Thanks for that question.
It's a pleasure to be here again. These are very important questions you're struggling with.
To connect what you just asked me to an earlier question about people sometimes perceiving they need to use buzzwords, that's because they haven't spent a lot of time thinking about substantive ways to address the criteria yet. It's because this is very new, I think, for people. If they use one of these phrases that trip off the tongue, they can build it into a nice sentence. However, it might be more useful to say.... I know that, in my field, women are severely under-represented. A woman coming into my lab may be the only one. If she's a post-doc, she's likely to be in her child-bearing years. I have an upfront policy that says that if you have children, I recognize that you need to go home earlier than might have been typical 20 years ago, when you worked until the lights went off. That's the kind of thing I mean.
I've had colleagues ask me to look at their EDI HQP statements. They call them “EDI statements”, but they're really training statements. Some of them, from white men who haven't had to think about this before—to speak about the elephant in the room—are very substantive. They have written down what they think are inclusive rules. They're very specific about them and why they're needed. It's not about buzzwords, though. It's actually about thinking about the kinds of people who might come to your lab and how you might help them do their best and be the best researcher possible when they leave your lab.
There is another element a lot of people touch on, which isn't related to what I think people are thinking of with respect to EDI buzzwords. When I started in the field—20, 30, 40 or however many years ago—you had to have, as a goal, being a professor. I'm speaking to my colleague here from the association of students. If you didn't say you wanted to be a professor, no one would spend any time on you. That is one of the elements that have changed substantively. Your highly qualified personnel training plan had better not assume that everyone is going to become a professor. It had better have all sorts of ways that you're going to connect people to industry and places where they can use their skills that are transferable.
I don't know if that gives you a feel for it. It's much more organic than people think. We're looking for meat. However, often, when we read these things, they're not meat because people haven't really dug into thinking about it yet.