What is the diversity report?

We ask members of The Ithacan to share information about their race, gender, sexuality, religion and ability level, as well as answer questions to gauge their sense of belonging in the workplace, on a digital survey each year. We share the results in a report on our website at the end of the fall semester.

Why does The Ithacan publish this report?

As a student-led media outlet, The Ithacan strives to represent the voices of students across campus and value students’ lived experiences and identities. We share demographic information so campus community members can understand how our editors’ and staff members’ identities compare to the broader student body, and consider how our identities may influence our coverage. 

We also strive to be transparent about our workplace culture by sharing information about editors’ and staff members’ sense of belonging in our workspace.

This report helps us identify gaps in representation and areas that we can better support and affirm our members’ identities. We will use these results to track our progress and develop goals and strategies to create an inclusive workspace.

What’s new in the 2025 report?

For the first time, this year’s diversity report expanded beyond the editorial board to share demographic information about staff members.

In past diversity report surveys, we have asked if respondents have felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace because of their race. We added questions this year to ask respondents if they have felt marginalized because of their gender, sexuality, religion and ability level.

We also added two final open-ended questions at the end of the report to allow respondents to share anonymous suggestions for any diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging efforts that they would like to see from The Ithacan, or anything else that they would like to share.

How did The Ithacan create this report?

Community Outreach Manager Kai Lincke created a Google Form with survey questions in consultation with Editor-in-Chief Prakriti Panwar. She used the same demographic questions as last year’s form to compare data and added several new questions to better measure respondents’ sense of belonging in our workspace. We used one form for editorial board respondents and one for staff respondents. 

We sent the form on Slack and gave e-board and staff members two weeks to complete it. Lincke visited one of each section’s weekly staff meetings to explain the report and ask staff members to fill out the survey. We sent three reminders about the form to staff members over Slack. We reminded board members to complete the form during three weekly noon meetings and twice over Slack. We told both staff members and e-board members that the survey was not mandatory, but very helpful for us as we work to cultivate a supportive workspace and plan future diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives.

Our 20-question survey included both multiple-choice and open-ended questions to allow board members to describe their own identities when applicable. Consistent with prior reports, we kept all responses anonymous and allowed respondents to select or write “prefer not to say” or “N/A” if they did not want to answer a question. We compared answers to Ithaca College student population data when available and applicable.

Out of the 26 members of the Fall 2025 editorial board, 20 members (about 77%) filled out the survey. This is a similar completion rate to Fall 2024, when 21 out of 26 board members completed the form, and Fall 2023, when 21 out of 27 board members completed the form.

We estimate that The Ithacan has about 90 staff members. About 48% of staff — 43 people — completed the form. Because this is the first year that we published data about staff members, we do not have a previous completion rate to compare it to, or prior results to compare to this year’s responses.

We understand that this report does not fully represent our editorial board and staff, but we hope that this information gives us a starting point to understand how we represent the student body and how we can improve our efforts to make our workspace inclusive, welcoming and affirming.

Demographic Data

Class Year

The editorial board is primarily composed of upperclassmen, with 10% of survey respondents indicating that they are seniors and 50% of respondents indicating that they are juniors. This shows an increase in the number of juniors from 2023, when 38.1% of respondents were juniors and 19% of respondents were seniors. None of the survey respondents indicated that they were first-year students, compared to 4.8% in the 2023 and 2024 reports. The share of sophomore survey respondents, 40%, is similar to 2023 and 2024, when 38.1% of respondents were sophomores.

More than half of respondents (55.8%) to our staff survey were first-year students, 25.6% were juniors, 11.6% were seniors and 7% were sophomores.

First-generation status

The college defines first-generation college students as “students (and their siblings) who are the first in their family to attend and graduate from a four-year residential college in the U.S.” According to the college’s 2025-26 Facts in Brief, 16.4% of undergraduate students identify as first-generation college students. 

Our survey results show that the share of first-generation e-board survey respondents increased to 25% in 2025, up from 14.3% in 2024, 9.5% in 2023 and 4.5% in 2022. 

Out of 43 staff respondents, 88.4% are not first-gen, 9.3% are first-gen and 2.3% preferred not to say.

Racial and ethnic background

We included six multiple-choice options for respondents’ race in this survey, following the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 standards for collecting racial and ethnic background data. We also included an option for mixed-race identities and allowed respondents to select multiple options to fully reflect their racial identities.

