B

Glossary

Accessibility—The design of products, devices, services, or environments so that people with disabilities can fully participate, engage, and benefit.

Authentic research—“Real” research that involves direct engagement with the actual work of missions or that provides training that is directly relevant to real mission work.

Best practice—“A procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption” (reference in Chapter 6, footnote 1)

Bias—Attitudes, behaviors, and actions that are prejudiced in factor of or against one person or group compared to another.

Disciplinary climate—How individuals experiences their field, institution or department; a manifestation of culture.

Disciplinary culture—The implicit or explicit customs, behaviors, norms, and values that are deeply embedded within a discipline or field.

Diversity—The practice or state of involvement of persons across a variety of social and demographic characteristics within organizational, institutional, and interactional settings.

Emerging practices—Best practices that are new, innovative, or exploratory in nature. They may be based on some level of evidence, but it is not sufficient for the practices to be considered “promising” or “evidence-based.”

Equity—The absence of barriers, biases, and obstacles that impede access, fair treatment, and opportunity for contribution by all members of a community, recognizing that different resources or approaches are needed to remedy the uneven playing field that exists across different groups.

Ethnicity—Socially constructed and historically contingent categorizations of humans based on perceptions of shared culture, such as language, ancestry, practices, and beliefs.

Evidence-based practices—Best practices that are grounded in research and evaluation and have met some established test of validity in improving a specific outcome.

Explicit bias—Conscious, intentional bias.

Gender identity—The way one identifies oneself within or outside of traditional, socially constructed categories of women and men. Gender identity is separate from biological sex (which is a socially constructed dichotomy of bodies based on perceptions of shared physical and/or chromosomal traits), and may include gender non-binary and gender queer identities that lie outside of the traditional gender binary.

Historically minoritized communities in STEM—Socio-demographic groups (e.g., certain genders, racial/ethnic groups) that, as a result of historical and contemporary processes of oppression and bias, have been excluded from full and representative participation in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM).

Homophily—Referring to people seeking out persons similar to themselves.

Implicit bias—A type of “unconscious” bias that occurs automatically and unintentionally, but affects an individual or group’s judgments, behaviors, and decisions.

Imposter phenomenon—The psychological experience of professional or intellectual fraudulence, disproportionately affecting historically underrepresented groups.

Inclusion—The practice of facilitating the equal distribution of opportunities, resources, and recognition to persons regardless of social and demographic characteristics within organizational, institutional, and/or interactional environments.

Institutional/organizational—Describes the conditions of a professional or academic environment, including availability of resources and opportunities, implicit and explicit disciplinary norms, values and institutional culture, and institutional and agency practices and policies.

Interpersonal—Describes relational factors, including interactions between individuals and groups shaped by social and personal identity, which can have a differential impact on historically underrepresented groups.

Intersectionality—A critical, theoretical, and analytical framework that highlights how multiple social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and disability intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reveal interlocking systems of privilege and oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism) at the macro social-structural level.

Intrapersonal—Describes beliefs, biases, and thought processes that shape decision-making, the judgments we make about others, and how we view ourselves.

Promising practices—Best practices that have been successfully implemented, but sufficient evidence that substantiates all the parameters associated with success of the practice has not been collected or generated.

Race—Socially constructed and historically contingent categorizations of humans based on perceptions of shared physical and/or social traits.

Sexual identity—The way one identifies oneself in terms of to whom one is romantically or sexually attracted. May be within or outside of traditional, socially constructed categories of heterosexuality and non-heterosexuality, and may include bisexual, queer, fluid, and asexual identities.

Social ecological model—Developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner to understand human development. Consists of concentric circles of influence and networks, applied to describe a broad range of social processes.

Structural—Describes the systemic factors that originate from sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions and act to constrain access to power, resources, and opportunity on the basis of identity, resulting in advantages for some groups and disadvantages for others.

Tokenism—The act of making only symbolic efforts to increase representation of persons from minoritized groups, particularly by recruiting one or two people from those groups to give the appearance of equality within an organization or work group.