In April 2021 the ICA Standing Committee on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access launched a survey of both current and lapsed ICA members with this central question: “How is ICA doing on issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA)?” We want to thank those who took the survey, which garnered 825 complete responses and 53 partial responses (60% completion) for a total of 878 included responses.
The IDEA Standing Committee is pleased to share with you the IDEA Survey preliminary report titled, “Perceptions about Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access: First Insights” through this link here.
The following provides a brief summary of our findings.
As a foundation, we investigated participant agreement with the statement, “ICA has demonstrated through its actions that diversity, equity, access and inclusion are priority areas.” The majority of respondents, 65%, generally agreed with that statement, with 18% neutral, and 18% disagreeing.
Cross-tabulation analysis allowed us to probe for possible gender differences in agreement with our major question. Those who identified as women and men expressed a similar level of agreement, whereas nonbinary/third-gender respondents expressed much less agreement with the statement. In a similar analysis, those who identified as White/Caucasians expressed the most agreement with this statement. South and Southeast Asians expressed less agreement. Middle Easterners and Hispanic/Latinx respondents expressed the least agreement. These findings indicate that lived experience and demographics may influence perceptions of how well ICA does in the areas of inclusion, diversity, equity and access.
The survey report includes an analysis of perceptions of costs of travel funding, the challenges of visa requirements, family obligations, membership fees, conference costs, and microaggressions. The report also compares perceptions of individuals from the Global North and Global South, including perceptions of regular members and lapsed members. Generally, members who self-identified as being from the Global South and participants who have allowed their memberships to lapse viewed conference costs as high. Responses to the statement, “Family obligations have prevented me from attending an annual conference in the past three years,” revealed some differences based on gender, with more men (15%) than women (4%) from the Global South reporting agreement. For those identifying as being from the Global North, slightly more women (29%) and men (26%) reported family obligations had prevented conference attendance.
Of significance also were the findings related to microaggressions where 13% of respondents said they occasionally, frequently, or very frequently experienced on average five types of microaggressions. The most common microaggression experienced by respondents was being “left out of conversations or activities,” (26.5%) followed by being “talked down to” or having their work treated as inferior (18.9%). When looking at rank, junior, and mid-career faculty said they experienced these microaggressions the most. Women reported experiencing more microaggressions than men; nonbinary/third-gender respondents reported having experienced microaggressions the most. An examination by race/ethnicity, noting some identities had very small numbers, those identifying as Native or Indigenous, East Asian, Hispanic/Latinx and Middle Eastern or North African reported having experienced microaggressions the most.
Lastly, the survey investigated interactions where individuals might have felt that they were treated unfairly. By far, most individuals who reported having felt that they were treated unfairly pointed to conference paper reviews as a site of mistreatment. In fact, 35% of respondents indicated they occasionally, frequently or very frequently perceived they were treated unfairly by paper reviewers. Although we recognize that poor reviews can be expected during academic life, it may be important for ICA to continue to encourage reporting of inappropriate reviews, as well as offering training for prospective reviewers. In practice, this finding also raises questions about how we decide what is knowledge, who gets to define knowledge for our field, and how we can better communicate with each other.
The Standing Committee on IDEA will be continuing with next steps in data analysis with a focus on the qualitative data. Yet these brief survey findings indicate areas of importance for ICA as it seeks to live up to its IDEA principles. In this spirit, the survey findings we have reported indicate some concrete steps ICA can take. Our findings invite ICA to further engage with ways to advance the association in this direction. These include:
1. Sharing the report with all ICA members and hosting a related town hall to discuss findings and next steps;
2. Co-sponsoring a resolution from M & I to waive membership fees for Tier-2 and Tier-3 members;
3. Devoting significant funding to help defray convention cost for Tier-2 and Tier-3 members, within which will be incentives to encourage attendance in small networks;
4. Devoting significant funding to increase the pool of reviewers from marginalized communities, Tier-2 or Tier-3 members, and/or with scholarly expertise embedded within those populations;
5. Encouraging a model of large teams of co-editors for ICA journals to help distribute labor and encourage diverse teams of editors; and
6. Ensuring that members’ experiences are valuable and worthwhile as they interact with ICA through the conference review process.
Please review the full report for a much more detailed analysis. We also appreciate any of your suggestions and concerns.