I was given the opportunity to attend the STEMM Change Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: A Technician Lens report launch at the Royal Society of Chemistry on the 14^th of November 2019, as a representative of the University of Edinburgh Technician Steering Committee (TSC). This event was a standalone component of the STEMM Change annual conference, which was a wonderful event looking at Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion within academia, however as a last-minute substitution to attend to represent the TSC, with travel to London only being booked on the 11^th of November (EEK!), I only made it to the afternoon sessions.

Made it to @STEMM_CHANGE pic.twitter.com/sObQqRZKhh

— Sarah McC (@ScienceSaz) November 14, 2019

I did manage to catch the afternoon keynote presented by Dr Dominic Galliano who talked about removing barriers to inclusion for LGBT+, and his experiences as a gay man within academia and higher education, while also discussing his involvement designing and performing inclusive public engagement activities. I really enjoyed this talk and as a passionate believer in the power of public engagement activities felt inspired by this presentation. This was followed by presentations from projects which have received funding as part of EPSRC Inclusion Matters, which included STEMEquals, a four-year research project aiming to create more inclusive STEM communities in higher education and industry. There was also a presentation from Northern Power, a project aiming to develop and support inclusive culture within Engineering and Physical Sciences in the North of England, which has developed a range of activities to support this, including reciprocal mentoring and access to an online platform to build a network and share experiences and training opportunities. The final presentation was from Evidence Base, a project investigating the leaky pipeline in STEM, and looking at circumstances that have resulted in only 4.6% of grants from the EPSRC worth more than £5m being awarded to women. The event then closed, and remaining delegates who were attending the report launch were ushered into the drinks reception prior to the report launch.

Some suggestions of how to improve Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion from Dr Dominic Galliano

I found the drinks reception really insightful and had the opportunity to chat with technical staff from a variety of fields, in both research and teaching roles within higher education, and see that despite technicians in different subject areas working in a variety of environments, many issues are common across the wide range of technical staff. Retaining skills lost when older technicians retire is a huge concern across the majority of fields for higher education technicians and technical managers. This is an issue as a large proportion of the technical workforce in higher education are approaching retirement and with fewer new technicians being recruited to retain these skills within organisations than are necessary this could leave a major skills gap. The report also found of the technicians in all disciplines who have management or leadership responsibilities as part of their role (~20%), only 32% are female, which with 41% women in the technical workforce suggests there is still something preventing women accessing these roles, however, it is unclear if women are not applying for these roles, or not being successfully recruited.

At the launch of the fantastic report "EDI: A Technician Lens", introduced by @kellyvere #stemmchangeconference @STEMM_CHANGE pic.twitter.com/zW6PYCeEeN

— Lucy Jones (@jones_lucy) November 14, 2019

Another topic discussed was a tendency for some to diminish the contributions of technical staff, with their skills often being devalued by the phrase “Just a technician”, not to mention issues around some technical staff being managed by staff who do not understand the technical career path and fail to understand the benefit of highly skilled and motivated technical teams to institutions. This was a wonderful networking opportunity and really helped me to see that many of the issues we hear about as part of the University of Edinburgh Technician Steering Committee are being faced by other institutions. The report was launched with some brief talks from Kelly Vere, Sam Kingman, Kate Jones and Denise McLean who all discussed the importance of this report, and their personal involvement with Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives and improvements, and what this has meant to them. It was wonderful to hear technical staff talking about the value of being involved with ED&I, and I left the event feeling quite positive about the work being done around inclusion and diversity for technical staff, as previously it has maybe felt like technicians are an afterthought in some of these developing equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives. This was reflected in the wording chosen in the conference programme to introduce this report to the (mostly) academic delegates attending:

“It is vital to appreciate that EDI challenges do not just apply to academic or research staff groups. Indeed, it is arguable that the issues are more serious in the technician community where EDI is often not as advanced. STEMMCHANGE has been working with Technician Commitment signatories the University of Liverpool and the John Innes Centre, and project partners the Science Council to highlight and address EDI challenges facing technicians alongside academic and research staff.

Report launch over, and with a journey back to Edinburgh still ahead of me that evening and anxiety setting in about missing my train, it was time to head, but not before quickly thanking Kelly and the STEMM change team for all the work that went into this event and the report. Having become accredited as a Registered Scientist through the Science Council this year, I also wanted to thank Mel Leitch, as it was actually a presentation he made at a Technical Staff Professional Registration event held at the University of Edinburgh, which lit the spark which led to me going forward with my professional registration application, and resulted in the Edinburgh CRF Genetics core team having 7 out of our 12 members of technical staff registered with the science council at all levels of accreditation. Overall this was a wonderful event and it’s fantastic to see a greater awareness of ED&I issues from a technician’s perspective.

Sarah McCafferty is a member of the University of Edinburgh Technician Steering Committee member and Research Technician in the ECRF Genetics core, primarily working in sample processing. She is passionate about science communication and the development of technical staff, spends too much time looking at cat gifs and can be found on twitter @ScienceSaz

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: A Technician Lens Report Launch – Sarah McCafferty / University of Edinburgh Technicians by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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