Toward a More Inclusive Future Free

It has been a long and difficult year in so many ways, and it has meant different things to all of us. As a community, we likely want to forget 2020. However, we are still dealing with one of the main stressors of 2020, COVID-19. We are also starting to think about the long journey we all will be embarking on to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.

2020 has also been a year of sadness. The murder of George Floyd opened a floodgate of emotion that had been hidden for years or even centuries. For many of us, this event served as a call to action, allowing us to release our feelings, bring to light our misgivings, and to demand a change in the current culture. The honest exchange of emotion around these issues provided a space in which we could all accept our individual differences and experiences and come together to work toward a common goal.

The science community has grappled with its often troubled history, as well, and has faced calls to examine its own biases and inequities. For instance, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX) recently requested that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine investigate systemic racism in academic research. These themes have likewise been explored in BioScience, such as in recent articles by Beth Baker and Sahotra Sarkar (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa157, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab059). This moment highlights how crucial it is that the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) continue to be an organization that lives by our inclusivity statement: “Science is strengthened by the open exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas.” As staff, board members, and member organizations (including scientific societies, museums, botanic gardens, and universities), we want to make strides in building an inclusive and diverse membership for the present and the future. It is our belief that a more inclusive and diverse membership will create scientific environments that foster that open exchange.

We are in the process of learning and conversing about the work we are committed to doing together: increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the biological sciences. We are taking intentional steps to assess our current programs, as well as to develop and expand programs and policies that increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we want to do this work together with our member organizations and with the upcoming generations that share these values.

Recently, a group of AIBS staff and board members worked together to develop a 12-month diversity plan (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab026) focused on three of our core activities: assessment, training, and communication. The goals it describes are clear, and we will use them as measures of our success. We hope the plan inspires the desire to work together, and we hope you see yourself in it. This is AIBS's plan, but this work needs to be done together as a community. It is hard work that will sometimes be difficult, but it will also be rewarding. We are building a better, more inclusive future for AIBS, and we hope you will join us in this journey.