to the organization, we have a Gender Equity Task Force and those focused on other areas of inclusion and diversity dimensions as well. I'm proud to be the co-chair of the Gender Equity Task Force, and one of the founding members.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: This is an organic hub that started as a grassroots effort of bringing colleagues together who were committed and involved in increasing gender diversity, inclusion, and research, building on the foundation of accomplishments by our own Elsevier foundation and working in partnership with the international gender summits. Our Gender Equity Task Force brings together various cross-business work streams examining our own key processes, principles, and systems in the context of gender I&D to ensure that Elsevier's supporting the most robust research possible in the most equitable, inclusive way, and establish a framework of best practices that are data informed and evidence based so that we have these best practices and policies that us as well as other organizations can emulate and/or build from.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: We focus most of our attention on external facing activities, including coordinator, gender, inclusion, diversity, equality efforts across our own business units, greater gender diversity in our journal editorial boards, peer reviewers and authors, and in terms of invited speakers and panelists to Elsevier sponsored conferences as well as our Elsevier award selection committees. We also aim to uncover and address issues of inequalities and implicit bias throughout our publication workflow, enhancing sex and gender based analysis and research and reporting on that in the publications that we sponsor, and expanding our journal and preprint content in all of these efforts.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: As well as because we're moving into the AI space more and more in data science, considering issues of bias that come up in AI technologies and how to overcome them very early on. And then also, using our considerable data and analytics resources to address critical issues of inclusion and diversity towards establishing a very strong base. And over the last three years, we've actually released two major global data and evidence reports on gender equity in the research workforce.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we've also extended those efforts to thinking about how we can think about gender identity in all of our activities, and have made a very strong commitment to inclusion of gender identity data within our editorial workflow systems. And then because we recognize that there are other aspects of I&D that we need to be thinking about simultaneously, begun to expand those and are thinking into race and ethnicity as well, I'm very proud to say that we're working super closely with Laura and the Royal Society of Chemistry and are part of their multi publisher stakeholder group.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And I think, Laura, there's about 35 of us that you've brought together and working in fact in conjunction, and then making sure that the things we learn for example within our own areas based editorial manager system can be shared with the community. Because this is not a time to think about competitive edge creation, but rather a way in which we can all come together for the benefit of research in general.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Holly. That's really interesting. So because we have limited time and want to cover a lot of ground, we've structured our session with a few questions that I'll pose to between one and three of the panelists. If we have time afterward, we'll take questions from the audience. But if we don't have time, please put your questions in the chat or email them to us.
SUSAN SPILKA: And we will get back to you. Please don't hold back. We really want to spark conversations and get some more collaboration going. So OK, first question. I'm going to pose my first question to Laura. How has research informed best practices in your organization and community?
LAURA NORTON: Thanks, Susan. In so many ways. Always. Research informs our next steps and the actions that we commit to making a change with. So some examples of some community actions that we have put in place, I mentioned before our women's retention and progression project and research called Breaking the Barriers. So that highlighted areas that people really saw a need for change within.
LAURA NORTON: And we made recommendations to others. So we made some recommendations to funders, academic institutions, industry. We wanted to see that funders balance short and long term funding structures because people talked a lot about the difficulty there in short term funding and balancing that with a career and time to publish your papers and move forward with your career.
LAURA NORTON: We asked the chemical sciences industry to share best practice in their data, because much of the data that we did glean within that research project did come from academia. And we also asked everyone to enforce a zero tolerance approach to bullying and harassment. Sadly, we found much evidence of bullying and harassment within the sector within that research piece. We also made commitments ourselves.
LAURA NORTON: So we said that we would launch new grant schemes to support people in their work. So we launched a new scheme called Grants for Carers, which provides up to 1,000 pounds for people who have with a added financial burden of attending meetings, conferences, events, or professional development events. So we help support the financial, I guess the added financial burden of providing care whilst you are not present.
LAURA NORTON: We also launched our assistance grants which provides financial support for those who require assistance themselves. And we launched our bullying and harassment support line off the back of that piece of research, which is there to listen, and signpost, and support anyone within the chemical sciences with issues around bullying and harassment. And some other examples.
LAURA NORTON: So our work, I'd mentioned earlier, is publishing in the chemical sciences gender biased. Sadly, we found that there are gender differences throughout the publishing process. And that has led us on to internal changes, and really trying to improve our practices within the organization, thinking about what we can do internally. So we set targets for our editorial boards, reviewers, and authors to try to improve representation.
LAURA NORTON: We said that we would increase transparency, that we'd undertake a comprehensive analysis and report on all of our authors, reviewers, and editorial decision makers. And we're doing that. Now we've kind of extended that further. We said initially that will be for publishing. And we've extended that further and we are now producing a biennial inclusion and diversity report that shows all of our data from all of our membership activities, all of our processes, and our publishing activities.
LAURA NORTON: We said that we would reflect our research community so that we would recruit and train reviewers, editorial board members, associate editors, to reflect the current gender balance of our research community. And we can already see changes there that we have already seen an improvement, and an increase in better representation of women on our editorial boards. We said that we would empower and innovate.
LAURA NORTON: So we provide new training and resources to empower our editors to eliminate any bias, and that we'd test new models throughout the publishing process right from submission through to publication. We've done this in numerous ways. Already, we're already starting to collect gender data from our authors. And we've introduced a name change policy recently. And we're trialing new methods of peer review as well.
LAURA NORTON: We also said that we would encourage intervention. And here we said that we'd partner with others and lead the development of a new inclusion and diversity framework for action, set the standard to drive change within the academic publishing industry. And that led us on to a further piece of work, our framework for action. And this is a tool to a prove inclusion and diversity in publishing with a series of actions for editorial boards, editors, authors, and staff from publishing organizations to kind of set where your current standard of inclusion and diversity is and develop further and improve your practices with inclusion and diversity.
LAURA NORTON: And that was really the starting point for the joint commitment that Holly just mentioned. So we joined with a group of publishers to discuss our framework for action. And from that, we developed the joint commitment for action, of which, as Holly said, we now have I think 39 member organizations. It's grown and grown. That joint commitment together, we all said that we will understand our research community, reflect the diversity of the community, share success to achieve impact, and set the minimum standards on which to build.
LAURA NORTON: And there are already really positive actions coming out of that group, not only the collaboration and the sharing between the panelists today and beyond within the 39 organizations involved, but we have already worked on author name change policies together and shared resources there. That information is then being shared with [INAUDIBLE] as well. We're talking about lots of other areas of ways in which we can work together and improve the standard across publishing as a whole and move faster by working together.
LAURA NORTON: So there's so many ways in which the research, and the data, and evidence is informing good practice within our organization within the chemical sciences community, within our publishing activities, and then within publishing as a whole working together through the joint commitment.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Laura. That's really quite a lot that's going on. Emma, would you take on the same question about how has research informed best practices in your organization and your community?
EMMA TREGENZA: Yeah, well I mean, as Laura said, there's just such an enormous amount of issues, I suppose, under practices that need to change or that we need to think about ED&I. And I'm not going to go into every single one of them because probably quite a lot of those are quite similar to the sorts of things Laura is talking about. But what I perhaps will just comment on is a couple of things.
EMMA TREGENZA: Holly mentioned this idea of urgency. And I think that this issue is so all encompassing that you can become a little bit stymied by just feeling like there's so much to do, and where do you even start. So one of the things that we started to do is section out and take slices in which we can start to make some action. So for example, start to set some KPIs around slices of our output rather than trying to do the whole thing at once.
EMMA TREGENZA: There are some questions I can see coming in about data. And I am going to address some of that in another question. But there are enormous challenges in trying to get at this data in order to set those benchmarks and to see your improvement. So if you can start with a smaller data set, that will help you to feel that you're making some improvements there. Because it does mean, it is a mindset change.
EMMA TREGENZA: It does mean changing the mindsets of your editorial boards, of your authors, even of your customers. Because things like impact factors and the value of research is so ingrained in the way that we think as an industry that that is going to take a long time to change. But unless we do that, we're always going to have underrepresentation of certain groups.
