Written Evidence Submitted by Wellcome
(DIV0096)
Wellcome is a politically and financially independent global charitable foundation, funded by a £38.2 billion investment portfolio.
Our work includes grant funding, advocacy campaigns, and partnerships to find solutions for today’s urgent health challenges. We have recently committed £16 billion over the next decade to fund science that supports a healthy future for everyone.
Wellcome’s new strategy: In 2019 Wellcome launched its new vision to support science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. Our new strategy focuses Wellcome’s strengths on giving researchers the freedom to explore and on using research to solve three worldwide health challenges--mental health, global heating, and infectious diseases—in addition to a broad portfolio of discovery research.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion at Wellcome: Principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) underpin our new strategy, as does Wellcome’s responsibility to help build a better research culture. We want the broadest possible range of people to contribute to – and benefit from – science’s potential to change the world. Wellcome has a dedicated Culture, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (CEDI) team which drives our work in this area, focusing on our role as an employer and a funder of research.
In March 2021 Wellcome published its DEI strategy which commits our organisation to become an inclusive employer, an inclusive funder, and a leader in inclusive research design and practice in the next decade. The results of the actions from the strategy will be better experiences for Wellcome staff, better science, and more equitable solutions to the health challenges we face.
While many people who work at Wellcome have a background in STEM, through their studies or previous employment, many colleagues also come from other areas, including, but not limited to, law, investment banking, the arts and the humanities and social sciences. We have responded to this inquiry from our position as a funder of STEM research, rather than as an employer, with a hyper-focus on improving diversity in academic research at HEIs and ROs.
Wellcome reports data annually on the grants we've funded over the past year and funding trends over recent years. This report includes the number and value of awards in our current grant portfolio, application, and success rates, and who we've funded and where.
The headline findings with regards to diversity of researchers from our most recent data release (March 2021) are:
Wellcome undertakes this activity to understand where we have underrepresentation in our portfolio to help inform how we design strategies to improve this, as well as mirror the extent of misrepresentation in the wider sector. We have attached a more thorough narrative of our data in Annex 1.
Additionally, we have attached our response to the Diversity in STEM APPG inquiry in Annex 2 for reference. The Committee should use the outcomes of its inquiry to focus down on tangible actions to the present problem. Funders are getting much better at highlighting the underrepresentation of particular groups in their funding—including NIHR and UKRI. The sector has gone far beyond understanding the details of misrepresentation of STEM and is poised for bold action.
A monoculture of STEM research stifles innovation
A growing body of work has begun to understand the relationships between social identities and research topic selection—and this has knock-on effects to the quality of research. For example, in more medical oriented research, decades of male researcher overrepresentation has led to disproportionately low attention to gender differences in medicine[1],[2]. As more women became drivers of the medical research community the situation has improved as women are more likely to include women as subjects[3] and report sex as an analytical variable[4]. Additionally, women are also more likely to produce scientific discoveries that lead to women’s health patents and to contribute to patenting in this area[5].
Funding outcomes are also aligned with topic selection. Disproportionately low success rates to receive NIH funding were identified for Black applicants and this was largely explained by topic selection[6]. These investigators were more likely to propose research on topics, such as human subjects research and research on health disparities, with lower success rates relative to White and Asian investigators.
These outcomes have implications for innovation and scientific competitiveness. Racialized and gendered groups are more likely to produce novel scientific contributions, yet their work is often neglected by other scientists[7]. In combination these studies suggest that unequal representation in science means some scientific questions are not getting asked or answered, and—critically—this limited scope of research breadth could stifle innovation.
Underrepresentation in STEM research will not provide the future workforce the UK needs
The UK Government has committed to increase its funding for research and development (R&D) over the next decade. Along with this investment comes the need for a larger workforce—it will be essential for as many people as possible in the UK workforce to have access to and be enthusiastic about participating in STEM R&D careers. This is in addition to making the UK an attractive place to have an R&D career within the global context.
