A toolkit for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in early-career ecology funding

Lack of funding is a major barrier to advances in ecology and related fields in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) (Bloch et al. 2014). Funding supports research, the pursuit and investigation of novel ideas, and the career development and livelihood of researchers; in contrast, a lack of funding can limit opportunities, lead to frustration, resentment, and ultimately, an exodus of talented researchers from the field (Basken and Voosen 2014; Daniels 2015)—often in search of more stable and remunerative financial arrangements (Wong et al. 2022). This is especially true for early-career researchers (ECRs; e.g., graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, assistant professors), who are developing their own research programs and have not secured long-term employment positions.

Individuals from racially diverse backgrounds have been disproportionately and systemically underrepresented as funding recipients in STEM fields (Chen et al. 2022). This likely begins at the early-career stage with individual research funding, where it has been shown that success or lack thereof in acquiring funds is not only a predictor but a contributing factor to future success (or failure) (i.e., the “Matthew effect”; Bol et al. 2018). Here, we refer to funding and grants as any type of financial award, including research and stipend funding, with the potential to impact an ECR’s retention in their field. A pattern of biased funding persists despite recognition that access and opportunity to pursue a career in STEM fields should be available and equitable to all, and despite evidence that diversity in research groups increases research quality and output (Harding 1998; Swartz et al. 2019). The broad lack of funding for ecology-related research is documented (Kuebbing et al. 2018), but Black, Indigenous, other people of colour (BIPOC), and individuals from other historically underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds often face additional and compounding barriers that limit their ability to secure competitive funding. For example, fewer opportunities at the undergraduate level and a lack of mentors from similar backgrounds can exacerbate difficulties in establishing a career (Strayhorn 2010; Whittaker and Montgomery 2012; Grossman and Porche 2014). As a result, non-White representation among early-career STEM grant recipients and working professionals is disproportionately low in North America. Despite comprising approximately 40% of the census population in the United States, ethnic and racial minorities received less than 7% of grant and philanthropic funds in general in 2013 (D5 2016). They also comprised less than one third of employed biological, agricultural, and environmental life scientists and made up less than 5% of scientists in the ecology-related fields of forestry and conservation in 2017 (Burke 2019). Comparable national statistics from Canada could not be found, and data on the demographics of funding recipients are generally scarce—although some specific grants and organizations (e.g., National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; NSERC) report on the equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) patterns in their funding opportunities. Programmes that distribute grant funds have the potential to help rectify these gross inequalities by advancing diverse and equitable representation among early-career funding applicants and recipients.

Barriers throughout the careers of scientists from historically underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds are increasingly acknowledged (e.g., see Whittaker and Montgomery 2012; Lee et al. 2020; Wanelik et al. 2020) and have been addressed in various ways around the world. In Canada, recent efforts by funding institutions and the federal government are working to improve diversity, representation, and retention of racial and ethnic minorities in ecology. For example, the Tri-Council of federal agencies (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) initiated a 7-year EDI plan (2018–2025); the Canadian Chairs Research Program also implemented, under federal legal orders, an EDI action plan in 2021 for institutions to achieve equitable distribution of research chair positions, focusing on Indigenous Peoples, racialized minorities, women, and persons with disabilities. The action plan also includes staggered targets to meet by 2029 based on national population demographics, with funding and other consequences if targets are not met. Many organizations have also released diversity statements to outline the importance of EDI to their mission and the ways they support diversity. However, a clear and cohesive framework with specific recommendations for how agencies and organizations can improve diversity across grant stages is lacking. Thus, important work still remains with regard to developing, implementing, and assessing the effectiveness of EDI efforts.

