Conclusion and perspectives
Our intersectionality analysis of academic success (Fig. 1a) helps build a framework to determine how the scientific community, funders and institutions should tackle the issues that impede EDI, in particular, and science, in general. Here, we discuss solutions for tackling the barriers at the microdiversity and macrodiversity scale.
Microdiversity. Promoting microdiversity in institutions and societies needs measures that prevent discrimination in the academic environment and increase the participation of minority groups in research. The absence of role models for minority groups in research institutions, editorial boards, and funding organizations is a major problem in the current system. The lack of training in EDI and intersectionality in most universities is also an issue that should be solved with proper education to provide the appropriate support to students and researchers from visible minorities. Other effective strategies might involve (1) welcoming a diverse research group by encouraging students from ethnic and religious minorities and different sexual orientations to join research groups; (2) creating support programs for minorities to guide upcoming foreign students and help them to adapt and feel included in the academic environment; (3) establishing regular EDI discussion groups to educate students and faculty members of the department about the discrimination and unconscious biases; (4) inviting speakers from marginalized groups in order to highlight their scientific contributions; (5) encouraging reading and citing research from visible and non-visible minorities, and (6) working on identifying problems of implicit biases.
Macrodiversity. The idea that we should only tackle discrimination to increase the representation of researchers from the Global South is inadequate as it is only one part of this issue. It is crucial to also improve access to science for researchers from the GS. This requires finding solutions to the language barrier, knowledge transfer, and scientific networking. Decreasing the burden of the language barrier by creating linguistic peer-review platforms where preprints from researchers with English as Foreign Language are reviewed by English proficient volunteers such as graduates and senior researchers is a promising avenue. There is a need to generalize the multilingual abstract and title in all journals to help scientists with limited English proficiency to access the scientific content of research articles. Also, promoting international collaborations of researchers from the Global North with researchers and students from the Global South by encouraging co-authorship and co-supervision as well as organizing major international conferences in countries of the Global South will help the exchange of ideas and perspectives and compensate for the lack of local expertise in developing countries. To overcome the problem of visa restrictions for traveling abroad, a problem that researchers from the Global South often face, international conferences should integrate virtual remote attendance to increase the diversity of nationalities and include everyone in the discussion of major issues.

Acknowledgments

R.K. was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (P400PB_191139). We thank Leithen K. M’Gonigle, Melissa Guzman, Amy Angert and Darwin Sodhi for helpful comments and suggestions. R.K. is grateful to the Equity, Diversity, and inclusion discussion group at UBC for fruitful discussions.