Providing empirical evidence to support greater equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in research funding

Context: Research funders face various criteria when allocating funding, increasingly emphasizing equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) alongside traditional measures of research excellence. The NIHR's Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Strategy 2022-27 aims to fund more inclusive research conducted by diverse teams, reflecting similar objectives of many UK and international funders, including the NIH and NHMRC. These initiatives aim to address shortcomings in existing processes that lead to imbalances in research funding allocation, such as the disproportionate awarding of grants to male principal investigators and barriers faced by women, racial minorities, and early career researchers. The Topic the Project Addresses: The project addresses the lack of established processes for determining the relative weights of EDI factors compared to traditional academic criteria in grant assessment and allocation. Traditional approaches involve scoring research applications against predefined criteria, but funders face trade-offs when applications have different strengths and weaknesses. Some funders, like the British Academy, are experimenting with modified lotteries to improve grantee diversity. This project explores innovative approaches to how EDI criteria may incorporated into both traditional funding mechanisms and weighted lotteries, to enhance equity and diversity in research funding. Aims and Objectives: The project aims to understand the decision-making process of NIHR grants committees, the trade-offs they make in allocating funding, and their preferences for particular applicant characteristics. It also aims to explore the possibility of incorporating these preferences into a more transparent and systematic allocation mechanism. Specific objectives include: Quantifying preferences for observable characteristics of applicants and adjustments for EDI. Understanding how these factors interact with the applicant’s peer review score. Exploring how empirically derived weights could be incorporated into future funding decisions. Simulating the impact of EDI weights on research funding allocation using traditional methods and modified lottery mechanisms. Translating research findings into policy and communicating them to the research community. Potential Applications and Benefits: This project will involve conducting a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to estimate the preferences of NIHR panel members and reviewers for different assessment criteria. The DCE will quantify preferences for different applicant characteristics and adjustments for EDI, helping to understand how these factors interact with the applicant’s score. The results will provide insights into how participants trade off different applicant characteristics when prioritizing funding applications. The project will explore how these empirically derived weights could be incorporated into future funding decisions. This includes simulating the impact of EDI weights on research funding allocation through traditional methods and incorporating weights into a modified lottery mechanism. The project will be implemented within a structured program of research and translation, in collaboration with the NIHR and other funding agencies. The implementation will involve setting up a steering committee with members of the research team and key academics involved in the NIHR. Two virtual workshops will be held: one early in the project to inform the design of the DCE and another to disseminate results and explore how findings can be incorporated into NIHR funding processes. The results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and promoted through media channels. Towards the end of the project, two translation workshops will be conducted to provide an overview of the study results and explore how different types of weighting might be incorporated in future funding processes to achieve greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in research funding allocation.