Proactively recruit those from underrepresented identities to undertake research careers
Designating pots of funding with the specific aim to increase representation of marginalized people in R&D careers will be essential for closing the current gap. Without an active approach towards this problem, there is unlikely to be any reasonable progress on diversity in STEM soon. For example, fields such as mathematics and physics will continue to see a gender gap for generations without further reforms how researchers are recruited, trained, and retained in STEM research[8]. There is little precedent for positive action research funding in the UK, but the sector is seeing examples of it from HEIs. The Wellcome Sanger Institute has just launched a fellowship aimed at postdoctoral researchers from Black heritage backgrounds. In the UK, the sector is yet to see this direct action from funding agencies on a large scale. Wellcome is currently considering how to support this funding approach; however, we cannot have large impact on our own.
With backing from the Government, UKRI and funding bodies should create positive-action funding schemes to support researchers from underrepresented backgrounds to enter STEM careers and research. There are a variety of high-profile positive action programs from the US that can be used as case-studies, can be modified for the UK context for a variety of career stages, and provide learnings for how to design these programmes thoughtfully.
Pre-graduate:
Doctoral training:
Post-doctoral training and early career researchers:
To successfully implement these schemes, UKRI and funders in the UK need to make full use of the provisions in the Equality Act of 2010 to make a positive difference. It will be important for UK Government to review and update the Equality Act of 2010 if funders find it challenging to deliver these activities, and UKRI could show significant leadership in this area.
The level of support necessary for each career stage in the UK will be field dependent. This type of bold action is a necessary step to increase diversity in STEM; however, it cannot be done in isolation.
Funders—including UKRI--should work with UK HEIs and ROs to build capacity and increase retention of underrepresented groups in research
Institutions must think carefully about encouraging people to undergo an R&D career in a system and environment that was not designed for them and might actively exclude them. Funders can eventually create policies to put pressure on HEIs and ROs to ensure inclusive environments; however, initial financial investments to support HEIs and ROs to do this will be much more beneficial.
Thanks to a significant amount of work on Research Culture, the UK is far ahead with regards to leadership on some of these issues and this is reflected in the aspirations of the Government’s R&D People and Culture strategy. It is a big step forward that this strategy was created, however, it was particularly lacking on tangible actions to increase underrepresented researchers to participate in research careers. To ensure delivery of its implementation, we need to see more UK Government endorsement—in tandem with financial support from funders—for institutional activities that directly support increasing representation in STEM careers.
A few key activities to increase underrepresented researcher recruitment include funders financially supporting HEIs and ROs through institutional awards to:
Recruitment is not a silver bullet, and HEIs and ROs must also focus on retention. A few strategies to increase the retention of underrepresented researchers should include financial support from funders for HEIs and ROs through institutional awards to:
HEIs and ROs will be key for attracting, training, and retaining researchers from underrepresented backgrounds; however, if they do not get direct financial support from funders to do so it will not be a priority for them. Relative to the investment in research across the UK, this financial investment from funders necessary will be very small.
Reframe funding assessment criteria to directly incentivise researcher activities that increase inclusion
Finally, we as a sector must figure out how to incentivise those who are already participating in research careers and doing research to increase the diversity of who they train and include in their groups. While Research England’s Future of Research Assessment Programme (FRAP) is leading reform, it is critical for this group to deliver a framework that includes directly incentivising the activities researchers undertake to build inclusive research groups in academia.
For funders—including UKRI—this will be done through:
For HEIs and ROs this will include:
Wellcome is pleased to see that the UK Government is taking the necessary steps to understand the enormous problems the diversity of people participating in STEM careers. Our organisation has a breadth of experience of working on these issues, and would be happy to help with any strategic developments in this critical area of work.
Annex 1
While difficult to understand the full extent of exclusion and underrepresentation as a result of inconsistent data collection and data protection regulations, we can report on Wellcome’s funding disparities for women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities.
Wellcome reports data annually on the grants we've funded over the past year and funding trends over recent years. This report includes the number and value of awards in our current grant portfolio, application and success rates, and who we've funded and where.
The diversity-related headline findings from our most recent data release (March 2021) are:
There are gaps in data related to the following, because we do not gather this information systematically:
Furthermore, while we gather diversity data about disability, the very low number of grant applicants and grant holders who respond that they identify as disabled indicates that there are barriers to people feeling comfortable to respond. We know this is a sector wide issue.1 We also do not yet perform intersectional analysis; the fact that Wellcome funds low numbers of researchers from minoritised groups limits our ability to do this.
