22 November 2022 
Sophie Crouchman, Strategic Projects and Research Manager
HR or People functions are very often the home of Diversity and Inclusion work, but are we practicing what we preach?
You may have seen a recent issue of People Management which asked if HR has a diversity problem. CIPD membership data shows 87% of members are white and, outside CIPD, data from the ONS shows the HR Profession is 89% white (higher than Finance, IT and Legal professions).
But what about universities? Well, the best dataset we have on HE workforce is the HESA staff return, and this shows that in the 2020/21 reporting year, 77% of HE staff were white – meaning that our HR functions are likely to be less diverse than the communities they serve.
Unfortunately, getting information on the make-up of HR professionals in HE is tricky – even if you have access to the full HESA dataset through Heidi Plus, disaggregating HR staff isn’t straightforward and now that returning data on non-academic staff is not compulsory in the HESA staff return, the data on professional services staff is incomplete. But how can we identify what steps we as a profession need to take, if we are unsure about what the starting point is?
Here at UHR we have decided to take action. We are developing mechanisms to learn about the diversity of people practitioners in the HE sector and we’re doing this for several reasons:
It is worth saying that we will never use the information we collect to target individuals or groups, or to exclude individuals or groups from accessing our opportunities.
In order to make this a success, we need your help. To coincide with the launch of our new website, we are asking members to review your profiles, which will give you an opportunity to answer some questions to help us understand the diverse group we work with. Log into the new website like usual. Head to the top right where you will see a My dashboard button. Click that, and then look for Edit profile, which will take you to an opportunity to make sure your saved information is still accurate and also the section mentioned above, starting Help us to offer you a better service.
Thanks, we appreciate it.
