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Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

 

The Economics Department at the LSE is a community where everyone is welcome and valued equally; where diversity is seen as a strength which improves our research and the education we offer; and where we strive to make each other feel safe and appreciated for the job they do.

Francesco Caselli

LSE is committed to building a diverse, equitable and truly inclusive university, a vision the Department of Economics fully supports. We believe that diversity is critical to maintaining excellence in all of our endeavours and we seek to enable all members of the Department to achieve their full potential in an environment characterised by equality of respect and opportunity.

 Our commitment to this vision can be seen in the recent formation of our EDI committee and the existence of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee in Economics (DICE) .

Read the Diversity and Faculty Recruitment, a report to the Economics department by the EDI committee. 

EDI Committee

Formed in 2022 the Department’s EDI Committee is the main forum for monitoring, promoting, and protecting equity, diversity and inclusion in the Department, among both staff and students, and across all areas of academic life, including – but not necessarily limited to – admissions, student progression, curriculum, recruitment, promotion, and relations between students and staff as well as among students and among staff members.

Members of EDI Committee

EDI Comittee Meeting Minutes

Terms of Reference 

 

DICE

The Diversity and Inclusion Committee in Economics (DICE) aims to build a LSE Department that is accessible to individuals of all backgrounds, open to critical self-reflection and intellectual pluralism in content and methods and aware of its social responsibilities.

A summary of the initiatives DICE are currently working on are as follows:

Academic Mentoring Programme (AMP)

  • A mentoring scheme designed to help applicants from underrepresented backgrounds put together the best application they can when applying to PhDs in economics. The program is run and administered by PhD students at LSE, along with PhD students at Cambridge, Oxford, UCL and Warwick. Mentors are PhD students who have gone through the application process themselves.
  • Currently in its third year, AMP has helped 200 mentees apply to PhD programs across the world. Enrolment in AMP is based on self-identification: individuals who are from a background that is underrepresented in academic economics (low-income, handicapped, female, etc.) can apply to be mentored and will be mentored by PhD students during 1-to-1 Zoom calls, subject to capacity constraints.

Curriculum review

  • DICE has started reviewing the curricula of first-year undergraduate economics courses, in conjunction with the lecturers, to expose students to and build a profession where increasingly diverse perspectives, backgrounds and voices are heard. 
  • The work consists of reviewing the content of each course in parallel with a set of guidelines. These outline our goals that courses should cite and reference a diverse set of economists, use diverse examples, draw from applications across several economic fields, set the course material in historical context and define Economics terms highlighting their meaning within the profession. 

Data Collection

  • DICE has worked on putting together a comprehensive dataset about the ethnic and income backgrounds of students in the department of economics at LSE. This is to better understand the scale of the problem, and to better understand students aspirations.

 

The School’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion by Developing LSE for Everyone is one of its three strategic priorities, as highlighted in the LSE Strategy 2023 , and ‘equality of respect and opportunity’ is one of the core principles set out in the School’s Ethics Code. The EDI Division acts to promote and further LSE’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion for all members of the School community.


To provide some examples of the School’s work:

  • Athena SWAN is a national charter mark – run by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) – that recognises the advancement of gender equality in higher education: representation, progression and success for all. LSE received a Bronze award from charter Athena SWAN in April 2020, in recognition of our commitment to gender equality. Find out about the action plan and further information here .
  • In 2017, LSE will be convening a self-assessment team to work towards the ECU’s Race Equality Charter Mark.  The Race Equality Charter is focussed on improving the representation, progression and success of black and minority ethnic (BME) staff and students in Higher Education.
  • LSE has also worked closely with AccessAble to develop online access guides to all the School’s buildings, and route maps around campus.

Other LSE Resources:

  • LSE offers various wellbeing support and mental health services for students including workshops, personal appointments as well as a 24/7 helpline: Find out more at their webpage here. 
  • Support is provided for transgender or gender non-conforming applicants including nonbinary people applying for graduate study at LSE. Click here for more information.  
  • If you have experienced, or witnessed, any form of sexual violence, bullying or harassment, and you want to report this to LSE, you can do this in two different ways. Speak to a Safe Contact or report to LSE directly. Find out how here
  • Staff Counselling is offered and the service can be accessed for help following either a work based incident or for situations relating to personal circumstances. Click here for more information. 

The Economics Department is located in Sir Arthur Lewis Building, the old Land Registry building. The online access guide to the building has been developed in collaboration with AccessAble and it can be found here.