We present below some of our grant funding data (focusing on our science portfolio, rather than our broader work on public engagement and humanities and social sciences). As part of the “research ecosystem” we acknowledge that the diversity (or lack of diversity) of who we fund is both a symptom of diversity challenges within that system, and a contributor to the ongoing under-representation of certain groups.
Gender:
Wellcome’s most recent Trends in Grants report, published in March 2021, shows that over the past five years:
An important question for a funder to ask is whether success rates are lower for some groups than others. This helps to disentangle whether the lower representation of women is because fewer apply, or because women are less successful when they do apply. Our analysis shows that differences in success rate by gender exist but tend to be relatively small for schemes in Science. However, women make up a much smaller proportion of applicants and awardees in Wellcome’s most senior schemes in Science and are overrepresented among our earliest career (i.e. pre-PhD level schemes).
Data therefore seems to reflect the well-documented challenge of the leaky pipeline, i.e. that the proportion of women in academic research in STEM decreases with seniority.
Disability:
Only 4% of UK-based applicants to Wellcome grants identified themselves as disabled in 2019/20. According to the UK Government family resources survey 2016/17, 19% of working-age adults are disabled. Over the past four years the success rate for disabled applicants (10%) has been lower than for non-disabled applicants (13%). But the small number of disabled applicants prevents us from making detailed analysis or statistically significant comparisons.
We know from research conducted by other organisations, that this very low number of disabled applicants and grant holders is likely to be both the result of low disclosure (people choosing not to tell Wellcome they are disabled through our diversity monitoring) and the barriers that disabled people face to building a career in research. It is important to note that the question we ask Wellcome applicants and grant holders (“Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person?”) is substantially less broad than the definition of disability used in many benchmarks, however we believe this is unlikely to fully account for the low representation of disabled applicants and grant holders in our funding.
Race and ethnicity:
Recent analyses of Wellcome’s funding describe the under-representation of Black and minority ethnic (BAME) researchers in our grant funding portfolio:
We acknowledge that it is Wellcome’s role to identify, and then tackle, the reasons behind our lower success rates for Black and Minority Ethnic grant applicants. However, evidence reviews and research indicate that under-representation of BAME, and particularly Black, researchers in UK academic research has structural roots that require collective action.
For example, in September 2019, Leading Routes published a report, ‘The Broken Pipeline: Barriers to Black PhD Students Accessing Research Council Funding’ that revealed that only 1.2% of research council funded studentships went to Black or Black Mixed students over a three 3-year period. Given the importance of a PhD, and specifically a funded PhD, for progression into a scientific career, these very low numbers of PhD studentships will mean a small pool of researchers eligible to apply to Wellcome’s major grant schemes.
Annex 2
For reference, we are attaching Wellcome’s response to the APPG inquiry on equity in the STEM workforce from January 2020.
Wellcome reports data annually on the grants we've funded over the past year and funding trends over recent years. This report includes the number and value of awards in our current grant portfolio, application and success rates, and who we've funded and where.
The diversity-related headline findings from our most recent data release (March 2020) are:
https://wellcome.org/reports/grant-funding-data-2018-2019
There are gaps in data related to the following, because we do not gather this information systematically:
Furthermore, while we gather diversity data about disability, the very low number of grant applicants and grant holders who respond that they identify as disabled indicates that there are barriers to people feeling comfortable to respond. We know this is a sector wide issue.[10] We also do not yet perform intersectional analysis; the fact that Wellcome funds low numbers of researchers from minoritised groups limits our ability to do this.
Wellcome currently funds researchers through a range of open-mode grant schemes. Our current awards range from Biomedical Vacation Scholarships for undergraduate students, through to Principal Research Fellowships for senior research scientists of international standing.
We present below some of our grant funding data (focusing on our science portfolio, rather than our broader work on public engagement and humanities and social sciences). As part of the “research ecosystem” we acknowledge that the diversity (or lack of diversity) of who we fund is both a symptom of diversity challenges within that system, and a contributor to the ongoing under-representation of certain groups.
