EDI development in your institutes

[Shiqi Zhang]

Comparing to a few years ago when EDI was just a concept, I’m really happy to see more and more institutes are putting up EDI committees that are dedicated to promoting EDI within the institutions. As a member of the EDI committee at BTI, I’ve gained so much knowledge about EDI and seen the committee has been involved in hiring, policy-making, etc., and been educating BTI community about EDI. And I’m glad to see the EDI tag on Plantae too!

I really want to hear stories from other institutes about how they promote EDI and if you are involved in it, what has been done that really impressed you?

Discussion

[Kristen Van Gelder]

I had the opportunity to be a graduate student representative on a faculty hiring committee. One part of the application for prospective hires, was including an EDI statement. Around this time, a thorough review was conducted university wide to determine the gender pay gap and fix it and our new president was, for the first time, a woman. I felt real progress was being made and I was proud that my university was taking steps to move forward and be more diverse and inclusive. It seemed like real progress was taking shaping in a university that at it’s beginning had separate colleges for men and women. Yet during this time, protests were taking place across the US and the world for Black Lives Matter. And it made us all realize in our department and throughout the university that while we had made some good progress in EDI, it wasn’t fully inclusive, and we were still lacking. I am happy about the progress we’ve made but I also know that we all need to speak up more, not just for our own minority groups that we fall into, but for every group.