Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System

[00:00:07] Karine Morin: Welcome to the Big Thinking Podcast, where we explore today’s biggest topics with Canada’s leading voices. I’m Karine Morin, and I am the President and CEO of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

[00:00:20] Earlier this year, the Council of Canadian Academies released its report “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System.” The report examines measures that can enhance EDI, the benefits and challenges of implementing them, and their potential impacts on people and institutions.

[00:00:41] In this episode, Dr. Wendy Rodgers, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Prince Edward Island and Chair of the Expert Panel on EDI Practices for Impactful Change, joins me to talk about this important report. Welcome Dr. Wendy Rodgers, I am delighted to be having this conversation with you.

[00:01:03] Wendy Rodgers: Thank you.

[00:01:05] Karine Morin: In a moment, we'll turn our attention to the report itself. But first I wanted to ask, before being invited to chair the panel, what professional experiences had shaped your understanding and your commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion or EDI.

[00:01:21] Wendy Rodgers: It's a really interesting question. From a scholarly standpoint, I've always been interested in research ethics and have been involved in ethics review and ethics administration and all kinds of things ever since I first became an assistant professor.

[00:01:34] And so through ethics, we're always looking at the balanced effect and both the costs of research, but also the benefits of research as it goes to different kinds of populations.

[00:01:45] And then in my own area, which is health research, it became very, very clear to me and a thing that I've used always is that research methods had led to a selection bias that resulted particularly in the area of cardiac research  

[00:01:59] But of course, there's new areas emerging all the time that a lot was known about the experience and the recovery of, in particular white men and white American men, as they experienced any kind of a cardiac event and intervention and the recovery process because of the way that they were selecting participants in the research, but also because of the rules applied to how we can do analysis and what constitutes an outlier, and actually creates noise in our samples because we only have two or three of these women over here.  

[00:02:32] So we're just going to exclude them and end up focusing entirely on the men, which up to about 20 years ago, resulted in a preponderance of information about the progression of heart disease that applied only to white American men.

[00:02:45] And so as soon as we started to apply that to women or, particularly to new Canadians who are coming from different parts of the world and different cultures, of course, it didn't apply. And even in the United States, it resulted in disproportionate death and morbidity among Black Americans, for example, in addition to women.

[00:03:05] And so that just stuck with me that we have to change the way that we are doing things to be more inclusive, to ensure that the effects of research and scholarship are more equitably distributed across the population.

[00:03:18] Karine Morin: That's really interesting. I have a bit of a background in bioethics and I too have found that there's some important intersections between the field of ethics and health and bioethics and equity, diversity, inclusion more broadly.  

[00:03:29] But let's turn to that report, and let's say briefly, that there are four key chapters, one that speaks to measures for recruiting, supporting faculty, staff, as well as students, a chapter on other measures for institutions to become more equitable, diverse, and inclusive, a chapter on measures related to government research funding, and then relatedly a chapter on EDI in the research process.

[00:03:56] But since the Federation's membership includes institutions, maybe we can focus a little bit more on these findings. So, starting with those measures that speak to supporting faculty, staff, or students, an example that easily comes to mind is that of mentoring.  

[00:04:12] And as you just spoke of your own experience, the report also demonstrates that EDI work disproportionately falls on the shoulders of members of equity deserving groups often referred to as the minority tax or the equity tax. What can be done for this workload for this responsibly to be distributed more broadly?

[00:04:34] Wendy Rodgers: There's a paradox there, and so yeah, the work does disproportionately fall to equity deserving groups. And I can't speak to all of the causes for that. But of course, it comes from a place that the majority is not going to concern themselves with taking care of minority issues and that people that share characteristics with whatever the minority issue is, they should take care of that themselves.

[00:05:01] And that broadens out a little bit to “women should take care of that, men shouldn't take care of that.” So, there's a lot of gender role influences in there, there's a lot of power relationships, there's the colonial nature of universities and how we run and all the members of the Federation, of course, you're going to be able to speak to that better than I can.  

