The academic world has become increasingly diverse over the past few decades. However, many of us have unconscious biases against certain groups of people, and common practices in evaluating merit have flaws that can perpetuate these biases. We, a group of eLife Community Ambassadors within the Intersectionality Initiative (2019-2020), have identified five current practices that are fundamental to academic science that may be hindering inclusivity in science. These practices include hiring, mentoring, writing reference letters, and reviewing grants and manuscripts. To try and level the playing field and increase inclusivity in science, we have compiled a guideline for each of these practices that are intended to help inform scientists, mentors, funders, and journals on ways to mitigate biases. The overall goal of these guidelines is to make science more inclusive and to limit bias in these core features of academic science.
We provide guidelines for the following five practices: inclusive hiring, mentoring, reference letters, manuscript/grant review.
These guidelines live on our main project page on the OSF: please visit them here.
Please feel free to use, share, and modify these guidelines!
We would like to get feedback on these guidelines to improve our documents. Please help us by taking this short (anonymous) survey.
- Sarah Hainer
- Ashley Albright
- Nick Leigh
- Babak Momeni
- Charlotte (Lotte) de Winde
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License – please attribute to ‘eLife Community Ambassadors Intersectionality Initiative 2019-2020’
We would like to thank eLife Community staff for their support, and the eLife Community Ambassadors who have translated the guidelines: Yen-Chung Chen and Hung Lo (Chinese), Humberto Debat (Spanish), Melanie Krause (German), and Renuka Kudva (Hindi). Images (except for Intersectionality logo) created with Biorender.com.