Publication Details

Abstract

Creating a welcoming community is key for an academic environment to thrive. This approach includes accurately representing community members’ identities to understand their experiences, and establishing procedures for recording and utilizing individuals’ names to support their ability to express their identities freely and without fear of discrimination. In this article we discuss a collaborative project undertaken at our university to begin collecting and storing expanded demographic information, specifically gender identity, chosen name (including diacritical marks), and pronouns. While these changes impact all populations, they are particularly important for the university’s transgender population. We describe the working group that carried out this project and the policies developed to guide the group, the mechanisms established to collect the information, and the fields that were utilized in the system of record (i.e., Ellucian’s Banner) to store the information. We also discuss the value gained because of this project, including increased inclusivity and the ability to use this information for reporting purposes, informing decisions, and improving the support and services offered to the community. Finally, we describe the challenges, barriers, security/privacy concerns, and successes that we encountered throughout the process and we offer recommendations for other institutions pursuing a similar goal.

Keywords: inclusivity in data, gender identity, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others (LGBTQ+), data governance

Authors: 

• Casey Gogno
• Scott Burden
• Wyntre Stout

Acknowledgements

We have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

We thank and acknowledge the contributions of this project’s working group members. In particular, Erica Gluszynski made substantial contributions to this manuscript and provided technical leadership to the project itself.

Readers can access the policies referenced in this article on Lehigh University’s website: Designating Gender Identity and Legal Sex (https://provost.lehigh.edu/designating-gender-identity-and-legal-sex) and Chosen Name Policy (https://provost.lehigh.edu/chosen-name-policy).

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