[00:05:20] However, inviting them all to investigate that further. I'm sure there's plenty of work out there, but how do we distribute it more equitably is part of the problem is that it's never recognized as work in the first place.

[00:05:32] It's recognized as something that's kind of nice if somebody bothered to do that. But I personally have been in evaluation meetings where people say, well, if that professor would just spend less time talking to all of those students and more time on their research, they might do better, but they don't.

[00:05:50] And so, therefore, they're not going to get the same recognition or the same kind of an award as a colleague who focused more narrowly on their research. So there's an under recognition of mentoring and support, particularly of equity deserving or under represented people who are in whatever the disciplinary is as actual work that is meritorious at all and anything other than sort of a waste of time and nice if you can do it, if we want to give that support.

[00:06:16] So I would say it has to start with the recognition that that is real work, and we also have to start by recognizing that our systems are not built to support everybody in the same way. And so looking at what is it about our system that is creating underrepresented or marginalized groups that are not able to succeed in those systems.

[00:06:34] So looking at that and then making that everybody's work so that all the people, whether they're from a majority or whatever the dominant group is in whatever the discipline is, that they have to actually engage in that process to make sure that minimally we're seeing efforts to increase diversity, and diversity is not going to be effective unless we also increase inclusivity.

[00:06:59] And so everybody has to take a role in doing that. I think there's layers of issues in there that we need to attend to.  

[00:07:06] Karine Morin: And again, I appreciate that starting point a paradox. The other way I think of it is how those groups will often also say nothing about us without us, so clearly, they want that inclusion, but then it creates that burden.  

[00:07:20] Wendy Rodgers: Yes.

[00:07:21] Karine Morin: In terms of institutional measures very broadly, the report sort of indicates in one of the chapters that what is needed most are training and leadership buy in.

[00:07:33] Yet, it seems like what we hear most often is that there's a lack of resources to advance EDI work and that it's really the resources or lack thereof that are the impediment. Why do you think this discrepancy between the report's finding on the importance of training and leadership relative to the perception on the ground that it is just a question of having the financial support or having the human resources support to do this work?  

[00:08:01] Wendy Rogers: When we talk about resources, we have to realize that we're talking about systemic issues and therefore identifying a single person or even a single office that's going to try to take care of this issue for us and then check our box is not actually addressing the issue at all.

[00:08:17] And so when we talk about resources, we need to think about the system that created the issue in the first place, but we also need to think about how one person can't possibly take all that on. So, the one person could maybe study what it is that's being exclusive, perhaps in a grant or a scholarship application process.

[00:08:34] And then we could change that process. And then we have to train everybody. I know that the term training is contentious as well, but we have to get everybody ready to understand what we are doing and how we are trying to do that.  

[00:08:47] Because even if we put in place some kind of a system to make sure that we're being more inclusive in how we're evaluating applications for grants, if the people that are reviewing the applications are not understanding what they are being asked to do, then it's not going to play out there either.  

[00:09:04] So, in terms of resources, we need to think of that as more than a person or just a little bit of money, but how we are supporting a whole system that's trying to achieve a particular outcome.

[00:09:18] And then we actually have to assess what steps were taken and what progress was made toward our outcome and evaluate the effectiveness of all of those steps in order to have it be sustainable and have any kind of a long-term impact.  

[00:09:33] Karine Morin: Well, the track I was going to take is to pick on a distinction that the report draws between diverse leadership, and just looking at the composition of leadership teams, and diversity leadership, that's defined as a proficiency of leaders to transform themselves and the institutions.  

[00:09:53] So, would you expand a little bit on that distinction and how it is that institutions indeed may have different compositions, but whatever it is, they can still take on or should still be willing to take on EDI work.

[00:10:08] Wendy Rodgers: So diverse leadership, if you're just measuring that as what are the characteristics of the individuals that comprise the leadership team doesn't necessarily give you diversity, unless all of those individuals are bringing their perspectives influenced by whatever their background is to whatever the discussions are.

