Box of delight

The lack of diversity at the top of pretty much every profession is well-documented, and scholarly communications is no exception. Compared with the number of women who work in our community overall, there are woefully few leaders, while people of color are very under-represented at all levels. Women of color who are leaders are even more of a rarity.

So it is a real privilege to be able to share this “conversation” between three such leaders — Dr Salina Gray, Science Educator; Raquel Tamez, CEO, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers; and Dr Rochelle L. Williams, Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator, The ARC Network, Association for Women in Science.

It was supposed to be different by now.

When Ursula Burns quietly shut off the light to her office as Xerox CEO at the end of 2016, her departure also cast a light on a sad statistic: There are currently zero African-American women running Fortune 500 companies. Burns’ appointment to the top job in 2009 had been hailed as a milestone. Suddenly it looked more like an anomaly.

Her story is in many ways perfect for a pioneering figure. She grew up poor on New York’s Lower East Side, the middle child of a single mother who washed and ironed clothes for money. Burns’ strength in math got her scholarships and a summer internship at Xerox. The company invested in her early and often. She made it all the way to the corner office

A new report investigating the pay differences between ethnic minority staff and their white counterparts has been published by the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA).

Inspired by the interest shown in gender pay gap reporting and the prospect of ethnicity pay gap reporting, the key findings include clear evidence that pay ‘penalties’ for ethnic minorities are significant, with black men and black women earning the least on average relative to white men. The research finds that the pay penalty experienced by ethnic minority women in the sector is much more likely to be due to factors associated with their ethnicity than their gender.