In 2018, our School applied for, and received, an Athena Swan bronze award. The application provided an overview of the School and its gender issues, and an action plan. This basically is a list of promised actions, and the criterion by which, at the end of the award period, it can be assessed whether the promise was kept or not.
This action plan filled 12 pages. It was incredibly detailed! And in order to reapply, we need to give an overview of to what extent we have managed to fulfil all that. And when I say we, I mean I. I was parachuted in as the next EDI lead, so it was me who had to account for all these promises I was not involved in making.
Nobody had been keeping track of how we were doing with regard to this action plan over the past five years, so figuring out how we had been doing was quite a big task. I had to go around and ask everybody for information. Some of that was difficult to get, given that a lot of people had changed roles in the last five years. We didn't have the same Head of School anymore, or the same Director of Research, just to give a few examples. And some people had left altogether. Some people were a bit surprised that their roles were associated with a promise; they had never seen this before. So much for continuity!
When I was going to see a lady from HR about the topic, I showed her what I had achieved so far. She said she would go through it in detail later. But just superficially going through it there were already two interesting discussions that came up.
I had to assign each promise a colour: red, amber, or green. My interpretation was: red is for promises we had not managed to keep. Amber was for partially kept promises. And green for things we had actually managed to do. But HR saw it differently! My contact suggested red for things we had decided to abandon altogether. There was a promise that had something to do with the gender balance of people attending a public event. And we had decided that in this day and age, we couldn't just go and decide for other people what their gender was, and we also didn't think it was the polite thing to do to make them declare their gender. So that was deemed unfeasible. So although we had promised something quantitative about the gender balance, we didn't know whether we had achieved it. We might have! But red.
I also had red for a promise we had completely failed at. Once every few years we do a staff survey, and the action plan had promised some action that would raise a certain positive response to 80%. We got stuck at 50%. Red! But HR thought amber, because at least we had done the action. It has not been done to such an extent that we had achieved the 80% positive response, but we had done it nonetheless. That's a partial success, so not red. That is a way of looking at it!
The other thing was, albeit related, a bit more philosophical. What is this application for? Is it for getting the desired award? In that case, a good strategy is to paint everything in as positive a light as we possibly can. Or is it for holding management to account? In that case, we should be as brutally honest as we can. If we make everything look as positive as possible, we might obscure areas that still require attention. And we both know that it is a bit of both. My contact confessed, however, that it was specifically the task of HR to support us in getting the award. And I understand why HR has received that brief. But it was interesting to talk about it!
So what was my evaluation? Of the 70 promises, I had 6 red, 26 ambers and 25 greens. And 13 outstanding. Will that (minus the outstanding; I will really have to chase these up) be enough for our bronze award reapplication? Stay tuned!
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