EMMA TREGENZA: So these are all very, very long processes. And we have to start somewhere, I would say. The other thing as both Laura and Holly have mentioned, is the fact that this is an industry effort. We need to work together and collaborate. This is not something that should be seen as the competitive advantage. We won't get there unless we all work together. So sharing ideas, sharing standards as much as we can, is incredibly important.
EMMA TREGENZA: And also of course we'll contribute to that long term change of attitude and culture that we need. The other thing I just wanted to mention, because I think it's probably a slightly different take, is that what we've also done is we've aligned what we're doing externally in terms of our output with what we do internally in terms of our own colleagues.
EMMA TREGENZA: So we have started to-- our ED&I policy, oh I'm sorry, ED&I strategy, is not just about our outputs. It's about everything that we do within the organization. So we've looked at aligning this around four multifunctional pillars. So we have people, product, community, and communications. And actually, that then covers a whole host of things that you do, not only about your own internal policies, but about things like what does the language in the products that you are offering when we're talking about AI?
EMMA TREGENZA: As Holly mentioned, what does that mean in terms of product development? What does it mean for R&D? What does it mean in the way that we speak externally and all of these things? And I think that's really important because it goes back to that point about the authenticity that I made earlier. It's very easy to trip yourself up by not practicing what you're preaching in this area.
EMMA TREGENZA: So you do need to look across everything that you do, I think.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Thank you. I think what I'm going to do because we have a lot to cover is I'm going to combine that question with the next question. So how has research informed best practices in your organizations and your community and cultural change? And I'm going to pose it to first Holly and then Matt. And so Holly.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: OK. So I talked about that we've done two major global gender research reports. And our most recent one is the researcher journey. And so you can take a look at that. It's freely available. I'll put the URL into the chat as soon as I'm done speaking because I can't type and talk at the same time. But I can do that.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And one of the things that we took away from that is because we did the analysis on a global scale and conducted this research and shared these findings really widely is that we're beginning to incorporate those, not just into the ways in which we share with universities, and funding organizations, but how do we actually take that data and use it within our own practices to support the research community. And in this case, we've done this to help advance our efforts and commitment around having greater gender diversity on our editorial boards and invited conferences on our review committees.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And so we're using that data and actually building out an opportunity for us to show why this is important, sharing it in an evidence based. And so we're sharing the data with our editors in chief by way of our publishers. We're giving them information on the current state of their own editorial boards and their gender composition. We're giving them data about their regional application of original diversity of gender, and in a field based.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And in some cases, it could be multiple fields. And asking them to use that data to establish milestones and goals with regards to increasing their gender diversity. Then we're helping them think about the ways in which they can communicate that into their fields and then to use that to drive information on how to actually think about selection of new individuals as part of those editorial boards.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And it's doing incredibly well. When we first started talking to editors, we found that there was a lot of pushback. We already have the best people. It's so hard to find more diverse. Everybody says no because there's such a small population. But we started to give them this data and said, look. We're not asking you to make massive changes in the next six months.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But what can you do in the six months relative to what your field looks like for example? And then we've been able to remind the editors that serving on an editorial board is an important leadership opportunity. And it can change the nature of somebody's career progression. And so if we want to help be catalysts of change, we can think more broadly about the ways in which we invite people to serve.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And we've had to remind folks, look. You don't have to be 70 years old and a full professor before you're invited to serve on an editorial board, that somebody has just achieved tenure within their university structure as a faculty member means that they have had at least four years of undergraduate work. They've add five to seven years of graduate training. They've had one to five years of post-doctoral training and probably five to seven years as a faculty member.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: How much more expert do you need to put somebody on an editorial board? And so we've helping them reframe the ways in which they think about the pools of individuals that they can draw from to bring onto the editorial board. In addition, recognizing that we've also started to pilot in some of our editorial boards junior editor roles, where people are serving in a mentored editorial role.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And they're being paired up with a more senior and experienced editor on the board so that we can help to actively build a pipeline of researchers who can serve as editors, and doing it earlier on in their career so that by the time for example a faculty member has just been tenured, they can immediately be eligible to serve on an editorial board. And this is really driving real change. And in fact, across Elsevier, what we planned by the end of the year across our entire portfolio of 2,500 plus journals is that all of our publishers in conjunction with the editors in chief will in fact set a series of goals for the next one to five years of how they're going to drive change and what that change will look like with regards to gender diversity.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And then we've asked them to begin thinking about other aspects such as race and ethnicity. And we know that these are going to be more challenging aspects. So we're saying to people, it's fine. We don't expect you to address them in the same scale. But we do expect you to start to consider these issues simultaneously. They may be offsets. But they need to be done in parallel.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And we've had no pushback. And then with regards to the questions that are coming up is, how do we do this and get people to understand? We are spending a considerable amount of time working with people. And how do we build trust with regards to the stakeholder communities that we're engaging while we're also actively thinking about how to build out the data collection efforts.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Those two things have to go hand in hand. And you can't have good data collection if you don't have trust from the stakeholders such that they're willing to share accurately with you so that you know what you get is a robust set of data in the end.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Holly. Matt, you want to address how your research has informed best practices in your organization, community, and driven culture change?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Yeah. So I mean, we've been doing trainings with our editors for a long time where we do implicit bias training and things like that. But we've found with our community of Earth and space scientists that they really value data. And when you can present them data that shows that there is an imbalance, that challenges their internal biases and makes them realize that they need to change their behavior.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So for instance, on gender balance, we've shown that there's not many women reviewers and not that many women on the editorial boards. And we looked and we saw that, well across our community of our membership, the number of women was only 35%. But if we looked at earlier career stages, we see it's a much more evenly split.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So that was one area where we were able to talk with editors and realize that we needed to bring in more of these earlier career members, and that you don't need to only reserve editor positions for the people at the latest stages of their career. So in this case, we were able to really push through term limits. And I got zero complaints as we talked about this through our publications committee and our diversity, equity, and inclusion committee and with the editors.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: They were all on board with these term limits. And similarly, we have associate editor positions, which are skewed a little bit earlier career. And we were able to expand those. The numbers that we used for our journals, similar to developing that slightly junior role. One thing we've seen that editors will do when they're not faced with the data is sometimes they'll want to protect certain groups.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: They'll say, well, these early career folks, they shouldn't be spending time because they should be spending time writing papers, or getting tenure, or getting to the next stage of promotion. And showing them the data makes them realize that, well, there's an imbalance here and that those people should be given the choice if they want to serve because that also moves their career forward. The other thing is with regional disparities.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So in our global participation, we've been able to show that there's things like, well, more than 30% of our submissions are coming from China now. And yet the acceptance rate is really low. And it's not a matter of increasing your acceptance rate of those papers from China just at the face of it. But we do see that our number of reviewers and our representation on the editorial board is not matching the amount of submissions we get from China.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And that has really moved our editors. They see the problem and then they add more editors. And in this case, we always allow them to add more. You don't necessarily say you have to fire someone to bring someone in. Another thing data has shown us is that we do see sometimes when we make efforts in one area, we may kind of go backwards in another. So again, that global participation and the gender are two things that we're measuring.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And as we expand our global participation, sometimes we could go a little bit backwards in gender. So we can monitor that and see what our effects are. And then the third thing is as we start presenting some of the data that hasn't been that positive, so for instance race, we have an abysmal record on participation within our community across race. And we started presenting that at these committee meetings.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And it A, shows us that we have a lot of progress to make, and it also shows us that our data is not really great yet. So one of the things we're really glad to be part of the joint commitments. But all these different publishers and societies coming together and saying, well, how should we measure race and ethnicity and do it across the globe in a way that people can find themselves, and they can report to you who they are?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Because the way we were doing it before, and still sort of lagging that, was based on the US Census. So for instance, if somebody only had the choice of African-American and they were a Black researcher working in Africa, they didn't see themselves there and they couldn't tell us who they were. So we've updated that and made it so that people can find themselves.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: I think I'll stop there for now.
