When political winds shift, EDI programmes that were built on values statements rather than governance structures are the first to be exposed.
In the context of research, this became visible with the political decisions of the second Trump administration.
The change in policy by a significant global player, like the US, has highlighted that we have never really built diversity into our research governance.
An example
Let us imagine that I, as a gay man, have my PhD funded in a Horizon Europe project. A core partner in the project is a partner outside Europe, where being gay is illegal. One of the key workshops in the project is held in this country, and I am concerned about whether I can go.
Who is going to advise me? The PI? HR? Head of department? The research manager of the project? And based on what? Our internal HR rules, national law and our Gender Equality Plan all say that we promote LGBTQ+ researchers and issues.
But is that of any use when being gay is illegal in the partner country? And can we challenge the partner on this issue without it being colonial behaviour? And who should address them? Me as a PhD student?
The challenges and questions are many, and, unfortunately, the solutions are not easy; it is often unclear who is responsible. From an HR perspective, the rules are likely clear, but these are the institution’s internal rules, and much research happens in inter-institutional international research collaborations.
And so, at a time of global tension and the politicisation of underrepresented groups, we leave the researchers and, particularly, the research managers responsible for the research projects, navigating a no-man’s-land without the proper skills and governance structures.
Three directions
In the UK, EDI in research is currently being pulled in three different directions, which isn’t making things any easier.
The first force pulls upward and inward. REF, and particularly the now-paused People, Culture and Environment framework, has concentrated institutional energy on performing diversity at the level of strategy, culture statements, and governance structures. This is where senior leadership attention flows, where resources are committed, and where progress is legible and auditable.
It is also almost entirely disconnected from what happens inside an international research project. An institution can score well on research culture indicators while its international collaborative projects remain ungoverned territory for anyone concerned with inclusion.
The second force pulls downward into projects. UKRI, Wellcome Trust, and an increasing number of international funders embed diversity requirements directly into grant conditions. Those requirements fall on PIs and research managers, the people who sign the grant agreement, manage the budget, and run the project meetings.
But without training, frameworks, and professional support, it risks becoming a performative box-ticking exercise. Not out of ill-will, but because everybody is left with good intentions, moral statements and policies.
The third force pulls outward across borders. The re-association of the UK with Horizon Europe and the broader pressure to rebuild international partnerships after years of disruption mean that collaborative projects spanning multiple countries are growing again. These are settings where national legislations clash and institutional EDI policies do not travel. It is also where the real complexity, different legal definitions of protected characteristics, cultural norms, and different power dynamics between partner institutions from the Global North and South have to be navigated in real time. And most of the navigation is done, by people who have never been trained to do so.
Low baseline
Too often, the result is avoiding conflict and aiming for the lowest common denominator, leaving underrepresented groups in research to fight for themselves and causing their perspectives in the actual research to be forgotten.
The consequences are predictable. When no one is trained, and no framework exists, it is easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist. In practice, that means the lead institution’s majority culture sets the terms. It means underrepresented researchers absorb the costs of cultural friction that nobody is responsible for managing, or they are expected to solve it, just because they are part of said groups, making EDI a question of sheer representation and not skills.
It means diversity requirements in grant agreements get treated as compliance boxes rather than genuine practice. And it means research excellence suffers, because the evidence is clear that diverse teams, well led, produce better science, and the “well led” part is not happening.
In the preparation for my forthcoming book on this topic, research managers from across the world have described navigating exactly this gap, making judgment calls about team dynamics, researcher well-being, and cross-cultural conflict with no institutional support and no professional framework. They were not failing. They were improvising, alone, in the space between HR policies (and in the UK, perhaps a REF statement) and a grant agreement, trying to make inclusion work in settings no one had designed for it.
The solution is not to take responsibility away from HR or from institutional leadership. It is to recognise that diversity leadership is also a research management competency and belongs to the professional formation of research managers and to the governance frameworks for internationally collaborative projects. This means diversity literacy is a recognised core component of research manager training, not an optional add-on for those who find it interesting. If we don’t support the entire research community in all its diversity and the messy complexity of the real world, we are not supporting research excellence.
What to do
There are no quick fixes to a complex problem, but a combination of approaches and tools can create a coherent and consistent framework that enables pragmatic solutions while maintaining a balance between our values and colonial behaviour towards the cultures we collaborate with.
It means funder requirements accompanied by the professional development infrastructure to meet them, to make a real difference for underrepresented groups, not just for the institutions to look good. It means consortium agreements that address inclusion as seriously as they address intellectual property. And it means the research management profession, which in the UK is more developed than almost anywhere in the world, is stepping into a role it has not yet been asked to play.
Diversity literacy and leadership first and foremost mean a shared vocabulary, tools to analyse the situation and find the right solutions to the challenge. But it is also learning to handle conflicts around sensitive topics like identity and culture, addressing diversity when supporting researchers in developing research strategies. And finally it is about dealing with the pushback that inevitably happens in the real world.
If we don’t start embedding diversity literacy and leadership in international research management, we leave it to good intentions and improvisation. Good intentions are not a strategy, and improvisation is not a sustainable governance mode, not to the research managers and researchers navigating it, and particularly not for the underrepresented groups and the society at large funding the research. And as international partnerships grow in complexity and funder expectations rise, the cost of leaving it unaddressed will show up not in REF statements on research culture, but in who gets to do research, and what research gets done
This raises a number of very important points. For a PhD student, the ‘home’ university is responsible for student progression and wellbeing. Some of this is covered in guidance to the sector, but fulfilling these obligations often requires knowing what to look out for. For example, if a disabled UK PhD student is studying for a joint PhD with an Australian university, and no one is aware that there isn’t ‘presumed institutional knowledge’ of disability in the Australian university context, the student may not know that they’re expected to tell each individual service themselves. If a problem arises, then the disabled PhD student may experience a detrimental impact to their studies and wellbeing, through no fault of their own.
For a sector built on knowledge, these issues really aren’t too complex to resolve. Values-based approaches may mean that collaborations don’t take place with partners whose values are fundamentally opposed to each others’.
I do hope that the staff who are responsible for PhD students find a solution to the issue you’ve raised.
“But is that of any use when being gay is illegal in the partner country?”
I once worked at a University in this situation and the advice given to staff and students was “act more manly”.