Women's Health Issues Commits to Actions for Equity

WASHINGTON, DC (May 6, 2022)—In a new Editor's Note, members of the editorial board and staff of Women’s Health Issues describe how the journal approaches racism and other forms of discrimination and steps its staff and board are taking to advance equity. Women’s Health Issues is the official journal of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health, which is based in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University.
 
Amita Vyas, Editor-in-Chief of Women’s Health Issues (WHI) and associate professor of prevention and community health at Milken Institute SPH, is the first author of the piece. She and her co-authors begin by acknowledging the intersecting forms of discrimination that produce inequity, the work by Black feminist and other critical scholars that explains how laws and cultural standards reinforce oppression, and the need to replace unjust systems and practices with ones that acknowledge and repair centuries of damage. “As a peer-reviewed journal that aims to advance women’s health, Women’s Health Issues recognizes our position of privilege within academic literature and the women’s health movement, and our responsibility to repair damage and to help create and maintain equitable systems and practices within these contexts,” the authors explain.
 
“Over the past few years, we’ve been learning from colleagues about best practices and have been making informal changes in how we consider submissions and edit manuscripts for publication,” said Vyas. “This new piece is the result of a process where we looked at the bigger picture, to think about how we could use our position within peer-reviewed publishing to help advance equity on a larger scale—and we’re making a public commitment so that we can be accountable for making these changes.”
 
To address racism and other forms of discrimination in publication practices, Vyas and her colleagues list concrete action steps and timelines in a table. The actions fall into three main areas: Increasing diversity in who is producing and accessing content; building a more inclusive scope of research; and encouraging inclusive dissemination of findings. Some of the first steps will come later in 2022, with new instructions to authors. One aim of the new instructions is to make the journal more welcoming to early-career authors; another is to ensure that all authors address sociodemographic characteristics appropriately in their analyses and use inclusive language. And, because the journal’s small staff and board limit the actions that are feasible, another action step is to seek additional resources to allow for larger steps.
 
“This has truly been a collaborative process, and I thank the many board members who have contributed their time and expertise to this process,” said Vyas. “I know our board will continue to be engaged in this essential work.” 
 
“Advancing Health Equity through Inclusive and Equitable Publication Practices at Women’s Health Issues” has been published online as an article in press and will appear in the May/June 2022 issue of Women’s Health Issues.