SUSAN SPILKA: That's great. OK, there are a bunch of questions that are on the chat. And if we have time, we'll get to some of those. But thank you to the panelists and to the participants for responding to those and getting a discussion going, a sidebar discussion going. We have one last question here, which is, what lessons learned from-- what are some lessons learned from your organization's work with DEI research?
SUSAN SPILKA: Start off with Emma.
EMMA TREGENZA: Thanks. I'm going to say something a bit controversial here given the subject matter of this session and what we've been talking about. But I do think that we need to be careful about applying academic standards to data when we're trying to improve diversity, particularly when we're talking about diversity other than gender. Because getting really good reliable information on ethnicity or other types of protective characteristics is very difficult.
EMMA TREGENZA: And Matt has already mentioned the fact that ethnicity and race mean completely different things depending on where you are in the world, for example. And we also, and I can see in the chat, there were legal challenges around asking for data, there is the challenge of whether or not people want to give you that data. Don't forget, we've had real problems of biases coming in to decision making based on data around ethnicity that people want to know about in the past.
EMMA TREGENZA: So it's a really nice surprise that people don't necessarily want to disclose that. So whilst I absolutely agree that if we can show people the data, it's an incredibly powerful story, and it will really help in changing individual behaviors, particularly when you're talking about editorial boards, for example, and I also think that we can't wait too long for perfection with this. I think that we need to start making some progress in small ways without necessarily having big data sets that we know we can rely on.
EMMA TREGENZA: And that's what I guess I was talking about before when I was kind of saying trying to break things down into slices. So you may know that you want to encourage more participation from Black academics in the US for example, or you want to encourage more participation from China, or whatever it happens to be. So sometimes I think the right thing to do is start with the problem and kind of work backwards from there and split this into manageable chunks around, what interventions can we make to improve that particular problem?
EMMA TREGENZA: So that's one thing I would say. And then the other thing, I guess, which I think people have alluded to a little bit, but I just really wanted to impress upon the audience, the importance of it, is this idea of hearts and minds. We are talking about cultural change here, whether that's outside or within your organization. Making the case and getting people to understand the importance for society of the whole around improving our diversity, but also that diversity is about everybody.
EMMA TREGENZA: I think some people shy away from the question of diversity because they don't think it means them. And of course it does. It's a whole myriad of different things. So the more we can do to work together to educate people around the benefits, the importance, the challenges, encouraging people to talk about their challenges more openly, I think the better really. As I said before, it's a long process to get to where we want to be.
EMMA TREGENZA: We're only going to do that by talking about it and continuing to share what we've learned.
SUSAN SPILKA: OK, great. Laura, any lessons learned so far?
LAURA NORTON: Thanks, Susan. I think I'll pull out two main areas. Those are data collection and collaboration. So thinking about data collection. So since we launched that first report I mentioned earlier, the diversity landscape of the chemical sciences, we now have three more years of data covering our membership, our membership activities, our publishing activities.
LAURA NORTON: And this always informs our next steps. It helps us to prioritize, which is a really difficult thing, in inclusion and diversity. But also it has allowed us to improve and continue to always improve how we collect and use diversity data and evidence. The importance of that data, that all of our initiatives, all of our interventions are based on that data.
LAURA NORTON: So the quality of that data is so important. We've also learned a lot about the importance of trust, developing trust in order for people to share their data with us. We've talked a lot about this in the joint commitment, what are we going to do with that data, being open about that, and making sure that people can trust us to do what we say we will, and the intention that we have to improve the work that we do with that data.
LAURA NORTON: The second area. I would say, collaboration. The importance of collaboration, and I can think of so many areas across our work where this has been important. So one example is some research that we did on exploring the workplace for LGBT plus physical scientists. Here, we collaborated with the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society to look at the physical sciences as a whole.
LAURA NORTON: It would have been very difficult for us to do that for just the chemical sciences with a lack of representation of LGBT plus people within the chemical sciences, and ensuring that we kept anonymity of anyone involved in the research. And also I think there were also shared issues across the physical sciences. So the importance there of bringing together all those networks across the physical sciences, the collaboration there, were also members of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Science Council's progression framework.
LAURA NORTON: And that has been instrumental in benchmarking our progress in inclusion and diversity across our membership activities, with other similar societies and sharing our knowledge. And it also really helped us to think about how we could do a similar thing for publishing and how we have joined together all of the organizations who are now currently involved in the joint commitment. And I think I already alluded to, and some of the other speakers today, have already alluded to some of the benefits that we're seeing out of the joint commitment, the sharing, the struggles, the challenges, and the successes with data collection.
LAURA NORTON: We now have a recommended way that we're seeing that all partners in the joint commitment should collect gender data. And as I think Holly said and Matt has also said, we're working together on how that can best be done for race and ethnicity. There are so many ways that by working together, we're already seeing improvements and faster improvements than I think any of us could have made alone.
LAURA NORTON: So I think for me, those are the two areas that I'll pull out, data and evidence, and the importance of collaboration.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Great. Matt, do you have any lessons learned to share?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Yeah, I have a couple along the lines of data and evidence. I think not assuming you know the answer. So for instance, when we've been trying to monitor what's happening during the pandemic and we hear that women are largely more impacted than men, we've been trying to measure that and say, well, have we seen a change in authorship? And we're not seeing it yet in the data we have. And it could be something that emerges.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: But it also opens us up to the questions of well maybe there's other things happening. We certainly know we've had editors and reviewers tell us that they can't do as much work for us and they need to take a break because of the pandemic. And we're seeing that it may be a little bit more nuanced than as either men or women. But people with caretaker roles are the ones who seem most impacted at this moment.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So we can then adjust and try to measure in different ways. And then the other, I guess lesson I think, is don't be afraid of making small changes that you think may only benefit a few people. Because for instance, we recently updated our name change policy as many publishers and societies have started doing to really address issues that were brought about within the trans community.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And we need to be able to change our name on past published papers in order to align with our true gender identity. And we've seen that after we updated our policy, that yes, we've had trans authors who've come and asked to make this update. And that's benefited them. But we've actually had more cis women who've been able to update their names. And so when you address issues that could affect underrepresented or vulnerable segments of the population you actually can help all of your members in ways that you didn't expect.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So I think that's been encouraging.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Holly, is there anything you want to add about lessons learned?
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Yeah, I would say a few. We have discovered it is easier said than done. But nonetheless we need to do. And so that's OK. Things are hard. And often those that are worthwhile doing are the hardest. So we understand that. But and so along those lines, we're not letting perfection get in the way of continuing to advance and do good work.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: So there are lots of times, for example, in our gender reports and in the biblio metrics schema that we use, we can only use an inferred binary gender designation. We realize that that's not perfect. But when we're looking at overall trends at a national scale, we understand that that can still provide us with actionable and important insight. And so we'll use that.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: At the same time, though, we recognize that we're going to be doing and supporting self-reported data collection. We need to be more specific. So we can't use amorphous terms such as gender. That's colloquial and it's very broad. We needed to understand that what we'll be asking people about is to report on their gender identity.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And then we absolutely need to think well beyond just binary options and being as inclusive as possible. We also learned that with the growing internationalization of research, we need to take into consideration global. And so these issues as Matt's already brought up of thinking about National Census Bureau schema for race and ethnicity, they simply are insufficient. And we're so glad for Laura and the RSC's initiative to bring us together and think about that.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And the opportunity then to think outside even ourselves even though there's now 39 publishers. So we've engaged a subject matter expert, a true scholar and researcher, in this space who's going to be guiding and supporting all of our efforts in this. We've also discovered that we have data and want to share data. But sharing is also not so easily done. And so take for example, we published a massive study of looking at submissions by gender into Elsevier's journals since the start of the pandemic.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And we're actually completely willing to share that data for others to be able to conduct the same kind of experiments on. But the ability of doing things like managing the legal data sharing agreements, not so easy. Taking data from one system that was not intended to support research necessarily and make that data available and clean enough to be able to support research studies also takes some work and effort.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we're working through these things. So if anybody's worried that we're not moving fast enough, we're moving as quickly as possible, but also taking into considerations everything from legal and privacy policies issues, data retention policies, transparent communication, prioritization of stakeholders, and the trust of those stakeholders, and then the technology. And we're very fortunate at Elsevier because we're working with Aries Editorial Manager.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we also have other internal editorial tracking systems. And we have crosstalk between them. Data standards for systems, interoperability, single sign on, appropriate access to data at the appropriate time by the appropriate people, data storage, and ability to ask, for example, open ended questions and providing those options that would allow people to really find themselves and share with that. We know that these are all things that we need to consider.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we're working through those and trying to come up with a plan that publishers or other data providers who are coming in a little bit later, you don't have to start from scratch. You're not reinventing the wheel. You can learn from the efforts that are already underway. So it's hard. But it's incredibly worthwhile. But you should all be prepared to tell your CEOs, no.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: We're not going to have this all done in six months.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Thanks, Holly. I think we are coming up at the end of our session. I want to share the poll results with you. There's some interesting results. The first question, does your organization state DEI values? 82% of the people on this call said, yes. 2% no. 14% said, not clearly, or comprehensively.
