How can we improve equity and diversity in research funding allocations?

A C-DICE Case Study from the Fellowship Calls

Despite greater transparency and attention being given to equity in the allocation of research funding, as recent equalities monitoring data from UKRI shows, there is still plenty of work to do. Focussing on gender alone, across funding councils, in 2021-22 there were more male than female applicants for funding, and the awards they receive are significantly higher as a median value. A positive sign was that the award rate for female fellowship applicants was higher than males for all research councils.

So, how do we go about continuing to level the playing field, and generate a more equitable research funding landscape? Using the experiences of Centre for Postdoctoral Development in Infrastructure, Cities and Energy (or C-DICE) we can highlight some areas where funders and recruiters can take a proactive approach, to the benefit of all applicants. C-DICE has run two campaigns to competitively award fellowship funding to postdoctoral researchers and central to our mission as a programme is inclusive practice and supporting diversity in the researcher community that we serve, and so it was concerning for us when female applicants were distinctly under-represented in our first fellowships call in 2022. Keen to rectify this, we deployed a set of measures for our second fellowships call the following year, with positive results.

Established in 2021 and funded by Research England, C-DICE has supported hundreds of researchers from tens of institutions in their career development to date. Expressions of interest for our first postdoctoral fellowships call, with one-year of funding, included an alarmingly small number of females, with even fewer completed applications from female candidates. In 2022, our approach was typical for the sector, having been adapted from other organisations’ similar calls. Determined to increase the interest from female applicants for the second fellowship call, we implemented a series of interventions to increase the quality and diversity of applications and applicants. We wanted to make the process more accessible and inclusive, which paid off including far greater engagement from female applicants.

Interventions to increase inclusivity and accessibility

Our first series of measures were intended to increase the reach, inclusivity and accessibility, to engage with those who may have discounted the opportunity as ‘not being for them’. This was all about the messaging, to make people take notice. Firstly, the flexibility of our Fellowship offer was heavily emphasised in the new call documentation, with flexible working options made clear, and changes made to the language used around the promotion of the fellowships, deliberately highlighting the option to build the fellowship around the applicant, encouraging those with caring or other responsibilities. Applicants could also shape their fellowship around existing contracts, part-time work or other commitments to provide a bespoke solution recognising the precarity of employment for many postdoctoral researchers. For the application process itself, we simplified this as much as possible and reviewed the documentation to ensure accessibility for neurodiverse applicants. Recognising applicants are from an early career stage, we requested a narrative CV, rather than an extensive publication list, to help ‘level the playing field’ and to account for disciplinary differences and different career stages. To extend the reach as far as possible, we targeted the marketing to include organisations supporting BAME and female postdocs. We also extended the application window for as long as possible and tweaked the timing to avoid school holiday times. Finally, to enable candidates to build their networks, we created a Fellowship Development Networking Grant of up to £1,000 to support the development of new collaborations or strengthen existing ties with delivery partners, with a positive correlation between shortlisted candidates and those in receipt of networking grants.

A structured and supported application process

To reduce the barriers to people completing applications we de-mystified and supported candidates through a structured and supported process which included informal webinars, providing an overview of the fellowship call with a Q&A session hosted by the C-DICE team and designed for those who prefer an interactive approach to information gathering. The questions from the Q&A fed into the online FAQs document for the benefit of other applicants. Furthermore, we ran three workshops covering: “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in Research Planning, Proposals and Practice”, “Creating a Budget Workshop” and an “Interview Skills Workshop”, these sessions improved the general quality of the applications as well as give applicants more confidence in applying. In 2024 we have added a further session “Getting the Best Out of Letters of Support”. These workshops recognised that for early career applicants, the proposal process can be complex to navigate for the first time, with a lot of jargon that may be a barrier to people applying. The “Creating a Research Proposal Budget Workshop” was developed in collaboration with a university Research Finance Supervisor, who expertly explained research finance terms and answered questions on creating budgets alongside case studies and examples. The slides and session recording were made available after the event. Whilst EDI is now a common feature of funding proposals, our experience is that candidates are often ill-equipped to deal with this aspect, the “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Research Planning, Proposals and Practice Workshop” dealt with this head-on. Delivered as an interactive online workshop, it explored definitions of EDI terms and why EDI matters for research. The workshop covered the fundamentals of EDI including the law, best practice and how to embed EDI in a research proposal and beyond. Case studies promoted discussion and how EDI applies to different research scenarios, and the session was not recorded to enable free discussion on potentially sensitive topics. The quality of the EDI in proposals for our fellowships was improved as a result of the workshop. Finally, the “Interviewing Skills Workshop” included a panel of senior academics who gave their best practices and top tips for interviews, in breakout sessions participants were given questions in a mock interview setting, with a recording of the presentations by the academics made subsequently available.

Reducing unconscious bias in the review process

Unconscious bias is a widely used term, but can be difficult to achieve in practice. To minimise unconscious bias in the review process, the applications were anonymised. However, we were unable to edit the letters of support which meant that in some cases anonymity was not maintained. Good practice was followed for the review and interview panels, which reflected diversity with a minimum gender ratio of either 3:2 or 2:3 male to female, a consistent panel member on all interviews, and any conflicts of interest were avoided. We also offered the experience of peer reviewing to fellow postdoctoral researchers (not applicants) to give them first-hand experience of the internal workings of the peer review process, and a deep insight into what reviewers value in applications, reflections from our peer reviewers highlighted how useful this experience had been.

The results speak for themselves

Following the processes and interventions described above, in the second C-DICE fellowship application process we saw improvements in the gender balance of initial expressions of interest in the fellowship improved from 83% male and 17% female (2022) to 53% male 43% female, 4% preferred not to say (2023). This demonstrated that we were drawing from a much more balanced pool of interested candidates, which would be much closer to the gender balance present in the discipline areas of C-DICE.

At the application stage, the gender balance of those who submitted was 44% female in 2023, improved from just 6% in 2022. At the shortlisting stage, 46% of shortlisted candidates were female in 2023, an improvement from 17% in 2022. Finally, a 50% success rate for female applicants was seen in 2023, compared to no successful female applicants in 2022. In our second call, in 2023, additional funding was made available to support applicants with the costs incurred in developing a proposal. Two thirds of applicants who took advantage of the grant to support their proposal development were shortlisted for interview. The results show that the interventions clearly improved the gender balance at all application stages. Due to the nature of the fellowship application process and the way in which the individual interventions were introduced and promoted, it has been difficult to pinpoint which specific intervention had the most impact. It is likely that each step played a role in improving the diversity of candidates, whether through awareness raising, accessibility, support or confidence, and certainly helped to raise the standard of applications received across the board. Our experiences of good EDI practice can easily be adopted for recruiters and funders at all levels, to ensure that recruitment processes are open to a wide range of candidates, not just those for whom the process is most visible, or accessible. Our experience shows that by reducing barriers we will see more diversity in applicants, which can only be a good thing for finding the best people for opportunities. This can be a part of fixing the system to make research accessible to everyone.

By Amy Beierholm, Sharon Henson, Kathryn North.