Wellcome’s most recent Trends in Grants report,[11] published in March 2020, shows that over the past five years:
An important question for a funder to ask is whether success rates are lower for some groups than others. This helps to disentangle whether the lower representation of women is because fewer apply, or because women are less successful when they do apply. Our analysis shows that differences in success rate by gender exist but tend to be relatively small for schemes in Science. However, women make up a much smaller proportion of applicants and awardees in Wellcome’s most senior schemes in Science and are overrepresented among our earliest career (i.e. pre-PhD level schemes).
Data therefore seems to reflect the well-documented challenge of the leaky pipeline, i.e. that the proportion of women in academic research in STEM decreases with seniority.
Only 2% of UK-based applicants to Wellcome grants identified themselves as disabled. According to the UK Government family resources survey 2016/17, 19% of working-age adults are disabled. Over the past three years the success rate for disabled applicants (13%) has been lower than for non-disabled applicants (15%). But the small number of disabled applicants prevents us from making detailed analysis or statistically significant comparisons.
We know from research conducted by other organisations, that this very low number of disabled applicants and grant holders is likely to be both the result of low disclosure (people choosing not to tell Wellcome they are disabled through our diversity monitoring) and the barriers that disabled people face to building a career in research. It is important to note that the question we ask Wellcome applicants and grant holders (“Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person?”) is substantially less broad than the definition of disability used in many benchmarks, however we believe this is unlikely to fully account for the low representation of disabled applicants and grant holders in our funding.
Recent analyses of Wellcome’s funding describe the under-representation of Black and minority ethnic (BAME) researchers in our grant funding portfolio:
We acknowledge that it is Wellcome’s role to identify, and then tackle, the reasons behind our lower success rates for Black and Minority Ethnic grant applicants. However, evidence reviews and research indicate that under-representation of BAME, and particularly Black, researchers in UK academic research has structural roots that will require collective action.
For example, in September 2019, Leading Routes published a report, ‘The Broken Pipeline: Barriers to Black PhD Students Accessing Research Council Funding’ that revealed that only 1.2% of research council funded studentships went to Black or Black Mixed students over a three 3-year period. Given the importance of a PhD, and specifically a funded PhD, for progression into a scientific career, these very low numbers of PhD studentships will mean a small pool of researchers eligible to apply to Wellcome’s major grant schemes.
As Wellcome seeks to address the disparities in our funding – in particular in relation to race and ethnicity and disability at all stages, and gender at more senior levels – we look to what we can learn from other funding agencies. We particularly encourage the UK Government and its agencies to learn from the approach taken to scientific workforce diversity by the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The Scientific Workforce Diversity (SWD) Office leads NIH’s effort to diversify the national scientific workforce and expand recruitment and retention.
The SWD Office coordinates a programme of work focused on testing a wide-range of interventions and building the evidence base for what works. Creating a UK office for STEM workforce diversity to coordinate work across the relevant UK government funding agencies and departments would signal a move from specific interventions to system-wide commitment to change.
The pathway to a research career, involving multiple challenging steps, can be argued to be a way of creating a highly trained STEM workforce capable of delivering research of the highest standards.
However, the pathway is also challenging and complex. Research indicates that those from previously marginalised backgrounds face barriers to navigating it and building a career in academic research. This is not to argue that there is anything lacking in these individuals; rather that they do not have access to the same degree of support and opportunities offered to others, i.e. that the problem is structural. These challenges are outlined in the “Broken Pipeline” report from Leading Routes:
“BME students at UK universities are less likely than their white counterparts to graduate from undergraduate degree programmes with a first or upper second class degree (Miller, 2016); more likely to lack a sense of belonging in or satisfaction with higher education (Mountford-Zimdars, 2015 and less likely to complete their first undergraduate degree (Woodfield, 2014, p. 8) – the lowest rates of continuation being amongst Black students (Keohane, 2017). Whilst the number of BME students attending university has increased by 34% since 2010-11 (HEFCE, 2017), only a small proportion enrol at highly selective Russell Group institutions (Boliver, 2016).