SUSAN SPILKA: And 2% said, not sure. But when the second question is, does your experience in your organization align with those values, only 48% said yes. So that's only 48% of the 82% felt that there was alignment in their experience with those values. Interestingly, no one said no. But 50% said not completely, which is that the world isn't a black and white place.
SUSAN SPILKA: And 2% said they're not sure. The third question was, has your organization's policies, programs, and practices advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past year? 37% said, yes a lot. 53% said, yes some. So that's 90% saw some progress this year.
SUSAN SPILKA: That's very encouraging. 8% of the participants said, it's status quo. The same. And 2% said, there's been lots of backsliding. So-- I find those quite interesting and in line with what we were hearing from the workplace equity survey in 2018. But I think possibly showing some progress since then.
SUSAN SPILKA: And that's what we'll report on in the next month or so from the overall survey. And I'll make that widely available. I'll also take the chat from this session and pull out questions and get answers for all of you. You're also free to speak with any of the-- any of the current panelists. The session will be recorded, is recorded, and will be available later today through November.
SUSAN SPILKA: I want to thank the speakers, Jackie, SSP staff, who have been so helpful, the program committee, and our generous sponsors. And hope everyone will take advantage of all the interactive networking events and marketplace gallery opportunities this week. You can advance your position and win prizes. So go for it. Anyway, thank you all so much for coming.
SUSAN SPILKA: I think we are at 12:00 noon. So we'll sign off now. Thank you.
LAURA NORTON: Thank you.
EMMA TREGENZA: Thank you. Bye.
SUSAN SPILKA: Bye.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Thank you.
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SUSAN SPILKA: Hello, everybody. Welcome to session 3B, Accelerating DEI. Have the data, use the data. I'm Susan Spilka from TBI Communications. And I'll be introducing our panels shortly. But I have some housekeeping matters to discuss at this point. And then we'll get to the program.
SUSAN SPILKA: First of all, the conference hashtag is #ssp2021. It really helps when people tweet and put social posts up. So please do. You can view this session full screen by clicking on the Theater Mode button in the video player. Instructions for closed captions or in the pathable chat. For this session, we ask that you put all questions in the pathable chat box to the right of the video player.
SUSAN SPILKA: We will not be using the built in Zoom chat function for this session. Additionally, there's a document in with all of our email addresses and a link to a survey, which I'm going to tell you a little more about shortly, that's available for download in the Files tab, which is to the right of the video player. So anyway, just to start, today is an anniversary that a colleague reminded me of this morning, a solemn anniversary.
SUSAN SPILKA: It's been a year since George Floyd was murdered. So I think one small way that we can honor his legacy is to take a look at what our community has been doing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our focus this morning will be on research. William Edward Demings, who's an engineer who helped design the US Census, remarked once, without data, you're just another person with an opinion.
SUSAN SPILKA: Observations that are supported by data separate the experts who really actually drive change from the rest of us regular folks with opinions. Today's panel brings together a group of such experts to talk about their research on gender, ethnicity, and other factors as it impacts the research enterprise and publishing workplace. They'll share insights and lessons learned for you to bring back to your workplaces.
SUSAN SPILKA: Our hope is that the sessions will inform best practices, expedite progress, drive cultural change inside our organizations through the research pipeline, and into society at large. As scholarly publishers, you see we have a superpower. We're the data stewards who share research with broad audiences. And so we have the power to make an impact way beyond our organizations.
SUSAN SPILKA: And by sharing, we multiply that impact. So before we move on to our panelists, I'd like to ask each of you to complete the Vital Signs survey that TBI Communications launched recently. We are conducting this very brief survey to take the pulse of DEI in our community. It's adapted from the 2018 Workplace Equity Survey. And we will benchmark against it for change.
SUSAN SPILKA: The survey runs through June 4. And we will share our findings openly this summer. You can access it at http://bit.ly, B-I-T period, L-Y, /tbi-dei. The link is in the document in the pathable File tab. So please fill that out.
SUSAN SPILKA: We've also put a few questions in the polling function of the conference. And there are multiple choice questions, they'll take you a second to answer. And it will be interesting to gather a segment that we can compare to the broader survey. So if you can answer them, that would be great. I'll try if we have time to report on the results at the end of the session.
SUSAN SPILKA: OK, time for our panelists. First order of business is for everyone to introduce themselves and describe what their organizations are doing with DEI research. First up, Emma Tregenza, who is the general counsel and EDI lead at Emerald Publishing. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, Emma?
EMMA TREGENZA: Hi. Thank you, Susan. And hello to everyone. I'm really excited to be here. I think this is going to be a really interesting discussion with some great thoughts from people who are involved in this area. As Susan said, my names, Emma Tregenza. I am the EDI lead at publishing. And we commissioned last year our first inclusivity report.
EMMA TREGENZA: And what we did with that was we took 1,000 members-- we surveyed thousands of academics across the UK and the US, and 1,000 members of the general public. And we looked at comparing the views on diversity and inclusion between academia and the general public. And what that showed us was some really interesting differences, not least the academics see significantly more issues than the general public do in terms of their respective workplaces.
EMMA TREGENZA: So we found that 60% of academic participants felt there was a universal culture of recruitment bias for example within academia compared to just 17% of respondents in wider society. So there were some big differences there. And what that told us was that there's a whole raft of homegrown issues, as I'm sure many of you know, within academia that's leading to significant underrepresentation of various diverse groups, including, if you look at that through a gender lens or through an ethnicity lens.
EMMA TREGENZA: And whilst that's true of other industries as well, I think we have to reflect on the importance that academia plays actually in society in general and really question whether that can be allowed to continue for much longer. The other thing that we have done is quite substantial research amongst our own employees to look at what expectations are around diversity and inclusion. And we're finding that increasingly this is becoming an employer critical issue that people expect to see handled well.
EMMA TREGENZA: But we also see that there's real sensitivity to inauthenticity here within the workforce. People are really don't want to see box ticking. They want to see action and they want to see change. And that can be incredibly difficult to deliver. So it takes some courage and some tenacity, I think, to make this change. But we need to do it together as an industry to move forward. It's such an important issue for us.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Emma. Laura. Dr. Laura Norton, who's the senior program manager for inclusion and diversity at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?
LAURA NORTON: Yeah, of course. Thank you, Susan. Yeah, hello, everybody. Really lovely to be here with you today. So I think I'm coming at this maybe from a slightly different angle today from some of the other panelists. As well as being an international publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry is also a professional body for the chemical sciences.
LAURA NORTON: And so much of my work on inclusion and diversity is about our work for the chemical sciences as a whole as well as our work on inclusion and diversity in publishing. So I think a slightly different angle there to some others today. To give you a little bit of a flavor of some of the work that we've been doing, I think the Royal Society of Chemistry has a long standing history caring about and wanting to improve inclusion and diversity within the chemical sciences and within publishing.
LAURA NORTON: And we really believe in data and evidence led approach. And that's evident in our new inclusion and diversity strategy, which runs to 2025. Our work where we've really focused on the data and evidence began back at the beginning of 2018 where we launched our report, the diversity landscape of the chemical sciences, where we looked at just that. What does the diversity of the chemical sciences look like?
