The mission of our EDI Hub+ is to drive systemic change, to deliver an Engineering, Physical and Mathematical Sciences (EPMS) research and innovation system that is equitable and inclusive for everyone – irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability, or socio-economic status.
It is widely recognised that the EPMS community faces many equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) challenges, particularly in relation to gender, ethnicity, and disability. A lot of important work is going on to try to address these EDI challenges, yet our experience is that much of this work is uncoordinated, poorly evidenced, and fails to become embedded in mainstream practice. All too often, funded EDI interventions and initiatives have been small in scale, limited in scope, and time constrained. While these projects generate important learning and good practice, the benefits are seldom fully realised because they fail to scale-up and achieve widespread and sustained adoption. Analogy can be made with the well-known phenomenon of the “valley of death” which occurs at the transitions between research and implementation. Engaging with the broad EPMS community to identify and share good EDI practice, determine unmet EDI needs, and evaluate what does and does not work, our aim is to scale-up EDI interventions that demonstrate success, and provide advice, funding and partnership-building support to progress them on the journey towards widespread implementation and adoption.
Our vision is underpinned by five key objectives:
Objective 1: Build a co-ordinated and collaborative network, bringing together the full breadth of the EPMS research and innovation community (universities, business, funders) to facilitate knowledge exchange, share good practice, identify unmet needs, and co-create interventions that seek to address those needs.
Objective 2: Collate and curate an interactive online resource of EDI interventions, with robust evidence as to what works and, crucially, what doesn’t work.
Objective 3: Develop EDI indices and supporting material that help us to get the right intervention to the right organisation at the right time.
Objective 4: Pilot and evaluate interventions embedded in EPMS research and innovation contexts.
Objective 5: Scale up successful interventions to widespread adoption, working in partnership with funders learned societies, higher education institutions, and industry to develop national-level guidelines, pledges, policies, and programmes that see the most successful activities and interventions fully embedded.