Meeting 3

14 Sept 2020 18:00 BST, 13:00 EDT, 10:00 PDT Present: Angeline, Kate, Alexa, Mack, Melissa Apologies: John

Reviewer guidelines

All present went over the guidelines for reviewers and discussed whether we wanted to establish an ideal gender bias ratio from a gender bias calculator for the letters. We decided that there was no ideal ratio, given the current state of English-speaking cultures. Suggested changes were committed to the review_guidlines branch.

We also discussed the review process. Angeline presented it as:

• Have one person acting as editor-in-chief receive requests and choose two+ appropriate reviewers from a list. Appropriate reviewers aren't conflicted (at the target institute, for instance).
• Give reviewers 5-10 business days to respond.
• Editor will collate reviews and return them to the letter submitter; a minimum of one response is needed.

This was deemed reasonable and we settled on needing the following documents:

• For submitters: a page/form laying out what we need from them that will include:
  • The target institution
  • Recommendation letter level
  • Conflicted reviewers (optional)
  • Write race/gender/career level (optional)
  • Current recommendation letter (accepted formats: .docx, .pdf, .txt)
• For reviewers: a page/form laying out what we need from them that will include:
  • Initial and final gender bias percentages
  • Checklist of things to look for (reviewer guidelines)
  • List of people who were included in the review process
  • Recommended revisions (accepted formats: .docx, .pdf, .txt)
• A code of conduct for reviewers
• A form for editor emails
  • Acknowledging receipt of submission
  • Requesting review
  • Acknowledging receipt of review
  • Returning review to submitter

Sample Letters

Mack presented his new sample letter, demonstrating racial stereotypes in a PhD-to-postoc recommendation letter. Alexa brought up the type of name that should be used in the sample (e.g., something familiar to Americans (Jones, Smith) or not (Liu, Khan). Melissa said it is possible to have the website toggle between the names. We decided this was ideal, but that the default name would (for now) be "Standard White".

Melissa presented the current display of example letters on the letter_anatomy branch. An overly-supportive male nomination letter is currently included and "bad" sections are called out by highlighted or underlined text. The curser will then display text that will contain an explanation of why this is bad and what would be good to say instead.

Alexa discussed this new nomination letter as well as the work-in-progress, under-supportive female nomination letter. Sample letters have been shown to different people for their reactions and to ensure that no one community member's writing style or wording is identifiable.

Other Tasks

John brought up our efforts to the MIST council and the MIST nomination committee is interested in attending our next meeting. Everyone agreed this would be a good thing, and Alexa offered to reach out to the SPA nomination committee to include them as well. Mack mentioned that the CEDAR steering committee meeting next month would include some time to talk about our efforts.

To make our work-in-progress easier to share, we discussed going live with the link-only version of our webpage. Everyone present agreed this would be a good thing to do.

Kate had discussed this project with NRL line manager Dr. McDonald, who did not foresee this work being a problem or requiring publication release.

Tasks for next meeting:

• All - Tackle forms discussed above in review_guidelines branch
• Angeline - arrange next meeting, work on nomination letters with Alexa, provide GitHub support
• Alexa - Work with Angeline on writing good/bad nomination letters
• Kate - Finish good undergraduate recommendation letter, focusing on replacing bad sections of Mack's letter with good text.
• Mack - Upload bad race/socioeconomic class PhD-to-postoc recommendation letter and provide good text that would fix the letter.
• Mel - Fix the javascript in the letter behaviour. Add a toggle for names and genders to the letters. Add more example letters. Make a live version of the web page based off of the current develop branch.