LAURA NORTON: Not surprisingly, we found that it was not representative of wider society, that we were certainly lacking in areas such as socioeconomic background, mental health, LGBT plus representation, race and ethnicity, and of course gender. And that led us on to a big piece of research that we released in November of 2018, our breaking the barriers report, that looked at women's retention and progression within the chemical sciences.
LAURA NORTON: That involved large scale surveys, focus groups, and interviews with people within the chemical sciences, policymakers, people who were chosen to leave the chemical sciences. And it pointed to three main areas where we needed to see change, academic funding structures, the academic culture, and balancing work with other responsibilities. Now of course, publishing falls heavily there within an academic culture.
LAURA NORTON: And we saw that one big piece that was missing from that research was looking at whether there was any bias or any gender differences within our own publishing portfolio. And that led us on to our report, "Is Publishing in the Chemical Sciences Gender Biased?", where we analyze the gender profile of authors of over 700,000 manuscript submissions across all of our journals between 2014 and 2018.
LAURA NORTON: I think I can talk a little bit more in some of the other questions that Susan may pose to us throughout the session on the findings of that research. But I think none of us will be surprised to hear that we did see that there are gender differences across the publishing pipeline as others have also seen when they've analyzed their own publishing portfolios.
LAURA NORTON: And some of the other panelists, I think, will talk about that today as well. So much of our work is really focused around data and evidence. That's where we think everything, the actions that we implement, the changes that we make, really should come from the data. Thank you very much, Susan.
SUSAN SPILKA: You're welcome, Laura. On to Matt Giampoala. Also, Dr. Matt. And I think everyone here has a doctoral level degree except for me. Matt is the VP for publications at the American Geophysical Union. Would you tell us about your work?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Hi, thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to be here as part of this panel. AGU's been doing a lot of great work in this space and is accelerating that. So similar to the Royal Society of Chemistry, we are a member organization. And we have not just publications, but lots of member activities. And our diversity and inclusion efforts really do focus through that membership in a lot of ways.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So we recently last year updated our strategic plan. So over the next five years, we've got three main pillars to that plan. And one of them is really around promoting and exemplifying an inclusive scientific culture. The other two are focused in-- they all are sort of interdependent with each other. But focusing on taking discovery science and moving that forward to address societal challenges.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And the third is around partnering. So the truth is that the interplay there is so important because we can't do any of this work alone. So AGU has been leaning into its work with diversity inclusion. We have an Ethics and Equity Center that has been sort of the backdrop of a lot of our operations. But we with our new strategic plan instituted a diversity and inclusion committee.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And they are partners to all our different committees and all our different programs. So our meetings, our publications, any sort of governance structure. And in that, we're accelerating our collection of data and revising the way we collect it, which I think we can talk about a little bit later. And I just want to say that within our publications program, we've been tasked to do an assessment of where we are on inclusion.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And we're finding that the more we use our data, the more we can actually convince our editors and our editorial boards to change their behavior because they know it's important. But when they actually see, when you can give them a measurement and say, well, you're here, submissions are here, and the acceptance rate is here, and the number of reviewers you have from a certain region are here. And they can see that there's an imbalance and then address those issues.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA:
SUSAN SPILKA: People with data versus people with opinions, right? OK, last but not least, Dr. Holly Falk-Krzesinski from Elsevier. Holly is the VP for research intelligence in Elsevier's global strategic networks team. And she's also co-chair of the company's Gender Equity Task Force.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for being here. As many of you probably are aware, Elsevier is a global publisher. We have a little over 2,500 journals in our portfolio. And that includes journals that are owned by lots of society partners. And we are their publishing partner. So we work with a wide range of stakeholders in the community. For us, we think about the importance of equality and equity in research on a global scale.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: We know that bias, discrimination, and exclusion as well as a lack of diversity and inclusion in research negatively affect both opportunities for individual researchers to be able to advance and excel in their careers. And then on the flip side of that same coin, then it also negatively affects the equitable and impactful outcomes of research. Really, the only way that we can make sure that research has a lasting impact on societal challenges of our times is by harnessing the full contribution of all stakeholders in the global research community.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And from Elsevier's perspective, we contribute to this effort by promoting diversity and inclusion in research through an evidence based approach and a coordinated set of actions and initiatives that follow along with that. And I want to add something about just how important it is that we are thinking about these things especially, and I'll talk a lot about our efforts with regards to gender equity. The World Economic Forum just at the very end of March released its global gender gap report.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And according to that report, closing the gender gap went from 99 years to 135.6 years. As if five generations wasn't already bad enough, almost two more now. Two more full generations. Moreover, the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Academies, and in a very large study that we did it Elsevier looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of these show that it has had a disproportionately and quite negative impact on women researchers.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Now I was aware the gains for women in STEM fields are fragile. I guess we just didn't realize how fragile and the order of magnitude of setback that could result over such a short period of time. So what I am emphasizing here is that there is a need for accelerated progress. And in fact, that need is really, really quite urgent. And I don't see any other way that we can proceed with that unless we're guided by data and think about things on a global scale.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: So at Elsevier, these DEI principles are coming right from the top. Our CEO is deeply invested in inclusion and diversity in research, and just last year launched an external I&D advisory board. Internal to the organization, we have a Gender Equity Task Force and those focused on other areas of inclusion and diversity dimensions as well. I'm proud to be the co-chair of the Gender Equity Task Force, and one of the founding members.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: This is an organic hub that started as a grassroots effort of bringing colleagues together who were committed and involved in increasing gender diversity, inclusion, and research, building on the foundation of accomplishments by our own Elsevier foundation and working in partnership with the international gender summits. Our Gender Equity Task Force brings together various cross-business work streams examining our own key processes, principles, and systems in the context of gender I&D to ensure that Elsevier's supporting the most robust research possible in the most equitable, inclusive way, and establish a framework of best practices that are data informed and evidence based so that we have these best practices and policies that us as well as other organizations can emulate and/or build from.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: We focus most of our attention on external facing activities, including coordinator, gender, inclusion, diversity, equality efforts across our own business units, greater gender diversity in our journal editorial boards, peer reviewers and authors, and in terms of invited speakers and panelists to Elsevier sponsored conferences as well as our Elsevier award selection committees. We also aim to uncover and address issues of inequalities and implicit bias throughout our publication workflow, enhancing sex and gender based analysis and research and reporting on that in the publications that we sponsor, and expanding our journal and preprint content in all of these efforts.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: As well as because we're moving into the AI space more and more in data science, considering issues of bias that come up in AI technologies and how to overcome them very early on. And then also, using our considerable data and analytics resources to address critical issues of inclusion and diversity towards establishing a very strong base. And over the last three years, we've actually released two major global data and evidence reports on gender equity in the research workforce.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we've also extended those efforts to thinking about how we can think about gender identity in all of our activities, and have made a very strong commitment to inclusion of gender identity data within our editorial workflow systems. And then because we recognize that there are other aspects of I&D that we need to be thinking about simultaneously, begun to expand those and are thinking into race and ethnicity as well, I'm very proud to say that we're working super closely with Laura and the Royal Society of Chemistry and are part of their multi publisher stakeholder group.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And I think, Laura, there's about 35 of us that you've brought together and working in fact in conjunction, and then making sure that the things we learn for example within our own areas based editorial manager system can be shared with the community. Because this is not a time to think about competitive edge creation, but rather a way in which we can all come together for the benefit of research in general.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Holly. That's really interesting. So because we have limited time and want to cover a lot of ground, we've structured our session with a few questions that I'll pose to between one and three of the panelists. If we have time afterward, we'll take questions from the audience. But if we don't have time, please put your questions in the chat or email them to us.
SUSAN SPILKA: And we will get back to you. Please don't hold back. We really want to spark conversations and get some more collaboration going. So OK, first question. I'm going to pose my first question to Laura. How has research informed best practices in your organization and community?
