Guest post: Non-optional diversity questionnaire
Originally a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowden on Robin might be described as….
Last week I was invited to referee a paper by an editor of a journal that I was associated with (as author, editor of three special issues, member of the Editorial Board) for more than 40 years. The paper was relevant to my expertise, so I said yes. However, when I tried to download the PDF file I was faced with a demand (not optional) to answer a “diversity questionnaire”.
I should have said right away that it was none of Elsevier’s business what I “identify as”, or what sort of person I spend my nights with. Foolishly, however, I answered their silly questionnaire, in which the first question asked if I was a man, a woman, or “other”. The other questions seemed mainly interested in my skin colour.
When I was on the Editorial Board we selected potential reviewers on our perception (sometimes wrong, of course) of their knowledge of the subject, etc., never any nonsense about “diversity”. In retrospect I could have answered “other (giraffe)” for the first question, and “green” for my skin colour, but I didn’t think of that until afterwards. Anyway, I am planning to write to the handling editor revoking my agreement to review the paper, and emphasizing that in the future I won’t agree to review papers if doing so requires me to answer questionnaires that have nothing to do with my competence.
The Royal Society of Chemistry seems to have been involved in this project, and has published what appear to be the questions that are being asked, or some of them.
The first question, naturally, is ‘With which gender do you most identify?’ – the choices offered are Woman / Man / Non-binary or gender diverse / Prefer not to disclose. There is of course no option for ‘I don’t ‘identify’ as anything, you nutters, I *am* a woman (or man as the case may be).
The other questions are ‘What are your ethnic origins or ancestry?’, with a list of regions from which to make selections, and ‘How would you identify yourself in terms of race?’, again with a list of options.
A glaring omission, to my eye, is any sort of question that relates to class of origin.
Class is so last century. (Funny how the left keeps being called “Marxist” despite the near-total disappearance of class.)
Well, but what about class in the sense of biology? My class of origin is Mammalia. I even identify as Mammalia, since otters are mammals. As for my identity in terms of race, I always lose races. I wasn’t fast even when I was young, so my race, I guess, is loser.
Tsk, iknklast, “loser” is so demeaning. You’re just velocity challenged.
What have one’s ‘ethnic origins’ or ‘gender’ to do with one’s ability to referee an academic paper?
I was distressed to see the Royal Society of Chemistry involved, but as far I can tell no actual chemists participated. It’s just Elsevier and someone called Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski PhD. I was interested to see what her qualifications as a scientist (and PhD) are: she had two papers in respectable bacteriology journals around the turn of the century, plus a meeting abstract.That’s it. One of the papers has five authors, all women as far as one can tell from their names: not much gender diversity there, unless “gender diversity” just means lots of women. Since then she has been promoted to the point where she can boss people around about diversity on behalf of Elsevier. She has an opinion piece in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. in 2017 entitled “Gender diversity leads to better science”. I thought I should read it to see what hard experimental evidence leads to that conclusion, but the paper contains no evidence, just opinion. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. should be ashamed of having published it.
The (British) Biochemical Society is no better. I have been a member since 1973, but I’m not sure how much longer I will stay, as it becomes less and less interested in biochemistry and more and more interested in diversity etc.The last couple of years they have asked (not required, admittedly) members to complete a diversity questionnaire. My wife (not a native speaker of English) didn’t understand the question about sexual preference, as there was a long list (eight, I think) of possibilities, but “heterosexual” was nowhere to be found. I told her that the appropriate box to tick was “straight”, but that was a colloquialism she had not met before.