Q&A: Embedding EDI at The Biochemical Society with Sarah Jenner

The Biochemical Society has been advancing molecular bioscience for over 100 years, promoting its importance as a discipline, facilitating knowledge-sharing, and supporting molecular bioscientists across all career stages. We talked to Sarah Jenner, Governance and EDI Manager at The Biochemical Society about how their equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) commitments have developed since 2019.

The Biochemical Society wrote a guest post for the EDIS in 2019 where Laura Woodland highlighted the Society’s EDI work in relation to grants and bursary funding. How has the society’s approach to EDI changed since then?

It’s been really nice to reflect on how we’ve developed what Laura outlined in that blog post. The main shift since 2019 has been the centralisation of our EDI commitment – we describe it as a golden thread that runs through everything we do, or sometimes a central pulse that reverberates throughout the organisation.

An example of this centralisation is that instead of one team thinking about accessible communications and changing their approach while another team does their own work on the same issue, we’ve adopted a central approach and provided a staff training session on accessible communications. This has meant that we’ve built accessibility into multiple ways the Society communicates, such as governance committee papers and our new website.

There’s always more work to be done, but EDI is at the heart of all of our work now – everyone’s looped into the same conversation.

In 2022, the Biochemical Society launched a three-year strategy that centres EDI, with the key principles of awareness, action and accountability. How did EDI come to be centred in the strategy and why?

The events of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement really pushed us to formalise our approach to EDI. In October of 2020, we established our EDI Advisory Panel formed of people from across our community who came together to work with the Society on how we can deliver EDI both internally and campaign for better EDI across the sector.

In 2021, we had the opportunity to reassess our strategy and as we had a year’s worth of recommendations from the EDI Advisory Panel, we decided that it was right to centre EDI. Our then-President was a huge advocate for EDI and he believed that it was not only the right thing to do for society, but also for science. He championed embedding EDI in the strategy, so it was really a joint venture between senior leadership and the EDI Advisory Panel.

It’s been great to have that direction at a strategic level because it enables us to deliver EDI work operationally and embed it into the Society.

The Society is currently working to update its organisational position statement on EDI in the science sector. Can you give us an overview of what the position statement will say and how the Society will use it?

The statement is our public commitment to EDI in the molecular biosciences, which is our area of expertise. It lays out our aims and how we plan to get there, structured around our Manifesto for Change of awareness, action and accountability.

Our goal for awareness is to promote and foster EDI throughout our community so we’re all working towards the same level of inclusion and representation. Action is ensuring we do what we say, like ensuring our work is as widely accessible as possible, whether it’s an event, a resource, or something else. Accountability is about being open and honest about what we’ve done, what we’ve yet to do, and what we can improve on. We’re always learning!

Our refreshed position statement came out of discussions with our EDI Advisory Panel – our previous position statement was very internal-facing, but after discussion with the panel we decided to take a position on how we act as an organisation to enhance our credibility within the sector. Going forward, we’re planning on reviewing our position statement on an annual basis to keep it up to date so it remains useful and stays at the forefront of people’s minds.

The Biochemical Society is a long-standing member of EDIS. How has the Society’s EDIS membership been beneficial to its EDI work?

It has been massively beneficial! Being able to come together with other organisations in a safe space to develop best EDI practise together has been so useful, it’s not an overstatement to say that EDIS has given us confidence to take our EDI work forward.

EDIS is somewhere we can go for information and resources that we really trust – recently we used the DAISY Guidance on how to phrase diversity questions and it’s obvious how much research has gone into developing it as a resource. We simply do not have the resource or knowledge in-house to bring together the best practise recommendations like EDIS does.

Having spaces like the EDIS Slack channel and the regular EDIS member meetings has been fantastic for connecting and learning with other organisations working on EDI. For example, after Cancer Research UK presented on their positive action schemes at a member meeting, I reached out to someone in our Education team to connect them and see what we could learn.

I also really appreciate that EDIS lives its values in terms of transparency and the way it operates as an organisation. I can come to an EDIS meeting and learn so much just from the way the meeting is held or read the EDIS newsletter and see the team’s continual self-reflection.

What does the future hold for EDI work at the Biochemical Society?

We want to continue embedding our central approach to EDI throughout the Society – I’d love to get to a point where people don’t have to be reminded to consider EDI and it’s just something they do as part of their work. We’ll never be perfect but we’re working on embedding our approach and I do think we’re getting there.

We want to grow our current EDI work, such as offering more support to our community in areas like our Care and Assistance Grant. We have to be realistic about resources, of course, but we also want to put more financial commitment behind what we offer.

We’re also looking to develop an EDI toolkit this year and participating in a student mentoring scheme with City, University of London. We’re considering developing an in-house mentoring scheme and thinking about what else we can offer as an organisation.

We’re making sure that EDI continues to be embedded both internally and in what we deliver to our community – we’re on a journey, of course, but we’ve made some amazing strides in the past few years.

You can follow The Biochemical Society’s Twitter here and The Biochemical Society’s LinkedIn here.

You can get in touch with Sarah Jenner via her LinkedIn here or email her at Sarah.Jenner@biochemistry.org. 

You can keep up to date with EDIS on our Twitter, our LinkedIn or subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

Have any questions about EDIS? Drop Robin Craig an email at r.craig@wellcome.org.