Diversity and inclusion at the ISJ
本文基于AIS高级学者委员会的报告，分析了ISJ编辑委员会在性别、地区和种族方面的多样性现状，并提出了更细致的多样性衡量指标，如国家、博士来源地和出生地，同时讨论了作者多样性及未来改进计划。
For many years, the ISJ has been included within the quaintly named “basket” of eight (Bo8) premier journals, an endeavour of the Association for Information Systems' (AIS) College of Senior Scholars (CSS)1 to single out the top journals in the field of Information Systems (IS). At its 2019 meeting in Munich, concerns were expressed that the Bo8's editorial boards were insufficiently diverse and as a result the CSS commissioned a task force to investigate the extent to which the editorial boards of the eight journals reflected the diversity of the AIS itself. The task force chose to define “editorial board” as meaning the people most directly connected with managing submitted articles, that is, the Senior and Associate Editors of a journal, but excluded the advisory board or a more general list of reviewers. It collected publicly-available data (primarily from journal and individual websites), and also consulted with the editors of the eight journals, before compiling a report that is available from the CSS website2 and that has been recently published as Beath et al. (2021). In this editorial, I deal with the report insofar as it pertains to the ISJ. I chart the current state of diversity in the ISJ's editorial board, but also take issue with some of the parameters of the report itself and suggest alternative ways of examining diversity. Finally, I outline some of my plans for further diversification of the ISJ and the ways in which this diversity can be measured. The ideas in and structure of this editorial have been significantly informed by Monideepa Tarafdar (senior editor at the ISJ) and Cynthia Beath (a member of the journal's advisory board and a forthright supporter of the journal). Benchmarking diversity lies at the heart of the CSS Diversity report. As Beath et al. (2021) note, “Editorial board diversity, we believe, is a signal that the journal is open to and inclusive of all authors”. The task force decided to limit its assessment of diversity to three demographic indicators, viz. gender, regional and ethnic diversity. Diversity was benchmarked on the data of the 3210 individuals who were paid-up Academic members of the AIS on 31/12/2019. Thus, the diversity of the editorial boards of the Bo8 as a whole and of the eight journals individually were compared to the diversity of AIS Academic members in terms of gender (actually sex, i.e., female or male), AIS region (1, 2 or 3) of current employment, and ethnicity.3 While gender and region of current employment are automatically collected by the AIS as part of membership demographics, ethnicity data was manually created by one of the task force members and mapped onto a simplified template that was restricted to terms adapted from the US census: (a) Chinese, (b) Indian subcontinent, (c) other Asian, (d) Black/African descent, (e) Caucasian/European descent, (f) Middle Eastern descent, (g) Hispanic (only in Region 1 because the term is largely meaningless elsewhere) and (h) Other (e.g., indigenous). In Table 1 below, AIS data for these various demographic indicators are compared with ISJ data (the 68 SEs and AEs of the ISJ, current on 1 January 2021) for the same indicators. Beath et al. (2021) report a similar analysis for all eight journals (with data collected in January 2020) that includes standard deviations, but Table 1 is sufficient for the current purposes. Eyeballing the data in this way is instructive. Superficially, it appears that while the ISJ's gender proportions are roughly in line with the AIS benchmark (in contrast to the basket as a whole), we have too few editorial board members from region 1 (while the basket has too many), too many from region 2 (the basket is about right) and about the right number from region 3 (the basket has too few). Where ethnicity is concerned, we have too many Chinese, too few other Asians (e.g., Thai, Korean, Japanese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, etc.), Caucasians/of European descent and of Middle Eastern descent, and about the right number of Black/of African descent, Indian subcontinent and Hispanic. My immediate observation when I saw the numbers was to think that hitting any of the AIS benchmarks would be entirely fortuitous: while we certainly champion diversity across all aspects of the ISJ and have deliberately sought to bring in more people from historically under-represented groups, we do not deliberately attempt to emulate AIS proportions, hitherto unknown. Indeed, as the AIS membership evolves, so the proportions will evolve and thus any target is going to be a moving one. Nevertheless, I would like to see more diversity in general, and not for a small number of ethnicities to dominate. The AIS CSS report makes six recommendations for change to the CSS itself, 5 to the AIS, and 15 for the consideration of the Bo8 journal editors. I do not plan to list or address all 15 here, but I do note that one of the recommendations is that editors should establish diversity and inclusion indicators that are appropriate for each journal