{"doi":"10.1093/aje/kwaa103","title":"Response to Society for Epidemiologic Research Diversity and Inclusion Survey Commentaries","abstract":"Editor's note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Journal of Epidemiology. We thank all the authors for answering our call for commentaries (1–10) to our article assessing diversity and inclusion among members of the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) (11). These insightful commentaries represent voices that should be heard with respect to diversity and inclusion in SER. They raised many sobering and important points and contain a wealth of actions for improving diversity and inclusion within the Society. The SER Diversity and Inclusion Committee and SER leadership will deliberate these ideas to identify effective and sustained diversity and inclusion actions for our organization. Here, we have endeavored to respond to all points covered by the commentaries herein, acknowledging that publication space constrains the more extensive exchange that these points warrant. The exchange represented by the pieces in the Journal should be viewed as only a small part of meaningful dialogues on improving diversity and inclusion in SER and we are grateful to all the authors for generously sharing their time, experiences, and expertise. In their article, Allen and Lewis (1) assert that the use of political affiliation is not an appropriate metric for diversity because it undermines the promotion of diversity and inclusion in epidemiology by working against equity-building initiatives. The authors point out that the promotion of political diversity is based on the premise that increasing diversity means increasing the variety of identities, which is agnostic to the power and priority those identities have historically received. We see the authors’ point and believe it warrants careful consideration in the context of the overarching and diversity and inclusion goals of SER. These goals should determine the appropriateness of political affiliation as a diversity metric. Drs. Lilienfeld, Terris, and MacMahon established SER as an organization for scientific research to “exchange ideas” (12), presumably for the purposes of advancing the field. If SER should represent a microcosm of society consisting of a wide variety of identities, SER’s goal may be to diversify identities and ideas, as epidemiology and science in general grow on a wide variety of views and perspectives (13–18), acknowledging antiscience views are an obvious and notable exception. Conversely, if the promotion of this kind of diversity is agnostic to inclusion, the variety of researchers could increase, but not the full or quality engagement among all people if persons do not feel included, welcomed, or valued (19). When these persons are reluctant to share their ideas (or are not given full consideration), we threaten our organization’s goal of continuously circulating diverse perspectives and ideas over the long term. Furthermore, the field’s impact on public health could suffer. Indeed, in the SER data, members of various groups were less likely to report feeling very welcomed (11); women with racial/ethnic nonresponse were least likely, whereas White men were most likely to report feeling very welcomed. Clearly, we should not solely focus on diversity to the detriment of inclusion, or vice versa. Rather, both should be thoughtfully promoted to cultivate the richest pool of ideas possible. The work of Allen and Lewis (1) highlights the need for being intentional in balancing diversity and inclusion within SER. We further appreciate the authors’ suggestion of the use of the Public Health Critical Race Praxis model in epidemiologic research by placing racism and intersecting inequities in their broader structural context given it is the background for all public health work. The article by Jackson (2) provides a well-researched compendium of actions for advancing diversity and inclusion in SER. This thought-provoking work challenges SER leadership and committees to examine critically how","journal":"American Journal of Epidemiology","year":2020,"id":108994,"datarank":0.20794415416798362,"base_score":1.3862943611198906,"endowment":1.3862943611198906,"self_citation_contribution":0.20794415416798362,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.20794415416798362,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9506,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":280504,"name":"Jennifer Weuve","orcid":"0000-0003-0922-0256","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304343,"name":"David S. 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