Ethnic Minority Experiences in Brain Sciences

In the summer of 2021, the Faculty of Brain Sciences EDI team conducted a number of focus groups with ethnic minority staff to better understand their experiences working in the Faculty. This project was facilitated and analysed by Clinical Fellow Dr Roopal Desai, from the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences.

Literature on ethnic minority employees within UK universities paints a stark picture of the additional barriers and difficulties ethnic minority employees face in relation to recruitment, career progression, and retention. Through running focus groups with our own staff, we hoped to better understand these experiences of our colleagues, and effectively address and dismantle the barriers they face.

The key themes that emerged from the focus group data are summarised below:

• All participants reported experiencing subtle forms of racism, discrimination or disadvantage whilst employed at UCL.
• The participants reported a sense of being held to a higher standard in terms of amount and quality of work they produce.
• Participants felt isolated, and as though they do not belong to the UCL community.
• Participants felt less able to progress at UCL as they do not see themselves reflected in senior roles.
• There was a sense that the burden of solving issues such as discrimination falls to ethnic minority staff, whilst White employees could choose to look away.

Overall, it has become clear that issues raised in the research literature on this topic are mirrored in the concerns of ethnic minority staff in the Faculty of Brain Sciences. This demonstrates the serious and urgent need to better address racial inequalities in the Faculty, and wider UCL.

Recommendations from the report are going to inform the Faculty’s EDI strategy, including forming networking groups, and supporting staff into schemes such as BMEntor and Inclusive Advocacy schemes.

It is important to highlight that in talking about some of these experiences considerable distress was elicited in some of the participants. There was also a strong cynical feeling of resignation that there was little will or appetite for change at UCL. This should be a call to action to all staff across UCL; that without appropriate responses to these results we risk further marginalising ethnic minority staff.

The concluding quote below from one of the focus group participants captures a common experience of distress and sense of frustrated resignation that several of the participants voiced.

“It is quite emotionally exhausting talking about experiences and[…] then after this it’s kind of like…then what? We’re being extrapolated for data and then what?”