Lord Taylor of Warwick – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Taylor of Warwick on 2015-11-10.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to promote the role of women researchers in the global agriculture sector.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Government is committed to developing a strong, diverse research community. The Research Councils and National Academies share this commitment.

Government is working with its partner organisations to promote equality across all research disciplines and has established a Diversity Steering Group to guide this work.

To improve the diversity of research fellowship awards, the National Academies are working to encourage more applications from under-represented groups and to guard against discrimination in the selection process. Government has also commissioned the Research Councils to develop an action plan to improve the diversity of grant applications and peer-review rates.

As an international example, Government and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have jointly funded four research programmes involving collaborative projects between UK researchers and partners in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.

All programmes have included research capacity building in developing countries and have had an increasing focus on integrating gender into agricultural research.

The most recent programme, Zoonoses and Emerging Livestock Systems (ZELS) includes a studentship programme and of the twelve PhD students who have been appointed, eight are women.