Should D&I get more comfortable with academic research?

Should D&I get more comfortable with academic research?

By Jo Faragher on 4 June 2026

Under increasing pressure to demonstrate their worth in a difficult climate, academic research can offer real value to D&I teams. Deep, targeted and peer-reviewed research into inclusion topics can provide a vital evidence base when organisations are considering investing in training, for example, or thinking about new ways to drive equity. At the same time, businesses are bombarded every day with headlines about what apparently works and what doesn’t – something that could be a distraction from the meaningful academic research that could be put into practice.

“The challenge with D&I is it can be dictated by fashion – whatever feels morally or politically urgent at the time rather than what practitioners feel able to do,” says Dr Louise Ashley, senior lecturer in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London. At the same time, universities are to a certain extent ranked by the quantity and quality of research they conduct and publish. “Critical research can ask deeper questions about the assumptions behind D&I, such as who benefits from popular interventions and what problems are named – and this can be harder to put into practice,” she adds.

Some things lend themselves better to research than others, explains Dr Ashley. For example a practice such as contextual recruitment (which evaluates a candidate’s achievements against their personal, socio-economic, and educational background) could offer the chance to run control groups, but not all D&I interventions can be measured in such a definitive way. “We can make educated guesses about what’s working, but there may be a number of variables why someone made partner at a law firm, for example,” she adds. Other times, political drive or leaders’ opinions can override evidence: around 10 years ago many businesses adopted unconscious bias training, for example, without evidence that it actually worked. Many withdrew it in years to follow because it failed to make any difference beyond raising people’s awareness.

Research-driven D&I

Dr Anthony Giannoumis, associate professor at Kristiania University College in Oslo and an author on inclusive leadership, says D&I practitioners use academic research “more than people assume, and less than they should”. “The best practitioners are genuinely research-driven. The closest parallel I can draw is deep tech, where everything is built on research and innovation. Good D&I leaders work the same way. They use research to design programmes, policies, and interventions, and there’s a deep history of work to draw on across sociology, law, organisational studies, and psychology,” he explains. Dr Giannoumis was involved in drawing up an EU coalition on gender-inclusive innovation called EQUALS-EU, where research data was used to build an incubator and leadership bootcamp. “Those interventions created value we could measure, and ripple effects we’re still seeing in the leaders who came through them,” he adds.

However, Dr Debbie Bayntun-Lees, professor of organisation and leadership development at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, feels that – despite a “substantial and growing” body of academic research on D&I – organisations are not drawing on it enough. “The gap between what the evidence tells us and what organisations actually do remains frustratingly wide,” she says. “The challenge is that most standard DEI strategies are designed for speed and optics rather than depth. They tend to roll out solutions; a training programme here, an awareness campaign there, that are disconnected from the wider culture, leadership behaviours and organisational systems in which inclusion either thrives or fails. The research is clear: these interventions rarely produce lasting change on their own. They address the surface while the underlying conditions remain untouched.”

“What academic research can offer organisations is something more valuable: a diagnostic lens,” she adds. “It helps leaders understand why exclusion persists, not just that it persists. It surfaces the mechanisms: psychological, structural, cultural, that sustain inequality even when organisations have the best intentions. From an organisational development perspective, there is real opportunity to work with leaders where they actually are, to understand the specific dynamics at play in their context, and to design responses that are grounded in evidence rather than assumption.” To do this, she explains, D&I teams must genuinely listen to the experience of employees beyond simply administering surveys. “It means treating inclusion as a whole-system challenge, not a standalone programme. And it means building the leadership culture that makes inclusion sustainable over time,” she says.

Deeper interaction

Is there room for D&I teams to work more closely with academics on the challenges they face? “The most powerful insights come when research and practice are in genuine dialogue,” adds Professor Bayntun-Lees. “Academics bring rigour, longitudinal perspective and the ability to identify patterns across contexts. Practitioners bring proximity to the messy reality of organisational life. When those two things connect, and when research informs real interventions, and real interventions feed back into research, you start to build the kind of evidence base that can actually move the needle.”

The barriers to using academic research should also be acknowledged. Dr Giannoumis adds: “The obvious one is lag. There’s always a gap between when research is done and when practitioners can use it, because the rigour of peer review and study methodology takes time.”

That said, the real problems are in translation and connection. “Most research is never translated into what it means in practice, so we badly need strong charismatic science communicators who can bridge that gap. And most research stays trapped in its own discipline. D&I is studied across many many disciplines, but almost nobody is doing the interdisciplinary work to connect those findings into something a practitioner can act on,” he says. Each year, Dr Giannoumis publishes a white paper that synthesises the prior year’s research into something leaders can use. “The barrier isn’t that practitioners won’t read the research. It’s that the research was rarely built for them to read,” he points out.

Aidan McKearney, professor in Human Resource Management and Organisation Behaviour at Hult International Business School argues that – often – business leaders want “quick fixes” such as a toolkit they can take back and implement. “The problem is, they tend to want a simple, superficial toolkit, rather than engage in the deep labour of systems change,” he says. He cites Hall’s Iceberg Model of Culture (where only 10% of culture is visible above the waterline) – meaning they are drawn to what they see and feel they can change, but this does not change what is below the surface. “That’s the deep labour culture work,” he explains. “Having said that, some scholars need to get into the practitioners’ world more, rather than just be comfortable with models and frameworks. But we have to have the conversation about short-termism vs long-termism. Short-termism can be an issue among some practice folk.”

Dr Ashley at QMUL believes there is room to build greater collaboration between academics and practitioners through, for example, advisory boards or by working together on the questions that need to be asked. “Practitioners know the pressures they’re dealing with and academics can turn those into questions, which could make research and practice more effective,” she concludes, with one caveat: “We want our work to have an impact, but we also need to protect a space for more critical work, otherwise we don’t ask the uncomfortable questions.”