DOI: 10.3886/e116922v1
title: Workplace Equity Survey

description: Organizations within the global workforce have, in recent years, designed and articulated well-defined values on diversity, equity and inclusion to meet current legal and ethical workplace requirements. Scholarly publishing is no exception. Recent appointments of women to key executive leadership positions at Cambridge University Press, Emerald, PLOS, Research Square, Taylor and Francis, and Wiley have gone some way to addressing the gender imbalance in executive roles. Nonetheless the ultimate aspiration – to reshape the workforce to be more reflective of the population, and for leadership to be more reflective of such a workforce – is not yet a reality. <br><br>The Workplace Equity Project (WE), an independent, nonprofit organization, conducted a global survey in 2018 to map the parameters that define the industry landscape, understand the drivers for change and recommend solutions for delivering improved outcomes. <br> <br>The survey report and WE Project blog and resources can now be found on the C4DISC website:<br>https://c4disc.org/workplace-equity-survey/<br>https://c4disc.org/category/voices/<br>https://c4disc.org/category/insights/<br><br><br><br><br>
description: Response Rates: The survey collected 1,182 responses from six continents, with the following number of responses to the demographic questions:<br>Question about Demographics / Number of Responses<br>Gender / 856<br>Sexuality / 855<br>Disability / 857<br>Age / 855<br>Country of residence / 845<br>Country of birth / 843<br>Ethnicity / 846<br>Language / 846<br>Religion / 848<br>Education / 847<br>Caregiving / 849<br>Compensation / 836
description: The study focused on a range of questions designed to capture data on individual experience and practice in the working environment, understand the features and attributes of the organizations that define the workplace, and Identify the demographic composition of the global workforce.<br><br>A total of 62 questions, deployed through Survey Monkey, was split into seven sections, covering work/life balance, career breaks, career satisfaction, professional development, mentoring, networking, and attitudes and behaviors. <br><br>Many survey questions were positioned against a multiple-choice scale, ex. Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. In order to perform statistical modeling in Excel, responses were adjusted to numerical representations, from 0-5. We used Excel’s Data Analysis ToolPak to run correlations between different sets of survey questions and answers.<br><br>The survey collected demographic data on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, residence, language, religion, and care-giving status; and employment data on salary range, organization size and type, and length of employment (within the industry and at the respondent’s current organization). The survey was self-selecting and results include data from only those individuals who agreed to participate, targeted through social media and with the help of the supporting industry organizations listed in the Acknowledgements. It is important to review the experiences documented in the data in that context. The demographic breakdown of the self-selecting sample is descriptive of that sample only and not necessarily representative of the industry as a whole. That stated, the findings largely align with anecdotal experience.<br>
description: We sought to understand and document with data the workplace experience and perceptions of people who work in the scholarly publishing industry. This includes publishers (commercial, society, university, nonprofit) and publishing services providers (commercial and nonprofit).