You legislate it. If you want to change it overnight, you legislate it and you tie funding to it.
We do that for people with disabilities, right? We have legislation that says you take out the steps and you put in a ramp. We don't ask people in wheelchairs to try harder or lean in. I think that's one way to do it.
There is one way to do it. They didn't end up doing that in the U.K., but simply the concept that it might be done really caught the attention of the universities, and then it became a competitive process where the competitive spirit took over and the universities wanted to compete with each other to get these awards.
There is the accountability and the consequences piece, or there is the incentivization and the reward-based piece. Money will always incentivize.
I think the federal government can do that through, for instance, the research funding. I sat on the Canada excellence research chairs selection board as the equity, diversity, and inclusion champion, and each university was required, in those applications, to put in an equity plan. For the most part, they were really, really substandard.
I think we could do what we do with other types of funding mechanisms that say that, until you have your biosafety certification in place, or until you have your animal care certification in place, or until you have your human research participants ethics certification in place, you don't get funding. It's not released to the universities.
You could do the same thing and say that you're not going to release the funding to the universities until you are satisfied that their equity plan is in shape and is acceptable, and it deals not just with teaching your hiring committees what implicit bias training is or having the training. We know that is not particularly effective. We need to go beyond that and we need to ask questions of how they are going to have sustainability, how they are going to ensure retention, how they are going to build their teams, and what the processes and policies are that they have in place. I want all of those things codified, and how they are going to improve them over the next three years.
We get universities to take responsibility for that and adopt SEA change or adopt Athena SWAN, and then reward those universities that do that.