and then to set measurable targets related to those indicators. I caution here that while the AIS benchmarks are instructive they are also limited in their scope. However, I agree that each journal editor should identify a set of diversity and inclusion indicators that make sense in the context of the journal and its readership. Extending these indicators beyond the three that the Task Force has relied on in this report is necessary. An important aspect of the AIS CSS report, and it is one that I share, is the belief that diversity is a good thing. My interpretation of the “diversity is good” argument is that when we include a wider range of perspectives, we will make better decisions and thus enhance quality. We will also demonstrate the openness of the journal to a diversity of authors. Thus, while I am generally in favour of indicators as useful ways of thinking about diversity, and there are many indicators in this editorial, I feel that hard targets are risky because it means that we embark on the slippery slope that leads to quotas and bean counting, both of which I wish to avoid. Nevertheless, I report data for the ISJ below so as to provide an indication of the current situation with respect to various indicators. Readers can decide for themselves if more specific targets are warranted. A second area relates to transparency: journal editors need to report on their diversity and inclusion statistics somewhere, either on the journal website or else in some other public way, such as this editorial, which is freely accessible from the ISJ website. I plan to update these data on an annual basis, either in future editorials or elsewhere on the ISJ website. While the level of diversity in the ISJ is high (at least according to the AIS indicators), it could be higher, particularly with regard to the extent to which minority groups are represented. The same comment, of course, applies to the AIS itself. Achieving a higher level of diversity will require attention to a range of indicators that I outline below. However, diversity must never come at the expense of merit: we expect that SEs and AEs will fit and enhance the ethos of the journal. I have no intention of descending to the point where I cherry pick individuals exclusively for their contribution to a diversity indicator irrespective of other attributes of their suitability for the position. This brings me to a more detailed critique of the AIS report and data. Firstly, I find that the AIS region and ethnicity coding to be coarse: just three regions and eight ethnic groups. Splitting AIS members into (only) three regions conceals a huge lack of diversity. The vast majority (88%) of Region 1 AIS members live in one country, the USA, but as a journal editor, I would like to seek submissions from authors distributed across the region. This will have an impact on targets: while I think we do need more Region 1 editorial board members, they do not all have to come from the USA. They should come from across the region. Thus, I plan to search for potential SEs and AEs from all countries within Region 1. To that end, I recently appointed an AE from Brazil and I am actively seeking other qualified individuals. A similar problem exists in Region 2, where the vast majority of AIS members work in Western Europe, with very few in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all of Africa. The almost complete absence of African scholars grossly limits the diversity of the AIS. A similar pattern applies to the ISJ editorial board, and while we do have African scholars on the ISJ editorial board, none of them currently live in Africa. Finally, Region 3 has better diversity data both among AIS members and with respect to ISJ editorial board members, who come from various parts of Asia and Australasia, though none from the Pacific Islands at the time of writing. That said, while we do have Indian scholars among our SEs and AEs, none of them actually live in India and only one received her PhD from India. Diversity is not just gender, country of birth and ethnicity: it is also where one studied, was professionally socialised, where one lives, works and breathes. Thus, using the region of employment or residence but not the natal origin or the location of postgraduate study as the basis of regional classification is quite problematic because the AIS regions are so large and conceal so much diversity. I do not find the AIS regions a good proxy for anything very useful except the most general kind of assessment of where editorial board members live. As I argue below, the actual state of diversity in the ISJ's editorial board is much richer than the data in the AIS CSS report suggests. But what we need to do is to examine some different aspects of the diversity. My first step was to look at the country of current employment, the country where a PhD was obtained and the natal origin (country) of the ISJ's SEs and AEs. This is presented in Table 2 below. Here, a more detailed picture emerges, with 36 countries indicated. Our editorial board members live in 16 countries, earned their PhDs in 17 countries and have natal origins in 29 countries. While 24% of our