Universities "must look deeper" into the drivers of inequality within research

Universities must seek a deeper understanding of the drivers of inequality in job roles and academic ranks if they are to achieve change. Professor Axel Gandy (Chair in Statistics, Imperial College London), Dr Georg Hahn (Senior Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Lancaster University) and Professor Nick Jennings (Vice Provost for Research at Imperial College London) have looked at possible inequalities relating to grant application success rates within Imperial over a five-year period. In an article for Research Professional , they said: "Clearly, a key driver of inequality is career progression. Universities take a range of factors into account when promoting staff, but if one of these factors is biased this can result in unequal promotion, and often unequal pay, as a consequence" The importance of grant income. Grant income is a factor in promotions at universities, they explain. UK research councils gather data on overall success rate by gender, age, disability status or ethnicity, but studies like this are susceptible to Simpson's paradox - a phenomenon in probability and statistics where a trend that appears in several different groups of data disappears or reverses when these groups are combined. For example: "More senior academic ranks tend to enjoy a higher success rate and these are the ranks containing a larger proportion of male academics," they said.