Guiding Biotech Boards on Frequent and Wider-Ranging DE&I Discussions to Achieve Progress

The biotechnology industry has moved forward on diversity and inclusion. Among the thousands of small emerging companies that comprise the sector, significantly fewer can be accused of the homogeny exhibited by boards of directors or leadership teams just a few short years ago.

This progress must be celebrated, for it has changed the culture of the companies and the sector. Some of that change has been internally led, with many passionate proponents leaning in, while external societal change and scrutiny have also moved the dial. Highlighting these wins is one thing, but the final victory cannot yet be claimed. There remain considerable imbalances in representation across a wide cross-section of demographical groups, and a reasonable number of companies appear stubbornly tone-deaf to the calls for any form of diversity, equity and inclusion, either at the board level or elsewhere in the company. As many companies grapple with economic headwinds, DE&I is quickly relegated to the lesser priority list.

While companies have unquestionably made progress in appointing board members and executives, far fewer companies have undertaken company-wide reforms of policies, processes, and systems to ensure they can embed effective DE&I throughout the company. This work is the hardest of all. It requires a high degree of courage on the part of leadership teams and, if managed poorly, can have negative implications for any company. The challenge also becomes greater with operational maturity. Ripping out embedded processes and designing new ones becomes more difficult with time and scale, even when their redundancy is clear.

For this reason, setting effective DE&I practices early in a company’s life seeds an inclusive culture and lessens the need for radical corrective moves as a company evolves and navigates high-growth mode and the accelerating pace of opportunity resulting from its innovative endeavours.

The Bioscience & Investor Inclusion Group (BIIG) has been designing DE&I solutions that directly target VC-backed private companies that have the desire to take decisive action toward greater diversity and inclusion as the company develops. Access to these "plug-and-play" ready-made resources lowers the time and cost barrier for companies to act. Companies do not need full-time HR leaders to implement DE&I.

One such resource is purposely intended for the board of directors. In analysing the DE&I issue among many different biotech company boards, some consistent themes emerged:

• ????????? DE&I is not making it onto the agenda with great frequency. The time constraints boards face in managing the board’s business and addressing priorities means that DE&I isn’t being elevated to the level of the board.
• ????????? When boards are discussing DE&I, they are typically very concentrated on matters of the board itself, such as the board’s diversity and composition.
• ???????? The DE&I discussions that make it to the board are typically very narrow in focus and concentrate on single-issue DE&I problems (e.g. Needing to appoint a woman to the board of directors).

Time is not seen as the only limiting factor. For board members to push for DE&I to be a more regular feature on the board’s agenda and for directors to be comfortable in engaging in wider DE&I discussions that encompass more of the company’s human capital matters, the directors themselves need to be more educated on the broader DE&I issues and the direct implications for the company. ?

To aid in this process, BIIG, through its partnership initiative, IgniteVC, has devised a discussion guide for the boards of these VC-backed biotech companies to engage in more comprehensive and frequent board dialogue on DE&I, looking at the wider company requirements and supporting the CEO and leadership team to drive change. We hope this guide and the accompanying resources will inspire DE&I champions (VCs, C-Suite, and Board members) who have the courage, tenacity and power of persuasion to take on the mission of advancing DE&I in their respective organisations and prevent it from being relegated from the agenda. Change happens one person at a time, and these resources empower you to BE THE CHANGE.

#diversity #equity #inclusion #venturecapital #biotech #boardofdirectors

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