{"id":3263,"date":"2013-01-22T08:54:53","date_gmt":"2013-01-22T08:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=3263"},"modified":"2013-05-25T18:23:50","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T18:23:50","slug":"raising-expectations-funders-get-toughish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2013\/01\/22\/raising-expectations-funders-get-toughish\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising Expectations: Funders Get Tough(ish)"},"content":{"rendered":"

About 18 months ago, Dame Sally Davies<\/a>, the Government\u2019s Chief Medical Officer, unilaterally raised the bar for Medical Schools wanting to apply to future rounds of funding through the Biomedical Research Centre scheme, demanding (in essence) that they obtain an Athena Swan<\/a> Silver Award if they wanted their future applications to be successful. Since then, various \u2013 possibly many \u2013 people including myself, \u00a0have been talking to key individuals in the Research Councils and trying to put pressure on funders generally, asking them to stipulate that funding will only follow good practice on the Equality and Diversity front (see, for instance, the letter Angela McLean, Paul Harvey and I published<\/a> in Nature in the autumn of 2011). At the time of Sally Davies\u2019 announcement I wrote a blogpost<\/a> openly calling for other funders to \u2018get tough\u2019. Now there is some movement in the right direction.<\/p>\n

Last week RCUK<\/a>\u00a0 put out a statement<\/a> laying out their own explicit expectations for Equality and Diversity. This is a statement covering the work of all 7 UK Research Councils and so it covers funding across all academic fields. For this reason, it is impossible to set a categorical requirement<\/span> of something as specific as an Athena Swan award: to date these particular awards only cover STEM departments, although the scheme\u2019s \u2018owners\u2019, the Equality Challenge Unit<\/a>, are piloting an extension<\/a> to cover Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.\u00a0 This pilot project is ongoing so, as yet, an equivalent award to Athena Swan in non-STEM subjects does not exist and RCUK could not use this as a basis for \u2018accreditation\u2019 across all research councils even if they wanted to.<\/p>\n

However, formal accreditation would have its drawbacks, a point made very clear at a consultation event organised by RCUK that I attended in the autumn.\u00a0 For instance, supposing a really bright early career female researcher wants to apply to hold a fellowship in a department with a lousy E+D record simply because the science is first-rate, should they be prevented because the department doesn\u2019t hold some explicit accreditation? If this were the case, the individual would be disadvantaged because of a department\u2019s failing. Furthermore, the most obvious benchmarking, that of Athena Swan, is really concerned with gender and not the other diversity aspects. So, a department could be good around gender but never have considered the position for BME\u2019s (black or minority ethnic if you don\u2019t know the jargon) for instance, or transgender applicants. So, the RCUK statement simply names participation in Athena Swan (as well as involvement with other similar schemes such as Stonewall) as something that would provide solid evidence that an organisation is adopting good practice around diversity, but such participation is not (as with the Department of Health) an absolute requirement.<\/p>\n

Is this sufficient? Time will tell whether this statement makes any difference or has any teeth in reality. The punchline is to be found in the final three bullet points of the statement, in which it says:<\/p>\n

RCUK will<\/p>\n