Athena Swan: the practical issues

Applying for an Athena Swan award is not only about evaluating the progress you have made with regard to gender equality in your Academic department, and philosophies about the progress you will make in the future, but also just about getting the document together. And getting it submitted. Of course there are impediments.

About a week before submitting I checked the website of Advance HE, the awarding body, to see how you actually go about submitting. The information pack I had been sent just said "check the website". But there was no mention of it there.

I asked Alison, my contact person. Luckily, she could direct me. It is a bit like a secret handshake! If you don't know where to look, and what parts of the site to get an account for, you'll never find it. Are they doing this on purpose?

Finding out where the document has to go is one thing; writing it in the first place is another. The reasonable platform to write it in is Microsoft Word. Everyone who has used that for extensive documents knows it is a temperamental collaborator. It makes strange, apparently autonomous, decisions about layout, and if you work it with voice control software, things get worse. It was quite frustrating at times.

My main application is in portrait, but the appendices tend to be in landscape, because they have tables in them that just don't comfortably fit on a portrait page. And I know that in theory, you can tell a Word document that part of it has to be portrait, and part in landscape. This did not work in practice, however. I didn't worry too much about that; you can just do that in PDF. But then I checked the submission requirements, and these said I had to submit in both PDF and Word. Oh no! That would be such a nightmare. And it was a change from instructions given earlier.

The screenshot I sent Alison

This complication solved itself, though; I mentioned it to Alison, who deals with Advance HE quite frequently, and she asked them if that was true. It turned out they had made this change as sometimes, the people reviewing the applications have visual impairments, and depend on screen readers. For some reason, PDF does not seem to always work well with those; hence the request for two formats. However; it seems to already be known who my reviewers would be, and they didn't seem to have visual impairments, so I was okay to just submit a PDF. Phew. 

The last documents I needed came from the Head of School. He had to write an endorsing letter, and a description of the department. Unfortunately he also had to write a lot of letters of endorsement for everyone who was applying for promotion in this round. Including me! And he had recently been busy with hiring people. And it seems he had to write a huge planning document at the same time. And I know he's busy, but he's known for months he needs to do this. And he is probably going to be the first one in the firing line if we don't submit for renewal. So busy or not, he had to perform! And I knew that in the end he would. And he did.

When in the end I had everything that was needed for the application, it was time to merge it all together. And I had to stick quite a number of files together! The application in three parts; the letter of the Head of School with a Bangor University letterhead, and the parts of the application that came before and after that, on a normal background; then something that wasn't technically an appendix but in practice was; then one appendix that came in three parts, and then three more appendices. Altogether 10 files. I don't have the software to do that, so I have to do it online, on the Adobe website, but there are restrictions to what you can make it do. Would it be okay with 10 files? I was about to find out.

When I clicked "merge" I held my breath. And then came an error message. Nothing about the 10 files, but that my merged document would be more than the maximum of 100 pages. Oh dear! Now what? Could I perhaps leave one appendix out and separately email it to Advance HE? But then I noticed I could just download the document. I'm not sure why they showed me that message when they were clearly allowing me to download the full 167 pages!

It felt really good to have the whole document! I did have a check whether everything seems to be in it. It all looked okay. Ideally, you would print it out, and with a big mug of coffee next to you, go through everything one last time in detail. But I didn't! It was the last working day before Easter, and I really didn't want to submit at the last minute. It is way too likely that something goes wrong. And who is going to provide you with assistance if the Easter break has already started? So I wanted to submit that very afternoon.

After several attempts I managed to login to where I needed to be. I first had to jump through some hoops before I could upload my document. But it didn't upload. I tried again. It didn't upload. I tried again. It didn't upload. This was exactly the reason I didn't want to submit any later than I was!

I sent an email to Advance HE. Was there perhaps a page limit that I wasn't aware of? Or a document size limit? My application was 3 Mb! Before I had an answer I decided to go back to the Adobe website and compress the file. I got it down to 2 Mb. Maybe that would work.

I got a quick reply from Advance HE; they said they had 'an intermittent problem on the platform'. So at least it wasn't my fault! And they offered to receive the application by email. But by then I had my compressed file, and tried again. It went through! It was done! 

It was 15:30. The university would close for Easter at 18:00. So I had time to email the news to the people who had worked with me; let them know the work was done, and thank them for their contributions. And that was it. The thing I had been most nervous about for the whole year was done! And now we need to wait for the outcome. At the earliest I will hear in May; at the latest, in mid June. I will report back!