[00:10:27] So just because you have an ostensibly diverse team, if that's not resulting in an expanded view of what an issue is, or an expanded range of perspectives brought to whatever discussion is undertaking, then you have not achieved diversity.

[00:10:46] And historically, of course, we see lots of examples. And these have mostly - that I'm aware of - have been written about how individuals were brought in and felt tokenized, basically, because they enhanced “diverseness”, I guess I'll say to avoid saying diversity because of the way that you post that. But then in order to survive in that situation, they had to adapt to the existing culture and practices that was already there.

[00:11:11] So diversity was not enhanced. In fact, it was detracted from because the perspective that came with the person was not welcomed into the environment. So I would, say that leaders have to transform themselves into being able to recognize what their own views are, where those came from, what the boundaries are of that, and then work on broadening those so that they can do their best to invite - minimally - invite in the views of people that are different from them into a particular discussion.

[00:11:46] And I would invite leaders into starting to think about how they can even start to represent some of those views. But still inviting the voices because we don't want to speak on behalf of people. So you really, your point, we want people to speak on their own behalf and make sure that those voices are brought there.

[00:12:02] But then the leader has to be able to take in all of that diversity to influence whatever their next steps are. An easy default position is for instance, when people think that they're doing a broad consultation is to go in and listen to several different groups. And then they're able to say, well, yes, I listened to you all.

[00:12:19] And I'm so it's just going to do this thing over here because doing this thing over here doesn't embrace the diversity that was shared through that consultation. And so it's that latter bit that I think is what the leaders have to do to transform themselves and to be really welcoming of the different perspectives that people are bringing to them through whatever their listening process is.

[00:12:39] Karine Morin: Right. These are all complicated and overlapping considerations. I think we have to absolutely recognize that diversity in and of itself isn't sufficient in that spirit of inclusion and of broadening is really why those two letters are important in that acronym.

[00:12:55] So the report has identified many different EDI practices in different areas. I wonder if you think there were some important key features of what have been effective EDI measures. What would you say is an underlying aspect to those measures that seem to move the needle seem to be effective?

[00:13:18] Wendy Rodgers: So a couple of examples that we have highlighted in the report, one of them is the Canada research chairs program when following the human rights decisions were forced to be more inclusive in the distribution of the Canada Research Chairs.  

[00:13:36] And there's some power and some money, which is always power, that goes along with that particular decision that required that the Canada Research Chairs be distributed more equitably.

[00:13:49] And that went with specific targets that were required for the overall program and for each of the institutions. It required for each of the institutions to come up with its own EDI action plan for how it was going to achieve and maintain this greater equity of distribution of the chairs.

[00:14:09] And it came up with specific consequences for the failure to achieve the targets and failure to achieve success in the EDI action plan itself. And so, in situations where that are a little bit reward based then we have to have those levels of consequences for failure to achieve the outcomes in order for the outcomes to get any traction.

[00:14:36] And I would say a very important feature wasn't with the targets, they were a very important feature because they helped the institutions realize where they had to get. And it gets us beyond sort of “do your best goals” to a specific targeted outcome of the goal, but the building of the action plan itself required much more integration of those ideas and those activities across the entire institution.

[00:14:56] So it became everybody's work, and it also became a plan that they had to implement year on year on year which starts to build the cultural change that you need for any of those things to get some traction and to become sustainable in the institution.  

[00:15:12] So that integrated approach, the overall planning approach, the targets, and then the outcomes for failure to achieve the targets were all really important components of that.

[00:15:22] Karine Morin: I wonder if you'd agree that in part then what was needed is a set of very clear instructions and clear expectations. And in a way, I wonder if you want to compare a little bit to a program that is dear to my heart, the Dimensions program that supported institutions and didn't have quite of that same set targets and consequences.

