JEDI Committee

What is the JEDI Committee?

The Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee (JEDI) evolved from its predecessor, the Workplace Diversity Committee. Working with the entire Cary community, JEDI promotes, advocates, and creates opportunities to achieve a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and just workplace. With input and collaboration from the community as a whole we help the Institute minimize barriers, foster deeper understanding, and ensure that inclusivity is central to Cary Institute’s workplace, programs, and hiring practices. We aim to address specific concerns of the Cary community related to these issues: this is not just the committee’s work but our shared work.

Your insights are vital.

To be effective, the JEDI committee needs input from the Cary community.  As an equal opportunity employer, Cary Institute is committed to fostering an environment where people from all walks of life can succeed.

Please use our JEDI feedback form and give us your comments, ideas, feedback, and any useful resources relevant for promoting justice, equity, diversity and inclusion at the Cary Institute. 

We also welcome suggestions for training opportunities, speakers, and online resources. Comments submitted via this form will go directly to the committee and will be anonymous, unless you choose to include your name. 

JEDI Committee Members

Ashley Alred, Alan Berkowitz, Barbara Han, Patricia Jones (ex officio), Shannon LaDeau, Kelly Oggenfuss, Steward Pickett (former Chair), Lori Quillen, Maribeth Rubenstein, Josh Wendover and Amy Schuler (Chair).

Our goals 

Broadly speaking, our committee works toward enshrining inclusivity as a Cary value. We understand this may require guidance from outside experts, professional training, and persistent attention through many efforts to become a more diverse and inclusive workplace.  

As explained in the 2019 Report to the President, “The work of this Committee is crucial in matching the Institute with the changing demography of the United States, in enhancing the relevance of science to its broadest constituency, and in ensuring the success of science as a creative and critical process based on the diversity of the community of its practitioners.” 

Self assessments

We hope to foster a community that is constantly striving to improve our perspectives on racial justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, in the workplace, in science and education, and in the world. Everyone has different kinds of implicit biases, which are attitudes that we are not consciously aware of and that nonetheless affect our behavior. Implicit Association Tests are tools designed to measure and raise our awareness of our own personal implicit biases. 

One set of Implicit Association Tests is provided here. These and similar bias tests can be useful self-checks and, when combined with active dialogue and personal reflection, help lead to improvements over time. We offer these tools while acknowledging their limitations. Taking such tests by themselves shows no evidence of concretely changing a person’s behavior - the act of assessing one’s own biases doesn't do much to actually correct one’s actions. This was the conclusion of a meta-analysis, which assessed nearly 500 studies (over 85,000 participants) to evaluate how well interventions such as Implicit Association Tests actually change implicit biases and behavior. On average, the effects were “relatively weak”, generally producing “trivial changes in behavior” (Forscher et al. 2019). Tests of implicit bias also are subject to high variability: the same individual can take the same test but give very different answers from one week to the next, with results also depending on the context in which implicit bias is being considered (Payne et al. 2017; Connors and Evers 2020).

Other resources

If you want to report concerns about conduct or ethical issues, please see the HR forms page or Sexual Harassment Prevention Policy page, or contact Human Resources directly.

Thank you for your partnership in making Cary a just and inclusive workplace and community.