Diversity Statements

Diversity statements usually are no more than two pages and speak to your experience, capabilities, and commitment to working with people from different backgrounds and to advancing a more inclusive, diverse and/or equitable academic environment. You can demonstrate these values through your teaching, research, and service. Keep in mind that diversity can mean a number of things including race/ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and military veteran status among others. Diversity statements will be listed explicitly as required documents in some job applications. If the position does not require a diversity statement, you may want to incorporate these values in your cover letter and teaching statement.

Getting Started: Questions to reflect on as you begin:

Experience and Identity: How have my experiences enlightened and empowered me? How do my previous experiences inform how I engage with others? Do I embody an under-represented group in my field? If yes, how and why is that meaningful?

Research and Teaching: How have I incorporated what I’ve experienced and learned into my teaching and research? How will I continue to make my classrooms diverse? How is my approach unique?

Collegial Collaboration: How have I handled working with someone whose background is unfamiliar to me? What have I learned from these experiences? How do I help to establish and to maintain an inclusive climate?

Vision for the Future: How will I demonstrate a continued willingness to learn and grow? How will I work to correct problems of recruitment and retention of groups underrepresented in my field?

Guidelines:

Consider these tips, adapted from UC Davis’s Academic Affairs website, in crafting your diversity statement:

  • Demonstrate your COMMITMENT to use your position to be a force of enlightenment and change by opening up opportunities to first-generation and underrepresented students.
  • Describe how you have CREATED programs that provide access and establish a pipeline for students in traditionally underrepresented groups.
  • Show how you ENRICH the classroom environment through exposure to new perspectives on cultures, beliefs, practices, tolerance, acceptance, and a welcoming climate.
  • Demonstrate how your research provides EXPOSURE for individuals historically excluded from disciplines on the basis of their gender or ethnic identity.
  • Speak to your LEADERSHIP in any capacity that tangibly promotes an environment where diversity is welcomed, fostered, and celebrated.
  • Discuss MENTORING students from traditionally underrepresented groups and at-risk students
  • Describe your OUTREACH to members of student clubs, organizations, or community groups whose mission includes service, education, or extending opportunity to disadvantaged people.
  • Show RECOGNITION of the challenges members of society face when they are members of underrepresented groups; or because of their religious, ethnic, or gender identities or orientation.
  • Detail SERVICE that promotes inclusion by striving to dismantle barriers to people historically excluded from the opportunities that all have a right to enjoy.