Diversity monitoring data collection: tips and guidance

EDIS Symposium 2019 Blog – Part 1

Welcome to the first of a series of blogs we will be producing about the 2019 EDIS Symposium. We know that attending and presenting at research conferences is vital to career progression, personal and professional development. We also know that within the science and health research sector, some people are systematically excluded from attending, contributing at or participating fully in these events. We want to explain some of the ideas, decisions and methods we used to try to make our event inclusive, and to measure if we were successful.

Diversity monitoring data is useful; it gives you a snapshot of who has managed to access your event (or employment within your organisation) and is a good first step to understanding who might face barriers to inclusion. However, it is important to understand that under-representation seen in diversity monitoring data is just one symptom of many as a result of issues with equality and inclusion. Treating the underlying cause is more important and effective than focusing on the numbers when solving these issues.

For the EDIS Symposium 2019, the membership group met multiple times over the last year to discuss how to make the event inclusive and how to remove barriers to participation. Diversity monitoring was included as a way to evaluate of these inclusion methods, so we wanted to share our rationale, decisions and approaches.

Important questions to consider when thinking about equality, diversity and inclusion are: why should we collect diversity monitoring data; how will we use this data and how should we collect this data? If you do want to collect diversity monitoring data, you should be able to answer all 3 questions and be confident and clear when explaining this to others.

Why do we collect diversity monitoring data?

We want to improve access and inclusion to science and health research events by typically excluded or marginalised people and groups. To know whether we were successful in doing this, we felt that understanding who attended the Symposium would be a useful indicator. In addition, if we monitor all of our events in this way, we can see whether our audience varies as a result of changes we might make in language, marketing, location, topic or other inclusion measures we might trial.

How do we use this data?

For every diversity monitoring question that you ask, you should see each as making a commitment to using that data in some way to inform decision making, policy or practice. The data can be used to inform your focus or overall approach but a person filling in the form will expect that each bit of data matters equally. This should be your approach, even if the results you get are not what you expected. Having this frame of mind in place before you start creating your form can help you decide what questions are appropriate, what benchmarking data you might use, how to create a plan for evaluating the data and to have a process in place ready to act on the results.

For the 2019 EDIS Symposium we used the following text:

We are collecting anonymous diversity monitoring data so that we have a better understanding of who is attending our events. We can use this information to understand who is attending our different events, benchmark this internally and use it to inform how we run our events and activities. We can also use this information to benchmark against relevant statistics as a way of assessing our own approach to events and other EDIS activities. We will use this questionnaire to create a summary report and we won’t report any aspects where the number of individuals responding are too low.

How should we collect diversity monitoring data?

We have been supporting Dr Emma Molyneaux, the Insight Research Analyst for Wellcome’s Diversity and Inclusion team, who has developed the following guidance on questions you could ask and why you might choose to ask them in different ways, as well as some overarching principles. Emma and the team have researched and reviewed multiple sources of data and diversity monitoring questionnaires extensively and consulted with experts and interested groups to develop this evolving guidance.

Asking the right questions

There are various sources of diversity monitoring questions available, however many will ask similar questions in slightly different ways. It might seem like two questions are asking the same thing, but slight differences are very important in diversity monitoring questions as they can affect how someone interprets the question as well as how you can benchmark the data. For example, if you aim to benchmark against other statistics (e.g. census data), you need to find out how the questions were asked to develop these statistics and ask your questions in a comparable way. Small changes in the way questions are asked can lead to substantial differences in reporting rates.

The Diversity And Inclusion SurveY (DAISY) guidance linked contains general tips as well as a full list of suggested questions, guidance on how to report and why each question might be considered. We hope you find this useful and informative when planning your own diversity monitoring questionnaires.