Conclusion and perspectives
Our intersectionality analysis of academic success (Fig. 1a) helps build
a framework to determine how the scientific community, funders and
institutions should tackle the issues that impede EDI, in particular,
and science, in general. Here, we discuss solutions for tackling the
barriers at the microdiversity and macrodiversity scale.
Microdiversity. Promoting microdiversity in institutions
and societies needs measures that prevent discrimination in the academic
environment and increase the participation of minority groups in
research. The absence of role models for minority groups in research
institutions, editorial boards, and funding organizations is a major
problem in the current system. The lack of training in EDI and
intersectionality in most universities is also an issue that should be
solved with proper education to provide the appropriate support to
students and researchers from visible minorities. Other effective
strategies might involve (1) welcoming a diverse research group by
encouraging students from ethnic and religious minorities and different
sexual orientations to join research groups; (2) creating support
programs for minorities to guide upcoming foreign students and help them
to adapt and feel included in the academic environment; (3) establishing
regular EDI discussion groups to educate students and faculty members of
the department about the discrimination and unconscious biases; (4)
inviting speakers from marginalized groups in order to highlight their
scientific contributions; (5) encouraging reading and citing research
from visible and non-visible minorities, and (6) working on identifying
problems of implicit biases.
Macrodiversity. The idea that we should only tackle
discrimination to increase the representation of researchers from the
Global South is inadequate as it is only one part of this issue. It is
crucial to also improve access to science for researchers from the GS.
This requires finding solutions to the language barrier, knowledge
transfer, and scientific networking. Decreasing the burden of the
language barrier by creating linguistic peer-review platforms where
preprints from researchers with English as Foreign Language are reviewed
by English proficient volunteers such as graduates and senior
researchers is a promising avenue. There is a need to generalize the
multilingual abstract and title in all journals to help scientists with
limited English proficiency to access the scientific content of research
articles. Also, promoting international collaborations of researchers
from the Global North with researchers and students from the Global
South by encouraging co-authorship and co-supervision as well as
organizing major international conferences in countries of the Global
South will help the exchange of ideas and perspectives and compensate
for the lack of local expertise in developing countries. To overcome the
problem of visa restrictions for traveling abroad, a problem that
researchers from the Global South often face, international conferences
should integrate virtual remote attendance to increase the diversity of
nationalities and include everyone in the discussion of major issues.
Acknowledgments
R.K. was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation
(P400PB_191139). We thank Leithen K. M’Gonigle, Melissa Guzman, Amy
Angert and Darwin Sodhi for helpful comments and suggestions. R.K. is
grateful to the Equity, Diversity, and inclusion discussion group at UBC
for fruitful discussions.