Psychology Faculty Establish Fund to Support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Research in the Workplace
When applying for a job, applicants sift through job descriptions like detectives to find clues about their perspective employer and workplace culture. The type of language used in these job advertisements can signal crucial aspects about a work environment, such as if the workplace is accepting and inclusive.
Psychology graduate student Melissa Pike wanted to know more about the signals employers are sending in their job advertisements through their use of ableist language. For her dissertation, Melissa consulted with subject matter experts to create a dictionaries that identified ableist language and the degree to which these words and phrases are problematic. Using the dictionaries to comb through over 1,800 job ads, Melissa found that 68% to 84% of these job ads had some form of ableist language. In the next phase of her research, Melissa plans to build different versions of job ads with and without ableist language to gauge whether it impacts if a job seeker would apply to the role.
This fascinating research has been funded by the Workplace Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (WEDI) Graduate Research Fund. In response to a group of Psychology graduate students who challenged the Psychology department to take action related to social change and racial justice, industrial organizational psychology faculty started the fund in 2020. The WEDI fund provides one or more grants of up to $2,500 per year to Psychology graduate students in order to support research and professional development related to workplace discrimination, with preference for research related to racial discrimination.
In addition to Melissa’s research, over the past two years this fund has also supported Rita Abdel-Baki, Joanna Collaton, Brianne Gayfer and Soeun Lee in their project Investigating Racial Discrimination in Canadian Psychology Graduate Departments, Caren Colaco for Investigating Group Differences in Exhaustion and Discrimination in the Workplace, and the next phase of Melissa’s research, Are They Really Just Words? Investigating the Impact of Ableist Language in Job Advertisements.
Often graduate students are reliant on their advisors’ funding to cover costs relating to their research, limiting the research questions they can explore. Having a source of funding they can control themselves allows them to conduct research that their advisor can’t fund.
“I’m incredibly grateful that this type of grant exists to ensure that inclusive and diverse research is being done and that graduate students are enabled to achieve their desired impact with their research.” said Melissa. “This funding allowed me to improve the impact and quality of my own research, as I was able to hire two undergraduate research assistants with lived experience of disability to assist with the research, purchase software to analyze the job advertisements and compensate subject matter experts who I consulted with for their time.”
The industrial organizational psychology faculty would like to see this fund enable more research like Melissa’s that will ultimately help employers make their workplaces more equitable and ensure that all job applicants and employees are treated fairly. This is an opportunity to promote a wide variety of research on equity and inclusion in the workplace and signal to psychology graduate students that anti-oppression and anti-racism work is a priority for the department.
Currently the WEDI fund is available for five years, from 2020 to 2024. Do you want to help extend the impact of this fund for future years and support workplace equity, diversity and inclusion research at U of G? Your gift could increase the annual funding or extend the term of the fund. To learn more about this giving opportunity, please contact Cristina Coates at ccoate02@uoguelph.ca or Kourtney Parker at k.parker@uoguelph.ca.