EDI progress being made at Canadian institutions, but clear goals still lacking

Universities are making progress towards creating more equitable, diverse and inclusive institutions, a new report has found. But more work needs to be done to weave EDI into the fabric of university life, says the Council of Canadian Academies report, and that must be backed by robust data showing what’s working – and for whom – and what’s not.

The report, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System, found that the most effective EDI measures are interconnected and mutually reinforcing, rather than any one intervention being uniquely powerful in isolation. Committed leadership, strong champions, supportive organizational structures, transparent reporting and accountability mechanisms, along with consistent resourcing all need to be present to effect meaningful change and avoid the problem of limited initiatives falling apart, said Wendy Rodgers, president of the University of Prince Edward Island who chaired the 11-member expert panel that produced the report.

“Paying attention to all of those infrastructure and support aspects are critical, because we need to understand that postsecondary institutions weren’t built for diversity in the first place,” said Dr. Rodgers. “We know who they were built for. And that is who dominated them for hundreds of years.”

The CCA is a non-profit organization that brings together sector experts to assess the evidence on complex scientific topics of public interest. Panelists were drawn from universities across Canada, representing a range of administrative and discipline-specific roles and each with experience researching and/or working on EDI initiatives. The report was commissioned in 2023 by the three federal granting agencies, along with other federal government agencies and departments. They were concerned that EDI work and progress has been uneven among institutions and has faced challenges and uncertainty around what works and how to measure success. They wanted to know what universities were doing to make EDI a reality in their institutions, the effectiveness of those measures, and what has worked best for people with multiple – or intersectional – underrepresented identities in the postsecondary research ecosystem.

What “stands out” is that the report was initiated by the Tri-Agencies, said Arig al Shaibah, associate vice-president, equity and inclusion at the University of British Columbia who has worked in EDI senior leadership positions in multiple universities across the country and whose research was also cited in the report. Calling the document’s potential for advancing EDI work “quite exciting,” Dr. al Shaibah said it represents “a singular, contemporary and comprehensive evidentiary summary for the Canadian context” that consolidates what is known about best practices in EDI. The report also “amplifies two key messages … that really still need to be driven home,” she said – that EDI is about educational access and equity as well as research excellence, and that the work must happen through an interconnected ecosystem of initiatives and supports.

“I do think it can be leveraged in a lot of useful ways,” she said, adding that the report does a good job of providing an easy-to-understand framework that may help people feel less overwhelmed by the task, as well as providing concrete examples.

The 206-page document includes specific chapters dedicated to effective and evidence-based practices for embedding EDI into: recruitment and support for faculty, staff and students; institutional development; government funding; and into the research process. Another chapter addresses general factors needed to support EDI work. Each chapter concludes with a summary of the most promising initiatives, what’s needed to support them, and their potential impact. The panel considered evidence from Canada and abroad, including the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, Australia and the European Union.

Universities need to build trust in order to fill data gaps

Still, the panel’s work was limited by gaps in quantitative and qualitative data, the report noted. This leads to a problem where universities “launch an initiative and they don’t have a clear baseline – what are we starting from, for instance?” said Dr. Rodgers. “And then they don’t necessarily have a clear goal – what are we going to try to achieve?”

The panel focused on the four categories used in employment equity legislation – Indigenous peoples, women, persons with disabilities and visible minorities – and added 2SLGBTQIA+ people. However, it added that more research and attention is needed on how other marginalized groups are doing, such as people from low-income backgrounds or who are neurodivergent, and those with more than one marginalized identity – known as intersectional. Disaggregated data, which shows how groups within the larger categories are doing – Black students within the larger visible minority category, for example – is also important, so that universities can track potential uneven impacts of EDI initiatives on people belonging to different sub-groups.

“We need to take a more deliberate and measured approach to what it is we are trying to achieve,” said Dr. Rodgers.

While most universities collect data under employment equity legislation, that information is limited by the broadness of the legislation’s categories and who the data is collected from. Efforts to collect more granular data can face distrust when individuals are uncertain how their information will be used, said Dr. Rodgers, adding that it’s universities’ responsibility to build that trust.

“People have to believe that the data isn’t just going to be collected and put in a box and nothing happens. They need to feel that the data is collected and it’s going to lead to transformative change,” said McMaster University biology professor Juliet Daniel, a member of the expert panel and an advocate for the collection of race-based data in health research. Her university does collect additional data, she said, and has earned trust through initiatives like its president’s advisory committee on building an inclusive community, which has existed for more than two decades and has broad, diverse representation from across McMaster. Ideally though, Dr. Daniel said universities would be subject to a federally mandated strategy that would ensure more granular data was collected, and in a secure way.

Among the positive developments noted in the report was a narrowing gender and pay gap among faculty and increased representation among full-time faculty and leadership from historically underrepresented groups. Some postsecondary institutions have set up EDI leadership positions and offices, put effort and resources into increasing diversity in STEM and other disciplines, such as Université de Sherbrooke’s Claire Deschênes Postdoctoral Fellowship Competition for women in engineering and McMaster’s Black Excellence cohort hiring. There has also been funding for community-based research that can involve historically marginalized groups, such as SSHRC’s Connections program grants.

Dr. Rodgers also called the establishment of equity targets for the federal government’s Canada Research Chairs program following a 2006 lawsuit settlement and subsequent requirements for universities to implement EDI action plans, “an exemplary example” of what can happen when a powerful body demands change. “When I was involved in implementing that change in the beginning, there was so much pushback [about] how unfair this was,” said Dr. Rodgers, a former deputy provost with CRC program responsibility at the University of Alberta. Years later, “we don’t hear about it quite so much now. It’s just built into the program. That’s what the program demands, so that’s what everybody does.”

Other findings in the report:

• Bridging programs such as Queen’s University’s Indigenous Futures in Engineering and inclusive admissions processes, such as that used at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry (which includes an equity representative on the applications committee), have shown promise for increasing student diversity.
• Providing inclusive work arrangements for staff and students helps to reduce barriers for everyone instead of requiring individuals to request their own accommodations.
• Transparent compensation policies, along with flexible approaches to compensation – e.g., seniority or skill-based, versus discretionary – help to address pay inequities.
• Uncompensated work to support EDI by members of underrepresented groups needs to be formally recognized and valued to avoid a “minority tax.”
• The federally funded Dimensions program pilot and EDI Institutional Capacity-Building Grants showed promise in helping universities develop their EDI work but were phased out without formal public evaluation.
• Funding programs that consistently provide support to underrepresented researchers throughout their careers are important to long-term EDI in the research ecosystem.
• Accountability and transparency mechanisms in funding programs help to achieve compliance with equity targets.
• “A sea change” is needed for how research excellence is defined, away from highly competitive research pursuits and towards more collaboration. The report also mentions the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, as an example of an alternative approach to research assessment, away from a primary focus on journal publication.
• EDI work continues to face some resistance within universities, including complaints about risks to academic freedom, the merit principle and research excellence. What’s more, it’s unclear how successful diversity training has been on long-term changes in behaviour. The report suggests making this training more practical and specific, such as how to make universities accessible to people with disabilities.
• While the panel did look to examples of Indigenization efforts at universities in its research, it recommended that separate research be done, led by Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders, to assess their effectiveness.