[00:15:49] It was really intended for willing institutions to participate, put forward some of those elements, action plans and whatnot, but they were invited to do so just for the recognition of achieving different levels.

[00:16:03] That said, the Dimensions program had a very comprehensive handbook, so, a set of instructions/expectations and so carrot or stick, or is it just people had been trying to second guess how to go about it and we're starting to accumulate a better understanding and therefore it really was, what is it we're trying to get at?  

[00:16:24] And we needed to put out some clear instructions, clear expectations and means to achieve those ends. How would you compare those two approaches or generally where we are now with EDI, an understanding of EDI measures?

[00:16:38] Wendy Rodgers: Sure. So, I agree with what you said and won't reiterate about the clear instructions and measures, I do think that that is critical in helping people, you know, how were they going to go about doing this? So I think that that was important.  

[00:16:51] The Dimensions program was interesting and it did entice universities to participate for the desired outcomes that they were trying to achieve, but there was no consequences for doing it or for not doing it.

[00:17:03] And I am not an expert on the Dimensions program but it's an example of a program where it was nice. And if a few people wanted to work on that, that would be great, they could go ahead and do that, but if things got too busy, you could get pulled off that project and had to go back and work on something else in the institution.  

[00:17:21] The institutions were not required to put any resources into it, so most of them didn't get a lot of investment, I would say. And then there wasn't a lot of measurement of the effects of the dimensions program, and it did fade away.

[00:17:36] As we know, it was recently announced that it's coming back. And so that's useful. And that came from anecdotal evidence, particularly from female scholars who were saying that it had started to make a difference in the institutions where it was more active, but where you leave it up to the choice of the institution.

[00:17:54] First of all, it suggests that it is an option, you can choose to do this, or you can choose not. Well, then it's an option, so I guess we can decide it's not an important core component of what it is to have a good research program, you know, like capital funds to build labs is for instance, so you're not putting it out there as though it is a required component.

[00:18:14] And then whenever you have pressures on our resources, which is basically always that. At the time, institutions are not going to do something that is optional, they are only going to do the things that are required and specifically things that are required that they believe will lead to superior outcomes for their institution.

[00:18:38] So that's how I would compare them. Although I think the spirit of Dimensions is where we need to be and maybe we are there now, but back when it first started, I don't know that we were there and I don't think the buy in was as great as it needed to be.

[00:18:52] Karine Morin: And I think that speaks to, in fact, how there has been an acceleration of, learning and understanding that has occurred in the past five years, whereas the Canada Research  Chairs Program in its earliest days, 20 years ago, would not have had that benefit of data-informed, evidence-informed understanding of what is at play in universities and colleges and, of course, secondary institutions.

[00:19:14] I want to shift a little bit to the chapter that speaks of EDI measures in the context of research practices and even research design. I found it interesting that lot of examples seem to have been drawn from health sciences - as your background speaks to - and STEM, and less so from the humanities and social sciences.

[00:19:36] And I wonder if you have a thought on how those disciplines need to also take on, in a explicit way, some of the work of EDI and not just let it be part of social sciences and humanities are about groups of people, etc., etc.

[00:19:56] So how do you think it would be important for humanities, social sciences to take this on more explicitly?

[00:20:02] Wendy Rodgers: What I can say is that across all of the areas, for instance, if you look at the progression of academics through the ranks, none is particularly strong there.

[00:20:14] And so, we can even make assumptions. And I think there are assumptions around that some disciplines are a little bit more inclusive than other disciplines, but I think they actually need to get quantitative data and look at that and really evaluate it.  

[00:20:30] And this is a big call generally that we need to have more data and more disaggregated data to look at how we are doing on the inclusion, even of the scholars who are engaging in this work in the social sciences and the humanities, in health sciences and, in STEM.

[00:20:48] And there will be little pockets, and we're aware of where most of them are, where there's very, very clear marginalized groups or, or unincluded groups. So, what are people doing to make sure that they're including all the different kinds of people.  