The Office of Analytics and Institutional Research reports that 23.7% of students identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color, 2.3% identify as international students and 71.5% identify as White in Fall 2025, while 2.5% of students’ race is unknown. 

The college’s demographic data for race and ethnicity is different because it records the number of international students. Our survey did not include a question about international student status.

The Ithacan editorial board continues to be predominantly White, with 19 out of 20, or 95%, of respondents identifying as at least partially White. Three respondents identified as Asian and two identified as Hispanic-Latinx. Two survey respondents identified as mixed. No survey respondents identified as Black or African American; Native American or Alaska Native; or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

The share of survey respondents who identified as people of color was 25%. This is an increase from the 19.1% of survey respondents who identified as people of color in 2024. About 23.8% of 2023 respondents and 28% of 2022 respondents identified as people of color.

On our staff survey, 37 respondents identified as White, three identified as Black or African American, one identified as Native American or Alaska Native, three identified as Asian, no respondents identified as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, six identified as Hispanic-Latinx and three identified as mixed. One respondent selected “prefer not to say.”

Gender

According to the Office of AIR’s 2025-26 Facts in Brief, 53.8% of students at the college identify as women, 41.7% identify as men, 4.5% identify as nonbinary and 0.02% prefer not to share their gender.

The Ithacan board is still mostly composed of cisgender women. Cisgender women made up 70% of respondents in 2025, compared to 57.1% of respondents in 2024 and 76.2% of respondents in 2023. The share of cisgender men on the board decreased from 33.3% in 2024 to 20% in 2025, but remained higher than the 14.3% recorded in 2023. The share of nonbinary board members, 10%, remains close to the 9.5% of respondents who identified as nonbinary in the 2024 and 2023 reports. 

None of the respondents identified as transgender or chose the “prefer not to say” option.

Our staff survey showed that 65.1% of respondents identified as cisgender women, 20.9% as cisgender men, 9.3% as nonbinary, and 2.3% as transgender men. Also, 2.3% of respondents selected “prefer not to say.”

Sexuality

Each respondent wrote their response to this question in a text box, which means that the categories for sexuality data reflect how each respondent defines their sexuality.

The college does not share any readily available data about sexuality, so we cannot compare our results with the broader student body. 

On our e-board survey, 35% of respondents identified as straight or heterosexual, compared to 33.3% of respondents in 2024 and 52.4% of respondents in 2023. This year, 20% of respondents wrote “N/A,” meaning that they prefer not to share their sexuality. This remains close to the 19% of respondents who wrote N/A in 2024, but up from the 4.8% who wrote this in 2023.

Additionally, 20% of respondents identify as bisexual, compared to 19% in 2024 and 2023; 15% identify as queer, compared to 19% in 2024 and 4.8% in 2023; 5% identify as lesbian, compared to 9.5% in 2024 and 14.3% in 2023; and 5% identify as demisexual. No respondents identified as demisexual in 2023 or 2024, but 4.3% identified as pansexual in 2023.

We chose to represent staff members’ sexuality with a bar chart instead of a pie chart because some staff members wrote multiple identities. The bar chart allows us to fully show how staff members define their sexual orientation.

According to our responses, 19 staff members identify as heterosexual, six as bisexual, three as queer, two as asexual, two as gay, two as pansexual, one as aromantic, one as panromantic and seven prefer not to say.

Ability Level

The college does not publicly report data about ability, so we cannot compare The Ithacan’s editorial board and staff responses to the broader student body.

The share of disabled board members in 2025 was 10%, an increase from 0% in 2024 and 4.8% in 2023.

Among staff survey respondents, 88.4% are abled-bodied, 9.3% are disabled and 2.3% prefer not to say. 

Religion

We provided a text box for this question so that each board member could write in their religion. The Ithacan collected data about board members’ religion for the first time in 2024, so there is only one year of data to compare with this year’s results. The college does not publicly report data about students’ religion so we cannot compare our survey responses to the broader campus community.

Our 2025 survey showed that 30% of e-board respondents do not practice a religion, an increase from 19% in 2024. This year, 40% of respondents said “N/A,” meaning that they preferred not to share their religion — which is similar to the 38.1% of respondents who wrote “N/A” in 2024.

In 2025, 15% of respondents are Catholic, 5% are Hindu, 5% are Christian and 5% are agnostic. 2024’s results showed that 19% of respondents practiced Catholicism, 14.3% practiced Judaism, 4.8% practice Hinduism and 4.8% practice Christianity. 

