Women Working In the Open – IO: In The Open

"I do a lot of work around diversity, inclusion, and representation in librarianship, publishing, and higher education. And I get a lot of questions like this from people looking to diversify their lists of potential collaborators, speakers, etc. I’ve even written a bit about ways to incorporate diversity into our programming and work.

As my friend and colleague Tara Robertson pointed out in this Twitter exchange, not having these names is not really the problem. The work we do in scholarly communication is still very much beset by racism and sexism. White male voices are very often overrepresented in the conversations; other voices are severely underrepresented. A recent study of the Association of College and Research Libraries ScholComm listserv bears some of this out, albeit on a limited scale in terms of data collection and analysis. The fact is, simply having a list of names isn’t enough if there’s no accompanying commitment to dismantling the structural inequities and meaningfully incorporating more of these voices into our conversations.

Nevertheless, in the hopes of helping well-meaning people like Lenny Teytelman to spread the word about women doing work 'in the open,' I offer up this starter list. This list is by no means meant to be comprehensive, but should hopefully be a starting point for diversifying the conversations and collaborations in scholarly communications. It’s also open for editing so feel free to add more names."