Diversity and inclusion: helping more ideas thrive
Science and health research should be open to anyone with a great idea.
We’re committed to making health research open to anyone with a great idea, and removing any barriers that people may face.
To solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone we need a diversity of people and ideas across science and research.
In the past, Wellcome has played an unintended part in sustaining barriers to inclusive research. Now we are using our influence to remove those barriers.
This means changing research processes and practices that systematically exclude or disadvantage people based on disability, gender and race. And it means co-developing research goals with the people and communities that the research is intended to benefit.
Wellcome cannot achieve its vision to support science to solve urgent health challenges facing everyone unless structural inequalities are corrected. We know that we have played our part in perpetuating and reinforcing these inequalities. This needs to change - urgently.
Over the next 10 years, our goals are to:
- become an inclusive employer: Wellcome staff will be representative of the places we work, able to be themselves, and supported to be their best
- become an inclusive funder: people funded by Wellcome will be more representative of the global population, able to be themselves, and supported to be their best
- support equal health outcomes: all Wellcome-funded research will be inclusive in both design and practice, to help drive better science and more equitable health solutions.
Find out how we’ll do this in our diversity, equity and inclusion strategy.
- 5% of Wellcome staff are disabled, compared with a baseline of 19% in the UK.
- Wellcome funding success rates for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic applicants remain persistently lower than for White applicants (8% compared with 14%).
- 86% of clinical trial participants are white, despite an increasing global enrolment.
Sources: Wellcome 2019 staff inclusion survey, Wellcome grant funding data 2019 to 2020, US Food and Drug Administration.
Since 2016 we’ve been working to make Wellcome a more diverse and inclusive organisation, and we have made some progress.
We’ve been working to embed equity at the heart of Wellcome’s new strategy.
We also have a number of staff-led networks which ensure that our policies and practices reflect the lived experience of staff.
In 2019 we set a target that 15% of the people on our funding committees would be from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities. This has now been achieved and we're looking to surpass it. We’ve also supported Wellcome grantholders to identify and tackle barriers to diversity and inclusion in their work through our Research Enrichment funding.
With the Francis Crick Institute and GlaxoSmithKline, we’ve launched a network called Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health Research (EDIS) which aims to inspire and encourage the UK scientific community to make equality and diversity a top priority.
In 2021, we published our anti-racist principles, guidance and toolkit. Co-created with staff and external anti-racism experts, it provides a framework for how to be anti-racist at Wellcome.
We are using the term BAME as this reflects how we collect and aggregate our data, which is based on UK census categories – but we acknowledge the limitations of this term and expect our approach will continue to evolve.
More news
Read more articles on diversity and inclusion.
This report provides data on the grants we've funded over the past year and funding trends for the past five years.
More reports
Read more reports on diversity and inclusion.
See everyone who's in our Culture, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion team, or contact us at inclusion@wellcome.org.
We want to make sure that in everything Wellcome does, the broadest possible range of people contribute to, and benefit from, science's potential to change the world.
