Increasing the diversity of the authors whose works are assigned on course syllabi is one way that educators can support social justice goals.
University teaching and learning centers, such as those at
Tufts and
Kansas,
encourage instructors to feature more diverse voices in course materials,
often as part of a wider set of anti-racist teaching practices. Institutions such as SOAS University of London,
meanwhile, have set up initiatives to help faculty revise reading lists
to improve the representation of women and people of color.
Seeing diverse kinds of names on the syllabus may help underrepresented students see themselves as belonging
in the scholarly traditions being taught—the privilege long held, if unconsciously, by white men.
A diverse faculty improves learning outcomes and provides role models;
a diverse syllabus could be expected to yield similar benefits.
Analyze Your Own Syllabi
This tool allows you to analyze the proportions of readings that you assign by women and people of color.
It uses US census and driver licensing records to estimate the probability that a name is associated with a given gender and race/ethnicity,
based on the gender_guesser and ethnicolr packages.
Simply upload a spreadsheet with the list of authors or readings.
You can use one of the two provided templates: template1.csv or template2.csv.
This website does not retain any information that you upload.
Authors' names must be comma-separated, e.g. Obama, Barack. Authors without a comma will be ignored as they are assumed to be an institutional author (e.g. United Nations).
Both .csv and Excel (.xlsx) formats are accepted, but for Excel, only the first sheet will be used.
The (optional) courseid column enables you to compare results for different courses. It can be numeric or the name of a course. If you just have one course, you can omit this.
The reading column is a citation in the following format: a list of authors (last name, first name) separated by semicolons, with ** after the last author. Everything after the ** is ignored.
For example: Agyeman, Julian; Bullard, Robert; Evans, Bob** 2003. Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.