LAURA NORTON: Thanks, Susan. In so many ways. Always. Research informs our next steps and the actions that we commit to making a change with. So some examples of some community actions that we have put in place, I mentioned before our women's retention and progression project and research called Breaking the Barriers. So that highlighted areas that people really saw a need for change within.
LAURA NORTON: And we made recommendations to others. So we made some recommendations to funders, academic institutions, industry. We wanted to see that funders balance short and long term funding structures because people talked a lot about the difficulty there in short term funding and balancing that with a career and time to publish your papers and move forward with your career.
LAURA NORTON: We asked the chemical sciences industry to share best practice in their data, because much of the data that we did glean within that research project did come from academia. And we also asked everyone to enforce a zero tolerance approach to bullying and harassment. Sadly, we found much evidence of bullying and harassment within the sector within that research piece. We also made commitments ourselves.
LAURA NORTON: So we said that we would launch new grant schemes to support people in their work. So we launched a new scheme called Grants for Carers, which provides up to 1,000 pounds for people who have with a added financial burden of attending meetings, conferences, events, or professional development events. So we help support the financial, I guess the added financial burden of providing care whilst you are not present.
LAURA NORTON: We also launched our assistance grants which provides financial support for those who require assistance themselves. And we launched our bullying and harassment support line off the back of that piece of research, which is there to listen, and signpost, and support anyone within the chemical sciences with issues around bullying and harassment. And some other examples.
LAURA NORTON: So our work, I'd mentioned earlier, is publishing in the chemical sciences gender biased. Sadly, we found that there are gender differences throughout the publishing process. And that has led us on to internal changes, and really trying to improve our practices within the organization, thinking about what we can do internally. So we set targets for our editorial boards, reviewers, and authors to try to improve representation.
LAURA NORTON: We said that we would increase transparency, that we'd undertake a comprehensive analysis and report on all of our authors, reviewers, and editorial decision makers. And we're doing that. Now we've kind of extended that further. We said initially that will be for publishing. And we've extended that further and we are now producing a biennial inclusion and diversity report that shows all of our data from all of our membership activities, all of our processes, and our publishing activities.
LAURA NORTON: We said that we would reflect our research community so that we would recruit and train reviewers, editorial board members, associate editors, to reflect the current gender balance of our research community. And we can already see changes there that we have already seen an improvement, and an increase in better representation of women on our editorial boards. We said that we would empower and innovate.
LAURA NORTON: So we provide new training and resources to empower our editors to eliminate any bias, and that we'd test new models throughout the publishing process right from submission through to publication. We've done this in numerous ways. Already, we're already starting to collect gender data from our authors. And we've introduced a name change policy recently. And we're trialing new methods of peer review as well.
LAURA NORTON: We also said that we would encourage intervention. And here we said that we'd partner with others and lead the development of a new inclusion and diversity framework for action, set the standard to drive change within the academic publishing industry. And that led us on to a further piece of work, our framework for action. And this is a tool to a prove inclusion and diversity in publishing with a series of actions for editorial boards, editors, authors, and staff from publishing organizations to kind of set where your current standard of inclusion and diversity is and develop further and improve your practices with inclusion and diversity.
LAURA NORTON: And that was really the starting point for the joint commitment that Holly just mentioned. So we joined with a group of publishers to discuss our framework for action. And from that, we developed the joint commitment for action, of which, as Holly said, we now have I think 39 member organizations. It's grown and grown. That joint commitment together, we all said that we will understand our research community, reflect the diversity of the community, share success to achieve impact, and set the minimum standards on which to build.
LAURA NORTON: And there are already really positive actions coming out of that group, not only the collaboration and the sharing between the panelists today and beyond within the 39 organizations involved, but we have already worked on author name change policies together and shared resources there. That information is then being shared with [INAUDIBLE] as well. We're talking about lots of other areas of ways in which we can work together and improve the standard across publishing as a whole and move faster by working together.
LAURA NORTON: So there's so many ways in which the research, and the data, and evidence is informing good practice within our organization within the chemical sciences community, within our publishing activities, and then within publishing as a whole working together through the joint commitment.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Laura. That's really quite a lot that's going on. Emma, would you take on the same question about how has research informed best practices in your organization and your community?
EMMA TREGENZA: Yeah, well I mean, as Laura said, there's just such an enormous amount of issues, I suppose, under practices that need to change or that we need to think about ED&I. And I'm not going to go into every single one of them because probably quite a lot of those are quite similar to the sorts of things Laura is talking about. But what I perhaps will just comment on is a couple of things.
EMMA TREGENZA: Holly mentioned this idea of urgency. And I think that this issue is so all encompassing that you can become a little bit stymied by just feeling like there's so much to do, and where do you even start. So one of the things that we started to do is section out and take slices in which we can start to make some action. So for example, start to set some KPIs around slices of our output rather than trying to do the whole thing at once.
EMMA TREGENZA: There are some questions I can see coming in about data. And I am going to address some of that in another question. But there are enormous challenges in trying to get at this data in order to set those benchmarks and to see your improvement. So if you can start with a smaller data set, that will help you to feel that you're making some improvements there. Because it does mean, it is a mindset change.
EMMA TREGENZA: It does mean changing the mindsets of your editorial boards, of your authors, even of your customers. Because things like impact factors and the value of research is so ingrained in the way that we think as an industry that that is going to take a long time to change. But unless we do that, we're always going to have underrepresentation of certain groups.
EMMA TREGENZA: So these are all very, very long processes. And we have to start somewhere, I would say. The other thing as both Laura and Holly have mentioned, is the fact that this is an industry effort. We need to work together and collaborate. This is not something that should be seen as the competitive advantage. We won't get there unless we all work together. So sharing ideas, sharing standards as much as we can, is incredibly important.
EMMA TREGENZA: And also of course we'll contribute to that long term change of attitude and culture that we need. The other thing I just wanted to mention, because I think it's probably a slightly different take, is that what we've also done is we've aligned what we're doing externally in terms of our output with what we do internally in terms of our own colleagues.
EMMA TREGENZA: So we have started to-- our ED&I policy, oh I'm sorry, ED&I strategy, is not just about our outputs. It's about everything that we do within the organization. So we've looked at aligning this around four multifunctional pillars. So we have people, product, community, and communications. And actually, that then covers a whole host of things that you do, not only about your own internal policies, but about things like what does the language in the products that you are offering when we're talking about AI?
EMMA TREGENZA: As Holly mentioned, what does that mean in terms of product development? What does it mean for R&D? What does it mean in the way that we speak externally and all of these things? And I think that's really important because it goes back to that point about the authenticity that I made earlier. It's very easy to trip yourself up by not practicing what you're preaching in this area.
