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Last week I asked for help finding resources on equitable/inclusive graduate recruiting. Many thanks to those who replied. I wanted to do a quick recap of what I have learned so far. This is work in progress and feedback is more than welcome 1/ https://twitter.com/LawUricchio/status/1291476196362825729
First, a quick scan of opinions/blogs will tell you a lot more about what not to do than what TO do. E.g., let's not use standardized tests in admissions ( https://smallpondscience.com/2019/03/08/what-are-the-reasons-we-have-for-dropping-the-gre/) 2/
A slightly deeper dive into papers will provide some references with quantitative arguments for test score biases ( https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaat7550, thanks @rvrohlfs!) and evidence that recommendation letters favor male candidates ( https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2819) 3/
#grexit, #BlackLivesMatter 
, and other movements have accelerated our discussions of how wealth/gender/ancestry are all wound so deeply into our identities and our CVs that all of our traditional indicators are freighted with prejudice and/or privilege. So what can we do? 4/
, and other movements have accelerated our discussions of how wealth/gender/ancestry are all wound so deeply into our identities and our CVs that all of our traditional indicators are freighted with prejudice and/or privilege. So what can we do? 4/
I still don't know. But at this point in my reading, the new insights have come from the social sciences. @mildredboveda shared this article, which, among many other things, touches on the ways that academia can marginalize Black and non-male students 5/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09518398.2020.1771465
I think we often fail to recognize academic culture as explicitly "white". If we can acknowledge that the scientific questions we ask and methods we pursue are inherently shaped by identity, then we must accept that academic culture also is not neutral 6/ https://medium.com/the-faculty/white-academia-do-better-fa96cede1fc5
White notions of hierarchical mentorship and "intellectual oppositionality" may marginalize non-white students. It may be insufficient to simply "welcome" students of color -- we should also cede power to scholars of color, to allow for new academic cultures and research q's 7/
This can mean that the research questions we pursue will change and broaden, and that mentorship will be more distributed. It can mean that white academics have to do the hard DEI work that has typically fallen onto BIPOC scholars 8/ https://ecoevorxiv.org/4a9p8/
But how do we get to equitable recruiting? For now I'm working on ads for PhD positions that incorporate these ideas. I want to express the research questions and mentorship culture of the lab and encourage more expansive interpretations of these questions and approaches 9/
But this is only a small start. As per @hormiga's recent blog post, if all of our indicators of success are biased, "how can we evaluate people who are seeking opportunities? That’s a hard question. I think it’s one we need to sit with for a while." 10/ https://smallpondscience.com/2020/08/11/are-recommendations-letters-a-bad-thing/
And while we are sitting with these questions, let's make sure we talk to our colleagues in the social sciences and read their work. I think there is a lot that we could learn from them. 11/11
