The development of a diversity mentoring program for faculty and trainees : a program at the Brown Clinical Psychology Training Consortium

Faculty and student diversity have become important and explicit goals of academic and research institutions (Brown, 2004). Diversity has been defined as the whole array of human characteristics that shapes our experience, including, but not limited to, race/ethnicity, gender, culture, disability, socioeconomic background, age, religion, and language. There are compelling reasons to increase diversity in the biomedical workforce. Diversity is beneficial to scientific research in that diverse research teams are known to solve complex scientific problems by bringing together contrasting perspectives, leading to more refined scientific questions, hypotheses, and study design (Bickel et al., 2002). Diverse research teams are also thought to be more likely and willing to challenge prevailing assumptions and offer contrasting perspectives to traditional orthodoxy (Harding, 1998).