Race equity needs nudges, not just good intentions

Race Equality Charter leader, Dr Teslim Bukoye, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), University of Bath, shares his thoughts on a nudge-led practitioner guide to making REC real.

Universities rarely lack statements of intent on race equality. What they often lack is a consistent way of turning that intent into everyday institutional behaviour. This is where the Race Equality Charter (REC) matters most. At its best, REC is not a badge, a process or a yearly submission exercise; it is a framework for asking whether a university’s ordinary systems are producing equitable outcomes for staff and students, and whether leaders are willing to redesign those systems where they fall short. 

The case for sustained attention is clear. Across UK higher education, diversity remains much stronger at the point of entry than at the point of decision making. Ethnic minority representation is far more visible among students and early career staff than among professors and senior leaders, with especially low representation at the highest levels of institutional influence. Although some progress has been made, the broader pattern remains familiar: as seniority increases, diversity thins out. At a time when the sector is experiencing significant leadership turnover, this matters even more. Universities are making a new wave of appointments that will shape culture, priorities and opportunity for years to come. Race equity, therefore, cannot remain a specialist concern sitting only with EDI teams. It must be understood as a core leadership and collective responsibility. 

Yet implementation often stalls for familiar reasons. Institutions produce action plans, establish committees and state clear ambitions, but race equality still struggles to survive the pressures of everyday organisational life. Recruitment and promotion decisions lean on tacit assumptions. Curriculum conversations focus on structure rather than belonging. Annual planning gives priority to finance, regulation and risk, while equity is treated as important but somehow separate. In many universities, race equality is still something people support in principle but do not consistently operationalise in practice. 

This is where nudges can help. Building on earlier work on behavioural insights, recent scholarship and practice guides on nudging show that organisations often place too much emphasis on plans, controls and formal systems, while paying too little attention to the decision environments in which people actually act. That insight is highly relevant to REC. If universities want different outcomes, they must pay closer attention to the routines, prompts, defaults and signals that shape everyday judgement. Structural inequities still require structural responses, of course, but many inequitable outcomes are also reproduced through what institutions make visible, normal and reviewable. 

Three practical implications follow. First, race equity needs to appear where leaders already look. If REC is discussed only in annual reporting cycles or specialist committees, it will remain marginal to institutional life. But when race equity is embedded into executive meetings, faculty reviews, departmental reporting, promotion discussions and student outcomes conversations, it begins to influence the places where decisions are actually made. This is a simple point, but an important one: what becomes routine becomes real. 

Second, leaders need usable evidence and timely prompts. Universities are not short of data, but many still struggle to present race-related disparities in ways that sharpen judgement and encourage action. Clear contrasts in recruitment, progression, attainment, workload or representation should not sit quietly in appendices. They should shape live conversations. The same is true of timing. Many interventions are well intentioned but poorly placed. A workshop months before a promotion round may do little when the real decision arrives. Behavioural prompts are most effective at the point of judgement. Before shortlisting, promotion, workload allocation or disciplinary decisions, leaders should be encouraged to ask simple but powerful questions: who benefits most from this process as currently designed, who may be overlooked, and what does the evidence suggest we should notice? 

Third, sponsorship should be treated as institutional infrastructure, not informal chance. Research has consistently shown the importance of mentors, sponsors, visibility and stretch opportunities in enabling progression. Yet too often, sponsorship remains uneven, informal and dependent on proximity to power. If universities are serious about race equity, they must make sponsorship more intentional. That means systematically identifying and supporting talented racially minoritised colleagues through secondments, acting roles, strategic projects and influential committees, so that progression relies less on insider familiarity and more on fair access to opportunity. 

None of this is especially dramatic, and perhaps that is the point. REC implementation rarely fails because universities cannot produce another strategy. It falters because institutions have not consistently redesigned the routines through which judgement is exercised. Perhaps, a nudge-led approach helps because it is practical. If race equity is to move from promise to practice, that is where the work now needs to happen. 

Teslim O. Bukoye is Associate Professor and REC lead at the University of Bath. A Fellow of the Association for Project Management, he is an award-winning scholar and educator, recognised for pioneering behavioural nudges in project performance, receiving awards for innovation in teaching and community inclusion, and for ReadCycle-Bath work featured by BBC. 

 Additional links: 

1. Bukoye, O. T. and Roehrich, J. (2025). How to nudge your project stakeholders to achieve better outcomes? APM How-to-Guide.
2. Bukoye, O. T. and Roehrich, J. (2023). How to use Nudges to improve project performance? Peer-to-Peer. Spring 2023 issue, APM Project Journal.
3. Bukoye, O. T., Ejohwomu, O., Roehrich, J., & Too, J. (2022). Using nudges to realize project performance management.International Journal of Project Management,40(8), 886-905.

The Race Equality Charter supports institutions in their work to drive out racism and tackle inequalities. The updated charter aims to provide clarity so that all applicants understand what’s needed at different stages of the process and streamlines the framework so that it remains robust and reliable.

Find out more here