[00:21:01] In the social sciences and humanities, I think they do need to attend that who are the scholars and what is the access to scholarship, and what are the assumptions that are driving what is good research in each of these areas need to be looked at.

[00:21:14] A phrase that comes a little bit more out of STEM and health sciences are sort of “gold standards.” So, gold standards for methods or measures or analysis depending on the discipline, there's different word terminology used to do that. But I would also say that what pervades all of the scholarly areas is a little bit of a backward loop in the evaluation of the quality of scholars, and the quality of the scholarly outputs.

[00:21:44] And this is because we always look to the most senior scholars as the experts in the fields to be the evaluators of the work coming from the newer scholars. And they are using that sort of gold standard approach as their filter in the evaluation of that work. And there's always going to be a bias built in there for all of the humans, but some of them try to overcome it.

[00:22:12] It's quite common that the newest work that is most divergent from whatever that traditional approach is, is not easily accepted by that kind of an evaluation system that is created by the career paths of people that had to, go through those traditional steps in order to achieve their expertise and are still using those criteria to evaluate the scholars that are coming next.

[00:22:40] And so until a few of those break through that, it's very difficult to disrupt that kind of an evaluative system. And that always results in whatever the newest, most disruptive idea is taking a long time to achieve any credibility, and it often has to achieve that credibility through alternative pathways, through publishing outlets that that dominant group is going to say, well, those aren't credible publishing outlets.

[00:23:10] They just developed that so they could get their work going and then you start to see things like podcasts emerging, and you start to see things like blogs emerging. And now you're seeing a little bit more on open access journals and these kinds of things emerging, but those are very expensive.

[00:23:27] And so it's very difficult for those that haven't already succeeded in the grant begets a grant, begets an award, begets another grant pathway to participate even in that. So, I think all of the areas of scholarship need to look at who they are deciding is the key expert in their area, how they are evaluating new scholars and new scholarship, and how they are funding those kinds of ideas to allow for just a faster turnover of ideas.

[00:23:55] And right away, that's going to poke a lot of people into thinking, well, we're just weakening our standards, just lowering the bar and now anybody can do anything they want and it's not real scholarship. And so that is a place right there where I think the social sciences and humanities could do a lot of work on helping people get tools for what constitutes good quality scholarship, good diversity of scholarship.

[00:24:21] And I always go back actually to when qualitative research was emerging and for a long time, it was, it was not given any credibility at all, it wasn't scientific in any kind of way and now, of course, it's held up as another kind of data that we need to collect, especially in the health sciences, for instance, which is heavily quantitative, but somebody has to do that work to change those systems.

[00:24:46] Karine Morin: It's really interesting speaking of trying to assess the excellence of disruptive or divergent it seems to be a real challenge. I know that the report also places a lot of emphasis on accountability as a critical factor for measures to be successful. And I wonder what that entails for institutions.

[00:25:06] What do they need to do differently to make sure that that accountability is at the forefront of their work? What mind set has to shift or change to be transformed within institutions to be willing to be transparent and accountable?

[00:25:22] Wendy Rodgers: So, one of the main findings throughout our work was that there is a lack of data evaluating the effectiveness of any kind of measure to enhance EDI in any aspect of the post-secondary. It's not good enough to say, well, we tried really hard, or we told everybody that they should pay attention to this.

[00:25:46] There has to be specific goals, and then there has to be a specific pathway to achieve the goal. And that has to go with some sort of assessment, often metrics of some kind, or evaluative criteria of some kind, to see, are we taking the steps that we need to take? And did those steps, in fact, lead to the outcome that we wanted to.

[00:26:11] And I would add to that, that we need to look at whether or not those outcomes were enduring or not. Because if we look at the CRC program, for instance, if they were to pull away the accountability that's required there for maintaining the equity targets - they called them - and the action plan, for instance, there's no question that that would all drop off and it would all go back the way it was before because we haven't gone through enough generations of scholars yet to have that be commonplace and expected behavior.

