Reckoning with our biases in epidemiology.

Biases and in-group preferences limit opportunities for persons of all identities to flourish in science. Decisions made by leading professional meetings about which presentations to feature prominently, and by academic journals about which articles to publish, reinforce these biases. The paper by Nobles and colleagues (Am J Epidemiol. XXXX;XXX(XX):XXXX-XXXX)), shows that women are less likely to be selected to be symposium presenters in the field's pre-eminent scientific meeting than men. The scientific and moral arguments for promoting diversity of engagement by persons of all identities in the field are abundantly clear, calling for efforts to mitigate the effect of these in-group biases. I offer three suggestions about how we can go about achieving better diversity in our field. 1. Increasing our discussions of the importance of diversity, raising consciousness about the issue consistently; 2. Ensuring that only blinded peer-reviewed presentations are advanced at professional meeting; 3. Publishing only blinded peer-reviewed papers in leading journals in the field. These steps-together with broader system-wide efforts to maximize diversity among trainees and faculty-can pave the way for any field to become welcoming to all, irrespective of any axes of identity.