Who gets the tap on the shoulder?

Sureshkumar Balasubramanian

Professor Sureshkumar Balasubramanian

There are the ones who tap shoulders. The ones who get tapped. The ones who don’t even know the tapping occurred.

There are the gatekeepers and filters, the people who get filtered, and the bystanders, either watching it all or oblivious to it altogether.

Monash University’s Professor Sureshkumar Balasubramanian has been thinking a lot about these people.

Not because he believes every missed opportunity, unsuccessful application or career setback is evidence of racism. Quite the opposite.

Academic careers are full of rejection, competition and subjective judgement. Different outcomes are inevitable. A difference in outcome is not proof of discrimination.

It is, however, something a scientist might investigate.

“We should test it,” he says.

It is a characteristically deliberate answer from a researcher used to asking questions that can be tested.

Professor Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised plant scientist whose research spans plant development and adaptation, artificial intelligence and genome editing.

He currently leads a world-first Australia-India research collaboration combining AI and CRISPR-based genome editing to develop rice varieties that can better tolerate rising temperatures, research with major implications for global food security as the climate warms.

Spend time talking to him, though, and another preoccupation quickly becomes apparent: what happens when we turn the same scientific scrutiny on the institutions in which scientists themselves work?

The catalyst was the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Racism@Uni report. Its release and the greater emphasis on university accountability that will accompany changes to the Higher Education Standards Framework from January 2027 prompted Professor Balasubramanian to begin writing publicly about questions he says he had been reflecting on for several years.

What followed was not a personal catalogue of grievances, but an increasingly systematic series of articles about uncertainty, evidence, institutional acknowledgement, gatekeeping, filtering and the difference between a process that appears fair, and one that can demonstrate it.

Professor Balasubramanian is animated when he talks about it, warm, energetic, quick to laugh and quick to follow an idea to its logical conclusion.

This is not a victim story.

Nor is his argument that structural racism requires a racist somewhere in the machinery, consciously pulling a lever.

“The key is to recognise that structural racism does not necessarily have a single individual cause,” he says. “It can emerge from the way systems and structures operate.”

A tap on the shoulder, after all, can look perfectly benign.

Someone has an opportunity. They think of somebody they know. Somebody they like, somebody they trust.

The conversation might happen in a formal meeting. But, as Professor Balasubramanian points out, it might equally happen “in a corridor, over coffee, at an informal gathering, or through people who already know one another.”

Nobody needs to dislike anybody else.

But if you zoom out far enough a different set of questions emerges.

Who keeps getting tapped?

Who knows the opportunities exist?

Who gets nominated, encouraged or invited into the room? Who has access to the conversations in which decisions are shaped before the formal decision-making even begins?

And who never knows there was a shoulder to be tapped?

Professor Balasubramanian calls these processes gatekeeping and filtering.

“Gatekeeping determines who gets into the pipeline,” he says. Filtering determines who gets through it.”

“Neither necessarily requires conscious discriminatory intent.”

And that is where his argument becomes considerably more demanding than the familiar institutional language of diversity and inclusion.

It is relatively easy to announce a commitment. It is easy to establish a committee, conduct a consultation, invite different voices into a room or publish statistics demonstrating the diversity of a workforce.

It is harder to ask what those things actually produce.

“A statistic can tell us something important while simultaneously failing to answer the question we actually want to answer,” Professor Balasubramanian says.

His distinction is between presence and outcome; between being included and having influence; between being permitted to speak and having what you say matter.

“True participation requires debate, signs of listening, and being taken seriously; not just a mechanism where ‘voices are heard.’”

And he proposes a rather unforgiving test of consultation:

“Consultation should be judged not by whether people were given an opportunity to speak, but by whether the institution can demonstrate what changed as a result of what they said.”

It is hard to hide discretion in that.

When 94 faces tell you almost nothing

When we spoke, our conversation turned to a controversy inside Professor Balasubramanian’s own broad scientific world.

In 2022, a promotional poster for the International Congress on Plant Molecular Biology, then planned for Cairns, displayed 94 headline speakers and session chairs.

Criticism quickly followed over the racial diversity of the line-up. An organiser’s two-word response on social media,  “Look harder”, dramatically escalated the dispute. Apologies followed. The American Society of Plant Biologists withdrew its support, citing concerns about how critics had been treated. The congress was subsequently postponed, with organisers saying COVID-related travel restrictions were the principal reason for the deferral.

The controversy generated the obvious question: Was the conference diverse enough?

Professor Balasubramanian’s writing invites a different, process-related set of questions, not about the intentions of the organisers, but about how selections like these are made.

How did those 94 people come to be on the poster?

