This keynote paper draws upon my experiences in relation to gender identity and institutional shifts to promoting a wider “culture of diversity”. My own practice has been feminist in nature, and as Postgraduate Research Lead, my pedagogical interests focus on research degrees and in particular, the ways in which we might build a community of communication and design researchers. The paper describes one UK-based model (and indeed there are many other approaches to consider), based on my experiences in the School of Communication at the RCA, where we foster an active research community, forever forward-looking, wherein members support each other as they become independent researchers. By doing so, we ask in what ways a research community might share and critically reflect on approaches to an understanding of gender identity as part of a wider context of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in design research.