Ethnic minority experts excluded from peer review in UK, MPs told

The UK’s main research funder has been criticised for its “sluggish” and “glacial” response to warnings that most research council committees lack any representation from black or ethnic minority staff.

Speaking at the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Narender Ramnani, professor of neuroscience at Royal Holloway, University of London, said that he had flagged the severe under-representation of ethnic minority staff on decision-making bodies with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), after obtaining data on the composition of committees via a Freedom of Information request, but had been disappointed by its response.

According to Professor Ramnani, just over half (51 per cent) of committee meetings held by six of the UK’s research councils over a five-year period failed to include a single ethnic minority member.

The Medical Research Council had the best record, with 22 per cent of meetings having no ethnic minority representation, falling to 7 per cent in one individual year, but other councils fared less well; in 2015-16, 92 per cent of Arts and Humanities Research Council meetings failed to include a single ethnic minority member, which, Professor Ramnani told the committee, was “shocking”.

That representation did not reflect the available pool of talent, he explained. At the Engineering and Physical Research Council, some 16.5 per cent of members of its peer review colleges were from ethnic minorities but many meetings – often attended by between 15 and 25 people, in his experience – still had no ethnic minority representation, he said.

“You have to wonder if 16.5 per cent are ethnic minority, why do we have these scenarios – why are any meetings devoid of ethnic minority representation?” said Professor Ramnani, who said only one council – the Economic and Social Research Council – had issued any guidance on this issue, despite all councils having policies to ensure women are present.

He questioned whether UKRI – which oversees the country’s research councils – was fulfilling its equality duties as a public body given the lack of representation at many committee meetings and criticised its slow response to his concerns.

“Its timescales to respond to this are glacial, at best – they are very slow,” he said, asking why UKRI had failed to pick up this problem with its own data.

“What has UKRI been doing with data for five years – it’s never been presented and there is no action plan to deal with it; all I’ve seen is a tweet about it in the past few days,” said Professor Ramnani.

He claimed there was a “lack of vision and lack of strategy” on equality issues from UKRI’s leadership. “It looks a bit fractured – every research council is doing its own thing and has its own standards,” he said. “It looks like there is not any drive from the top.”

Ensuring representation at research council committee meetings would be a “day’s work” if central guidance was issued, he said. “We do not need more committee or inquiries – it is just updating the guidance,” said Professor Ramnani.

Calling for public reporting of ethnic minority representation at committee meetings, he added that he wanted “time-bound actions” on this. “We cannot have this sluggishness in responding to this,” he said.

Melanie Welham, UKRI executive champion for people, culture and talent, said the organisation was “grateful to Professor Ramnani for his work on these important issues and in raising it with the Science and Technology Committee”.

“We have made progress but we need to do much more to help foster a system that is fair, just and equitable,” continued Professor Welham.

“Black, Asian and ethnic minority researchers and innovators are underrepresented across our portfolio and the wider system, including on our research council committees. Across UKRI we are actively reviewing and updating our processes and policies to improve inclusion.”

Speaking at the same hearing, Rachel Oliver, director of the Centre for Gallium Nitride at the University of Cambridge and representative of the Inclusion Group for Equity in Research and STEMM, agreed that UKRI’s response to this issue had been “glacial”. “Good representatives from ethnic minorities with the peer review colleges are not being drawn upon…and, as panel chairs, are hugely underrepresented,” she said.

That was important because “a tiny amount of bias” in a “very marginal and competitive grant process” make the difference between a researcher getting grant funding or not – which, when compounded by the system, “means we have a very large number of white male professors and very few black women professors”, said Professor Oliver.

She suggested that an external body should audit UKRI's progress on equality and diversity issues. "We can't have UKRI marking its own homework," said Professor Oliver.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com