We can’t give up on EDI in science

My academic science career started nearly a half-century ago in the US, in the wake of the equal opportunity legislation enacted under Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programme.

For all the resulting openness to talent regardless of background, however, it wasn’t easy for my department at the University of Colorado to appoint a British scientist. Supporting letters from Congressman Tim Wirth and Senator Gary Hart were just one small part of a paper trail that must have weighed at least a few kilograms.

And while I was a minority in one sense, I was – as a white male – in the privileged majority in another. The dean – unusually for that time, a woman – expressed surprise that physics was hiring another man; she had expected a woman and had therefore congratulated my non-physicist wife at the social event to welcome new faculty.

A stated commitment to recruit more women did not alarm me, however: quite the opposite. Recognising there were too few women in physics was not difficult, and I appreciated being chosen in the face of scrutiny of whether my selection was fair to all who should be considered. I’m still grateful they took a chance on me.

More than 40 years later, in 2023, I became president of the Institute of Physics. My predecessor was a woman, and so was my successor: two of five women that have led the IOP since 2008. But while that is a marker of the progress that has been made since the early 1980s, it was also very clear to me that physics was and is still far from being the diverse community in every sense that we aspire to be. That is why we launched a new strategy for the physics community to “welcome, include and reflect all parts of our diverse society”.

A growing number of critics are now saying that those of us pushing for equality of opportunity have gone too far: that some woke virus has invaded our thoughts. In the US, indeed, DEI is now widely prohibited, and the very mention of inclusion risks seeing funding cancelled. But our initiative at the IOP has nothing to do with politics or wokeness, and it did not stem from a preoccupation with regulation or box-ticking. Instead, we simply determined to leave no room for doubt that the only necessary qualification for membership of the global community of physicists is scientific merit.

No one, of any political persuasion, would deny that people of every nationality, race, class, gender and sexuality should be equally welcome to wonder at the beauty of the universe and to use their knowledge to better our society, health and environment. And when I put this vision to my colleagues, they were equally committed.

To realise this vision we need, as the suffragists said, deeds not words. There is, for example, a terrible shortage of trained physics teachers in UK schools, meaning that the least advantaged are also the least likely to benefit from the early education and inspiration that opens doors later. It is no good focusing only on selection criteria for university admissions or promotions if the barriers to entry were erected a decade or two earlier.

So we are working with government, schools and teachers themselves to boost teacher recruitment, retention and retraining. We are giving advice to science graduates on how to get into teaching, how to get school experience and what funding is available – including our own newly instituted scholarships. We are offering help for returning teachers and establishing awards for teachers who make a difference. We have prepared over 3,000 free physics teaching resources, including classroom activities and teaching guidance, and we are researching and piloting schemes to support greater gender balance in school physics.

To be very clear, I am not talking about “positive” discrimination. I don’t want to prejudice access to this great profession against anyone for any reason. Candidates for scarce appointments and resources must be selected on merit.

But let’s not kid ourselves that we are making our selections in some perfectly fair world. My alma mater, the University of Oxford, was painfully slow to accept women even as students. And while I’m proud that Irene Tracey – a colleague I knew there when she was an early-career scientist and mother – is its 273rd vice-chancellor, she is only its second female leader, and that progress didn’t happen without a struggle for female recognition that is ongoing.

Back in my days as a young scientist in America, I was part of a newly desegregated church and sang in a mixed gospel choir. There, I made friends with men and women who in their youth could not travel at the front of a bus or go to the same parks as their white neighbours. In that era, the woman mathematician Katherine Johnson was employed by Nasa to work on the calculations for the first and subsequent US-crewed spaceflights, but she was forbidden to use the same bathroom as her white colleagues.

It wasn’t so long ago, either, that US universities had quotas for Catholics and Jews, or that a gay man, Alan Turing, was shamed and rejected in the UK despite his pioneering work in computer science and his important role in enabling the Allies to win the Second World War.

The codification of brutal prejudice is still within living memory, and its consequences remain deeply embedded. Of course, we have not always got it right in the struggle to build a better society, and we should acknowledge and correct any errors in our diversity programmes. But the ambition itself is just, and we should not apologise for it, no matter how powerful our detractors. As the motto of the Royal Society reminds us, we owe our oath to no man. 

We have to acknowledge that this is a different political era. The headwinds are strengthening and threaten to become a storm that sweeps away even that progress we have made. We will have to approach a commitment to equality accordingly.

But we must not give up. The struggle must go on. It is not too late to build a better world.

Keith Burnett is a former president of the Science Council and of the Institute of Physics. He was vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield between 2007 and 2018.