Athena Swan

Given that I am now the School of Ocean Sciences equality lead, it is my task to try to make sure that our School either keeps or gets a gender equality award. In higher education in the UK, there is some framework called Athena Swan, and it gives out bronze, silver and gold awards. We as a School have a bronze award. And we’d like to keep it. I had a chat with Katrien, my predecessor, and we figured it would be reasonable to reapply for it. We didn't think we would be ready for a silver!

And in order to apply for this kind of award, you have to submit an awful lot of information. You need all the statistics about gender balance (or lack thereof) within the staff and the students, and also in how applications for promotion are treated. And what our policies on parttime working and maternity leave are. And whether anything is changing in that. You also need to discuss whether there is gender equality in what grades the students score, and whether any gender does better in any module and why, et cetera et cetera. It is a lot of work! And some of that, we academic staff don't even have access to. So for all these numbers, we need help from HR, and from student administration.

When it comes to finding out whether students and staff of various genders feel treated equally, and how they feel about that opportunities for working parttime and such things, of course we need to sort ourselves out. But altogether, HR plays quite a role in getting the application together. So the first thing I did after I had had my handover was email a lady in HR who would help me with our application. I had no idea how you go about it! Especially given that there is supposed to be a permanent committee focused on these things within the School, but it seems to have died in the pandemic. There was nothing in place. So I asked to meet her. And she was up for that.

We had a nice chat! And the amount of work that needed doing became clearer to me than it had been when I had only looked at the documentation I had got from my predecessor. I have access to our previous submission, and the information pack about what a new submission needs to look like. The procedure seems to have changed quite a lot! To the annoyance of quite a lot of people.

The next thing I need to do now is get a committee together. I suspect there will be overlap with the previous one, but for reasons of turnover and suchlike I expect some new faces as well. We'll see! This is going to be a big job…