This Grant Maker Pledged $17.5 Million to Address Diversity and Inclusion in Its Own Ranks

Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest foundations, with more than $32 billion in assets, made news this month when it published data on the pay gap between its male and female employees.

The disclosure was a matter of law — legislation was passed in Britain last year requiring all employers with more than 250 employees to make such data public. And the numbers, Wellcome Director Jeremy Farrar told the Guardian, made for “uncomfortable reading.”

The organization had a gender gap in median pay of 20.8 percent, largely because men hold most of the top executive positions, including running the institution’s investment team. That was higher than the national figure of 18.1 percent. Men at Wellcome also got a disproportionate share of bonuses — the gender gap in median bonus pay was 22.6 percent. Women make up about 64 percent of the foundation’s staff.

The gap at Wellcome are little different than what can be found at many foundations in the United States. A newly released survey of small foundations, for example, found women were paid 84 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned.

But Wellcome, which employs 750 people and spent $1.5 billion last year, largely supporting science and medical research, is already two years deep into a major push to address gender and racial disparities in its operations.

In late 2016, after many months of internal study, Wellcome’s executive leadership team approved $17.5 million over five years to make diversity and inclusion strategic priorities. The money will be used in a variety of ways, including to support a network that Wellcome founded alongside biomedical company Francis Crick Institute and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. That network aims to advance diversity in the science and health professions by forging partnerships among philanthropies, government-funded organizations, and businesses.

Lauren Couch, who helped lead the foundation’s preliminary research, started as head of Wellcome’s Diversity and Inclusion Team in January 2017.

Speaking by phone from London, Couch talked to the Chronicle about Wellcome’s approach.

“We are an independent organization. We have got quite a decent amount of funding, and we are really keen on testing and trying new methods, evaluating them really carefully, and then sharing what we learn with others,” Ms. Couch said.

What was the thinking behind the legislation requiring employers to publish data on their pay gaps?

We have had equal-pay legislation in this country since 1970, which states that a man and a women doing the same the job must not be paid differently. But there has been an understanding that it actually takes quite a lot of legislative clout to make that a reality.

So by asking organizations to publish their gender pay gap, it not only looks at those pay differentials with people in the same jobs, but it looks at the fact that generally speaking, within the UK, men tend to inhabit more of the top jobs in organizations, which is exactly the issue we see at Wellcome. So there is also a distribution issue. Women aren’t getting there. They are not getting those high-paid roles.

There was an acknowledgment that we’re missing out on some extraordinary talent as a result of that happening nationally. And the way to create a movement and historical turning point around this was to ask organizations with 250 employees or more to publish their pay gap together.

From my perspective, if 50 percent of organizations that publish put together really excellent action plans to address their pay gaps, we are actually going to make significant change together, and that is what I find really exciting.

Was the leadership at Wellcome surprised by the organization’s own statistics?

Wellcome draws heavily from the science and research sector, which has, typically, an imbalance of men in the top jobs — professorial roles, for instance. We also have a legal department, an investment department, which are also heavily male. I don’t think our executive leadership team were surprised that we had a gap. But they all feel, every one of them, that this isn’t good enough. Everyone in our organization feels this isn’t good enough. It is not OK to have a pay gap — 20.8 is significant.

It certainly has given every member of the team an incentive to champion the actions that we are putting into place.

What are you and your colleagues at Wellcome doing to change things?

We know there isn’t a single intervention that is going to make a difference. There is no magic bullet. I wish there was. Our idea is that you need to make lots of small changes to create that needle shift in this area.

There are a few activities we are prioritizing this year.

When I took this case to our Board of Governors two years ago, I said, you know what, we don’t even have the data to say exactly what is happening here.

So one of our first priorities needs to be ensuring that we can actually see how women are experiencing Wellcome as an organization. How they are moving through the organization. So one of our activities is around ensuring we have more robust diversity data.

We are also going to launch an unconscious-bias program, which not only will equip our colleagues to manage bias in their own behavior and others but also to think about how bias might have an impact on the programs and projects they run.

Certain environments or situations can make it more likely for you to exhibit bias. So we are interested in equipping our colleagues not only with the tools to call out biased behavior when they see it but also to think about, OK, how do I design this process to be the most inclusive that I can?

We are looking at recruitment, which is probably quite obvious, but we’ve got a few ideas and changes we’d like to make within our recruitment model.

We are likely to introduce a gender-balanced short list. We are going to explore introducing name-blind recruitment.

Wouldn’t that require upending human-resource and hiring processes?

The Diversity and Inclusion Team at Wellcome, it works across the whole organization, or at least it is beginning to. We’re are a relatively new team. Working closely with the people in HR will be absolutely vital.

Every tweak or change we’re proposing will be necessarily collaborative, which I personally find exciting.

What other changes will you be experimenting with?

We have had a Behavioural Insights Team working — they are called the Nudge Unit — within the government for the last few years. And a spinout of the Behavioural Insights Team, who use behavioral insights to essentially create better health outcomes or other socially productive outcomes, their spinout is called Applied, and it is supposed to be the most inclusive way of making recruitment decisions.

It’s like a plug-in, a bit of technology. It does a few things. It hides CVs completely, because apparently we dwell too much on unnecessary detail in CVs. It also makes you review all questions together. Rather than going through one applicant at a time, it makes you look at question one next to every other question one.

These simple, tiny little tweaks and changes, called nudges, can actually make the whole recruitment process much more inclusive and less likely to bias women, for instance, or members of minority ethnic communities.

What else would you like your peers to know about what is happening at Wellcome?

When I talk about collaborating within Wellcome, I mean everybody being able to lead on this agenda in one way or another. I don’t expect that to happen without support, but our whole ambition is to almost render ourselves redundant within five years because we want to equip our colleagues to lead in this as business as usual.

That is a really, really important part of the way we are working. We don’t just want to create a new department. We don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for others to lead on this agenda. That is where I think the difference will be made.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.