 Okay hi everyone my name is Lucy Moore and this is Antoinette Foster and we are founding members of a student group that we started at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland here and the name of the group is called the Alliance for Visible Diversity and Science and in today's talk we want to first highlight our stories and experience with starting the group and specifically starting a group that focuses on you know these complex issues of diversity and then the second part of the talk will address the importance of using data to drive decision-making surrounding these issues within academia. So we'll start by telling you just a little bit about ourselves and how we found ourselves working in this space. I'm originally from Alaska and then I came down here for college went to University of Puget Sounded to come to Washington then I found myself at OHSU for my PhD in neuroscience and I graduated in January and I'm currently post-doc in there. I got involved in these diversity issues during my graduate career because it's always been very apparent to me that there are serious social inequities and these just become further magnified as you kind of climb the ranks of academia and it's always been a point of frustration for me and I think that both of us as scientists for both of us as scientists it was very clear that these issues needed to be approached in a more scientific manner. And I'm Antoinette I'm originally from Denver Colorado I'm a neuroscience graduate student at OHSU which is what brought me here about six years ago and I've been working in diversity equity and inclusion for about 10 years. So in order to get started I want to take a brief detour and ask you to imagine this scenario. Okay so imagine you move to another country and you're the only one there from the country that you're from. Maybe the language is the same but but small things like the food and cultural references are and there's nothing wrong with experiencing another color another color another culture. But let's say that this is what your situation is every day and you find and it's so bad it gets to the point where you feel socially isolated. That doesn't sound fun right? But now picture this. Brutality against people from this country is seemingly normalized and seemingly legal. You're afraid to be out in public you fear for your family and your friends the larger community of people like you that you don't even know. Some people in this new place don't know that this terrifying issue was a problem and others don't seem to care and this increases your feelings of social isolation. This was my experience starting graduate school here in Portland. I felt socially isolated not only because I was the only person of color and the first black person and the only not just the first black person not just the first black woman but also the first black person in my program but also because this was around the time when police brutality against black people was becoming more mainstream knowledge and no one around me cared to talk about it. Oftentimes when minorities express their feelings of exclusion others can minimize the depth and importance of social isolation injustice and frustration that we're constantly surrounded by. I knew I needed more support from my environment and if I felt that way then other must others must as well. This led to the creation of our student group which this led to the creation of our student group and we quickly found out that my experience was not unique. I also want to emphasize that throughout this talk we'll be drawing on examples coming from OHSU but this is not specific to OHSU at all. These issues are found across institutions and across places of business. So before we tell you about our group we want to take some time to defer we want to take some time to define some terms that we use frequently so that we're all using the same definitions. Okay so the first term is underrepresented minority which will refer to as URM. These are individuals from racial and ethnic groups that have been shown by the National Science Foundation to be underrepresented in health related sciences on a national basis and this is determined by looking at the percentage of each racial and ethnic group and comparing that to the national percentage. Diversity carried it a very good job defining this so I won't go on too much about this but I'll just say all the ways in which people can be different and this encompasses basically any kind of spirit you can think of. And then finally inclusion Kerry also did like a lovely job of describing what inclusion is and what it looks like but it's the act of creating environments in which any individual or group can feel respected valued and welcome to fully participate. So you can think of URM and diversity as who was in the room and think of inclusion as how do they feel about being there. Historically with affirmative action policies we've typically thought about numbers and so most initiatives are targeted towards getting diverse individuals in the room but haven't thought about ways to adjust the culture to accommodate different people or about creating environments where everyone lives. So keep these terms in mind as we move through this talk. So about our student group we established the Alliance for Visible Diversity and Science and we call it AVID almost four years ago and this and we chose to specifically focus on race and graduate studies. We chose to focus because every form of diversity needs separate consideration to understand their unique challenges and race was receiving very little attention at OHSU. It's also important to explicitly talk about race in the context of scientific research because unlike medicine there is no patient population that drives the need for a racially diverse team. So diversity efforts become voluntary and ultimately optional, become an ultimately optional activity. So these are the faces of the people who played a pivotal role in the creation of this group. Our mission