Our staff survey showed that 30.2% of respondents prefer not to say if they practice a religion, 18.6% do not practice a religion, 16.3% are Jewish, 14% are Catholic, 9.3% are Christian, 2.3% are Hindu, 2.3% are agnostic, 2.3% are Buddhist, 2.3% are atheist and 2.3% are spiritual.

Level of religiousness

We found that 50% of e-board respondents are not religious, 30% are somewhat religious, 15% are moderately religious and 5% do not know how religious they are. Last year, 33.3% of respondents were not religious, 42.9% were somewhat religious, 19% were moderately religious and 4.8% did not know how religious they were.

According to our survey, 37.2% of staff respondents are not religious, 30.2% are somewhat religious, 18.6% are moderately religious, 9.3% do not know how religious they are, 2.3% are very religious and 2.3% prefer not to say.

Workplace Culture

In past diversity report surveys, we have asked if respondents have felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace because of their race. We realize that many other aspects of people’s identities can cause them to be marginalized, so we decided to add questions this year for marginalization related to every other demographic point that we ask about (gender, sexuality, religion and ability level). We also added a question to ask if respondents have experienced microaggressions, which we define as subtle behaviors that make people feel disrespected or uncomfortable, in our workplace.

We plan to consider these responses when planning our future training and team building sessions.

Have you ever felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace as a result of your race or ethnicity?

When we asked e-board members if they have ever felt marginalized in our workplace because of their race, 95% of survey respondents strongly disagreed and 5% of survey respondents felt neutral. This is an improvement from 2024, when 81% of respondents strongly disagreed, 14.3% were neutral and 4.8% somewhat agreed. In 2023, 85.7% of respondents strongly disagreed, 4.8% said they were neutral, 4.8% of respondents said they somewhat disagree and 4.8% said they somewhat agree.

When we asked staff members if they have ever felt marginalized in our workplace because of their race, 86% of respondents strongly disagree, 9.3% feel neutral, 2.3% somewhat agree and 2.3% prefer not to say.

Have you ever felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace as a result of your gender?

We found that 80% of e-board survey respondents strongly disagreed that they have ever felt marginalized based on their gender, 15% somewhat disagreed and 5% somewhat agreed. This is the first year of collecting data for this question so we have no prior years to compare results to.

We found that 83.7% of staff survey respondents strongly disagree that they have felt marginalized based on their gender in our workspace, 7% somewhat disagree, 4.7% somewhat agree, 2.3% feel neutral and 2.3% prefer not to say.

Have you ever felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace as a result of your sexuality?

The majority of e-board survey respondents, 90%, strongly disagreed that they have ever felt marginalized because of their sexuality in our workplace, while 5% somewhat agreed and 5% felt neutral.

Similarly, the majority of staff survey respondents, 95.3%, strongly disagreed that they have ever felt marginalized because of their sexuality in our workplace, 2.3% somewhat agreed and 2.3% felt neutral.

Have you ever felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace as a result of your religion?

We found that 95% of e-board survey respondents strongly disagreed that they have ever felt marginalized in our workplace as a result of their religion, and 5% felt neutral.

We found that 86% of e-board survey respondents strongly disagreed that they have ever felt marginalized in our workplace as a result of their religion, 7% somewhat disagreed and 7% felt neutral.

Have you ever felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace as a result of your ability level?

Out of our 20 e-board respondents, 85% strongly disagreed that they have ever felt marginalized in The Ithacan workplace based on their ability level, 10% somewhat agreed and 5% somewhat disagreed.

Out of our 43 staff respondents, 76.7% strongly disagree that they have felt marginalized based on their ability level in our workspace, 9.3% feel neutral, 7% somewhat disagree, 4.7% somewhat agree and 2.3% prefer not to say.

Have you ever experienced microaggressions in The Ithacan workplace?

We included a definition of microaggressions on the survey: subtle behaviors that make people feel disrespected or uncomfortable.

We found that 65% of e-board respondents strongly disagreed that they have ever experienced microaggressions in The Ithacan workplace, 25% somewhat disagreed and 10% somewhat agreed.

We found that 79.1% of staff respondents strongly disagreed that they have ever experienced microaggressions in The Ithacan workplace, 16.3% somewhat disagreed and 4.7% somewhat agreed.

