Stop excluding carers! Eight ways to create an inclusive research culture

An ordinary afternoon in academia: at 2.45pm, your calendar pings: an invite to a departmental talk that starts at 4pm. You would like to go, but school pick-up is at 3.10pm and childcare is already stretched. This is not a motivation problem; it is a design problem.

Female academics with caring responsibilities told us they want to take part in research activity, but the way opportunities are scheduled, delivered and advertised often makes that impossible. And at times, their caring commitments are overlooked. Our research project involved collecting evidence from in-person and online focus groups with home and international researchers, alongside insights from the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey, to identify and raise awareness of challenges these researchers face. It revealed that they experience lower satisfaction with research culture and community in general.

The good news: most barriers are fixable without major new funding. Below are seven changes departments and professional-services teams can adopt now.

1. Treat “before 3pm” as the default, not the exception

Events after mid-afternoon become inaccessible when school pick-up times are fixed. Schedule seminars, training and networking in the middle of the day.

Practical tip: do a quick “carer-access check” for your event template: timing, online option and whether core content will be available afterwards.

2. Make online access the norm – and make hybrid participation count

For many carers, attending in person can be physically impossible or too costly with childcare and travel taken into account. Online access is therefore the most inclusive option, but only if it enables real participation. 

Minimum standard: prioritise clear audio for all participants; assign a chat moderator; and build in a clear moment for online voices (for example, take online questions first during a Q&A). When carers cannot attend live, share a catch-up route. If recording the whole session creates concern, record only the talk and circulate slides plus a short summary within a week. Test audio and, where budgets allow, use a camera that shows the room.

3. Train supervisors to be confident, consistent first responders

Supervisors are often the first point of contact when care pressures escalate. Support becomes uneven if it depends on individual confidence.

Two small wins: offer a brief “care-aware supervision” refresher (what to say, options, referrals) and provide a one-page signposting map supervisors can use immediately.

• Spotlight guide: How to factor family into higher education
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4. Signpost housing and schools for international families

International carers reported only discovering how hard it was to navigate housing options and school-place deadlines on arrival. This is because mainstream information often assumes solo arrival, which can leave family need unseen. Stress and isolation follow.

Practical tip: publish a “family-friendly university arrival pack” outlining housing routes, a simple school-application timeline and named contacts.

5. Make leave and entitlements consistent and clear

Maternity, paternity and bereavement leave vary by status and funder; even when policies exist, researchers cannot take advantage of benefits they cannot understand.

Practical tip: create a plain-English “leave map” for PGRs and ECRs, covering the most common scenarios and who to contact.

6. Treat childcare as an access issue, not a personal problem

Emergency childcare and affordability were recurring themes in our study, especially for international researchers. If career opportunities depend on attending training and networking, then childcare support is an equality issue, not a personal preference.

Start small: pilot emergency childcare micro-grants or a fund that offsets costs for priority events, with fast decisions and minimal paperwork.

7. Upgrade well-being support for complex, long-running realities

University well-being services must address issues beyond generic “student anxiety”. Participants spoke of post-partum depression, long-term caring challenges and bereavement.

Practical tip: establish a warm handover pathway so carers are not bounced between services. Offer formats carers can use such as remote appointments, flexible times and permission to pause and restart when care demands spike.

8. Don’t forget community: design spaces with carers in mind

Our childcare-supported awayday surfaced practical challenges but showed the way forward: spaces that cater to carers’ needs. These require practical, low-cost infrastructure changes such as: 

• Providing breastfeeding and lactation rooms across campus buildings

• Creating child-safe spaces

• Offering child-friendly cultural or social activities for families living on or near campus. 

These measures signal that carers and their dependants are part of the academic community, not inconveniences to it.

Because caring responsibilities vary widely, community-building also needs flexibility. Online coffee chats can support carers who cannot be physically present, while in-person gatherings scheduled during core hours can offer opportunities for peer support, stress relief and informal knowledge exchange. These spaces allow carers to learn from one another’s strategies for navigating research funding, workload and institutional expectations – and, crucially, to feel less isolated.

A care-aware culture is not “special treatment”; it simply removes needless friction so carers can participate without explaining, apologising or opting out. Choose one change within your control this month, then track take-up and iterate.

Mingzhi Li is a postdoctoral researcher and co-investigator on the Female Postgraduate Research Students and Early Career Researchers with Caring Responsibilities (FECARE) project; Cagla Karatepe is a PhD candidate and principal investigator on the FECARE project, and student carers project officer; Yanyan Li is an early-career fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study and a co-investigator on the FECARE project; Xinran Gao is a PhD researcher and a co-investigator on the FECARE project, all at the University of Warwick.

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