Draft new action plan

In my previous blog post, I discussed the action plan of our 2018 Athena Swan bronze award application. But, of course, I also had to write an action plan for the new application. And this was even more important, so it was time I moved on with that.

I had a deadline, as I had an appointment with a lady from HR to go through my draft. Unfortunately, that meant weekend work, but so be it.

When I wrote the new action plan I was trying to keep it brief. The biggest change in application format was that you were not expected to write something the size of War and Peace this time. So no 12 pages! I was a bit scared that my draft was already four pages. We were only supposed to have 4 to 8 priorities. That they were almost a page each was not something I had done on purpose! But it was just that there often were many aspects to each priority, and I wanted to be able to wave our new action plan around to make the School stick to it; all aspects thereof.  

The first criticism I received all that I had so far not provided a qualitative rationale for my priorities. They were all based on data! Things such as application rates, promotion rates, degree classification, responses in staff and students surveys, et cetera. So I will now add a bit of a header to every priority, and say things such as that there currently is a #% gender gap in rate of applying for promotion among the academic staff. And then it makes sense that I have a priority to narrow that gap, and an action intended to effect that. 

To my slight disappointment, the second bit of feedback was that HR said that four pages was not enough. I would have to bulk it out! Make my priorities more detailed, and have more of them. She said I could also add a priority that was not based on data, like the other ones are. For instance; at the moment, all the data I have assumes that gender is a binary thing. So I can't realistically make any quantifiable promises about everyone for whom this does not hold, but at least I can acknowledge that I am aware of the issue, and can see some way of incorporating this sort of information in the future. And at the moment, the award is all about gender, while it makes sense to go intersectional. 

I have some work to do now, updating my action plan! And I hope I am quick about it. Providing the old and the new action plan is not enough; I also need to write the associated text! Luckily not all of it; I have asked the Head of School to provide his part. 

I already confessed that my teaching is undoubtedly already suffering because of the time this takes. It will stay that way for a while! I'm really glad that soon there will be a week of no teaching (except fieldwork). I hope I can manage to churn out most of the application then!

Students don’t have to choose between mr, miss and mrs anymore! How many don’t? That can go into a new priority. 

Students don't have to choose between Mr, Miss and Mrs anymore; Mx is also an option!