Blog

Reflections on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work in practice

Our senior researcher (Sana Iqbal) reflects on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work conducted by TSIC

What do we mean when we say DEI

This learning summary draws on reflections from members of the TSIC. Over the past few years, our team at TSIC has been working on what we call “Diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI). We also started looking at what has been happening in the sector with regard to bringing greater DEI into monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) practices. Those words have taken on a wealth of definitions and ever-changing interpretations, which can make them sound empty and confusing (even for us!). To make things easier, we will simply say that at its core our work on DEI is about making the social sector and access to services/funding more inclusive and equitable for everyone.  

As a team, we started by organising a series of reflective sessions. Although we know the meaning of DEI, we realised that we were not spending enough time reflecting on what we wanted to achieve through our work in this area, what our main challenges were, and where we wanted to go from there. For consultants like us, it is easy to lose sight of our overreaching goal as we get absorbed in our clients’ challenges and the specificities of their situations. This summary covers our reflections and insights in an attempt to define future pathways of our DEI work:

Our definition of success 

We took some time to reflect on the kind of impact we would like to have on our clients when it comes to our work on diversity and equity. In other words, we asked ourselves: how does success look like for us when it comes to DEI?  

  1. The team was unanimous on the fact that the impact of our work should continue well beyond the lifecycle of the consulting project. They should be durable and withstand changes in staff and leadership. See the example here of the Wellcome project.
  • For this to happen, we strive to see the development of a “diversity and equity mindset” (or social justice), which relies on a thorough understanding of the benefits of diversity and equity and/or a deeply engrained commitment to those values. If this cultural change within the organisation happens, the impact of our consultancy project will spill over to other areas of the organisation’s work that have been left unscrutinised – and the work on DEI will continue after we leave.
  • Our vision for Change is to see it materialise through organisational policies, for example in recruitment, portfolio management and funding strategies. Most of the time, it will take months for new policies to be developed based on our work and for those policies to become effective, which means that we often lose sight of our impact.
  • We want user/grantee voices to be heard. Even when what they say is challenging and uncomfortable for our client. We often hear from research participants that similar consultancy projects have not yielded the changes that were deeply needed. This frustration made us reflect on our role as consultants and the power that we have in making the desired shift possible.  

Our main challenges  

DEI is a complex topic and there are many challenges standing in the way of achieving our goals. Here are some of the main difficulties we identified:  

  1. Biases: Our own biases are often the first barrier we must think about. As researchers, we might want to design research around things we think are important, but that are not central to the communities or people whose experiences we want to reflect. For our project to be truly impactful, we need to continually question our assumptions and reassess our choices. Participatory or co-production approaches are helpful in this regard, but even they are influenced by preconceived ideas of what matters in a certain context.  
  • Commitment to Change: Because of the variety of lived experiences and intersections of identifies, it is sometimes difficult to know what demographics or groups should be the focus of DEI work. In theory, identifying those groups who face challenges in accessing services or funding, based on research, is part of the DEI work. However, due to the complexity of the task, many organisations tend to be blind to or less interested in certain demographics/ lived experiences. While some characteristics get more attention and are easily identifiable (e.g. gender or ethnicity), other groups facing discrimination or barriers when interacting with the organisation are sometimes disregarded (e.g. people with disabilities and low-income people). This simplification reduces the scope of our work and goes against the learnings from research on intersectionality; but most importantly, it also prevents the development of a truly inclusive culture.  
  • Contextual knowledge: Our work on DEI often relies on “categorisation” of people’s lived experiences (e.g. ethnicity, religion, gender). Although it is difficult to escape the need for categories, this process can result in oversimplification of the reality experienced by individuals. Very often in DEI, people are reduced to a set of characteristics they identify with (or that we assume they identify with), even though the extent to which those play a role in their lives might vary significantly. Intersectionality is a helpful concept to consider, and we always try to integrate it into our research design, but it does not always provide the nuances required to understand the complexities in which individuals live.  
  • Transformational practices: Although this is a relatively rare occurrence, clients can be reluctant to accept certain findings. They can also decide not to implement our recommendations, sometimes with good reasons, other times out of fear to change existing structures of power. We always strive to help them through those changes, but  
  • Accountability: When working with groups that have been excluded from access to services or funding, we must ask ourselves: how do we hold ourselves accountable to them? We can ensure to report their thoughts truthfully, but we do not have control over what our clients will ultimately do. Without mechanisms to ensure that our work will have an impact on their access to services or funding, it is difficult to establish the kind of trust that is necessary to conduct DEI work.
  • Lack of data/interest: Finally, when it involves research, DEI comes with challenges similar to other types of projects, including the lack of engagement from research participants (for example, if they have never been engaged with the client organisation before), absence of reliable data collected by the organisation prior to the project (especially historical data) and safeguarding issues.  

Where do we want to go

Most of the challenges that we just outlined do not have easy solutions. But some approaches or methodologies can help us address them and improve the quality of our work, which is why we would like to focus on those in the future: 

  • Participatory research has to be prioritized which is co-produced with users to make sure that their experiences are recognised and fully integrated into the research design.  
  • Multi-year action learning research would ensure that recommendations from research findings are implemented and their impact is tested. This approach allows for continuous learning and refinement of DEI tools, which is better suited to a topic like DEI than more time-limited and less agile approaches. If it includes users, action learning is a powerful method to enable organisations to constantly improve inclusivity and align with the needs of their beneficiaries. 
  • Translating lessons from intersectionality into our work. We are still learning how to integrate intersectionality into our research practice based on the context of the research. We want to look more closely at our approach to intersectionality until now and refine it for future projects.  
  • Focusing more on characteristics that tend to be forgotten, such as neurodiversity.