Do Universities Really Want Inclusion?

I was a guest on the University of Melbourne’s Supporting Women in MDHS (SWiM) webinar and had a great discussion with the host, Natalie Hannan, about the pros and cons of creating programs for women (or any other group) and about who they leave out. 

I launched the Women in AMIA committee as a grassroots initiative to give women more opportunity to a) address gaps we saw in our field and to b) lead in a professional organization with limited leadership roles. Women in AMIA has engaged hundreds of women, created amazing programs, and is having an impact on the representation and visibility of women in our field.  For example:

• The First Look program has exposed diverse undergraduate women with an interest in informatics and/or STEM to a field that doesn’t have enough diversity

• The Women in AMIA Leadership Program--and now the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH) Women in Digital Health leadership program--have helped participants gain confidence, competence, and connections.

We want to expand the AMIA program to anyone who would benefit--not just women.

Rethinking Gender and identity

As universities are grappling with how to treat identity in a diverse society, I returned to Eugenia Cheng’s book x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender. Dr. Cheng makes the point that gender is a proxy for character traits--there is a statistical relationship between gender and certain traits, but when we conflate gender with other character traits, it’s harder to diagnose and address the root problems. For example, we may say

Women are less likely to ask for pay raises, so women are paid less.

But some women ask for pay raises, and some men don’t. Instead, if we say

People who do not ask for pay raises get paid less

then we can address the link between asking for pay raises and getting pay raises for everyone who is affected.

You may question the approach of getting everyone to act in the way that is associated with being male: asking explicitly for pay raises. The main point of x+y is to provide another way of looking at behavior that doesn’t use gender as a proxy. She creates an ungendered language for behavior:

Ingressive behavior is competitive, individualistic, and single minded

Congressive behavior is cooperative and concerned with relationships in the group more than with individual success

Cheng thinks that congressive behavior is better for society but that ingressive behavior is rewarded more by society, because society is based on competition. Because society rewards asking for a pay raise, talking about how successful you are, and not being waylaid by emotions or what people think of you, we often focus on training people to behave more ingressively rather than changing our reward structures.

What does this have to do with universities? 

To me, academics is a prime example of valuing ingressive behavior. It’s one giant contest for the university to look successful and appear to be the best to the outside world, and everything we do as academic staff is judged against our contribution to that goal.

Every university I’ve been affiliated with values nationally visible contributions more than local contribution, even if the local impact is actually greater than the impact of the talk you gave in Europe or the committee you chaired for an international conference.

I offer a few suggestions to make universities more congressive and less ingressive, ultimately making them more inclusive:

• Rethinking promotion and incentives - Maybe you are a very strong congressive person, and your impact is in helping connect people, building community, enriching people’s thinking, helping people learn more and teach better. These are things that are very difficult to measure or argue for in promotion. (But in the long run, they actually may help the university towards their ranking contests by providing better experience ratings.)
  

• Marking (grading) - For many faculties, the goal of marking is not to reflect the learning of the student but to facilitate the ingressive view of a competition in allowing only a few students to receive the top marks. Otherwise, the story goes, how will they select the top students that go on for a PhD and compete for scholarships?
  

• Admission to PhD programs - Our faculty is especially ingressive in determining who is admitted or receives a PhD scholarship, because it is a competition based on one number (the Weighted Average Mark). This inhibits acceptance of diverse applicants who may come from a disadvantaged background or have impairments that affected their marks or had interruptions like child bearing or caring.
  

• Teaching as collaboration - A handbook entry that must be approved 1.5 years before the class is taught and strict adherence to a syllabus makes it harder to build the collaborative, participatory environments best for learning. A new book Syllabus talks about what teaching looks like when teaching turns into learning and a teacher learns together with the classroom of students. Cheng describes this in terms of ingressive and congressive teaching:

I think it's important to find what motivates the students and tap into that. When you're teaching ingressively, you try and bend their will to yours to try and show them, this is the right way of thinking - this is the way - instead of meeting them somewhere.

In this world where we say we value diversity and inclusion, we need to go beyond identity categories and create environments that support a broader range of people--for example, those who are socially anxious and can’t ask for help, who suffer from depression and are thus less “productive”, who step back to support a spouse’s career, and whose contributions are more congressive and less individualistic.