EMMA TREGENZA: So you do need to look across everything that you do, I think.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Thank you. I think what I'm going to do because we have a lot to cover is I'm going to combine that question with the next question. So how has research informed best practices in your organizations and your community and cultural change? And I'm going to pose it to first Holly and then Matt. And so Holly.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: OK. So I talked about that we've done two major global gender research reports. And our most recent one is the researcher journey. And so you can take a look at that. It's freely available. I'll put the URL into the chat as soon as I'm done speaking because I can't type and talk at the same time. But I can do that.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And one of the things that we took away from that is because we did the analysis on a global scale and conducted this research and shared these findings really widely is that we're beginning to incorporate those, not just into the ways in which we share with universities, and funding organizations, but how do we actually take that data and use it within our own practices to support the research community. And in this case, we've done this to help advance our efforts and commitment around having greater gender diversity on our editorial boards and invited conferences on our review committees.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And so we're using that data and actually building out an opportunity for us to show why this is important, sharing it in an evidence based. And so we're sharing the data with our editors in chief by way of our publishers. We're giving them information on the current state of their own editorial boards and their gender composition. We're giving them data about their regional application of original diversity of gender, and in a field based.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And in some cases, it could be multiple fields. And asking them to use that data to establish milestones and goals with regards to increasing their gender diversity. Then we're helping them think about the ways in which they can communicate that into their fields and then to use that to drive information on how to actually think about selection of new individuals as part of those editorial boards.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And it's doing incredibly well. When we first started talking to editors, we found that there was a lot of pushback. We already have the best people. It's so hard to find more diverse. Everybody says no because there's such a small population. But we started to give them this data and said, look. We're not asking you to make massive changes in the next six months.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But what can you do in the six months relative to what your field looks like for example? And then we've been able to remind the editors that serving on an editorial board is an important leadership opportunity. And it can change the nature of somebody's career progression. And so if we want to help be catalysts of change, we can think more broadly about the ways in which we invite people to serve.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And we've had to remind folks, look. You don't have to be 70 years old and a full professor before you're invited to serve on an editorial board, that somebody has just achieved tenure within their university structure as a faculty member means that they have had at least four years of undergraduate work. They've add five to seven years of graduate training. They've had one to five years of post-doctoral training and probably five to seven years as a faculty member.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: How much more expert do you need to put somebody on an editorial board? And so we've helping them reframe the ways in which they think about the pools of individuals that they can draw from to bring onto the editorial board. In addition, recognizing that we've also started to pilot in some of our editorial boards junior editor roles, where people are serving in a mentored editorial role.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And they're being paired up with a more senior and experienced editor on the board so that we can help to actively build a pipeline of researchers who can serve as editors, and doing it earlier on in their career so that by the time for example a faculty member has just been tenured, they can immediately be eligible to serve on an editorial board. And this is really driving real change. And in fact, across Elsevier, what we planned by the end of the year across our entire portfolio of 2,500 plus journals is that all of our publishers in conjunction with the editors in chief will in fact set a series of goals for the next one to five years of how they're going to drive change and what that change will look like with regards to gender diversity.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And then we've asked them to begin thinking about other aspects such as race and ethnicity. And we know that these are going to be more challenging aspects. So we're saying to people, it's fine. We don't expect you to address them in the same scale. But we do expect you to start to consider these issues simultaneously. They may be offsets. But they need to be done in parallel.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And we've had no pushback. And then with regards to the questions that are coming up is, how do we do this and get people to understand? We are spending a considerable amount of time working with people. And how do we build trust with regards to the stakeholder communities that we're engaging while we're also actively thinking about how to build out the data collection efforts.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Those two things have to go hand in hand. And you can't have good data collection if you don't have trust from the stakeholders such that they're willing to share accurately with you so that you know what you get is a robust set of data in the end.
SUSAN SPILKA: Thank you, Holly. Matt, you want to address how your research has informed best practices in your organization, community, and driven culture change?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Yeah. So I mean, we've been doing trainings with our editors for a long time where we do implicit bias training and things like that. But we've found with our community of Earth and space scientists that they really value data. And when you can present them data that shows that there is an imbalance, that challenges their internal biases and makes them realize that they need to change their behavior.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So for instance, on gender balance, we've shown that there's not many women reviewers and not that many women on the editorial boards. And we looked and we saw that, well across our community of our membership, the number of women was only 35%. But if we looked at earlier career stages, we see it's a much more evenly split.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So that was one area where we were able to talk with editors and realize that we needed to bring in more of these earlier career members, and that you don't need to only reserve editor positions for the people at the latest stages of their career. So in this case, we were able to really push through term limits. And I got zero complaints as we talked about this through our publications committee and our diversity, equity, and inclusion committee and with the editors.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: They were all on board with these term limits. And similarly, we have associate editor positions, which are skewed a little bit earlier career. And we were able to expand those. The numbers that we used for our journals, similar to developing that slightly junior role. One thing we've seen that editors will do when they're not faced with the data is sometimes they'll want to protect certain groups.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: They'll say, well, these early career folks, they shouldn't be spending time because they should be spending time writing papers, or getting tenure, or getting to the next stage of promotion. And showing them the data makes them realize that, well, there's an imbalance here and that those people should be given the choice if they want to serve because that also moves their career forward. The other thing is with regional disparities.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So in our global participation, we've been able to show that there's things like, well, more than 30% of our submissions are coming from China now. And yet the acceptance rate is really low. And it's not a matter of increasing your acceptance rate of those papers from China just at the face of it. But we do see that our number of reviewers and our representation on the editorial board is not matching the amount of submissions we get from China.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And that has really moved our editors. They see the problem and then they add more editors. And in this case, we always allow them to add more. You don't necessarily say you have to fire someone to bring someone in. Another thing data has shown us is that we do see sometimes when we make efforts in one area, we may kind of go backwards in another. So again, that global participation and the gender are two things that we're measuring.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And as we expand our global participation, sometimes we could go a little bit backwards in gender. So we can monitor that and see what our effects are. And then the third thing is as we start presenting some of the data that hasn't been that positive, so for instance race, we have an abysmal record on participation within our community across race. And we started presenting that at these committee meetings.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And it A, shows us that we have a lot of progress to make, and it also shows us that our data is not really great yet. So one of the things we're really glad to be part of the joint commitments. But all these different publishers and societies coming together and saying, well, how should we measure race and ethnicity and do it across the globe in a way that people can find themselves, and they can report to you who they are?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Because the way we were doing it before, and still sort of lagging that, was based on the US Census. So for instance, if somebody only had the choice of African-American and they were a Black researcher working in Africa, they didn't see themselves there and they couldn't tell us who they were. So we've updated that and made it so that people can find themselves.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: I think I'll stop there for now.
SUSAN SPILKA: That's great. OK, there are a bunch of questions that are on the chat. And if we have time, we'll get to some of those. But thank you to the panelists and to the participants for responding to those and getting a discussion going, a sidebar discussion going. We have one last question here, which is, what lessons learned from-- what are some lessons learned from your organization's work with DEI research?
SUSAN SPILKA: Start off with Emma.
EMMA TREGENZA: Thanks. I'm going to say something a bit controversial here given the subject matter of this session and what we've been talking about. But I do think that we need to be careful about applying academic standards to data when we're trying to improve diversity, particularly when we're talking about diversity other than gender. Because getting really good reliable information on ethnicity or other types of protective characteristics is very difficult.
EMMA TREGENZA: And Matt has already mentioned the fact that ethnicity and race mean completely different things depending on where you are in the world, for example. And we also, and I can see in the chat, there were legal challenges around asking for data, there is the challenge of whether or not people want to give you that data. Don't forget, we've had real problems of biases coming in to decision making based on data around ethnicity that people want to know about in the past.
EMMA TREGENZA: So it's a really nice surprise that people don't necessarily want to disclose that. So whilst I absolutely agree that if we can show people the data, it's an incredibly powerful story, and it will really help in changing individual behaviors, particularly when you're talking about editorial boards, for example, and I also think that we can't wait too long for perfection with this. I think that we need to start making some progress in small ways without necessarily having big data sets that we know we can rely on.
EMMA TREGENZA: And that's what I guess I was talking about before when I was kind of saying trying to break things down into slices. So you may know that you want to encourage more participation from Black academics in the US for example, or you want to encourage more participation from China, or whatever it happens to be. So sometimes I think the right thing to do is start with the problem and kind of work backwards from there and split this into manageable chunks around, what interventions can we make to improve that particular problem?
EMMA TREGENZA: So that's one thing I would say. And then the other thing, I guess, which I think people have alluded to a little bit, but I just really wanted to impress upon the audience, the importance of it, is this idea of hearts and minds. We are talking about cultural change here, whether that's outside or within your organization. Making the case and getting people to understand the importance for society of the whole around improving our diversity, but also that diversity is about everybody.
EMMA TREGENZA: I think some people shy away from the question of diversity because they don't think it means them. And of course it does. It's a whole myriad of different things. So the more we can do to work together to educate people around the benefits, the importance, the challenges, encouraging people to talk about their challenges more openly, I think the better really. As I said before, it's a long process to get to where we want to be.
EMMA TREGENZA: We're only going to do that by talking about it and continuing to share what we've learned.
SUSAN SPILKA: OK, great. Laura, any lessons learned so far?
LAURA NORTON: Thanks, Susan. I think I'll pull out two main areas. Those are data collection and collaboration. So thinking about data collection. So since we launched that first report I mentioned earlier, the diversity landscape of the chemical sciences, we now have three more years of data covering our membership, our membership activities, our publishing activities.
