Diversity and inclusion at the ISJ

Abstract

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)1 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 website2 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.3 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 benchmarks would be entirely fortuitous: while we certainly champion diversity across all aspects of the ISJ and have deliberately sought to bring in more people from historically under-represented groups, we do not deliberately attempt to emulate AIS proportions, hitherto unknown. Indeed, as the AIS membership evolves, so the proportions will evolve and thus any target is going to be a moving one. Nevertheless, I would like to see more diversity in general, and not for a small number of ethnicities to dominate. The AIS CSS report makes six recommendations for change to the CSS itself, 5 to the AIS, and 15 for the consideration of the Bo8 journal editors. I do not plan to list or address all 15 here, but I do note that one of the recommendations is that editors should establish diversity and inclusion indicators that are appropriate for each journal and then to set measurable targets related to those indicators. I caution here that while the AIS benchmarks are instructive they are also limited in their scope. However, I agree that each journal editor should identify a set of diversity and inclusion indicators that make sense in the context of the journal and its readership. Extending these indicators beyond the three that the Task Force has relied on in this report is necessary. An important aspect of the AIS CSS report, and it is one that I share, is the belief that diversity is a good thing. My interpretation of the “diversity is good” argument is that when we include a wider range of perspectives, we will make better decisions and thus enhance quality. We will also demonstrate the openness of the journal to a diversity of authors. Thus, while I am generally in favour of indicators as useful ways of thinking about diversity, and there are many indicators in this editorial, I feel that hard targets are risky because it means that we embark on the slippery slope that leads to quotas and bean counting, both of which I wish to avoid. Nevertheless, I report data for the ISJ below so as to provide an indication of the current situation with respect to various indicators. Readers can decide for themselves if more specific targets are warranted. A second area relates to transparency: journal editors need to report on their diversity and inclusion statistics somewhere, either on the journal website or else in some other public way, such as this editorial, which is freely accessible from the ISJ website. I plan to update these data on an annual basis, either in future editorials or elsewhere on the ISJ website. While the level of diversity in the ISJ is high (at least according to the AIS indicators), it could be higher, particularly with regard to the extent to which minority groups are represented. The same comment, of course, applies to the AIS itself. Achieving a higher level of diversity will require attention to a range of indicators that I outline below. However, diversity must never come at the expense of merit: we expect that SEs and AEs will fit and enhance the ethos of the journal. I have no intention of descending to the point where I cherry pick individuals exclusively for their contribution to a diversity indicator irrespective of other attributes of their suitability for the position. This brings me to a more detailed critique of the AIS report and data. Firstly, I find that the AIS region and ethnicity coding to be coarse: just three regions and eight ethnic groups. Splitting AIS members into (only) three regions conceals a huge lack of diversity. The vast majority (88%) of Region 1 AIS members live in one country, the USA, but as a journal editor, I would like to seek submissions from authors distributed across the region. This will have an impact on targets: while I think we do need more Region 1 editorial board members, they do not all have to come from the USA. They should come from across the region. Thus, I plan to search for potential SEs and AEs from all countries within Region 1. To that end, I recently appointed an AE from Brazil and I am actively seeking other qualified individuals. A similar problem exists in Region 2, where the vast majority of AIS members work in Western Europe, with very few in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all of Africa. The almost complete absence of African scholars grossly limits the diversity of the AIS. A similar pattern applies to the ISJ editorial board, and while we do have African scholars on the ISJ editorial board, none of them currently live in Africa. Finally, Region 3 has better diversity data both among AIS members and with respect to ISJ editorial board members, who come from various parts of Asia and Australasia, though none from the Pacific Islands at the time of writing. That said, while we do have Indian scholars among our SEs and AEs, none of them actually live in India and only one received her PhD from India. Diversity is not just gender, country of birth and ethnicity: it is also where one studied, was professionally socialised, where one lives, works and breathes. Thus, using the region of employment or residence but not the natal origin or the location of postgraduate study as the basis of regional classification is quite problematic because the AIS regions are so large and conceal so much diversity. I do not find the AIS regions a good proxy for anything very useful except the most general kind of assessment of where editorial board members live. As I argue below, the actual state of diversity in the ISJ's editorial board is much richer than the data in the AIS CSS report suggests. But