is to recruit, retain and most importantly support graduate students, postdoctoral scholars staff and faculty members from underrepresented backgrounds. Our group takes a two-pronged approach. First we focus on community building and education. A major part of diversity, equity and inclusion work is building community. This is especially important in research where labs can be relatively siloed. This physical restriction makes it just generally difficult to build connections but it's even more challenging for underrepresented minorities as there are few of us and we're not located in the same space. So building a community where everyone could gather was essential. Another important aspect of our group is education. Issues surrounding race can be intimidating and challenging to talk about. So we strive to create a safe space to teach others while cultivating a safe space for us to do so ourselves. We also work on policy reform. We work with the OHSU administration to create more effective policies, practices and initiatives. Once we got started we quickly realized that this work came with considerable challenges and expected considerable challenges. So one of the challenges we met and quickly run into was vastly different understandings of the problem. So we tried to explain to administration that the lack of inclusive practices created a problematic environment at OHSU and the response was actually disbelief and invalidation to the point where many people didn't seem to understand the problem to begin with. And this makes sense because we were all coming in with vastly different personal experiences and perspectives without any mechanism with which to get us all on the same page. And then of course this led to different understandings of solutions and what effective actions and initiatives might look like. So for example, OHSU created this diversity wall that highlights the history of diversity at OHSU and in Oregon and though there was good intention behind this, it doesn't really do anything to push forward inclusion. So if you think back to Antoinette's experience entering grad school and not feeling supported and then being told by administration that there wasn't a problem with support for diversity on campus, you might imagine that walking by this wall would feel more insulting than inclusive. Another thing of course we experienced was discomfort around the topic of race because even though these conversations have increased in frequency in recent years, it's still not particularly easy to talk about. And we weren't only talking about race but also why the efforts around diversity and inclusion were lacking. So the creation of the group was pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people in the OHSU community and oftentimes these feelings were manifested in defensiveness and avoidance. So for instance, many people would ask why we focus on race whereas other groups would not be asked this question, such as the LGBTQ group is not questioned about their focus while we are often we're criticizing question for focusing on race without including other forms of diversity. And to us this response just indicates a discomfort around the topic and a hard time acknowledging race as an issue. And finally and most importantly, there was little to no data around these issues to allow anyone to assess the problem effectively. And of course data are important to get everyone on the same page about what the problem actually looks like and are needed to formulate effective policies versus taking the same approach over and over without metrics for success. So it would be like if you were asked to make a cake but you weren't given instructions on how to do it or you weren't given a list of ingredients. You may intend for your cake to look like this but more likely would end up looking like this or worse. So trying to create policies without data is a way to do it but there are better ways. In other words, we can use evidence-based practices and make data-driven decisions. We're all critical thinkers and we understand the value of data and empirical investigation. We apply this way of thinking to all facets of our lives yet when it comes to race this critical thought is often times abandoned. We rely on anecdotal evidence and opinions to inform our policies rather than research. We should probably just stop doing that because it doesn't make any sense and it actually hurts people. So, and these problems are not a black box. They're solvable just like any other problem. So what type of data might be helpful? We can start with diversity which remember is who is in the room and something that would be useful for instance is statistics on graduate school, the graduate school application and recruitment process and this might include percentage of URMs who applied, percentage interviewed, why people were denied and why people declined. Other information includes understanding what your admissions criteria are. This sounds obvious but most graduate programs don't have standardized rules around who gets in and why. And this lack of standardization leaves too much room for personal biases of all types to creep in. So it would be useful to understand what strong predictors of academic success are and adjust admissions requirements based off of this data and evidence. So a well-known example of this is the GRE which is the standardized test for graduate school admission. And obviously a better score increases your likelihood of acceptance and I personally sat on admissions committees where there were certain professors who regarded the GRE as pretty much like the single metric for someone's intelligence. But recent studies have shown that the GRE is a weak predictor of how people perform in graduate school and actually relates more to socioeconomic status. So now that we understand that the GRE is actually discriminatory, institutions are slowly shifting away from including them in the application process. Also any time we talk about diversity we need to