We funded people to make energy research more inclusive. Then we saw what got in their way
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Professor Simone Abram, Principal Investigator of EDI+
““If we are not going forwards, we are not standing still; we are going backwards.” By Professor Simone Abram
When we designed EDI+, we started from a fairly simple observation. There was already a great deal of activity around equality, diversity and inclusion in energy research, and no shortage of training. What we saw much less of was people having the time or opportunity to put what they had learnt into practice.
Someone could go on a course, learn something useful and then return to a job with little time or opportunity to put that learning into practice. We wanted to approach the problem differently, by giving people the skills and time to work on the conditions that produce inequality rather than asking them to describe those inequalities again.
The Fellows still needed to understand EDI across the breadth of energy research, but the emphasis was on what they could do with that knowledge. Much of the training focused on understanding what was happening inside an organisation, designing an intervention that made sense in that particular setting, putting it into practice and working out whether it had made a difference.
Those are different skills from identifying inequalities. Four years on, the programme’s practical focus has proven one of its key strengths. Across two cohorts, 19 Fellows took on the challenge and 15 carried an intervention through, working within institutions with very different cultures, pressures and capacities for change. We asked a lot of them, and they brought real energy and invention, shaping their projects around organisations they knew from the inside.
That figure shows what people can do when they are allowed to work seriously on a problem within their own organisation. Some Fellows are already applying for funding to extend their work or apply it more widely, which tells me they found things worth sharing. Their experiences also taught us a great deal about the conditions that help people make change, as well as the barriers that can get in their way.
When funded time doesn’t become working time
EDI+’s funding from UKRI allowed us to buy out one day a week of every Fellow’s time, but for a good number, that did not mean a day came off their existing workload. Some departments were too understaffed to release people, while in others, particularly in the hard sciences, the Fellowship was not always regarded in the same way as other research. The department received the funding, but the Fellow could still be left with much the same job as before.
That exposed a more fundamental problem with the way research time works in practice. A funder can pay for a proportion of someone’s contracted hours, but that does not automatically give the university the capacity to redistribute the rest of their work. Funded time on paper can therefore look very different from the time a researcher actually has available. There is a wider point here. When people win funding but are not given the time to do the work it was intended to support, they are being denied the same opportunity to develop their research and careers as colleagues who are able to use that funding as intended. That, in itself, can reinforce existing inequalities.
The financial pressures facing UK higher education have made this problem harder to solve. Universities are expected to support a wide range of activities, funded by income streams that do not always cover their full costs, with money moving between different parts of the institution to keep things going. As those pressures have intensified, departments have had less room to absorb additional workload, even when an external funder is paying for their time.
Four of the 19 Fellows did not carry their planned interventions through to completion for various reasons that I would not presume to discuss in detail. We do know that, in at least one case, difficulties securing the time that had been bought out meant the Fellow was unable to complete the work they had planned. More broadly, the experience showed how important it is for organisations to create the time they have accepted funding for. Without that space, this kind of work can become an additional responsibility alongside a job that has not become any smaller.
We encountered a related problem in industry. Some of the energy organisations that had supported our original application as something the sector needed had reorganised by the time we began recruiting and were no longer willing to pay for activity they regarded as training. Some of that coincided with a wider retreat from talking openly about EDI, and some was financial; more than once, we encountered the view that an organisation already had an EDI officer and therefore did not need someone else to do this work.
That picture has begun to change again, with interest from companies rising sharply over the past year. The question now is how to turn that renewed interest into the capacity to make changes in practice.
Diversity can be inconvenient
Some of what the Fellows encountered was stark. Entrenched misogyny remains present in parts of the sector, as do racism and victim blaming, and these form part of the environment in which people are trying to make energy research a better place to work.
Other barriers were less dramatic but probably more widespread. Someone arriving in this country for the first time, for example, may be expected to work out an unfamiliar system largely on their own because the people around them have forgotten how much of what they know is tacit. Processes, expectations and ways of working that seem obvious when you have spent years inside an organisation can look very different to someone encountering them for the first time.
In principle, these ought to be among the easier problems to address, but doing so requires people to recognise that colleagues may experience the same workplace quite differently.
The reality is that diversity can sometimes be inconvenient. Accommodating somebody whose needs differ from your own takes thought and sometimes effort, particularly when an organisation encounters a particular need for the first time. Once that adjustment has been made, however, it can quickly become an ordinary part of how things are done.
In many ways, this was what the Fellowships were testing: whether people could identify those points of friction and make practical changes, to go beyond documenting them. They were doing that within established systems, sometimes without the data they needed to understand the problem fully, and over a period of two years, which is not long when the objective is organisational change. It would have been surprising if every intervention had produced the same result.
Lasting change
The Fellows’ experience has left me more convinced that change is possible, but also clearer about what it asks of the people and organisations involved. Training and funding can create the opportunity, but people also need support and authority to put what they have learnt into practice, and enough time for new ways of working to take hold.
One of the things I will remember most is how readily people step in when formal structures fall short. Fellows found colleagues forming groups and networks to support people whose needs might otherwise go unmet, often creating their own solutions to problems an organisation had failed to address.
There is a great deal to value in that willingness to support one another, but it remains second best. The ambition has to be to build organisations where people do not need informal networks to compensate for shortcomings in the formal system, and where inequalities are less likely to arise in the first place.
Senior appointments with responsibility for equality can help signal that an organisation takes this seriously. Still, lasting change also depends on people throughout an organisation doing the work through their everyday decisions and practices. EDI+ gave Fellows the opportunity to test what that could look like, at a time when the wider environment for this work was often challenging.
If we are not going forwards, we are not standing still; we are going backwards. After four years of watching people try to move their organisations forwards, I am convinced that change can happen. I am also much clearer about what we need to give people if we expect them to make it.
Story written by Derek Main