We will shortly be in a position to confirm who is on the Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team (AS SAT) for the School of Education. There is still time for you to become involved at this level if you wish – please come and talk to me.

THE SELF-ASSESSMENT PROCESS

Having an effective self-assessment team is important to the success of our application to the Athena SWAN Charter. These are the details that we are required to include in the submission:

  • members’ roles (both within the institution or department and as part of the team) including identifying the chair;
  • how people were nominated or volunteered to the role and how any time involved in being a member of the team is included in any workload allocation or equivalent;
  • how the team represents the staff working in the institution or department (eg. a range of grades and job roles, professional and support staff as well as academics and any consideration of gender balance, work-life balance arrangements or caring responsibilities);
  • when the team was established, including how the team communicated, for example, face to face, email, etc.;
  • how often the team has met;
  • the focus of the meetings;
  • how the team has consulted with members of the institution or department (and students);
  • consultation with individuals outside the institution: external consultation refers to consultation outside the institution or department, for example, a critical friend reviewing the application, consultation with other successful Athena SWAN departments/institutions;
  • how the self-assessment team fits in with other committees and structures of the institution. It is important to include information on the reporting structure. For example, is there a direct route for the team to report to, is Athena SWAN a standing item on the department/institution’s key decision-making board?

As you will have noted, we need a strategic approach to the membership of this group. We need both men and women, as well as range of work roles represented. We are currently reviewing the need for a more strategic approach to equality in the School of Education, and the AS SAT will play a key role in relation to this in the future. This will also form part of our AS submission and action plan.

Plans for the future of the self-assessment team

  • how often the team will continue to meet;
  • how the team intends to monitor implementation of the action plan, including how it will interact with other relevant committees and structures within the institution;
  • how the team intends to keep staff (and students) updated on ongoing work;
  • succession planning for where membership of the team will change, including any transfer of responsibility for the work, role rotation and how the workload of members of the team will be accounted for in workload allocation;
  • at institution level, how the team will engage with departments to encourage them to apply for award;

The UoB’s Athena SWAN Bronze Level Action Plan states that ” A need has been identified to ensure that Athena SWAN activity is explicitly considered within the future workload model“, and there will shortly be news about the resourcing this project.

Many of my colleagues, both female and male, have indicated a commitment to the process because they believe in what it represents and what it could achieve. The Athena SWAN guidance is very clear about it being a group of people who takes the self-assessment forward, so if there are colleagues out there who still want to get involved in our submission please contact myself or Andy Davies.

Not achieving the Bronze level award may have a direct impact on the SoE’s access to funding in the future, as funders are increasingly looking for organisational commitment to equality processes. So, as university lecturers, researchers and professional support staff,  we all have a vested interest in making this work.

Bronze Level requires the creation of an action plan based on the responses to the consultation process that’s yet to come. This will require us to look closely at the personal, cultural and structural  (thanks Mark!) make-up of the SoE, in order to determine the actions needed to comply with the Athena SWAN mission.

 

University of Brighton Institution Bronze Award Submission (2016).  Available at: https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/hr/equality/pubdocs/UoB_Institution_Bronze_April_2016_publication.pdf

This was said by Professor Tom Welton at the Athena SWAN lecture last night as he was describing the journey to the Athena SWAN gold award at the Chemistry Department of Imperial College. He talked about the ability to ‘look in the mirror’ to not only identify where working practices need to improve , but also to identify the things that are done really well.

He talked a lot about the post-graduate, post-doctoral and professorial levels at Imperial and how these originally reflected the male dominated nature of chemistry as a discipline. Ten years ago they had  a ratio of one female professor to nineteen men but have since managed  to acheive seven female professors through a different way of looking at talent pools and recruitment. The ‘leaky pipeline’ analogy is one that is used frequently to describe the reasons why women leave STEMM subjects and/or do not achieve promotion or positions of responsibility in the same way that men do, and by examining the points where the leaks occur, Imperial has also managed to make a difference to  the flow of women leaving  the department after they had achieved their doctorate.

The issues for the SoE will inevitably be  different because the starting points are different to that of Imperial,  but one thing that occured to me whilst he was speaking and which is partly due to my own experience of trying to complete a doctorate whilst working full-time, was that of how many women have achieved post-graduate qualifications in the SoE compared to men in the last few years. What is the ratio of new staff coming in with a Masters level qualification, and are they more or less likely to go on to do a doctorate? How many people do not complete their doctorate, what is the ratio of women to men, and why do we think this is? Is there a correlation between the experience people have whilst doing their Masters and the liklihood of them going on to doctoral level? If there is an imbalance, what can we do about the support given to colleagues studying for post-graduate qualifcations in order to make it the norm that people will be successful rather than not? Such questions will need to added to the survey questions….

By encouraging colleagues in the SoE to study whilst they work, how exactly are we supporting them? Are we pretending that we’re giving post-graduate study equal status to other parts of our workload, or is the reality that other duties ‘trump’ an individual’s time to study and write – a call to a meeting, marking, or covering absence perhaps? How can we support individuals to preserve some semblance of work/life balance whilst undertaking post-graduate study without feeling guilty or defensive of taking legimate study time? I’d welcome your thoughts on this….