The Challenge
Ideas and scrutiny from some people are undervalued.
Throughout the history of academia, people who hold marginalized identities, including those based on race, ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ status, and disability status, are underrepresented in faculty, post-doctoral, and graduate researcher positions (compared to both the U.S. population and the undergraduate population of colleges and universities). The problem of underrepresentation goes beyond statistics about employment, many have argued that communities within science, including the open-science community, silence and exclude people with marginalized identities, including BIPOC scholars, women, those with disabilities, those who do not speak English, etc.
Readings
- Matias, J. N., Lewis Jr, N., & Hope, E. (2021). “Universities Say They Want More Diverse Faculties. So Why Is Academia Still So White?” FiveThirtyEight.
- Narrow hiring practices at US universities revealed. (If interested, the accompanying paper.)
- Graduate student enrollment and time to degree by department at MIT.
- Pownall, M., Talbot, C. V., Henschel, A., et al. (2021). “Navigating Open Science as Early Career Feminist Researchers.” Psychology of Women Quarterly.
- Problems with “parachute science” in the Global South, from Science Friday.
- Crew, B. (2020). “Women and Minority Researchers Have More Original Ideas, But White Men Are Rewarded Faster.” Nature Index.
