Diversity and inclusion

New Royal Society reports on diversity in early-career awards

17/03/2026

Many research funders now develop and publish statistics on the diversity of those they fund, with some comparing the profile of awardees with that of applicants to see if their selection processes are inclusive or end up favouring or disfavouring particular groups. The Royal Society has been taking this a step further, with the assistance of CRAC, for its early-career fellowship schemes, comparing those profiles with the diversity of those who are eligible to apply. This gives a fuller picture of their award-making, with the potential to shine a light on groups of researchers who potentially could but do not apply for their schemes. Such insights are obtained to inform the ongoing development of the Royal Society’s grant-making and other activities to broaden the participation of talented individuals of diverse backgrounds.

The Society has now published two reports produced for it by CRAC. The first attempted to establish the diversity profile of researchers in the UK eligible to apply for Royal Society early-career fellowships (updating previous work five years ago, but becoming increasingly difficult to do), which was then used to benchmark the diversity of applications to the schemes (results of which are in the second report). Overall, the exercise shows further progress being made but that applicants continue not to be fully representative of the profile of eligible applicants in the UK in certain respects, but with the schemes showing different variances. We feel the Society should be commended for attempting such benchmarking and being open in publishing the results and hope other funders will consider something similar.