Borne out of the coauthors reflecting on the apparent lack of EDI amongst ecology ECRs in North America and the shortage of organized recommendations for funding agencies and grant makers, we developed the Stage-based Assessments of Grants for EDI (SAGE) toolkit (Supplementary Materials A). The SAGE Toolkit highlights steps that Canadian and other funding agencies and grant makers can consider in their EDI efforts when assessing their funding programs to increase sustained diversity among award applicants, recipients, and the larger scientific community. The SAGE Toolkit is organized in an applicant-centered way, into the Advertising, Application, Review, and Awarding stages that early-career BIPOC and those from other underrepresented backgrounds experience and interact with when seeking funding. Advertising refers to the materials and process by which funding announcements are circulated to potential applicants; the Application stage encompasses the information required of applicants and its submission process for evaluation; the Review stage includes the development, training, and activities of the people who review applications and recommend grant recipients. Finally, the Awarding stage involves the conditions for funds disbursement and communications between agency and applicants after funding decisions have been made. At each of the four stages, we identified components relevant to EDI and provide justification for their importance (e.g., Fig. 1). We include recommendations and steps for increasing EDI and offer examples where funding agencies are already working towards improving EDI. The recommendations are general but meant as a starting point for discussion and evaluation of current practices. Our hope is that grant administrators and decision makers can use the SAGE Toolkit to iteratively assess performance, reflect, and improve over multiple grant cycles. Funding agencies should commit to continued efforts to seek the most current EDI best practices—which evolve rapidly—and also to reflect on how these recommendations are relevant to the specific demographics they serve or aspire to serve. Our toolkit emphasizes BIPOC and racial EDI, as this has been a prevalently discussed inequality across funding opportunities in ecology and related fields (Duc Bo Massey et al. 2021; Chen et al. 2022). However, our recommendations are relevant for many axes of identity and backgrounds that are underrepresented and often left out of equitable consideration for grants—especially due to intersectionality, which is both the connectedness of multiple axes of identity (Parent et al. 2013) and subsequent complex impacts of discrimination (Bowleg 2012; Bauer 2014).

To create the SAGE Toolkit, we used multiple sources of information and knowledge. Our objective was to develop a useful toolkit for advancing EDI, rather than to identify all possible considerations or to conduct a comprehensive review of all Canadian ECR funding opportunities in ecology. For each stage, at least three coauthors developed a preliminary list of considerations and corresponding recommendations for action. These lists were informed by reviewing Canadian funding opportunities with information available online (n = 19; listed in Supplementary Materials B) based on a combination of opportunistic searching and coauthors’ prior knowledge. Support for considerations and recommendations with references were gathered from grey and peer-reviewed literature and the extensive knowledge of the coauthors, who included researchers and other professionals in ecology with a range of identities, backgrounds, and experiences—both personal and career-related (see Positionality statement). We focused on grants from Canadian institutions and organizations (any organization or institution that holds award competitions for ECRs in Canada in the fields of ecology or evolution) because there is a lack of available information about EDI in Canadian funding for ecology and related fields. We used public information available online because transparency is important for advancing EDI and promoting accountability. Variation in available information led to some stages, considerations, and recommendations having more citations and references than others, but all were reviewed and endorsed through coauthor consensus.

Recognizing the diversity and positionalities amongst our coauthors, there was the opportunity to further validate and enrich the toolkit with the lived experiences and perspectives of select coauthors who self-identified as early-career professionals. To identify common themes related to ECRs’ pursuit of funding opportunities, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five coauthors. Interviews were conducted by a coauthor (AF) with expertise in administering semi-structured interviews. In one-on-one 45-minute audio calls, interviewees were asked about their career experiences in ecology as they pertained to the four stages of the grant process (Supplementary Materials D). Interviews were recorded, each transcribed by the respective interviewee, and analyzed in two rounds by the interviewer (AF) to identify thematic codes and subcodes. Further details about the interviews and analysis can be found in Supplementary Materials D. Approval for the semi-structured interviews was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the University of British Columbia (REB_H21-03284).

Finally, we collated the four stages into a unified toolkit and trialed its usability by applying it to the NSERC Banting and Yellowstone 2 Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) grants. We further developed the toolkit based on group discussion, adding final justifications, examples, and recommendations. To increase adoption by funding agencies, we sought feedback from NSERC, the Liber Ero Fellowship Program, and Y2Y, which were chosen to reflect a range of funding amounts and sizes of funding agencies. We hired a science communicator and enlisted a French translator to develop English and French versions of an infographic and a two-page overview of the SAGE Toolkit (Supplementary Materials C) for funding agencies and programs. Below, we highlight and discuss major conclusions from each stage of the SAGE Toolkit.

