Diversity and inclusion at the ISJ

For many years, the ISJ has been included within the quaintly named “basket” of eight (Bo8) premier journals, an endeavour of the Association for Information Systems' (AIS) College of Senior Scholars (CSS) to single out the top journals in the field of Information Systems (IS). At its 2019 meeting in Munich, concerns were expressed that the Bo8's editorial boards were insufficiently diverse and as a result the CSS commissioned a task force to investigate the extent to which the editorial boards of the eight journals reflected the diversity of the AIS itself. The task force chose to define “editorial board” as meaning the people most directly connected with managing submitted articles, that is, the Senior and Associate Editors of a journal, but excluded the advisory board or a more general list of reviewers. It collected publicly-available data (primarily from journal and individual websites), and also consulted with the editors of the eight journals, before compiling a report that is available from the CSS website and that has been recently published as Beath et al. (2021). In this editorial, I deal with the report insofar as it pertains to the ISJ. I chart the current state of diversity in the ISJ's editorial board, but also take issue with some of the parameters of the report itself and suggest alternative ways of examining diversity. Finally, I outline some of my plans for further diversification of the ISJ and the ways in which this diversity can be measured. The ideas in and structure of this editorial have been significantly informed by Monideepa Tarafdar (senior editor at the ISJ) and Cynthia Beath (a member of the journal's advisory board and a forthright supporter of the journal). Benchmarking diversity lies at the heart of the CSS Diversity report. As Beath et al. (2021) note, “Editorial board diversity, we believe, is a signal that the journal is open to and inclusive of all authors”. The task force decided to limit its assessment of diversity to three demographic indicators, viz. gender, regional and ethnic diversity. Diversity was benchmarked on the data of the 3210 individuals who were paid-up Academic members of the AIS on 31/12/2019. Thus, the diversity of the editorial boards of the Bo8 as a whole and of the eight journals individually were compared to the diversity of AIS Academic members in terms of gender (actually sex, i.e., female or male), AIS region (1, 2 or 3) of current employment, and ethnicity. While gender and region of current employment are automatically collected by the AIS as part of membership demographics, ethnicity data was manually created by one of the task force members and mapped onto a simplified template that was restricted to terms adapted from the US census: (a) Chinese, (b) Indian subcontinent, (c) other Asian, (d) Black/African descent, (e) Caucasian/European descent, (f) Middle Eastern descent, (g) Hispanic (only in Region 1 because the term is largely meaningless elsewhere) and (h) Other (e.g., indigenous). In Table 1 below, AIS data for these various demographic indicators are compared with ISJ data (the 68 SEs and AEs of the ISJ, current on 1 January 2021) for the same indicators. Beath et al. (2021) report a similar analysis for all eight journals (with data collected in January 2020) that includes standard deviations, but Table 1 is sufficient for the current purposes. Eyeballing the data in this way is instructive. Superficially, it appears that while the ISJ's gender proportions are roughly in line with the AIS benchmark (in contrast to the basket as a whole), we have too few editorial board members from region 1 (while the basket has too many), too many from region 2 (the basket is about right) and about the right number from region 3 (the basket has too few). Where ethnicity is concerned, we have too many Chinese, too few other Asians (e.g., Thai, Korean, Japanese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, etc.), Caucasians/of European descent and of Middle Eastern descent, and about the right number of Black/of African descent, Indian subcontinent and Hispanic. My immediate observation when I saw the numbers was to think that hitting any of the AIS DOI: 10.1111/isj.12329