Our EDI strategic priorities and achievements

We pledge to publish an annual EDI report, from 2022, to share key equality metrics with our community. We will work towards achieving pay gap and workload gap transparency​ by 2027.

In recent years, mental health has become a concerning issue within the Higher Education sector. This has been significantly aggravated by the Covid-19 crisis and the pandemic of stress and isolation that derived from it. Our 2021 Staff and Student Surveys highlighted the growing need to offer mental health support locally at the QS IoN. 

We are currently working hard to improve our local mental health and wellbeing support provisions. We run Mental Health First Aid training at QS IoN to increase the number of members of staff who are equipped to be a first point of contact and support staff/students experiencing emotional distress or suffering in silence with mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety or depression.

We are committed to ensure representation from all of our departments and ensure balanced representation between gender, ethnicity, people in different roles and at different levels of seniority amongst those who are trained as Mental Health First Aiders at the institute. The list of QS IoN MHFA is available for consultation on our Wellbeing and Mental Health website.

Mental health is a subject often neglected in Academia, with extraordinarily detrimental outcomes for scientists and scientific output. This is particularly true for young researchers, who are the most vulnerable in our community. We aim to lead on several events to normalise conversations around mental ill health in Academic settings. Our first event took place during the 2022 Mental Health Awareness Week and was led by Professor Schiavo and Dr. De La-Rocque. This event invited the QS IoN community to kick-start an important conversation on wellbeing, work-life balance and the importance of creating a research culture that provides better support and outcomes to us all. 

See the recording here. 

The academic research environment is highly pressurised. In this context problematic behaviours are often excused, suffering is seen as a badge of honour and bullying is endemic in many environments. At the QS IoN we strongly oppose to the ‘thick skin’ rhetoric being used as an excuse to abuse. As such, we invite all the members of our community to help us foster a Culture of Care and create a workplace culture that truly champions diversity and inclusion. We are actively working on indentifying and understanding unacceptable behaviours in academic settings, their impact and triggers. We are working on the production of a visual campaign that will raise awareness of such behaviours. We will also keep on promoting specialised training, such as ‘Where do you draw the line’ and ‘Active Bystander’ for staff and students.

One of the issues often highlighted in the 2021 Staff and Student surveys and during our Townhall meeting was the need to create more platforms for departmental cross-pollination and networking. In 2022 we supported the re-launch of the QS IoN Seminar Series a monthly seminar series where Early Career Researchers presented their work to PIs, ECRs and students across the Institute in a relaxed environment. In the coming years we are looking into different initiatives to bridge the gap between departments.

We will continue to work hard to provide career development support for all members of staff. To this end we will:

• Continuously improve our ECR Promotions’ workshops.
• Renew the QS IoN Leadership Development Programme for Technicians and Research Assistants.
• Keep on improving our mentoring offerings to accommodate more mentees. Learn more about it on our IoN Mentoring website.
• Increase transparency of UCL career structures for members of staff in different occupational groups through the creation of a new website page entitled ‘Building your career at IoN’.
• Increase transparency on Proleptic (or tenure-track) appointments at QS IoN by sharing the criteria and guidance on our websites and in our promotions’ workshops.

We are committed to tackling the underrepresentation of students from ethnic minority backgrounds and we are looking into funding strategies to support access to PGR studies in our Institute, as well as widening participation in our PGT degrees.

We are working towards building a strong case to apply for an Athena Swan Gold award by 2025. We will keep pushing for increasing the proportion of women and ethnic minorities in Academic posts​. We aim to implement bold recruitment strategies to increase representation of women and ethnic minorities who are shortlisted for senior positions at the IoN by 2027.