editorial board members were born in, studied in and now live in the same country, most of them moved at some stage, which I suspect parallels behaviour across the AIS more generally. Considering our SEs and AEs, some stayed at home to study and then moved away (11%) while others moved away to study and then returned (8%). Others moved away to study and then stayed there (32%). A final group moved away to study and then moved elsewhere to work (24%). These figures attest to a global diversity of the ISJ's editorial board in a way that is not captured by the AIS benchmark comparative data. However, a new bias emerges here: while 26 SEs/AEs were born in the global south (developing countries), only two received their PhDs in the global south and only five currently live in the global south. This is a matter for some concern, though it probably reflects global educational movements and cannot easily be addressed at the scale of one journal. Beyond editorial board data, I also felt that it would be instructive to examine the provenance of our authors. Who are they? Where do they live? Obtaining raw data from manuscript central is not too difficult, but parsing it by gender is not at all simple and prone to error. Although genderizing software programmes exist, these tend to be more accurate with “western” names that often tend to be gender specific, and tend to be much less accurate with non-western names. For instance, the Chinese name that is rendered as “Li Li” in the Roman alphabet (i.e., family name and given name are both Li), could involve a number of different characters in Chinese, and so could be male or female. Here are some examples: 李俐, 李力, 黎莉, 黎厉, 厉俪. All five would be romanised as Li Li (in Mandarin), but the act of romanisation removes any way of even guessing at the gender based on the characters. Incidentally, the first, third and fifth are more likely to be female, while the second and fourth are more likely to be male, but these are not absolute. Sometimes females have “male” names and vice versa. Since manuscript central only captures the romanised form, it is impossible to determine gender unless someone does an intensive search for the named individual and ideally finds a photograph or some other gender-identifiable evidence on the Internet, such as a website that uses the male or female personal pronoun. An easier solution is that we ask ScholarOne to request the inclusion of gender when a paper is submitted. However, this is controversial: some believe that the submission of gender data should never be mandatory and indeed, in some countries, it is illegal to collect it. Despite these genderising challenges, I attempted to assess the gender distribution of submissions to ISJ, in response to a request that I look for change in gender distribution of submissions to the journal pre- and during-pandemic. I was able to assign genders to the first authors of 95% of the papers submitted in March–May of 2019 and in the same months of 2020. The results showed that the gender distribution in 2019 was very similar to the gender distribution among AIS Academic members: 35% female/65% male. In 2020, the proportion of submissions from females was actually higher: 40% female/60% male. While this is a very limited analysis of the gender distribution of submitters to ISJ, it does suggest that even during challenging times, the journal is attracting significant submissions from females. Nevertheless, manuscript central data for the ISJ do indicate the country from which the first author is submitting and this provides a very rough indicator of geographical diversity. Therefore, I downloaded the metadata for all submissions to the ISJ from 2011–2020, that is, of data. This that we have received submissions from first authors in countries. Table Although countries to provide evidence of diversity, only of them are in AIS Region while are in Region 2 and are in Region itself has members from Region 1 countries, Region 2 countries and Region 3 Region 2, 16 countries in are among our submitting authors are AIS members from countries in Where papers are concerned, the situation is not quite so diverse Table the same we papers from authors based in three in Region 1 (only is 16 in Region 2 none from and in Region I feel that this more detailed analysis a richer picture of the diversity of the ISJ, but there is for The that we have submitting authors from countries, and have papers from authors in countries, but there is no basis for with other is is that authors should feel no matter who they where they come what kind of they This of is what diversity It be that we cannot their but at the very we must that will them to enhance the of their and writing. This is that we and I am to AEs and SEs on the basis of such and because they demonstrate with the journal's a distributed editorial board if those board members the ISJ in their as a journal in which to and as a journal that will them In an AE or while the of the individual to in this at a high level is I am also in the of the individual AEs often assign papers to be by in their AEs and SEs can also the journal within their Thus, diversity in the