LAURA NORTON: And this always informs our next steps. It helps us to prioritize, which is a really difficult thing, in inclusion and diversity. But also it has allowed us to improve and continue to always improve how we collect and use diversity data and evidence. The importance of that data, that all of our initiatives, all of our interventions are based on that data.
LAURA NORTON: So the quality of that data is so important. We've also learned a lot about the importance of trust, developing trust in order for people to share their data with us. We've talked a lot about this in the joint commitment, what are we going to do with that data, being open about that, and making sure that people can trust us to do what we say we will, and the intention that we have to improve the work that we do with that data.
LAURA NORTON: The second area. I would say, collaboration. The importance of collaboration, and I can think of so many areas across our work where this has been important. So one example is some research that we did on exploring the workplace for LGBT plus physical scientists. Here, we collaborated with the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society to look at the physical sciences as a whole.
LAURA NORTON: It would have been very difficult for us to do that for just the chemical sciences with a lack of representation of LGBT plus people within the chemical sciences, and ensuring that we kept anonymity of anyone involved in the research. And also I think there were also shared issues across the physical sciences. So the importance there of bringing together all those networks across the physical sciences, the collaboration there, were also members of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Science Council's progression framework.
LAURA NORTON: And that has been instrumental in benchmarking our progress in inclusion and diversity across our membership activities, with other similar societies and sharing our knowledge. And it also really helped us to think about how we could do a similar thing for publishing and how we have joined together all of the organizations who are now currently involved in the joint commitment. And I think I already alluded to, and some of the other speakers today, have already alluded to some of the benefits that we're seeing out of the joint commitment, the sharing, the struggles, the challenges, and the successes with data collection.
LAURA NORTON: We now have a recommended way that we're seeing that all partners in the joint commitment should collect gender data. And as I think Holly said and Matt has also said, we're working together on how that can best be done for race and ethnicity. There are so many ways that by working together, we're already seeing improvements and faster improvements than I think any of us could have made alone.
LAURA NORTON: So I think for me, those are the two areas that I'll pull out, data and evidence, and the importance of collaboration.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Great. Matt, do you have any lessons learned to share?
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: Yeah, I have a couple along the lines of data and evidence. I think not assuming you know the answer. So for instance, when we've been trying to monitor what's happening during the pandemic and we hear that women are largely more impacted than men, we've been trying to measure that and say, well, have we seen a change in authorship? And we're not seeing it yet in the data we have. And it could be something that emerges.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: But it also opens us up to the questions of well maybe there's other things happening. We certainly know we've had editors and reviewers tell us that they can't do as much work for us and they need to take a break because of the pandemic. And we're seeing that it may be a little bit more nuanced than as either men or women. But people with caretaker roles are the ones who seem most impacted at this moment.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So we can then adjust and try to measure in different ways. And then the other, I guess lesson I think, is don't be afraid of making small changes that you think may only benefit a few people. Because for instance, we recently updated our name change policy as many publishers and societies have started doing to really address issues that were brought about within the trans community.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: And we need to be able to change our name on past published papers in order to align with our true gender identity. And we've seen that after we updated our policy, that yes, we've had trans authors who've come and asked to make this update. And that's benefited them. But we've actually had more cis women who've been able to update their names. And so when you address issues that could affect underrepresented or vulnerable segments of the population you actually can help all of your members in ways that you didn't expect.
MATTHEW GIAMPOALA: So I think that's been encouraging.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Holly, is there anything you want to add about lessons learned?
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Yeah, I would say a few. We have discovered it is easier said than done. But nonetheless we need to do. And so that's OK. Things are hard. And often those that are worthwhile doing are the hardest. So we understand that. But and so along those lines, we're not letting perfection get in the way of continuing to advance and do good work.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: So there are lots of times, for example, in our gender reports and in the biblio metrics schema that we use, we can only use an inferred binary gender designation. We realize that that's not perfect. But when we're looking at overall trends at a national scale, we understand that that can still provide us with actionable and important insight. And so we'll use that.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: At the same time, though, we recognize that we're going to be doing and supporting self-reported data collection. We need to be more specific. So we can't use amorphous terms such as gender. That's colloquial and it's very broad. We needed to understand that what we'll be asking people about is to report on their gender identity.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And then we absolutely need to think well beyond just binary options and being as inclusive as possible. We also learned that with the growing internationalization of research, we need to take into consideration global. And so these issues as Matt's already brought up of thinking about National Census Bureau schema for race and ethnicity, they simply are insufficient. And we're so glad for Laura and the RSC's initiative to bring us together and think about that.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And the opportunity then to think outside even ourselves even though there's now 39 publishers. So we've engaged a subject matter expert, a true scholar and researcher, in this space who's going to be guiding and supporting all of our efforts in this. We've also discovered that we have data and want to share data. But sharing is also not so easily done. And so take for example, we published a massive study of looking at submissions by gender into Elsevier's journals since the start of the pandemic.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: And we're actually completely willing to share that data for others to be able to conduct the same kind of experiments on. But the ability of doing things like managing the legal data sharing agreements, not so easy. Taking data from one system that was not intended to support research necessarily and make that data available and clean enough to be able to support research studies also takes some work and effort.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we're working through these things. So if anybody's worried that we're not moving fast enough, we're moving as quickly as possible, but also taking into considerations everything from legal and privacy policies issues, data retention policies, transparent communication, prioritization of stakeholders, and the trust of those stakeholders, and then the technology. And we're very fortunate at Elsevier because we're working with Aries Editorial Manager.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we also have other internal editorial tracking systems. And we have crosstalk between them. Data standards for systems, interoperability, single sign on, appropriate access to data at the appropriate time by the appropriate people, data storage, and ability to ask, for example, open ended questions and providing those options that would allow people to really find themselves and share with that. We know that these are all things that we need to consider.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: But we're working through those and trying to come up with a plan that publishers or other data providers who are coming in a little bit later, you don't have to start from scratch. You're not reinventing the wheel. You can learn from the efforts that are already underway. So it's hard. But it's incredibly worthwhile. But you should all be prepared to tell your CEOs, no.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: We're not going to have this all done in six months.
SUSAN SPILKA: Great. Thanks, Holly. I think we are coming up at the end of our session. I want to share the poll results with you. There's some interesting results. The first question, does your organization state DEI values? 82% of the people on this call said, yes. 2% no. 14% said, not clearly, or comprehensively.
SUSAN SPILKA: And 2% said, not sure. But when the second question is, does your experience in your organization align with those values, only 48% said yes. So that's only 48% of the 82% felt that there was alignment in their experience with those values. Interestingly, no one said no. But 50% said not completely, which is that the world isn't a black and white place.
SUSAN SPILKA: And 2% said they're not sure. The third question was, has your organization's policies, programs, and practices advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past year? 37% said, yes a lot. 53% said, yes some. So that's 90% saw some progress this year.
SUSAN SPILKA: That's very encouraging. 8% of the participants said, it's status quo. The same. And 2% said, there's been lots of backsliding. So-- I find those quite interesting and in line with what we were hearing from the workplace equity survey in 2018. But I think possibly showing some progress since then.
SUSAN SPILKA: And that's what we'll report on in the next month or so from the overall survey. And I'll make that widely available. I'll also take the chat from this session and pull out questions and get answers for all of you. You're also free to speak with any of the-- any of the current panelists. The session will be recorded, is recorded, and will be available later today through November.
SUSAN SPILKA: I want to thank the speakers, Jackie, SSP staff, who have been so helpful, the program committee, and our generous sponsors. And hope everyone will take advantage of all the interactive networking events and marketplace gallery opportunities this week. You can advance your position and win prizes. So go for it. Anyway, thank you all so much for coming.
SUSAN SPILKA: I think we are at 12:00 noon. So we'll sign off now. Thank you.
LAURA NORTON: Thank you.
EMMA TREGENZA: Thank you. Bye.
SUSAN SPILKA: Bye.
HOLLY FALK-KRZESINSKI: Thank you.
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The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
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Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
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