what we need to do is to examine some different aspects of the diversity. My first step was to look at the country of current employment, the country where a PhD was obtained and the natal origin (country) of the ISJ's SEs and AEs. This is presented in Table 2 below. Here, a more detailed picture emerges, with 36 countries indicated. Our editorial board members live in 16 countries, earned their PhDs in 17 countries and have natal origins in 29 countries. While 24% of our editorial board members were born in, studied in and now live in the same country, most of them moved at some stage, which I suspect parallels behaviour across the AIS more generally. Considering our SEs and AEs, some stayed at home to study and then moved away (11%) while others moved away to study and then returned (8%). Others moved away to study and then stayed there (32%). A final group moved away to study and then moved elsewhere to work (24%). These figures attest to a global diversity of the ISJ's editorial board in a way that is not captured by the AIS benchmark comparative data. However, a new bias emerges here: while 26 SEs/AEs were born in the global south (developing countries), only two received their PhDs in the global south and only five currently live in the global south. This is a matter for some concern, though it probably reflects global educational movements and cannot easily be addressed at the scale of one journal. Beyond editorial board data, I also felt that it would be instructive to examine the provenance of our authors. Who are they? Where do they live? Obtaining raw data from manuscript central is not too difficult, but parsing it by gender is not at all simple and prone to error. Although genderizing software programmes exist, these tend to be more accurate with “western” names that often tend to be gender specific, and tend to be much less accurate with non-western names. For instance, the Chinese name that is rendered as “Li Li” in the Roman alphabet (i.e., family name and given name are both Li), could involve a number of different characters in Chinese, and so could be male or female. Here are some examples: 李俐, 李力, 黎莉, 黎厉, 厉俪. All five would be romanised as Li Li (in Mandarin), but the act of romanisation removes any way of even guessing at the gender based on the characters. Incidentally, the first, third and fifth are more likely to be female, while the second and fourth are more likely to be male, but these are not absolute. Sometimes females have “male” names and vice versa. Since manuscript central only captures the romanised form, it is impossible to determine gender unless someone does an intensive search for the named individual and ideally finds a photograph or some other gender-identifiable evidence on the Internet, such as a website that uses the male or female personal pronoun. An easier solution is that we ask ScholarOne to request the inclusion of gender when a paper is submitted. However, this is controversial: some believe that the submission of gender data should never be mandatory and indeed, in some countries, it is illegal to collect it. Despite these genderising challenges, I attempted to assess the gender distribution of submissions to ISJ, in response to a request that I look for change in gender distribution of submissions to the journal pre- and during-pandemic. I was able to assign genders to the first authors of 95% of the papers submitted in March–May of 2019 and in the same months of 2020. The results showed that the gender distribution in 2019 was very similar to the gender distribution among AIS Academic members: 35% female/65% male. In 2020, the proportion of submissions from females was actually higher: 40% female/60% male. While this is a very limited analysis of the gender distribution of submitters to ISJ, it does suggest that even during challenging times, the journal is attracting significant submissions from females. Nevertheless, manuscript central data for the ISJ do indicate the country from which the first author is submitting and this provides a very rough indicator of geographical diversity. Therefore, I downloaded the metadata for all submissions to the ISJ from 2011–2020, that is, 10 years of data. This reveals that we have received 2933 submissions from first authors working in 95 countries. See Table 3. Although 95 countries seem to provide considerable evidence of diversity, only 11 of them are in AIS Region 1, while 63 are in Region 2 and 21 are in Region 3. [AIS itself has members from 14 Region 1 countries, 63 Region 2 countries and 22 Region 3 countries]. Within Region 2, 16 countries in Africa are represented among our submitting authors [There are AIS members from 18 countries in Africa]. Where accepted papers are concerned, the situation is not quite so diverse (see Table 4). Over the same 10-year period, we accepted papers from authors based in 28 countries: three in Region 1 (only one, Brazil, is outside North America), 16 in Region 2 (though none from Africa) and 9 in Region 3. On balance, I feel that this more detailed analysis presents a richer picture of the diversity of the ISJ, but there is still room for improvement. The fact that we have submitting authors from 95 countries, and have accepted papers from authors located in 28 countries, sounds impressive, but there is no basis for comparison with other journals. What is critical is that authors should feel welcome, no matter who they are, where they come from, what kind of IS research they do. This spirit of inclusiveness is what diversity really means. It may be that we cannot accept their papers, but at the very least, we must offer constructive feedback that will help them to enhance the quality of their research and writing. This is something that we already do, and indeed I am positively biased to appoint AEs and