editorial board is likely to to diversity in the submitting authors. This is a I that the AIS CSS will a more analysis of diversity in future Finally, I come to the issue of diversity and inclusion indicators. As I I am to be too I do not think it is for to set quotas for any AIS gender or location of current Nevertheless, I do that the current of diversity are not only and appropriate for the journal, but also We have among authors and that the ISJ will to qualified individuals in Nevertheless, I that we have few editorial board members who either received their PhDs in or live in the global I am to The AIS CSS Task Force that editors AEs on a basis with some from more members of the editorial I find that this is a that with an such that we need to be open to new AEs, so as they are by more AEs from the global south will be an way of that our diversity beyond the countries. Indeed, I suggest that the AIS CSS Task Force a with of and countries and global in each of the current AIS This will journal editors to they can diversity in a more way than the current Where gender is concerned, if anything we should be to more female board members we expect the AIS proportions to I believe that the ISJ will be by a of people in and AE across indicators. our SEs and AEs the AIS benchmarks for gender, location and but received their in a small group of the same to the same and the same kind of then that would not as a diverse editorial board in my I note that while of our SEs and AEs received their PhDs and currently work in countries where is the less than were born in a country where is the This in part reflects the global educational that I to It also that of our SEs and AEs have that from a first to in an I regard this as a aspect of diversity that we need to and I also that these will be more of the that similar authors will be and in their and and will them to to the ISJ. A editorial board is an to the journal and is we should or As I I believe that a diverse editorial board will to a diverse set of authors for that matter At this I will also the editorial advisory board, which for the ISJ of 36 of them are with the same countries as the editorial board, but to that list of 36 countries, I can and It is my that the editorial advisory board members actively potential authors to to the ISJ, where and so actively to the diversity of the journal. All the to this point has diversity as by of demographic indicators. I suggest that this is are also indicators to which we have not the of a submitting is a journal open to and of different of different different It is for an editor to a of But does that of openness into the papers that are submitted to and for Here, I see two indicators, each of which is though with some Firstly, what are the of of the editorial board At the ISJ, we do collect this each AE and is to provide to that identify We this to assign Since the are there is a and many But in terms of diversity, I would like our editorial board members to be diverse to be able to any paper that is within and that is submitted to the ISJ. At the time of we have and I that this indicator is with further diversification not At the same it is important that members of the be very with authors should not have to the on of for instance, an should not include a to the that is The be for an that makes an at the ISJ, we have recently the as a new of diverse is the that is actually submitted and Although it would not be hard to a of though it would be more to each to this Nevertheless, such an would certainly have the of what is what we and what we I would not to do this analysis for submitted but it could be for each submitted and each published in the However, such a will take more time than I have at my at least for the time Finally, I have to that each journal has its It would be if all journals with the same the same the same as diversity and are journals need to their individual often a journal to to because of that indeed, I authors to an with a specific journal in if the fit is good then the of is In this issue of the ISJ, we In the first et al. (2021) the problem of and context in in and the potential of They argue that many of the with are and also to their and They further argue that these in the if do not actively on they the They a for as a and on three of and In the second and (2021) when of their They on and study the a which is both for personal and in for purposes. from they that when they will using the a or their The authors to the a to they identify that are for than and they the that these In the third and (2021) examine which both an state of and that state is with the in the context of a study with and data, the authors that with and a while and and and actual to The study to the of the by the new of based on a and that that many are an the and the of a In the fourth et al. (2021) using as a for individuals identify has But is about individuals to potential The authors related to from a the number of an was as the of the the of the on and the of the The results showed that work to and the most on related to to and with I am to my at the ISJ and elsewhere for their to of this Cynthia Monideepa