An actionable anti-racism plan for geoscience organizations

Advancing anti-oppression and social justice in healthcare through competency-based medical education (CBME)

Competency-based medical education (CBME) focuses on preparing physicians to improve the health of patients and populations. In the context of ongoing health disparities worldwide, medical educators must implement CBME in ways that advance social justice and anti-oppression. In this article, authors describe how CBME can be implemented to promote equity pedagogy, an approach to education in which curricular design, teaching, assessment strategies, and learning environments support learners from diverse groups to be successful. The five core components of CBME programs - outcomes competency framework, progressive sequencing of competencies, learning experiences tailored to learners' needs, teaching focused on competencies, and programmatic assessment - enable individualization of learning experiences and teaching and encourage learners to partner with their teachers in driving their learning. These educational approaches appreciate each learner's background, experiences, and strengths. Using an exemplar case study, the authors illustrate how CBME can afford opportunities to enhance anti-oppression and social justice in medical education and promote each learner's success in meeting the expected outcomes of training. The authors provide recommendations for individuals and institutions implementing CBME to enact equity pedagogy.

Application of an Antiracism Framework to Improve Pediatric APRN Education

Poor health outcomes for children are directly tied to poor social determinants of health and systemic, embedded health care inequities. To prepare the next generation of pediatric advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs), nursing schools must educate students to address inequities through innovative curricular models and teaching modalities. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the application of an antiracism framework to a graduate APRN program. This article describes the application of this framework, which led to significant administrative, curricular, and course changes to prepare pediatric-focused APRN students to address the health inequities and poor social determinants of health facing children today. By describing our journey to embed an antiracism framework, other nursing schools can make substantive changes necessary to prepare their students to address these health inequities.

Junior scientists spotlight social bonds in seminars for diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM

Disparities for women and minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers have continued even amidst mounting evidence for the superior performance of diverse workforces. In response, we launched the Diversity and Science Lecture series, a cross-institutional platform where junior life scientists present their research and comment on diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. We characterize speaker representation from 79 profiles and investigate topic noteworthiness via quantitative content analysis of talk transcripts. Nearly every speaker discussed interpersonal support, and three-fifths of speakers commented on race or ethnicity. Other topics, such as sexual and gender minority identity, were less frequently addressed but highly salient to the speakers who mentioned them. We found that significantly co-occurring topics reflected not only conceptual similarity, such as terms for racial identities, but also intersectional significance, such as identifying as a Latina/Hispanic woman or Asian immigrant, and interactions between concerns and identities, including the heightened value of friendship to the LGBTQ community, which we reproduce using transcripts from an independent seminar series. Our approach to scholar profiles and talk transcripts serves as an example for transmuting hundreds of hours of scholarly discourse into rich datasets that can power computational audits of speaker diversity and illuminate speakers' personal and professional priorities.

Contextualizing Gender Disparity in Editorship in Psychological Science

Discourse on gender diversity tends to overlook differences across levels of hierarchy (e.g., students, faculty, and editors) and critical dimensions (e.g., subdisciplines and geographical locations). Further ignored is its intersection with global diversity-representation from different countries. Here we document and contextualize gender disparity from perspectives of equal versus expected representation in journal editorship, by analyzing 68 top psychology journals in 10 subdisciplines. First, relative to ratios as students and faculty, women are underrepresented as editorial-board members (41%) and-unlike previous results based on one subfield-as editors-in-chief (34%) as well. Second, female ratios in editorship vary substantially across subdisciplines, genres of scholarship (higher in empirical and review journals than in method journals), continents/countries/regions (e.g., higher in North America than in Europe), and journal countries of origin (e.g., higher in American journals than in European journals). Third, under female (vs. male) editors-in-chief, women are much better represented as editorial-board members (47% vs. 36%), but the geographical diversity of editorial-board members and authorship decreases. These results reveal new local and broad contexts of gender diversity in editorship in psychology, with policy implications. Our approach also offers a methodological guideline for similar disparity research in other fields.

Pathways for diversifying and enhancing science advocacy

Science is under attack and scientists are becoming more involved in efforts to defend it. The rise in science advocacy raises important questions regarding how science mobilization can both defend science and promote its use for the public good while also including the communities that benefit from science. This article begins with a discussion of the relevance of science advocacy. It then reviews research pointing to how scientists can sustain, diversify, and increase the political impact of their mobilization. Scientists, we argue, can build and maintain politically impactful coalitions by engaging with and addressing social group differences and diversity instead of suppressing them. The article concludes with a reflection on how the study of science-related mobilization would benefit from further research.

Long-Term Retention of Diverse Paleontologists Requires Increasing Accessibility

Geoscience encompasses a variety of scientific subdisciplines aimed at exploring, understanding, and predicting global phenomena. Yet despite its global reach, the geosciences are the least diverse of the STEM disciplines. Paleontology, a subdiscipline which prides itself on unearthing the diversity of life, comprises no greater level of diversity among its researchers than geosciences overall. This deficiency is in direct opposition to the level of public interest generated by paleontological research. Paleontology has broad educational appeal and has been leveraged in various ways to promote STEM learning. However, despite this widespread interest, there is an overwhelming decrease in the diversity of participants in paleontology at increasing levels of academia. At each academic career stage, from undergraduate to tenured faculty, the number of underrepresented (URP) and underserved persons (USP) dwindles. Here we highlight and discuss barriers to access experienced by URP and USP researchers that hinder their ability to progress at every level of the academic journey post-K-12, focusing on the track to a tenured professorship. Neglecting to consider the unique barriers faced by URPs and USPs when developing curricula, building programs, and evaluating productivity perpetuates the chronic lack of diversity in paleontology, regardless of individual interest in pursuing a career in the field. We also suggest actionable items for instructors, as well as members of the scientific community in positions of power and policymakers. While the lack of diversity in paleontology is dire, the field is small enough that individuals have the potential to make a meaningful difference.

