Dr. Coles is an Associate Director of Biostatistics at Bristol Myers Squibb. He is a collaborative researcher who specializes in the design and implementation of clinical trials and the interpretation of clinical trial data to facilitate the assessment of benefit/risk for promising pharmaceutical innovations. He is also a subject matter expert in diversity, equity, and inclusion and chairs the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Minorities in Statistics as well as the organization’s Antiracism Taskforce.
Dr. Marker is a senior statistician who recently retired after 37+ years at Westat. He is continuing to consult on topics of personal interest. He has worked on studies in the fields of public health, environmental pollution, homelessness, voting rights, and many others. He recently served as co-chair of the American Statistical Association’s Anti-Racism Task Force. Dr. Marker is an internationally recognized consultant in total quality management, having advised the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, South African, Dutch, and Danish Governments on improving the quality of their data collection activities. He has also appeared as an expert witness before Federal, state, and local governments and on voting rights and language-minority rights before Federal, State, and Provincial courts.
Dr. Marker is a Fellow of the ASA and American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and an Elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He will receive a Founders Award from the ASA at this summer’s Joint Statistical Meetings.
Episode Description
Since the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, institutions all over the U.S. have been exploring their pasts. In order to understand how they may have contributed to or helped perpetuate systemic racism. Universities, private businesses, and non-profits have all been working to try to understand what it means to be Anti-Racist. The American Statistical Association launched an Anti-Racism Task Force to explore this very thing, and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Dr. Adrian Coles and Dr. David Marker.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Since the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, institutions all over the US have been exploring their pasts in order to understand how they may have contributed to or helped perpetuate systemic racism. universities, private businesses and nonprofits have all been working to understand what it means to be anti racist. The American Statistical Association launched an anti racism Task Force to explore this very thing. And that's the focus of this episode of stats and stories where we explore the statistics minus stories. And the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer Chair of Miami statistics department. We have two guests joining us today, Adrian Coles and David Marker. Adrian Coles is an Associate Director of Biostatistics at Bristol Myers Squibb. He's a collaborative researcher who specializes in the design and implementation of clinical trials and the interpretation of clinical trial data to facilitate the assessment of benefit risk or promising pharmaceutical innovations. He's also a subject matter expert in diversity, equity and inclusion, and chairs the American statistical association's committee on minorities in statistics. David marker is a senior statistician, former Vice Chair of the AASA professional issues and visibility Council and former member of the asaa Board of Directors, calls and marker are also the co chairs of asase, anti racism Task Force. Thank you both so much for joining us today.
Adrian Coles
Thanks for having us. Excited to be here.
David Marker
Thank you so much.
Rosemary Pennington
I know the task force issued a report in February of this year, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the task force even came about.
David Marker
So both at the time, the President and President Elect of the HSA, Wendy Martinez and Rob Santos, were very interested in coming to terms with racism and the lack of organized anti racist activities in the organization and the profession. And so they proposed the idea and got approval from the board of directors. And their first step was appointing the two of us to be co chairs. And then they started pulling together a list of names, and we suggested some names. And it took a couple months, I think, and then they gave us a draft charge that we played around with a bit modified a bit and we got our marching orders. And that took about 18 months, I think 20 months to then delve into this.
John Bailer Yeah, so the idea of a draft charge, I think it's always good to start there. So what did you all set out to do as part of this, this process.
Adrian Coles So the charge that we were given by the board really had three different components to it, the two of the components were asking us to look within the organization. And a third component was asking us to look outside of the organization. And so to be more specific, the first component of our charge was to review the association's infrastructure policy, allocation of resources and procedures to determine if they are implicitly or explicitly racist, and have marginalized, excluded or otherwise harmed members of some racially defined groups. The second component of our charge was to assess the communications and activities of all AASA groups that provide services, benefits or support to key stakeholders of the organization for the presence of racism. And then the third was to catalog the ways through which statistics and data science can contribute to racism. And then to further propose mechanisms to which the association would work to inform the public on the responsible use of statistics and data science. Again, the aim there is to support anti racist systems and institutions within our society. So again, the first two were really introspective. And then the third was asking us to think about all of the ways that our discipline is used to get decisions and culture within our broader society.
Rosemary Pennington
Early on in the report, you talk about your framing and how your task force approached what racism is and how it sort of informed the work you did. So could you guys talk about, you know, how you were defining and thinking about racism, what it is, as you were sort of doing this work that you were charged to do?
