Advancing DEI at the DOE National Laboratories

The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Office of Science (SC) believe that creating a diverse workforce and an equitable and inclusive workplace culture that values and celebrates a diversity of people, ideas, practices, cultures, and educational backgrounds is essential for establishing the creative and innovative work environments necessary for the success of the DOE National Laboratories and continued delivery on DOE’s vital missions. Further, behavior such as discrimination and harassment undermine SC’s ability to achieve its mission by reducing productivity, discouraging or inhibiting talent retention and career advancement, and weakening the integrity of the SC enterprise overall, and will not be tolerated. The DOE National Laboratories are each engaged in a number of efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at their laboratory and to continuously assess the effectiveness of their policies, processes, and practices for cultivating an equitable, inclusive, and safe work environment. They also collaborate in key areas to collectively advance DEI across the DOE laboratory complex.

The Office of Science has worked closely with the ten DOE National Laboratories that it stewards to support and encourage their efforts to advance DEI within their organizations. In recent years, SC has instituted new processes to strengthen SC oversight, provided expert feedback and guidance to improve their DEI related programs, processes, and activities, and increased laboratory accountability. SC continuously seeks opportunities to work collaboratively with all of the DOE National Laboratories to develop and promote successful DEI strategies.

Collaborative SC Oversight of Laboratory DEI Strategies

External Peer Review of SC Laboratory DEI Strategies

Promising Practices for DOE National Laboratory DEI Efforts

DOE Laboratory DEI and Workforce Demographics

Collaborative SC Oversight of Laboratory DEI Strategies

DOE National Laboratories’ management and operating (M&O) contracts include requirements that the DOE laboratory contractors establish DEI plans and update their plans annually. In 2016, SC took action to strengthen oversight and laboratory accountability for DEI and establish uniform guidelines for the annual DEI plans for the ten SC National Laboratories, which resulted in a shift from a largely compliance-based approach to requiring actionable strategies. SC’s new guidance includes the use of a defined content structure for their written plans to improve the consistency and quality with which each lab communicates to SC its vision, strategy, and major actions for advancing DEI at their laboratory and for assessing the effectiveness their efforts. SC established an annual, formal SC Headquarters-driven review and feedback process on the laboratories’ DEI plans and activities.  In 2017, SC also began requiring that the SC laboratories post their workforce demographics on their public websites.

External Peer Review of SC Laboratory DEI Strategies

In late 2019, SC conducted an external peer review of the ten SC National Laboratory DEI strategies. SC empaneled a group of reviewers representing subject matter expertise that ranged from leadership in managing large research organizations or departments; operations management, including human resources and civil rights compliance; social science research in diversity, harassment, and workplace civility; and professional leadership in promoting diversity in science and engineering fields. The reviewers were charged with evaluating whether the SC National Laboratories DEI efforts will enable the laboratories to: 1) competitively attract, develop, and retain a diverse workforce of talented staff, and 2) cultivate equitable and inclusive laboratory cultures that are critical to building the creative and innovative work environments needed to deliver on the DOE mission. Reviewers were also asked to evaluate whether SC’s processes for oversight of DEI at its laboratories were likely to be effective at guiding the laboratories to advance DEI at their institutions. All laboratory review documents and reviewer input are confidential, however a copy of the SC review criteria can be found here.

The SC National Laboratories were provided with the responses from the reviewers, which included a synthesis of SC laboratory-wide strengths and opportunities for improvement, as well as laboratory-specific strengths and weaknesses. Based on the reviewer feedback, SC also updated its laboratory DEI promising practices document and shared it with the laboratories. Further, the peer review informed improvements to SC’s approach to the annual DEI plans and feedback process, identified areas where SC can work with the DOE laboratories to further advance DEI efforts; and encouraged SC to conduct future peer reviews of the SC laboratories’ DEI efforts through onsite reviews every three to five years.

Promising Practices for DOE National Laboratory DEI Efforts

The Office of Science developed the Summary of DOE Office of Science Recognized Promising Practices for DOE National Laboratory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts as a compendium of promising practices for SC DOE National Laboratories to consider when developing and implementing their overall DEI strategies. The document was originally drafted in 2019 to recognize practices that have been adopted by one or more SC National Laboratories that have demonstrated some effectiveness in other institutional environments (e.g., academia or industry) and hold potential to advance DEI objectives in the DOE National Laboratory setting. The document was externally reviewed in 2019 and updated in 2020.  It is intended to be informative to DOE National Laboratory leadership and staff, as well as others engaged in advancing DEI at similar institutions. It is not intended to be a comprehensive checklist, recognizing that each organization needs to identify the appropriate strategies to address its own unique DEI challenges and goals.