What formal and informal processes shaped the selection? Who was considered and approached? What role did professional networks, recommendations and familiarity play in determining who came to mind?

These questions do not presume discrimination. They ask instead whether the processes that produce an outcome can themselves be examined.

This is the problem with judging a system solely by its visible endpoint.

Professor Balasubramanian has a phrase for another version of it: “statistical hoodwinking.”

Institutions can point accurately to diversity within their ranks. But the statistic may tell us who arrived without telling us what happened after they got there.

“Diversity can tell us who is present,” he says. “It does not necessarily tell us who is thriving, who is merely surviving, and who is lost along the way.”

For Professor Balasubramanian, the answer isn't to infer discrimination from every disparity.

It is to become curious about the disparity.

“A difference in distribution is not proof of discrimination,” he says. “It is a signal to investigate.”

That theme runs through the series of articles he has published in recent weeks.

Together, they amount to something more interesting than a call for greater awareness.

They are an argument for evidence.

“Science does not normally begin by assuming that an observed pattern has a particular cause,” Professor Balasubramanian says. “It begins by observing the pattern, considering alternative explanations, gathering evidence and testing hypotheses.”

Then comes the question.

“Why should institutions be any different when examining their own systems?”

The problem with good intentions

Most institutional systems do not announce themselves as unfair.

They arrive as processes.

Selection criteria. Nomination procedures. Leadership opportunities. Invitations. Networks. Assessments of readiness, suitability, communication, collegiality and fit.

Decisions made by reasonable people exercising reasonable discretion.

And discretion here is key.

Academic institutions, Professor Balasubramanian observes, frequently rely on nominations for grants, awards, leadership positions and recognition. There is nothing inherently wrong with nomination systems.

But they give individuals considerable gatekeeping power.

People naturally choose colleagues they know, trust and work with. If networks and familiarity are unevenly distributed, however, apparently neutral decisions can repeatedly reproduce those differences without any individual decision-maker recognising the larger pattern.

That is exactly why good intentions cannot settle the question.

Neither can the fact that everyone technically went through the same process.

Professor Balasubramanian describes this as “non-parallel parallelism”: processes that appear equivalent producing divergent outcomes because the structural conditions underneath them are not equal.

Trust

There is another word Professor Balasubramanian returns to repeatedly: trust.

“When institutions cannot demonstrate that decisions are consistently fair, they place the burden of interpretation on individuals,” Professor Balasubramanian says.

Was I unsuccessful because somebody else was better? Was I not ready? Was it ordinary competition? Was it the luck and subjectivity inherent in any career?

Or is there a pattern here that I cannot see because I have access to only my tiny part of the system?

Institutions, of course, can see considerably more.

They know who is recruited. Who applies. Who gets alerted to opportunities. Who gets encouraged or nominated. Who receives awards. Who joins committees. Who participates in leadership. Who is invited into strategic discussions. Who receives professional development. Who gets promoted. And who leaves.

Professor Balasubramanian's proposition is surprisingly simple.

Look.

“We have the data to analyse and fix,” he says. “But do we have the courage to look and analyse?”

And then do something much harder.

Change.

Professor Balasubramanian's writing repeatedly returns to the distance between acknowledgement and accountability, between institutional statements and institutional behaviour.

“What is the evidence? What has actually changed? Does the experience on the ground correspond with the institutional statement? And perhaps most importantly: Are the words and actions aligned?”

It is tempting, particularly in institutions full of committees, strategies, frameworks, consultations, training programs and carefully crafted commitments, to mistake activity for evidence of progress.

Symbolism has value. Professor Balasubramanian acknowledges that.

But symbolism is not intervention.

And a process being established, convenient or even defensible tells us little about whether the process produced fair outcomes.

Does discretion remain largely invisible behind a process that can point to consultation, procedure and good intentions?

“True leadership is measured by the willingness to look at that data,” Professor Balasubramanian says.

Perhaps this is why his argument goes beyond the particular problem he set out to examine.

Racism is the subject.

But the machinery he describes, discretion, gatekeeping, informal networks, opaque decisions, subjective assessments, consultation without influence and processes defended because they are established, will be familiar to considerably more people than those who have experienced racism.

His argument does not require us to assume malignant motives. It requires something potentially more uncomfortable. That we examine our own decisions.

Who have I encouraged? Who have I overlooked? And it makes the final question difficult to outsource to somebody else. Not: Who are the racists? But: Where am I in the system?

The one tapping the shoulder? The one being tapped? The gatekeeper? The person doing the filtering?

Or the bystander who never thought to ask what was happening outside their field of view?

Explore Professor Balasubramanian's anti-racism writings here:

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