Adrian Coles
You know, we wanted to be very thoughtful about this definition. As we started our work, right, I think when you are trying to define racism, there are a number of ways that you can describe or, you know, define this concept. And so one of the things that was very important to us was that not only do we have consistency of language and understanding within our Taskforce, but that we will also be very inclusive of not only racial differences, but differences in ethnicity as well. So we elected to really take a broader view on racism, one that also included ethnicity, and again, what you see defined in the report is our attempt to make sure that, at least within our task force, there was an alignment on what racism was, so that we could target our efforts to try and to assess and evaluate the presence of the same construct throughout the organization or, you know, external from the organization.
John Bailer
Yeah, I thought that was such an important part to start any kind of conversation like this or any investigation like this. And then I did appreciate that the vision that you stated is kind of the ultimate aim. To your work. I mean, you said it, I'll quote, we aim to be an anti racist, professional association that actively works to ensure that there are no differential outcomes and experiences of our members by racial ethnic group membership. I mean, it sort of it's a very direct, very, very focused response. So you've started about kind of what you were charged to do, kind of laying some foundations for how you know, what, what kind of tasks you were supposed to address? And then what kind of vision did you have for the future? Can we before we get to some of the conclusions, can you talk a little bit about the process of how your group came together? And started to move on to these various questions?
David Marker
So let me take the first crack at that. Part of what's behind that vision is, you know, at almost the same point, the organization was developing a Jedi group of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. And we had to, in order to be effective, we had to put some limitations on what we were focusing on. And so while the Jedi group may be concerned about very important issues in terms of LGBTQ plus involvement, gender issues, things like that, but that was not part of our purview. But at the same time, given that race is an artificial construct to start with, it could very easily get confused with ethnicity. And therefore we thought it was appropriate to combine and not try and separate race and ethnicity and put that together. So that was important. And then key, I think, in setting the ground rules and expectations is part of the vision, this what it says, In what you just quoted, in association that actively works to ensure and at least for me, that comes out of among the many books on this topic that I've been reading the last couple years, Abram candies, how to be an anti racist, where he points out that there are racist things. And then there are lots of things that aren't in and of themselves racist. But if you don't take an anti racist role, you will end up perpetuating the racist systems that are there. And so therefore, the vision was not that we wouldn't be racist, but that we would actively try to be anti racist. And so that was a real part of driving what we were doing, communicating that among the 20 members of the task force, we asked them, you know, these three components of the, of the charge, and we said, we're too big to try and deal with all of this together. So we want to set up subcommittees and which ones are you interested in? And based on that we broke into three subcommittees and both Adrienne and I felt that we needed diversity in the leadership of that. And we wanted to, in particular, to encourage younger members of the association to take leadership on that. And so we among the people who volunteered for the different roles, we ended up selecting chairs and vice chairs for the different subcommittees so that they could really delve into it.
Adrian Coles
Yeah, if I can just add a bit to that as well. You know, I think one of the things that we recognized at the beginning of this journey was that the types of conversations that we needed to have to produce this roadmap that could be very valuable for the organization would be difficult conversations. We understood going into this that we were going to have a very diverse team. You know, we wanted the team to really reflect the type of diversity that we want to see in the organization, you know, moving into our future. But what comes along with that, there's also some diversity and experiences and exposure to these conversations. And so it was very important for us as we started our work to spend some time building a healthy team culture. And so when you look at the report, you know, we share a bit about our methodologies. And there's a part where we sort of lay out a timeline that really details how we organized our work at a high level. And you have noticed that the beginning of our work was really focused on organizing the work and part of what we accomplished there, or at least we attempted to accomplish, I think we did a decent job building a healthy team culture that valued inclusion that demonstrated a value for psychological safety. So people were welcome to speak up and share their thoughts and to question the pressure test ideas. And we also wanted a culture that demonstrated grace. Right, we want team members who have that ability, again, we knew that, you know, these conversations can be very charging to individuals. And so there might be times during discourse that, you know, someone says something that wasn't properly understood by someone else. And so how do we handle those moments? And so we wanted to take some time to really frame that. And I think as David sort of alluded to, as well, we knew that the work that we were being asked to do was enormous, right, and it can be overwhelming. And so about, you know, really sort of partitioning these key steps, you know, we're going to have this stage where the focus is just on identifying what our key focus areas are, we will have another stage where we wanted to assess in detail those areas that we've identified in the previous stage, and then a period of time where we work to develop recommendations. The reason for that is that we wanted to break it down into consumable chunks so that no team member felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tasks that lay before us.
