Leadership & Governance

ATS Policy on Diversity and Inclusion

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ATS Diversity & Inclusion Statement:

The ATS promotes diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging for everyone throughout its endeavors and initiatives. By fostering inclusive perspectives across constituents from different disciplines, career stages, and identities, we strengthen our mission's impact. This commitment is reflected in a range of ATS initiatives aimed at creating pathways to advance health equity in pulmonary, critical care and sleep health for all.

  • Diversity: The condition of being different or having differences. Differences among people with respect to age, class, ethnicity, gender, health, physical and mental ability, race, sexual orientation, religion, physical size, education level, job and function, personality traits, and other human differences.
  • Equity: Fair treatment for all while striving to identify and eliminate inequities and barriers.
  • Inclusion: means that everyone is included.
  • Belonging: means that everyone is treated and feels like a full member of the larger community and can thrive.

Why Is Diversity Important to ATS and Its Members?

  • Diversity in personal and professional identities and life experiences provides diversity of thought that strengthens an organization.
  • Diversity in the composition of committees, assemblies, and particularly in leadership will ensure that organizational decision-making reflects a broad range of perspectives.
  • Ensuring representation of members from diverse backgrounds at scholarly venues (i.e., meetings, conferences, and symposia) is important to facilitate new collaborations, ideas, and directions in science.
  • Diversity and inclusion enhance scientific creativity and can lead to meaningful discoveries that will improve health outcomes for the patients that we serve.

It is important that the ATS captures the multiple facets of diversity that are represented by members of the ATS society (e.g., clinical practice guidelines, conference speakers/chairs, meetings, steering/organizing committees, standing committees, etc.) on local, national, and international levels.

ATS Policies on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging

  • The ATS uses gender-neutral terms (e.g., ‘Chair’ instead of ‘Chairman’) in all society communications.
  • When co-sponsoring or jointly developing an activity, documents or resources with another association (signatory, stakeholder, industry, or non-industry partner) the ATS works collaboratively with the organization to encourage diversity in representation and aiming to observe inclusive practices. The ATS reserves the right to not cosponsor, approve or endorse events that do not align with this policy.
  • The ATS collaborates with its conference planning groups to ensure a proportionate representation of women among committee participants and event speakers, reflecting the membership's gender distribution.
  • The ATS strives to include U.S. minorities groups, particularly under-represented racial/ethnic minorities, in all its activities, mirroring the membership's diversity.
  • The ATS aims for gender balance among participants (moderators, panelists, speakers) at ATS-led or sponsored events, whenever content expertise allows.
  • ATS encourages all members to self-identify their diverse attributes in applications, abstract submissions, etc., to support the goal of ensuring inclusive representation in these areas.
  • The ATS will aim to continue to advocate for the inclusion of diverse groups and individuals at various career stages, international membership and levels of experience in its core committees and on conference planning committees for meetings that the ATS hosts/cohosts.

Awareness and Reporting

To ensure broad awareness of this policy, the ATS will:

  • Post this policy on the ATS website.
  • E-mail the speaker invitation policy to all faculty (speakers and chairs).
  • Reference this policy in conference/meeting materials (e.g., programs, handbooks) with which the ATS is involved, including links to the ATS website.
  • Highlight this policy in the opening announcements of meetings/conferences in which the ATS participates.
  • Continue collecting data and reporting information.

ATS Assemblies

Specific Recommendations

  • Assemblies, composed of assembly chairs, program chairs, planning chairs, the web director, the nominating committee, and working group chairs, should be a balanced inclusive group of individuals and disciplines to better reflect the society and the communities served by the assembly.
  • Assemblies will advocate that diverse inclusive representation occurs in an equitable manner in events that it hosts/cohosts, and in nominations for awards originating from the assembly.
  • Assemblies will advocate that diverse inclusive representation occurs in documents (such as guidelines or working group papers) and projects that originate from the assembly.

Assembly Programming

  • Programming for the ATS International Conference will be allotted to high-quality researchers/presenters representing the broad diversity of the ATS community. In this regard, the Assemblies should aim to achieve overall diversity and inclusion in representation of ATS community.

Reporting Metrics

Assemblies will aim to track statistics annually as they strive to reach the goal of inclusive representation. However, a limitation to tracking representation is the lack of members self-identifying. We encourage our community to voluntarily self-identify to ensure we reach our goal of inclusive representation.

Reporting metrics will be collected anonymously and be reported in aggregate. Variables will include:

  • Sex
  • Gender identity
  • Racial and ethnic demographics
  • Sexual orientation
  • Disability
  • Years at rank and faculty appointment
  • International or domestic membership
  • Trainee involvement (undergraduate/postgraduate/international).

Committees

Specific Recommendations

  • Committees, composed of a Chair, Vice Chair(s), and appointed members should be balanced by gender, race/ethnicity, and discipline to reflect the society and the communities served by the ATS.
  • Committees Chairs will advocate that diverse representation occurs in an equitable manner in all activities and deliverables that they oversee, working groups that they organize, and new ideas or requests originating from the Committee.
  • The ATS will aim for representation of historically marginalized individuals in the U.S., including women, appointed to standing committees.
  • Committee-based webinars, podcasts, networking centers and events will aim to have diverse participants on organizing committees, for speakers and/or moderators.

Awareness

  • The Health Equity and Diversity Committee (HEDC) will work closely with ATS committees through an HEDC liaison to encourage discussions on diversity, inclusion, belonging and health equity matters. HEDC will provide an annual update on this initiative to the Executive Committee.
  • Committees with conference and membership-centric deliverables (e.g. the Steering Committee on Advancement and Learning, International Conference Committee, and the Membership Committee) will ensure that the ATS diversity policy is incorporated into all future learning formats and membership initiatives.
  • The ATS Health Equity and Diversity Committee will collaborate with the Diversity, Equity, and Community Outreach department to provide recommendations as needed to enhance representation opportunities for future events and activities.