SEs on the basis of such constructive reviews and reports, because they demonstrate affiliation with the journal's mission. Having a globally distributed editorial board helps if those board members promote the ISJ in their own communities as a desirable journal in which to publish, and as a journal that will give them constructive feedback. In appointing an AE or SE, while the ability of the individual to perform in this role at a high level is essential, I am also interested in the network of the individual concerned. AEs often assign papers to be reviewed by colleagues in their network. AEs and SEs can also promote the journal within their network. Thus, greater diversity in the editorial board is likely to lead to greater diversity in the submitting authors. This is a worthwhile objective. I hope that the AIS CSS will consider a more sophisticated analysis of diversity in future years. Finally, I come to the tricky issue of identifying diversity and inclusion indicators. As I mentioned above, I am loath to be too specific: I do not think it is sensible for us to set precise quotas for any particular AIS region, gender or location of current work. Nevertheless, I do consider that the current levels of diversity (on multiple indicators) are not only respectable and appropriate for the journal, but also self-sustaining. We have excellent networks among authors and reviewers, ensuring that the ISJ will continue to attract suitably qualified individuals in multiple roles. Nevertheless, I recognise that we have few editorial board members who either received their PhDs in or live in the global south: I am striving to appoint more. The AIS CSS Task Force suggested that editors appoint AEs on a trial basis with some mentoring from more senior members of the editorial board. I find that this is a sensible suggestion that fits well with an SE-AE structure, such that we need to be open to new junior AEs, so long as they are mentored by more senior SEs. Including junior AEs from the global south will be an effective way of ensuring that our diversity extends beyond the developed countries. Indeed, I suggest that the AIS CSS Task Force consider a 6-region split, with separate identification of developed and developing countries (global north and global south) in each of the current AIS regions. This will encourage journal editors to consider how they can achieve diversity in a more nuanced way than the current 3-way split. Where gender is concerned, if anything we should be looking to appoint more female board members since we expect the AIS proportions to shift towards parity over time. Overall, I believe that the ISJ will be best served by a variety of people in SE and AE roles across multiple indicators. If our SEs and AEs perfectly matched the AIS benchmarks for gender, location and ethnicity, but had received their professional training in a small group of countries/universities, spoke the same language, subscribed to the same epistemological beliefs and undertook the same kind of research, then that would not count as a diverse editorial board in my view. I note that while approximately half of our SEs and AEs received their PhDs and currently work in countries where English is the “national language”, less than 14% were born in a country where English is the “national language”. This in part reflects the global educational migrations that I referred to earlier. It also suggests that well over 80% of our SEs and AEs have successfully made that transition from a first language other-than-English to succeed in an English-dominated academic culture. I regard this as a valid aspect of diversity that we need to uphold and celebrate. I also hope that these non-native English speakers will be more understanding of the difficulties that similar authors face, will be constructive and developmental in their reviews and reports and will encourage them to submit to the ISJ. A polyglot editorial board is an asset to the journal and is something we should maintain or enhance. As I mentioned above, I believe that a diverse editorial board will help us to attract a diverse set of authors (and for that matter readers). At this point, I will also mention the editorial advisory board, which for the ISJ consists of 36 people. Many of them are associated with the same countries as the regular editorial board, but to that list of 36 countries, I can add 7 more: Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Georgia, Jamaica, Myanmar, Poland and Slovenia. It is my hope that the editorial advisory board members actively encourage potential authors to submit to the ISJ, where appropriate, and so contribute actively to the diversity of the journal. All the discussion to this point has concerned diversity as measured by multiple flavours of demographic indicators. I suggest that this is convenient yet incomplete. There are also scholarly indicators to which we have not paid attention. From the perspective of a submitting author, is a journal open to and welcoming of different types of research, different methods, different epistemological positions? It is relatively easy for an editor to create a position statement of openness. But how does that position of openness translate into the papers that are submitted to and accepted for publication? Here, I see two possible indicators, each of which is measurable, though with some effort. Firstly, what are the acknowledged topics of expertise of the editorial board members? At the ISJ, we do collect this information: each AE and SE is required to provide up to 10 keywords that identify expertise. We use this information to assign papers. Since the keywords are self-identified, there is a considerable variety, and many overlap. But in terms of diversity, I would like our editorial board members to be sufficiently diverse to