08/24/2020

Driving Gender Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications

The power of active ERG

What is an ERG?

How many of us know what ‘ERG’ stands for? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. An Employee Resource Group is a volunteer group of like-minded colleagues who come together to create positive change for their wider workplace community. These groups are not to be underestimated — in fact, they should be celebrated and promoted within organizations because they add tremendous value, and increase the organization’s value proposition for attracting, keeping, and developing talent.

What Is The Mission of Our ERGs?

Although ERGs can address an almost limitless range of subjects, our areas of focus are on gender diversity, equity, and inclusion. Each of our groups are open to everyone, and all are welcomed and included in our steering groups and events. There’s no such thing as a ‘women-only’ issue. It’s well documented, and has been discussed in The Scholarly Kitchen in several articles (“Mind the Gap: Gender Disparity in Scholarly Publishing Revisited”, “Gender Diversity: We Can Do Better”, and “A Woman’s Worth: Examining the Gender Pay Gap among UK Scholarly Publishers”) that women are underrepresented and underpaid in decision-making roles at the top of our organizations and boards. But improved practices, processes, and policies around parental leave, representation and different leadership styles benefit everyone.

In addition, publishers play an influential role in who gets heard, especially as we re-evaluate our practices and processes around selecting conference speakers, editorial board members and peer reviewers, as well as around our end-to-end author experience. As such, it’s critical that there is a dedicated space within publishing organizations for colleagues to talk about what gender diversity, equity and inclusion looks like for us as well as our researcher communities, in order to drive more effective change. Having a dedicated ERG creates a platform for colleagues to talk about what is relevant to us, and to flag key issues to our leadership for wider consideration – as well as to keep the pressure on to achieve meaningful change that sticks.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.