add inclusion which remembers how people feel about being in the room. And because this is about how people feel and work together, qualitative data is invaluable. And this data can be collected through well-developed and through climate surveys although this type of data is seen to some people as less important. That couldn't be further from the truth because we see examples all the time of how the culture of an environment influences outcomes. So these are just a handful of examples of what kind of data would be useful. But this really is a whole field. There's a whole body of knowledge around this and there are infinite more questions you could ask. So, what is the best way to collect these data? Okay, so if you just glance at these terms they're probably familiar to you and we understand the importance of standardized definitions and external review. But I want to explain how these concepts can be applied to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. So for example consulting the literature and experts is a basic first step. There's a body of literature on these topics as well as other institutions and businesses working on this such as Google and other institutions. Consult and collaborate instead of recreating the well. Transparency and accessibility is so important for racial issues in order to build trust. There's a history of data being used against underrepresented minorities so institutions need to be transparent about data collection, how it's analyzed and how it's interpreted. So an example here is OHSU recently distributed a climate survey around racism on campus which is really great. But it mainly involved listing the number of racist incidences describing each, describing actions and outcomes from each and someone who experiences microaggressions every single day isn't going to bother filling all of this out. And it was also very focused on reporting which is problematic because most people don't bother reporting things because reporting is not often met with action. So this survey was very skewed in the data that it was collecting and I think it would have been more useful to just focus on evaluating how people generally feel about the state of inclusivity. And I personally chose not to participate in that survey because of all of the glaring issues that I saw. So for example one of the issues that I personally saw was if the demographic that's most likely to experience a racial insult is the minority then if you pull the data you might think that there's not a problem which is not true. And also if I personally, so there are not a lot of underrepresented minorities within my program right, and if I represent and I don't participate in the survey then your survey is not representative. So it's really important to know, it's really important to have a plan, a transparent plan and make that plan accessible with how you are collecting the data and what you plan to do with it. And that also leads to the idea of community-based participatory research and initiatives. This is imperative because there is information that only your community knows that helps inform solutions. So for example, consulting with AVIDs or other professional organizations with the creation of that survey could have helped us understand the caveats before we even sent it out. Okay, so you may have noticed that we are essentially describing the scientific method, right? Collect data, determine metrics in action, execute, evaluate, address, repeat. Yeah, this is painfully obvious. Everyone in this audience is not surprised that we're saying these things but what's shocking is that it's overwhelmingly underutilized within academic institutions and businesses when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. So what can you do? This is the most frequently asked question after doing this work for a long time. And now you know why data is important in DEI, what can you personally do to create data-driven, diverse, equitable and inclusive environments. So that collection around these issues is ultimately up to those who are getting paid at your institution to do this work. It should not be a volunteer activity but we could all still play a role in ensuring that it's happening. Okay, so how do we do that? The first thing that we would like to suggest is to be critical about any diversity, equity and inclusion effort that's taking place at your, that's happening at your place of work. So ask who's in charge of these efforts? How is the data being collected? Was the impacted community involved? Don't be afraid to ask the tough questions because they're not tough questions if it's being done right. Educate yourself on this issue, on these issues. Resources are everywhere so read up on the topic. I personally think that this is one of the so I think this is one of the most personally accessible and underutilized strategies I encounter. You are better equipped to be critical when you have a starting base of knowledge and I think that this is something that people can feel more comfortable with to talk about if you have some idea of what you're talking about so I can't underscore the importance of educating yourself on the topic. And lastly do not rely on those who are getting paid to collect this data or working on diversity, equity and inclusion to solve the issue. We all know the Culture Center or the inclusion team is a great place but ask yourself how can a small fraction of people change the entire culture of a workplace? That does not make any sense. In order to find solutions we all have to be on board and we all have to be actively engaged in order to create diverse, equitable and inclusive environments. So we hope we've shed some light on the fact that diversity initiatives within academia require more rigorous approaches and ideas about how you can personally contribute to a better environment in your space. Thank you so much for having us and if you have any questions please feel free to contact us and we'll take questions now as well. Thank you.