be able to handle any paper that is within scope and that is submitted to the ISJ. At the time of writing, we rarely have problems and I consider that this indicator is amply met, with further diversification not required. At the same time, it is important that members of the review team (including reviewers) be very careful with mismatched positions: authors should not have to educate the review team on basic points of methodology, for instance, since an accepted article should not normally include a tutorial to the method that is applied. The exception may be for an article that makes an explicit methodological contribution: at the ISJ, we have recently initiated the Research Methods Article (RMA) as a new category of submission. Second, how diverse is the research that is actually submitted and accepted? Although tedious, it would not be hard to develop a checklist of research “types”, including topics, methods, theories, etc., though it would be more onerous to map each submitted/accepted article to this template. Nevertheless, such an exercise would certainly have the merit of revealing what is submitted, what we publish and what we reject. I would not want to do this analysis retrospectively for every submitted article, but it could be done for each newly submitted article, and perhaps each article published in the last 10 years. However, undertaking such a project will take more time than I have at my disposal, at least for the time being. Finally, I have to remark that each journal has its quirks! It would be sad if all journals looked alike, with the same benchmarks, the same values, the same people. Even as diversity and inclusiveness are appreciated, journals need to maintain their individual character. Authors often select a journal to submit to because of that character (Davison, 2020): indeed, I always encourage authors to write an article with a specific journal in mind, since if the fit is good then the chance of acceptance is higher. In this issue of the ISJ, we present four papers. In the first article, Pousti et al. (2021) explore the problem of virtuality and context in social media research in IS and the potential application of reflexive research principles. They argue that many of the challenges associated with social media research are emergent and yet also linked to their virtual and contextual features. They further argue that these challenges may remain unaddressed in the shadows if researchers do not actively reflect on how they affect the research process. They develop a research framework for social media research, considering social media research as a reflexive space and building on three levels of reflexivity: theory, design and practice. In the second article, Zamani and Pouloudi (2021) explore how users respond when technology falls short of their expectations. They focus specifically on volitional IT use and study the tablet, a popular IT artefact, which is used both for personal purposes and in consumerised environments for professional purposes. Drawing from Critical Realism, they illustrate that when users experience negative disconfirmation, they will discontinue using the tablet, develop a workaround or reframe their initial expectations. The authors contribute to the literature following a holistic approach to post-adoption: they identify behavioural outcomes that are relevant for consumerised rather than strictly organisational environments, and they uncover the mechanisms that trigger these outcomes. In the third article, Jaeger and Eckhardt (2021) examine situational information security awareness, which combines both an individual's state of knowledge and how that state is achieved through interaction with the system environment, in the context of phishing emails. Through a phishing study with eye tracking and survey data, the authors show that past experience with phishing emails and a security warning increase situational information security awareness, while phishing emails' contextual relevance and misplaced salience decrease situational information security awareness. Furthermore, situational information security awareness increases perceived threat and perceived coping efficacy, and ultimately actual behavioural responses to phishing attacks. The study contributes to the growing body of the behavioural information security literature by introducing the new concept of situational information security awareness based on a dynamic, situational and interactionist approach that proposes that many security-related behaviours are shaped through an interaction between the person and the perception of a threatening situation. In the fourth article, Jensen et al. (2021) describe how using crowdsourcing as a method for helping individuals identify phishing messages has shown promising results. But little is known about how individuals respond to crowdsourced warnings regarding potential phishing messages. The authors examined four features related to warnings derived from a mock crowdsourced anti-phishing warning system: the number of times an email message was reported as being potentially suspicious, the source of the reports, the accuracy rate of the warnings (based on reports) and the disclosure of the accuracy rate. The results showed that crowdsourcing features work together to encourage warning acceptance and reduce anxiety. Warning accuracy rate demonstrated the most prominent effects on outcomes related to individuals' judgement accuracy, adherence to warning recommendations, and anxiety with system use. I am grateful to my colleagues at the ISJ and elsewhere for their reactions to multiple versions of this editorial: Cynthia Beath, Monideepa Tarafdar, Vanessa Cooper, Clara Yu, Albert Boonstra, Angsana Techatassanasoontorn, Petter Nielsen, Yulin Fang, Federico Iannacci, Antonio Diaz Andrade.