In recent years, agencies and institutions have been confronted with the lack of diversity among researchers at all career stages, and efforts have been made to address this disparity. The SAGE Toolkit breaks down the grant process into the applicant-centered Advertising, Application, Review, and Awarding stages to highlight specific areas where funding agencies can more effectively attract and serve BIPOC, and generally a more diverse pool of applicants. Many of the considerations and recommendations are generally already recognized as good practice in various aspects of research, funding, and mentorship, but the SAGE Toolkit provides a unified and coherent collection for the explicit purpose of supporting EDI in ECR funding. It is the responsibility of funding agencies and programs to determine for themselves how and when to best engage, adopt, and implement relevant components and recommendations in the SAGE Toolkit. Agencies should be mindful of how this work is distributed across its human resources (Trejo 2020; Williamson et al. 2021), and endeavor to embody these efforts to advance EDI at all hierarchies of their decision-making and power structures. The hope is that such efforts and actions translate into diverse grant recipients, supported ECRs, and an equitable, inclusive, scientific community. While it can be difficult to change longstanding practices, we believe that an honest reflection of funding missions paired with iterative use of tools, starting with the SAGE Toolkit, can contribute to advancing EDI in ecology and related fields beyond performative statements and gestures (Fig. 2).

Our work indicates that awarding funds to individuals from underrepresented racial backgrounds is insufficient for advancing EDI in ecology and related STEM fields. Funds reach a small proportion of applicants, and increasing EDI should involve action throughout the grant process. Opportunities exist at all four stages that would benefit all applicants. Furthermore, funding opportunities should strive to be flexible when working with applicants and grant recipients, as supporting ECRs is individual-specific. Importantly, efforts to increase EDI must not be one-off exercises, but rather be made with a long-term focus based on evolving best practices. Indeed, we recognize that the SAGE Toolkit should be dynamic and open to additions and changes. In the toolkit, space at the end of each stage allows for additional considerations, justifications, and recommendations. The most up-to-date SAGE Toolkit can be found online at bit.ly/ediSAGEtoolkit. Our work focused on EDI in early-career funding for individuals, and we acknowledge that non-profit organizations and programs with minority-serving missions face similar challenges with philanthropic funding. We note that academic and philanthropic institutions also serve an important role in the funding process and call on them to consider the toolkit criteria for internal awards. For members of racialized, historically marginalized, and equity-deserving groups, we recognize that choice in which funding opportunities to apply for can be a luxury and is not always possible. We encourage applicants to self-advocate when it is safe, and to seek out resources, clarifications, allies, and other advocates whenever and wherever possible. We call for continued work across all types of funding opportunities and support mechanisms to advance EDI in ecology and related STEM fields. Finally, the process of developing this toolkit—from the collaboration of its diverse coauthors to the recommendations provided in the SAGE Toolkit and its proposed iterative application—highlights the potential for shifting the relationship between funding agency or opportunity and applicant from a transactional dynamic between the powerful and needy to one of supportive community and collaboration.

The coauthors are a group of multi-cultural, multi-generational, and international researchers, academics, and administrators. Career stages amongst the coauthors range from early to established and included students, researchers, professors, EDI experts, grant recipients, administrators, and reviewers. Some are from colonizer/settler backgrounds, while the majority are from multiple axes of identity that have been systemically marginalized in settler society, research, and academia. Six also self-identified as ECRs. We recognize that EDI work falls often on equity-deserving people and acknowledge that our collective positionalities motivated and actively informed this work. The coauthors have all experienced success in traditional academic and professional settings to varying degrees in our careers in ecology-related fields—as evidenced by all holding at least one graduate degree and having university or organizational affiliations at the time of this work. Therefore, we recognize the complex and collective nature of the work that is needed to contribute to and see a more equitable, diverse, just, and inclusive scientific field.

We would like to thank Wapiti Studios (Sarah Nason) and Catherine Lalonde for their help in developing English and French versions of the SAGE infographic and two-page document. We are grateful for feedback on the toolkit from the following people: Sharon Wang, J. A. Lee-Yaw, Joseph Heras, Ariel Greiner, Julia Lowndes, and Aerin Jacob (Y2Y). We also received valuable feedback on the toolkit from representatives of the following granting agencies: Liber Ero Fellowship Program (Kerry Kenwood) and National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Sarah Smith). We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for this manuscript, who provided stimulating feedback.