How comfortably can you talk about your social and cultural background in The Ithacan workplace?

We asked respondents to consider, on a scale of one to 10, how comfortable they feel discussing their social and cultural background in The Ithacan workplace. 

In the 2023 and 2024 reports, the lowest comfort level e-board respondents reported was a five, with 14.9% of 2024 respondents measuring their comfort level at a five and 9.5% of 2023 respondents recording five. The lowest comfort level in 2025 was a seven, which received 10% of responses, compared to 9.5% of responses in 2024 and 23.8% in 2023. Comfort level of eight received 15% of responses this year, compared to 19% in 2024 and 28.6% in 2023. 

We have seen the largest change in the number of e-board respondents who measure their comfort level at a nine or above this year, with 40% of respondents reporting a comfort level of nine compared to 19% in 2024 and 14.3% in 2023. This year, 35% of respondents recorded a comfort level of 10, compared to 38.1% in 2024 and 19% in 2023. 

A level four was the lowest that staff members rated their comfort level with discussing their social and cultural background in The Ithacan workplace (one respondent). Three respondents said five, one said six, eight said seven, 11 said 8, 11 said 9 and eight said 10.

To what extent do you feel this organization values your unique background and experiences?

When we asked e-board respondents to share the extent that they feel our organization values their unique background and experiences, 70% said they strongly agree. This almost doubled from 2024, when 38.1% said they strongly agree, and increased almost 50 percentage points from the 23.8% of respondents who strongly agreed in 2023.

This year, 20% of respondents said they somewhat agree, compared to 38.1% in 2024 and 52.4% in 2023. Moreover, 5% of respondents felt neutral this year, compared to 19% in 2024 and 2023. The share of respondents who somewhat disagreed, 5%, is similar to the 4.8% who somewhat disagreed in 2024 and 2023.

We found that 41.9% of staff respondents somewhat agree that this organization values their unique background and experiences, 32.6% strongly agree, 20% feel neutral, 2.3% somewhat disagree and 2.3% strongly disagree.

To what extent do you feel the training you receive for The Ithacan promotes inclusivity?

When we asked e-board respondents about whether they feel the training they receive promotes inclusivity, 65% said they somewhat agree, an increase from the 28.6% of respondents who somewhat agreed in 2024 and 42.9% in 2023. While 20% of respondents strongly agreed in 2025, 23.8% strongly agreed in 2024 and 19% strongly agreed in 2023. This year, 10% of respondents felt neutral, compared to 28.6% in 2024 and 23.8% in 2023. Finally, 5% somewhat disagreed, compared to 19% in 2024 and 14.3% in 2023.

A pie chart shows the degree to which The Ithacan staff survey respondents feel the training they receive for The Ithacan promotes inclusivity: 41.9% somewhat agree, 32.6% strongly agree, 20.9% feel neutral, 2.3% somewhat disagree and 2.3% strongly disagree.

Open-ended feedback

We added two final open-ended questions at the end of the report to provide opportunities for respondents to share anonymous suggestions for any diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that they would like to see from The Ithacan, or anything else that they would like to share. 

We included the disclaimer, “Note that any comments submitted on this form may be included (anonymously) in our annual diversity report. If you would prefer to share feedback or suggestions with the EIC/ME/Community Outreach Manager more privately, please send a slack or use The Ithacan anonymous feedback form.”

One person responded, “I think we could do more to include the voices of disabled individuals in our reporting and in the newsroom.”

No one responded to the question asking if there was anything else they would like to share. 

Our call to action

The Ithacan is committed to elevating and affirming traditionally marginalized voices in our reporting and in our newsroom.

We understand that this must start with strong training for our team of student journalists. Since last year’s diversity report, we have worked to incorporate more training centered on improving source diversity and building an inclusive newsroom environment. The Ithacan e-board members attended three virtual one-hour training sessions with the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ director of Diversity & Inclusion during Fall 2025. We will work to incorporate more training and resources centered around diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging for our editors and staff in future semesters.

We will continue to explore ways to increase representation on our editorial board and staff and work to create a welcoming workspace where our editors and staff members feel that their unique identities are valued.

Editor’s note: The text explaining e-board members’ responses to the question “Have you ever experienced microaggressions in The Ithacan workplace?” was updated Dec. 28 to correct two inaccurate percentages that did not match the graph.