Specifically, BME representation amongst postgraduate research students continues to be low. BME representation continues to remain relatively high among first degree undergraduates and taught postgraduates (23.9% and 22.0%, respectively). However, this has been markedly lower among all postgraduate research students where 16.8% are from BME backgrounds (Advance HE, 2018) - just 4% of which are Black (HESA, 2019).”[12]
Research conducted by the Bridge Group for Wellcome in 2016 highlights the same challenge: that current pathways into postgraduate research act as a blocker to BAME, and specifically Black, students following this route. This points to the fact that the under-representation of BAME researchers is linked to current pathways into postgraduate research:
“There are clear, and at times very stark, differences in entry to doctoral study by ethnicity. Attainment levels at first degree explain part of the difference. Increasing the diversity of the STEMM doctoral student body will require widening the net for recruitment, since most of the high-achieving STEMM graduates from minority ethnic backgrounds are located outside of Russell Group universities.”[13]
As part of its programme of work focused on improving research culture, Wellcome commissioned Shift Learning to undertake a study (literature review, followed by 94 qualitative interviews, four workshops and a quantitative online survey of over 4,000 researchers) into the current state of research culture. The aim was to generate a rigorous foundation of data from which to better understand the current culture.
The picture is not uniform, but there are many common themes. Researchers are passionate about their work and proud to be part of the research community. Culture varies a great deal from place to place, and different individuals have very different experiences, with underrepresented groups experiencing the most challenges, such as bullying and harassment. Researchers say that their working culture is best when it is collaborative, inclusive, supportive and creative, when researchers are given time to focus on their research priorities, when leadership is transparent and open, and when individuals have a sense of safety and security. But too often research culture is not at its best.
While most researchers feel that their sector is producing high-quality outputs, they also report deep concerns about how sustainable the culture is in the long term. They say that conditions are being worsened by a complex network of incentives from government, funders and institutions that seem to focus on quantity of outputs, and narrow concepts of ‘impact’, rather than on real quality. The upshot is that they feel intense pressure to publish, with too little value placed on how results are achieved and the human costs. They accept competition as a necessary part of working in research but think that it is often becoming aggressive and harmful. They also have widespread concerns about job security – especially in academia. While many researchers enjoy and feel equipped to manage their teams, those being managed are often missing out on the critical aspects of good management such as feedback. And worse, many have experienced exploitation, discrimination, harassment and bullying.[14] For example, findings from Wellcome’s survey into research culture indicated that 43% of respondents. had experienced bullying or harassment, while 61% had witnessed it. These figures rose when looking at results for those who self-identified as disabled: 62% of disabled respondents reported experiencing bullying or harassment, whereas 73% had witnessed it. Women were also more likely to have experienced bullying or harassment (49%) than men (34%).[15]
Wellcome acknowledges that improving research culture will require concerted effort on the part of government, agencies, funders and universities.
A focus on the transition into postgraduate research: Wellcome and others have noted the importance of the transition into postgraduate research, and the need to improve access to postgraduate research studentships for Black and Minority Ethnic students in particular. The recent funding call from the Office for Students and Research England[16] represents a positive tangible step to both understanding current barriers and interventions that will work to address these. It will be important for the UK government and its agencies to put in place sustainable funding for this work, given that long-standing inequalities will take considerable time and effort to address. We don’t know what will make a real difference in this area, and so we need to invest in initiatives and monitor and evaluate their impact.
Data gathering: While insufficient in itself to address long-standing inequities in STEM, robust data gathering – at all education and career stages – will enable organisations and sectors to track progress, and also be held accountable for progress. Something that is not currently possible is to track individuals through different aspects of the education system (school, university) and into their careers. Such an ability to track individuals through their careers will be important to understand the impact of interventions. Coordination by the Government or its agencies to enable this data infrastructure would be valuable.