"Maybe this is just not the place for me:" Gender harassment and discrimination in the geosciences

Rampant gender-based harassment and discrimination are recognized problems that negatively impact efforts to diversify science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. We explored the particularities of this phenomenon in the geosciences, via focus groups conducted at STEM professional society meetings, with the goal of informing interventions specific to the discipline. Using grounded theory analysis, two primary drivers for the persistence and perpetuation of gender-based harassment in the geosciences were identified: a particular history of power dynamics and maintenance of dominant stereotypes, and a pattern of ineffective responses to incidents of harassment and discrimination. Informed by intersectional feminist scholarship by women of color that illustrates how efforts to address the underrepresentation of women in STEM without attending to the overlapping impacts of racism, colonialism, ableism, and classism will not succeed, we view harassment and discrimination as structural problems that require collective solutions. Continuing to recruit individuals into a discipline without changing its fundamental nature can tokenize and isolate them or encourage assimilation and acceptance of deep-seated traditions no matter how damaging. It is the responsibility of those in power, and especially those who hold more privileged status due to their social identities, to contribute to the dismantling of current structures that reinforce inequity. By providing explanatory illustrative examples drawn from first-person accounts we aim to humanize the numbers reported in workplace climate surveys, address gaps in knowledge specific to the geosciences, and identify interventions aligned with an intersectional framework that aim to disrupt discriminatory practices endemic to the geosciences and larger STEM community.

Accelerating ethics, empathy, and equity in geographic information science

There has been a groundswell in the support needed to center ethics, empathy, and equity in scientific thought and practice. Drawing on our experience from GIScience, our goal is to accelerate ethical, empathetic, and equitable scientific practices. Many of the opportunities and challenges we outline are broadly applicable and will stimulate the conversations needed to accelerate transformation of science practice and culture. With an emphasis on practical suggestions for reshaping science, we invite all scientists to join in a fundamentally different approach. This paper is a step toward mobilizing the scientific community toward ethics, empathy, and equity by inviting humility, broader measures of excellence and success, diversity in our networks, and the creation of pathways to inclusive education.

Science has traditionally been driven by curiosity and followed one goal: the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Recently, ethics, empathy, and equity, which we term “the 3Es,” are emerging as new drivers of research and disrupting established practices. Drawing on our own field of GIScience (geographic information science), our goal is to use the geographic approach to accelerate the response to the 3Es by identifying priority issues and research needs that, if addressed, will advance ethical, empathic, and equitable GIScience. We also aim to stimulate similar responses in other disciplines. Organized around the 3Es we discuss ethical issues arising from locational privacy and cartographic integrity, how our ability to build knowledge that will lead to empathy can be curbed by data that lack representativeness and by inadvertent inferential error, and how GIScientists can lead toward equity by supporting social justice efforts and democratizing access to spatial science and its tools. We conclude with a call to action and invite all scientists to join in a fundamentally different science that responds to the 3Es and mobilizes for change by engaging in humility, broadening measures of excellences and success, diversifying our networks, and creating pathways to inclusive education. Science united around the 3Es is the right response to this unique moment where society and the planet are facing a vast array of challenges that require knowledge, truth, and action.

Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity

Sampling biases in the fossil record distort estimates of past biodiversity. However, these biases not only reflect the geological and spatial aspects of the fossil record, but also the historical and current collation of fossil data. We demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism and socioeconomic factors, such as wealth, education and political stability, impact the global distribution of fossil data over the past 30 years. We find that a global power imbalance persists in palaeontology, with researchers in high- or upper-middle-income countries holding a monopoly over palaeontological knowledge production by contributing to 97% of fossil data. As a result, some countries or regions tend to be better sampled than others, ultimately leading to heterogeneous spatial sampling across the globe. This illustrates how efforts to mitigate sampling biases to obtain a truly representative view of past biodiversity are not disconnected from the aim of diversifying and decolonizing our discipline.

50 Years of Women in Cell Biology: Where have we been? Where are we going?

It's been 50 years since Women in Cell Biology (WICB) was founded by junior women cell biologists who found themselves neither represented at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) presentations nor receiving the information, mentoring, and sponsorship they needed to advance their careers. Since then, gender parity at ASCB has made significant strides: WICB has become a standing ASCB committee, women are regularly elected president of the ASCB, and half the symposia speakers are women. Many of WICB's pioneering initiatives for professional development, including career panels, workshops, awards for accomplishments in science and mentoring, and career mentoring roundtables, have been incorporated and adapted into broader "professional development" that benefits all members of ASCB. The time has passed when we can assume that all women benefit equally from progress. By strategically, thoughtfully, and honestly recognizing the challenges to women of the past and today, we may anticipate those new challenges that will arise in the next 50 years. WICB, in collaboration with the ASCB, can lead in data collection and access and can promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. This work will be a fitting homage to the women who, half a century ago, posted bathroom stall invitations to the first Women in Cell Biology meetup.

A year in review: Are diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives fixing systemic barriers?

Are current diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives addressing systemic issues? This article highlights the progress thus far and emphasizes the systemic and cultural shifts needed to support and retain historically excluded scientists.