Scholars Claim Ocean Sciences Must Incorporate DEI Policies

Scholars Claim Ocean Sciences Must Incorporate DEI Policies

The left will continue pushing this in every single discipline. Nothing will be spared.

The College Fix reports:

Ocean sciences must incorporate DEI, scholars argue

Ocean science researchers must work “towards equity and justice” in their field, according to a group of scholars.

Their academic paper includes a call for scholars to “[a]dvocate for and actively create opportunities for your BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and female colleagues, even when this means personally stepping aside/turning down opportunities.”

Nature’s open-access publication, npj ocean sustainability, published the paper.

Proposals focused on a variety of policies, including specifically promoting minority groups. These applied to funding, such as in the call for “More grants awarded to underrepresented researchers,” and to citations, such as in the calls to “Check whether your reference lists are gender-balanced.”

They also suggest “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies and “anti-racist” training for research staff.

Ocean scientists should also educate themselves “on the work of minority scientists relevant to [their] study and consider proactively citing more work by minority scientists as an act of reparative justice and affirmative action in citational practices.”

Paper co-author Paris Stefanoudis at the University of Oxford provided The College Fix with a sampling of resources to incorporate the suggestions.

“That is really hard to track since there are so many issues covered here,” Stefanoudis said, when asked about examples of the paper’s ideas being implemented. He pointed to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Gender Citation Index Balance Tool as an example of “gender-balanced referencing.”

Stefanoudis also mentioned the publication Conservation Letters’ policy as an example of the paper’s proposal to “[m]andate that publications on the Global South by those in the Global North include authors from those geographies.”

The publication requires “manuscripts focused on conservation in Low and Middle Income Countries include authors from the relevant country/countries.”

The researchers also suggested the special recognition of “individuals from underrepresented groups through awards, invited talks, keynote lectures at conferences etc.”

One of the researchers, Asha de Vos of the Oceans Institute of University of Western Australia, spoke regarding the contents of the paper and a related op-ed she wrote in the New York Times at a British Ecological Society conference.

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