Internal University of Cambridge training materials suggest that academics seeking research grants are being coached to treat equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as part of what helps make a bid successful – not only in dedicated equality sections, but across substantive parts of applications, from the wider research environment to academic matters such as research topic, participant selection and methodology.
The materials, seen by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), centre on an online training session entitled “Embedding EDI in Research Grant Applications”, hosted by the University’s Research Office and developed with Cambridge’s Head of EDI, Ndunge Kivuitu. Advertised to research-active academics, the session introduces a new EDI grant-application “best practice” resource, built around a review of what funders look for in restricted calls for grants, large grants and fellowships – in the presenter’s words, “what is going to win funding”.
Focusing on UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), including the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the Wellcome Trust, the presenter described as a “key finding” that EDI is “often assessed implicitly” across applications, in sections such as “Research Environment” – which accounts for 25% of Wellcome’s assessment – and “Responsible Research & Innovation”, rather than only through dedicated EDI sections. At the MRC, meanwhile, the training notes that EDI is now an explicit assessment criterion for Centres of Research Excellence, whose guidance states that successful centres should be “beacons of excellence in research culture and equality, diversity and inclusion”.
Having set out the funder guidance, the presenter indicated that this was not simply a matter of one or two discrete sections, separate from the academic content of the bid. The Research Office had reviewed successful grant applications to identify the common features of bids that secured funding, and found a consistent emphasis on EDI across those applications. Themes flagged as especially relevant to early-career researchers included a “strong emphasis” on demonstrating “commitment” to EDI, including via a “track record and future plans” of such activity.
The accompanying booklet, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI): A Reflection Resource for Preparing Grant Applications (“Preparing Grant Applications”), which participants were repeatedly encouraged to engage with, makes the same point in more detail.
Much of the resource can be read as ordinary equality practice: considering barriers to participation, mentoring under-represented groups, shaping recruitment practices, diversifying research teams, and redesigning access arrangements. Properly framed, such activity may help institutions comply with their obligations under the Equality Act 2010, including the public sector equality duty in section 149. But as one Cambridge postgraduate who spoke to CAF on condition of anonymity pointed out, junior researchers at the start of their careers, with no prior experience as a principal investigator or co-investigator on a funded project, are unlikely to have had the institutional power to shape recruitment, participation or access in those ways.
It is therefore notable that Preparing Grant Applications also points towards lower-barrier forms of EDI activity that move beyond equality-law compliance, including involvement in politicised EDI advocacy networks, service roles and “positive change” work.
In a section titled “Evidencing Contributions to EDI”, for instance, it asks questions pertinent to early-career researchers, including: “How do you show commitment to EDI in your research?”; “What service roles have you carried out to promote EDI?”; “What is your involvement in… EDI networks?”; “How do you actively participate in these networks?”; and whether applicants are involved in “the leadership of these networks or initiatives”. It also asks how researchers plan to continue “instigating positive change through EDI activity during your research”.
Among these networks at the University are Cambridge’s LGBTQ+ network, which adopts the language of gender identity and whose listed committee members all give preferred pronouns, and the Race Equality Network, which promotes material steeped in the language and assumptions of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter.
Needless to say, no instruction is given to join such networks. But in a resource designed to help researchers understand what makes bids competitive, the cue is hard to miss: EDI-network involvement is one way to evidence “commitment” that will strengthen funding applications and ultimately advance an academic career.
Judged against the networks’ own descriptions of their purpose and role, that means Cambridge’s training materials are treating participation in activist institutional structures driven by contested political programmes as relevant evidence of grant competitiveness, without appearing to consider who may be excluded or disadvantaged by that expectation.
And such detriment is undeniably a risk, since the positions advanced by those networks may be rejected by other academics not only as a matter of intellectual disagreement, but from the standpoint of protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010. Gender-critical beliefs, for instance, have been recognised as protected following Forstater v CGD Europe, with Higgs v Farmor’s School underlining the protection afforded to the manifestation of such beliefs. In Corby v ACAS, an employment tribunal likewise accepted that opposition to critical race theory could amount to a protected philosophical belief.
The resulting pressure is especially acute for early-career academics. If funders and universities increasingly expect an EDI “track record”, the easiest way to evidence one may be through precisely these second-order forms of EDI activity: training, committees, networks, service roles and “positive change” work.
As CAF’s postgraduate source put it, “If this is the kind of evidence researchers are encouraged to marshal in order to demonstrate an EDI track record and strengthen funding applications, then gender-critical feminists like me, or academics who reject critical race theory, decolonisation agendas, or anti-racist frameworks in which neutrality is treated as complicity, are going to be placed at a serious disadvantage.”