Positive action programmes to specifically address the under-representation of BAME researchers: We consider it particularly important that measures be taken to address the under-representation of BAME researchers, from PHD level onwards, as noted above. In order to address this challenge, targeted interventions to ensure BAME (and specifically Black British) students are supported to become postgraduate research students will be important. It is timely for positive action measures to be considered at all career stages. Potential examples include the creation of dedicated PhD fellowships for students from BAME backgrounds as exist in the United States.[17]
Measures to address bullying, harassment and non-inclusive behaviours:
Although responsibility for improving the culture within research lies with individuals and institutions, there would be value in the Government, and its funding agencies, exploring what tools can be used to more robustly tackle non-inclusive behaviours. In 2020 Wellcome held a series of townhall events as part of its research culture programme of work, and participants provided a number of suggestions of measures that could be taken to tackling bullying and harassment:
We think such suggestions would require thoughtful implementation (given what is known about the bias against women and other minoritised groups in the provision of feedback[18]), but this is where sector collaboration could be valuable. We welcome the work of BEIS in this area with the plans for a new research and development People and Culture Strategy, noted in the BEIS Roadmap.
Given the particularly negative impact of bullying and harassment on BAME academics – both in terms of prevalence and impact[19], there would be value in exploring the inclusion of principles of anti-racism in existing bullying and harassment policies and training, as recommended by Dr Nicola Rollock in her report on the experience of Black women professors in the UK.[20]
5. What are the impacts of COVID-19 on equity for STEM workers (including job and income security, contract type etc) in the short- and medium-term? Which communities, groups, organisations or sectors are being most impacted?
Wellcome shares the concerns of many in the research field that COVID-19 will have a negative impact on researchers because of (but not limited to) caring responsibilities and health challenges.
Wellcome has begun to address this by adapting our grant application process. There is a section in our application forms where applicants can describe the impact of the pandemic on their research. We will take this into account when reviewing applications. https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-grant-applicants-and-grantholders
It will be important that all research funders take into account the fact that some people will have been more negatively impacted than others by the pandemic – and that this will mean they have fewer research outputs, such as publications. The reasons for this include, but are not limited to, the additional burden placed on those who have caring responsibilities, and the requirement to shield for those with certain medical conditions.
(January 2022)
[1] Policy: NIH to balance sex in cell and animal studies. Nature. 2014.
[2] Sex inclusion in basic research drives discovery. PNAS. 2015.
[3] Factors affecting sex-related reporting in medical research: a cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis. Lancet. 2019.
[4] One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis. Nature Human Behaviour. 2017
[5] Who do we invent for? Patents by women focus more on women’s health, but few women get to invent. Science. 2021.
[6] Topic choice contributes to the lower rate of NIH awards to African-American/black scientists. Science Advances. 2019.
[7] The diversity-innovation paradox in science. PNAS. 2020.
[8] The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? PLOS Biology. 2018.
[9] Strategies to improve equity in faculty hiring. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 2019.
[10] See, for example: https://royalsociety.org/blog/2021/01/trends-on-students-and-staff-with-disabilities-in-stem/ and https://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/external/disclosure-and-support-issues-for-disabled-staff-in-higher-education-report-2008.pdf
[11] https://wellcome.org/reports/grant-funding-data-2018-2019
[12] The Broken Pipeline, Barriers to Black PhD Students Accessing Research Council Funding, Paulette Williams, Sukhi Bath , Dr. Jason Arday and Chantelle Lewis, September 2019
[13] Diversity in Grant Awarding and Recruitment at the Wellcome Trust, Bridge Group, August 2016.
[14] What researchers think about the culture they work in, Wellcome Trust and Shift Learning, 2020, https://wellcome.org/reports/what-researchers-think-about-research-culture
[15] What researchers think about the culture they work in, Wellcome Trust and Shift Learning, 2020, https://wellcome.org/reports/what-researchers-think-about-research-culture
[16] https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/improving-access-and-participation-for-minority-ethnic-groups-in-pgr-study/
[17] https://www.hhmi.org/science-education/programs/gilliam-fellowships-advanced-study
[18] Chávez, K., & Mitchell, K. (2020). Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53(2), 270-274. doi:10.1017/S1049096519001744
[19] Universities & College Union (UCU) (2016) The experiences of Black and minority ethnic staff in further and higher education, London, https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7861/The-experiences-of-black-and-minority-ethnic-staff-in-further-and-higher-education-Feb-16/pdf/BME_survey_report_Feb161.pdf
[20] Rollock, N., (2019). Staying Power: The career experiences and strategies of UK Black female professors, https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10075/staying-power/pdf/ucu_rollock_february_2019.pdf