Infusing science, practical skills, and joy into diversity discussions!

Diverse Joy ® Podcast
& Educational Video Series

With Dr. William T. L. Cox & Dr. Amber Nelson

Diverse Joy Podcast with Dr. William T. L. Cox & Dr. Amber Nelson
Dr. Cox and Dr. Nelson in a promotion photo from an episode of season 1 of Diverse Joy

Episodes of Diverse Joy® Release the First Wednesday of Each Month

Published episodes can be found below, by following the podcast wherever you get podcasts (links for various podcasting platforms are available below) or by subscribing to @BiasHabit on YouTube for the video version.*

*The audio-only podcast features the same content as the video version, minus some additional visuals.

Follow Diverse Joy on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, and Bluesky.

Get notified about new episodes by signing up for our newsletter or by following (“subscribing to”) the show in your podcasting app or on YouTube.

Infusing Joy into Diversity Discussions

Diverse Joy is the official podcast of Inequity Agents of Change.

Cohosted by Dr. Cox and Dr. Nelson, with occasional guests, Diverse Joy is a free monthly podcast and educational video series. In each episode, the cohosts share some of the joy from their lives, discuss a diversity topic, answer audience questions, teach an evidence-based bias habit-breaking skill to help you in your efforts to reduce bias and promote inclusion and equity, and more! Their goal is educate while keeping you entertained, and most of all, to infuse joy into diversity discussions.

Diverse Joy is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally, many teachers and professors use the educational videos in their classrooms, and many organizations use Diverse Joy as a monthly diversity activity. As its title implies, it focuses on infusing joy back into diversity discussions. Joy is both practical and scientifically justified as a weapon against bias.

Submit Questions and Topic Ideas for an Episode of Diverse Joy

We use audience questions in each episode of the podcast; if you have a question related to a topic in the realm of bias, diversity, equity, or inclusion, please send it our way!

If you have a relevant topic idea that you think would be a good subject for one our episodes’ main discussions, we’d love to hear it, too!

You can also just share your joy with us!

Please submit any of the above ideas using this form, and it may be featured on a future episode!

Dr. Cox and Dr. Nelson pose for a promotional photo; he is wearing a silver blazer and glasses, she is wearing a black leather jacket and glasses. They are seated at a table and their hands are resting on the table.

Season 1 of Diverse Joy was sponsored primarily by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number R35GM128888. The content is solely the responsibility of the speakers and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Production is also supported by donations to our nonprofit, Inequity Agents of Change.

We Also Have Merch

If you’re interested in supporting our organization, we also have Diverse Joy merchandise available. Your purchase supports production of Diverse Joy - and helps us spread the joy!

Meet the Diverse Joy Team

The Diverse Joy theme and interstitial music was composed and performed by Jay Arner

Guests of Diverse Joy have included:

  • Sandy Eichel, a wealth management advisor and international speaker; they’ve been on to discuss “What is Professionalism Anyway?”, trans* and nonbinary identity related topics, and in our April 2025 episode, recognizing and correcting your own biases!

  • Nicki Vander Meulen, a lawyer focused on disability issues and the first-ever openly autistic person to be elected to a school board in the United States; she’s been on to discuss disability desegregation in schools, and how the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA) has lead to accommodations to help everyone.

  • Valeria Martinez, an immigration attorney; she was on the November 2024 episode to discuss an array of topics and history related to immigration in the United States, as well as the role of the law in mandating fairness, asylum seekers, the definition of migrants as compared to refugee.

  • Bernie Hoes, an educator; he was on earlier this year to discuss “Living Black History” and how Black identity is not a monolith.

Diverse Joy Episodes

Listen to Diverse Joy on your favorite podcasting app (or watch on YouTube) with the links in the carousel below; or use episode pages here with embedded media players for the audio or the video for each.

Episodes are listed in reverse chronological order, with our most recent episode displayed first. Once you’re on an episode page, you can navigate to the next episode (in either direction) from that page. And episodes are tagged with relevant keywords to help you find related episodes!

William Cox William Cox

S2E06: Joy in Challenging Beauty Standards

We help you ring in the New Year with this month's episode (released New Year's Day)!

Will shares that (last year's) New Year's Eve festivities brought him joy; and Amber gives us an inside look at her Spotify Wrapped.

This episode's main discussion topic is Beauty Standards and the Halo Effect (allowing people whom you might find more attractive to get away with things that you might not let people you find less attractive to get away with - see the TV show "You" as a great example of "the character is a stalker, but he's hot, so it's kind of okay!").

For story time, Will recounts a negative story about what could have been a human resources violation at a workplace related to a married couple where the wife was up for a promotion and the boss wanted to make sure she did not wind up with a pay bump that would have resulted in her making more money than her husband, but the HR person stepping in to stop that nonsense; followed up by a more positive story that ties into the main Beauty Standards topic, and how "Star Trek: Discovery" had a lovely storyline about a "repulsive looking" alien character finding love in the final season of the show (with a more traditionally beautiful character). In response to this month's audience question, Amber and Will discuss name bias and the ways in which it can negatively impact folks, such as applying for jobs (and ways in which to potentially combat that bias).

The bias habit-breaking skill in this episode is to Adopt a Cumulative Perspective on Bias, which requires understanding that just because you might think if you slip up and express bias towards someone, you should acknowledge that your "one time slip up" is actually probably one of dozens of "slip ups" that person has been the recipient of that day - because bias, even minor slips - aren't actually rare and isolated incidents for those people experiencing them.

The episode wraps up with Amber's joyful recommendation of "Never Say Never with Jeff Jenkins", a travel show hosted by a larger bodied Black man, who doesn't let the lack of accommodations for heavier folks stand in his way of having all the life experiences he wants to have (like skydiving).

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