Invited Commentary: Reckoning With Our Biases in Epidemiology

Abstract

Abstract Biases and in-group preferences limit opportunities for persons of all identities to flourish in science. Decisions made by those in charge of leading professional meetings about which presentations to feature prominently and by academic journal staff about which articles to publish reinforce these biases. The paper by Nobles et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2021;190(9):1710–1720) showed that women are less likely to be selected to be symposium presenters in the field’s pre-eminent scientific meeting than men. The scientific and moral arguments for promoting diversity of engagement by persons of all identities in the field are abundantly clear, calling for efforts to mitigate the effect of these in-group biases. I offer 3 suggestions for how we can achieve better diversity in our field: 1) increase our discussions of the importance of diversity and raise consciousness about the issue consistently; 2) ensure that only blinded, peer-reviewed presentations are advanced at professional meeting; and 3) publish only blinded, peer-reviewed papers in leading journals in the field. These steps—together with broader system-wide efforts to maximize diversity among trainees and faculty—can pave the way for any field to become welcoming to all, irrespective of any axes of identity.