Rosemary Pennington 12:01
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking with Adrian Coles and David Marker, who co chaired asase, anti racism Task Force, the way you talk about how this work happened, Adrian, and the grace that you tried to provide one another is really interesting, because as I was reading this report, it really, it's unflinching in a lot of ways about sort of what AASA could be doing to do better and to do more. And so it was, I wonder if you could talk about sort of what the kind of big overarching areas were that you looked at? And maybe some of the highlights of what sort of the findings were because, again, thinking of through, like how these these compositions must have happened, like the findings were? I mean, they're striking when you read them?
Adrian Coles 12:42
Sure, sure. And one thing to note, you know, before we you know, sort of list out some of the key areas of focus, you know, one of the things we were very intentional about was encouraging, you know, the taskforce members to assess not only where there were opportunities to grow and to improve, but also opportunities to scale up things that we were already doing well, right. And so, you know, we recognize that there are many activities and initiatives within the American Statistical Association that have already been addressing justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, and certainly the various dimensions of that conversation right when we have it holistically. But you know, there's a lot of synergy between the different dimensions of diversity, equity and inclusion, that all benefit from, you know, similar policy. And so we understood that there was already some good work being done. And so we wanted to try to identify some other things as well. And to make it clear that, you know, while there were opportunities to improve that, no, the NSA was already on this journey before the task was assembled. But in general, there were really six dimensions or the association that we thought represented most of the experiences of our core membership. And so one of those is governance, structure and operations. Another is communications and publications. Do we have the different events that occur within asaa AOCs sponsored events and partnerships? Do we also think about how we fund events and the other components of our infrastructure? We thought we thought about our award experience, right? You know, the NSA has done a wonderful job of recognizing and acknowledging the contribution of our colleagues. And so are there opportunities there for us to be anti racist. And then we also thought about, you know, the external influence of our organization, on society and other areas of science. So those were like the big categories that we saw, we wanted to really, you know, explore those to see, you know, where there might be opportunity for growth or the scale of things we're already doing.
David Marker 14:44
Well, one related point was that Rob Santos was quite clear to us that we should not limit ourselves and our recommendations. We shouldn't limit if they had financial implications if they were different. halt, if they had short or long timeframes, that we really need a roadmap that this was going to be an ongoing effort. And if it had implications on any of those, then the current board and future boards have to deal with it. But we shouldn't say that. Well, that's kind of too hard, too much to ask. And I think as a result, as you said, we came out with some pretty strong recommendations.
John Bailer
Yeah, I thought it was, it was interesting that within the findings, you also then tagged actions to them, and timeframes in which to do them. I thought that was, you know, sort of you're, you're saying that there's a lot to do, but we, you know, we recognize that we can't do it all at once. So that there has to be some staging of the activities that are done, could you just give us you know, one or two of these recommendations that that really kind of that you found to be particularly exciting, important, impactful, just at the start to sort of help us help us get a kind of a little bit of a taste of what was in the room, your broader report?