During the training session, the presenter also repeatedly stressed that one form of support Cambridge’s Research Services could provide to applicants was “non-academic review” of grant applications. But where EDI is woven through substantive and assessable parts of funding bids, including research environment and participant recruitment, will incursions into academic judgement be preventable?
A case in point is the training session’s observation, drawn from the Research Office’s review of successful bids, that social and human-science applications involving qualitative or quantitative surveys of people needed to place “emphasis on diverse human participants and impact on people”.
This was picked up in more detail in the “Diverse Participants in Research” section of Preparing Grant Applications, which asks how applicants “ensure the inclusion of under-served groups”; overcome “barriers” to including “under-served communities”; assess the “risks” of not recruiting a diversity of participants; “ensure that your research benefits as broad a set of beneficiaries as possible”; and avoid “exacerbat[ing] inequalities”.
In many contexts, those may be entirely reasonable prompts. Cardiovascular research has historically under-sampled women; autism studies have under-represented girls; genomic datasets have been skewed towards people of European ancestry; and disabled people may face practical access barriers in trials. But those examples treat demographic inclusion as a methodological concern. What Preparing Grant Applications does not do sufficiently is separate that issue from contested ontological categories used to structure demographic data.
Put simply, although research across the social, human and medical sciences depends on stable categories, many contemporary EDI frameworks treat the sex binary not as an ordinary classificatory fact but as a contested, morally loaded proposition. On one view, sex is a real, binary and materially important variable, distinct from gender identity, which researchers need to record and analyse accurately for reasons including differential health outcomes, sex-specific disease risk, drug efficacy, safeguarding, sports performance, crime and population-level data. On the activist view, treating sex as the primary category risks denying trans-identifying people’s identity, excluding them from public recognition, or misrecognising them in ways that, it is alleged, threaten their dignity and safety.
The resulting methodological question – “should participants be categorised by sex, gender identity, or both?” – is ultimately something for researchers to answer according to the purposes of their study. But where that question is swept up into a research-funding ecosystem that appears to favour, or may be perceived as favouring, one answer over another, a methodological judgement becomes a potential career-progression issue.
Is that what is happening at Cambridge? It is certainly easy to see how an argument for not excluding trans-identifying people from a research sample – even where the purpose is to isolate biological sex – could be presented as a way to show commitment to the LGBTQ+ cause: refusing to exclude a vulnerable and under-served group, ensuring that research benefits “as broad a set of beneficiaries as possible”, and avoiding any risk of “exacerbat[ing] inequalities”.
And in a training ecosystem that encourages researchers to evidence involvement in networks like the LGBTQ+ network, while applying to funders like UKRI – whose EDI pages publish staff commentary framing “fighting for trans rights” as “vital” and gender-critical feminists as “anti-trans” – a junior researcher working on, say, sports physiology or some areas of criminology, might reasonably wonder whether a “biologically essentialist” cohort design or exclusion criteria would be interpreted by a funder as insufficiently “inclusive”, before pre-emptively blurring categories, expanding inclusion criteria, or avoiding politically difficult research designs altogether.
The recent case of Dr John Armstrong at King’s College London suggests this is not as far-fetched a worry as it might initially appear. In 2023, after members of the UK Athletes’ Commission asked him to survey elite athletes on trans participation in athletics, he submitted an ethics proposal whose stated aim was to examine “when males should be allowed to compete in the female category in athletics”. KCL’s ethics process rejected the proposal because the terms “male” and “female” were treated as “misgendering”. While the committee raised no objections to the proposed survey questions themselves, it told him to seek EDI-team input on the “wording used in the survey” and the “presentation of the research”.
The Government-commissioned Independent Review of Data, Statistics and Research on Sex and Gender, led by Professor Alice Sullivan, points in the same direction. Its section on research ethics processes states that “ethics committees have objected to data collection on sex and to the use of language which refers to sex”, and records that ethics committees “commonly direct researchers to draw on advice from university EDI teams”. One participant said their research ethics committee required them to collect information on gender identity rather than sex, while another, who preferred not to be quoted directly, said their university’s EDI unit had advised staff to be cautious about asking questions on sex in surveys or other forms of data collection because such questions may be “problematic”. The Review also says it had seen university guidance, including at Loughborough, Oxford and UCL, which “codif[ies] a belief in gender-identity theory into rules and recommendations regarding what data should be collected, discouraging data collection on sex”.
Following these disclosures, and evidence received from concerned members of the academic community, CAF will write to the University seeking clarification on several aspects of the Reflection Resource and inviting it to revise the guidance where necessary. Among the questions it will ask are how the guidance can be reconciled with the University’s statutory duties to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech; what consideration has been given to ensuring that academics holding protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act are not disadvantaged by expectations around EDI networks, service roles or “positive change” activity; and what safeguards exist to ensure that advice intended to improve grant competitiveness does not become a vehicle for steering research methodology, participant selection or academic judgement.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.