[00:26:46] So, if you take out those accountability indicators which were imposed by the CRC, then that's all going to slip back. So, institutions have to do that for themselves, they have to lay a pathway, they have to decide what it is that they want to achieve, then they have to say how they're going to do that because just saying we're going to achieve a salary equity and, but not saying how they're going to do that.

[00:27:05] Well, of course they're never going to achieve it. And then they, at the end, they're just going to say, well, you know, we tried really hard. It's an intractable problem, what are we going to do? Well, they need to set progressive goals to help them achieve whatever the target is, and they need to be really transparent about that. I would suggest, allow the community to say, well, you said you were going to do this, did you do it?

[00:17:29] Karine Morin: A bit of a walk to talk on the science of EDI, I guess, in a way. The report, um, has a lot of content and a lot of references, how do you envision all of these findings, this assessment can inform EDI efforts for the post-secondary research ecosystem going forward? What are your hopes for this report?

[00:27:41] Wendy Rodgers: Yeah, you're right, it's a big report, and it has lots of sources in it, I have to give such a huge amount of credit to the panel, and to the Canadian Council of Academies’ staff who kept tracking down everything that the panel said. There's a good amount of diversity in the panel, especially in the literatures that they are working with regularly.

[00:28:14] They were very knowledgeable about a broad array of literatures down to the individuals, very impressive. So, they tracked down everything that was mentioned and that's why there's a lot of things in there. What I would hope is that every institution sort of reads through it.

[00:28:30] And so I think what it shows us is that there's a broad array of things that can be done, and I think an institution can pick a path that it wants to follow and do their work to implement that path in a really robust way. Because another big finding is that the most effective interventions were more integrated across the institution.

[00:28:50] They did have resources and by resources, we mean money, of course, so financial resources, but also human resources and also expertise for those humans. So not just any human, you want to make sure that they have the expertise and it's more than passion. It's great if everybody's an advocate for inclusion, for instance, but there is a science behind this and they need to be informed on what that science is, and they need to have a specific path laid out and they need to have an outcome, and they need to evaluate whether or not they achieved that outcome.

[00:29:21] So if every institution picked up just one thing that was important to them and they followed that pathway and they did some goal setting, set some evaluation metrics for themselves, tracked all that and reported on it, that would take us a long way, I think.  

[00:29:38] And then I also think if all of the institutions were to work together, and this would be a great thing for all of the tri-agencies to participate in, if they worked together on collecting at least a minimum amount of data on faculty, staff, students, and activities’ impact, that it would be much easier to share what is effective in some places and other places.

[00:30:04] It would also be much easier to identify because there's different patterns of lack of diversity across the country, for instance, and what's going on in different places, and then help them get there more readily would give us a more national approach to it. So, I think if we could work together on just a few little things that would help us all.

[00:30:25] Karine Morin: Oh, I think you've set a clear path forward course of action, and hopefully there'll be lots of your colleagues who will want to take it up with you. And certainly, I do hope that the work will be done collaboratively and not in a competitive way.  

[00:30:37] I certainly have heard that EDI is meant to be work done in solidarity, and hopefully that's what we'll see coming forward. Thank you very much, Wendy Rogers, this has been wonderful to explore this report with you.  

[00:30:51] Wendy Rodgers: Thank you.

[00:31:01] Karine Morin: I thank our audience for listening to the Big Thinking Podcast. Also, a very sincere thank you to my guest, Wendy Rodgers, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Prince Edward Island and Chair of the Expert Panel on EDI Practices for Impactful Change.

[00:31:18] I also want to thank our friends and partners at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, whose support helps make this podcast possible. Finally, thank you to CitedMedia for their support in producing the Big Thinking Podcast. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform to catch new episodes. À la prochaine!

This podcast had production support from Cited Media, the academic podcasting company. For more, go to citedmedia.ca