New EDI hub to use sector knowledge to address diversity challenges

The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Hub+ 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 that will be integrated and adopted within the community.

The Hub involves eight university partners and is led by Professor Vania Dimitrova and Professor Louise Jennings from the University of Leeds. The Department of Chemistry’s Professor Paul Walton is a co-investigator on the project.

"The EPSRC EDI Hub+ project is a hugely exciting development and I am delighted that we will be able to contribute through Paul’s involvement,” said Dr Martin Cockett, Deputy Head of Department, Department of Chemistry. “The Department of Chemistry at York has a long and distinguished history of promoting equality and diversity in all aspects of our operations.

“Chemistry at York was the first academic department in the UK to receive an Athena SWAN Gold award, awarded in 2007 under Paul’s leadership as the then Head of Department. It has been held continuously since. Congratulations to Paul and the other collaborators from the partner universities around the country."

The EDI Hub+ is supported by the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through a £2.5m investment.

Persistent challenges

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.

“It will consolidate the work of existing initiatives and lead new programmes of work, ensuring that the best solutions can be brought to bear on challenges specific to the engineering, physical sciences and mathematics communities.”

Core themes

The EDI Hub+ is one of the activities in EPSRC’s three-year EDI action plan. It will focus on three themes:

• career pathways: including removing barriers to doctoral study for underrepresented groups, providing inclusive support at key career transitions and growing diverse leadership
• research funding and processes: including trialing and evaluating alternative approaches to funding opportunities and peer review, and reducing the burden on specific groups
• organisational culture: including making workplaces more inclusive and accessible, fostering inclusive leadership and adopting equitable work-life balance approaches.

National approach

The Hub will deliver:

• 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
• an interactive online resource of EDI interventions, with robust evidence as to what works and, crucially, what doesn’t work
• EDI maturity indices and supporting material that help us to get the right intervention to the right organisation at the right time
• piloted interventions embedded in EPMS research and innovation contexts
• scaled-up and fully evaluated interventions that have the potential for widespread adoption
• EDI national-level guidelines, pledges, policies and programmes
• 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.  

The Hub will build on the work of existing initiatives, including the EPSRC Inclusion Matters projects, and will collaborate with other programmes also supported by UKRI such as the EDI Caucus.

The EDI Caucus provides high-quality research evidence on EDI that informs policy and practice in the research and innovation system. The EDI Caucus and EDI Hub+ will collaborate on themes that are aligned.