David Marker
Well, one of them is that this is building on what Adrian just said about that a lot of good stuffs being done already was that we urge committees, sections and chapters, to look at their charges, look at their own internal structure, and identify activities that they can and should be doing to help the anti racist goals of the organization. And so we even compiled a pendeks in the report, that points out that there's a tremendous amount being done already. So this isn't saying, oh, you should expand what you've done. But a lot of what is done is the fact that, that it should be part of a bigger hole, and part of an overall effort has not been identified in the past. So the section on statistics and the environment has done environmental justice projects in the past, but they haven't necessarily built it that way. And there are, you know, the social statistics section that has done a lot. Number of chapters have mentoring programs to try and help young statisticians. But how much have they focused those to reach out to HBCUs to target the resources to other minorities, who we would like to help have a welcoming experience. So it's not all new, but it's putting it in this context. And for other chapters and sections, it is new, right? We're hoping to galvanize them to follow it. So that's one and then the second is the whole issue of artificial intelligence, and how things like facial recognition software, predictive policing, have really abused statistical methods in ways that will not miss by no means purposefully. But if you train a dataset, or an AI program on datasets that have racist historical practices built into them, then they are going to build that into the artificial procedures that they have. And so trying to deal with this was a lot of what one of the subcommittee's focused on. And one of the suggestions is to develop a template that companies that hire statisticians to work in the artificial intelligence machine learning fields, could use to make sure that how they hire people and how they support them, and the datasets that they use, will be done in an anti racist fashion. The comparison I give is that airport, the American Association for Public Opinion Research a number of years ago, started a transparency initiative, where they get polling organizations to promise to provide lots of information about how they collected the study and what the response rates are going to be and how they're going to compute them, which allow people to understand what's going on. And I would love the AASA to have a template that we get meta and Google and Twitter to sign on to about what they are going to do to encourage this. And just before I stop, I'll say that just in the last two hours before we started this taping, I saw a notice from the University of Maryland, where I got my undergraduate degree that as part of their A group of the undergraduate students and their cumulative senior project, they went looking at how AI software that indeed, uses for job descriptions might well be biased. And their initial results are showing that if you put that the ultimate degree, a person has this from an HBCU, they seem to get lower ratings. It's not that they're indeed using software, but they have indeed made the data public. And they trained in AI software, and saw that, you know, historically, most of those hires were not coming from HBCU. So the software says, Oh, that's not something that seems to get rewarded. So yeah, that's at the undergraduate level, being able to look into this, this is what we need to encourage.
Adrian Coles Yeah. And so there were at least three groups of recommendations that I think stood out to me. So David, you have a one in three chance of being right. Now, so the first group of recommendations is really connected to I think a learning that we gain through this experience, it's a learning that I've also gained through other experiences I've had in my life is that when we over prioritize, you know, technical skills or technical details, if we don't put enough emphasis on having healthy culture, your culture can drift to places that are unintended, right. And so one of the solutions to that we believe is the group of recommendations where we have encouraged the board of directors to consider a mandate for some of our governing documents, right. So if we think about the Constitution, the bylaws, maybe even the strategic plans to think about how we are capturing our value for not only justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, but more specifically, anti racism in that framework. And you know, I think from a very high level, we do believe that this type of change, we want to see this sustained only when you are able to change a person's heart. But while we're in the process of doing that, we do believe that providing the appropriate structure within our governing framework is going to be valuable to driving the cultural change that we want to see, while we wait for everyone to catch up in their heart. Right. So that is a very important group of recommendations, I think that's sort of reflected across three different recommendations. Another recommendation that was certainly near and dear to my heart. So when we think about the activities within the AASA, that are currently seeking to help increase the number of historically underrepresented minorities within our discipline in the field, we believe that there was an opportunity for the HSA to lean in a bit, a bit more to support those initiatives. And so that's not to say that the HSA has not been supportive at all. But you know, when you think about volunteers who are already sort of serving out in the margins of their professional lives, is there a way that we can provide more staff support to these initiatives, as we think about how we can scale these programs up to have broader impact? When we think about how we're able to fund these initiatives? You know, unfortunately, these initiatives are not free. And so, you know, one thing I do tip my hat to, you know, the leaders within the NSA for is the fact that the organization has a learning organization, right. So as we were sort of going through this process and learnings were starting to, you know, come hot off the presses, there were decisions being made along the way that certainly reflect you know, they're reflected what we were learning, for example, you know, the NSA has now created a bipartisan ballpark standing for black Indigenous and People of Color, to provide a very focused funding mechanism for programs that are intended to serve those historically underrepresented communities. And so by inviting people by creating that funding opportunity, people can give directly to that. So that it doesn't necessarily have to always impact other areas within asase budget people have given directly to that cause. And then I think the third thing that stands out to me that I was happy to see show up as a recommendation was really thinking about how we acknowledge and show appreciation for people's contributions, right? We know that oftentimes when we're thinking about the nomination process, or the recommendation process for awards and you know, other types of recognition that people tend to nominate people that are close to them in proximity, and in those circles in those instances, you know, affinity bias can creep in very quickly. And so, you know, encouraging ASAE to rethink their processes around Awards and nominations to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be recognized. for their hard work and their contributions to our field is something that I'm proud of.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. I'm going to encourage everyone who listens to go dig up the report and read through it. I think not only do you have some really important findings, but I think the recommendations are really important too. It could be the kinds of things other organizations also look to do. So. Um, thank you both for being here today. Thanks for the good work. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.