UEA part of EDI sharing hub to use collective knowledge to address diversity challenges
By: Communications
A new national hub will harness the engineering, physical and mathematical sciences (EPMS) research and innovation community’s collective effort to address diversity challenges specific to the sector.
The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Hub+, of which the University of East Anglia is a partner, will act as a focal point of activity and knowledge of good EDI practice across the UK.
Drawing on expertise and insight from people and organisations from within and beyond the sector, the hub will provide leadership to pinpoint diversity challenges unique to EPMS.
These challenges will be tackled by scaling-up EDI interventions which will be integrated and adopted within the community.
The hub involves eight university partners and is led by the University of Leeds.
It is supported by the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through a £2.5 million investment.
EPSRC Executive Chair Professor Charlotte Deane said: “The diversity challenges we face deprive individuals of opportunity, with the result that the research and innovation system, and society more widely, cannot benefit from their contributions and perspectives.
“The EDI Hub+ aims to address the persistent challenges we see across the engineering, physical and mathematical sciences community by harnessing our collective accumulated knowledge."
Dr Katherine Deane, of the UEA’s School of Health Sciences, said: “We will look at creating the evidence for how we can make our research workforce more diverse, and how we can support our researchers to make sure our research is relevant to communities currently under-served by our research. The hub will also make sure we share this information as widely as possible.
“Research needs lots of different perspectives in order to find solutions that work in a wide range of settings. What works for one group of people may not be so great for another.
“Just because you use a wheelchair, are black, or gay should not stop you from being a researcher, or engineer, or mathematician.
“However, we know that at the moment opportunities to work in these fields are not equal, and that the impact of the research does not benefit all communities equally.
“The EDI Hub will let us drive change by sharing best practice and researching how to make change to improve EDI faster and better.
“For example, UEA has one of the most accessible set of labs in the world in the New Science building.
“We will be sharing the access guidelines that helped design them so other facilities can be built to allow disabled scientists to study and research safely and in comfort.”
The EDI Hub+ is one of the activities in EPSRC’s three-year EDI action plan.
It will focus on three themes:
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career pathways: including removing barriers to doctoral study for underrepresented groups, providing inclusive support at key career transitions and growing diverse leadership
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research funding and processes: including trialing and evaluating alternative approaches to funding opportunities and peer review, and reducing the burden on specific groups
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organisational culture: including making workplaces more inclusive and accessible, fostering inclusive leadership and adopting equitable work-life balance approaches.
It will deliver:
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a coordinated and collaborative network across the four nations, bringing together the full breadth of the EPMS research and innovation community (universities, businesses, funders) to facilitate knowledge exchange, share good practice, identify unmet needs, and co-create interventions that seek to address those needs
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an interactive online resource of EDI interventions, with robust evidence as to what works and, crucially, what doesn’t work
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EDI maturity indices and supporting material that help us to get the right intervention to the right organisation at the right time
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piloted interventions embedded in EPMS research and innovation contexts;
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scaled-up and fully evaluated interventions that have the potential for widespread adoption
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EDI national-level guidelines, pledges, policies and programmes
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co-created interventions which will be backed by a Flexible Fund to enable piloting of co-created interventions, scaling up of successful pilot projects, and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions.
Working with universities, learned societies, industry partners, professional bodies and international collaborators, the EDI Hub+ will lead initiatives to empower individuals throughout the EPMS community.
Joint project lead Professor Louise Jennings, of the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds, said: “We’re passionate about this project as we feel the time is ripe to focus on evidence based sustained transformation across the engineering, physical and mathematical sciences research and innovation community.
“Our goal is to see equitable and inclusive processes become embedded and normalised in everyday practice.
“The level of interest we have received already from institutions wanting to get involved and partners keen to work with us on this, demonstrates that there is appetite for change and organisations are already engaging with the process.”
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