After I had felt that I had acquired some grip on the situation of our upcoming application for an Athena Swan award, it was time to bring everybody else up to speed. We had the first meetings of the Self Assessment Team and one of the working groups.
The working group was the Women in Science group. That was a group with good representation. We had students, researchers and academic staff on it. And I had dug out some data from staff and student surveys. Interestingly, there are really big differences between how satisfied the various genders were among the students and the staff. And we talked a bit about what to do with that. And about what further data that we wanted to have.
In the meeting of the central team, one of the main points of discussion was the enormous plan of action outlined in the previous application. It was 13 pages of promises to improve something, and the evidence needed to show we had done it. It is a lot of promises! And some of these will have had some dust on them. They all also had a contact person; many of these were the Head of School. However; this was written in 2018, under the previous Head of School, and it turned out that there had been no handover with his successor. So the current keeper of the position was a bit taken aback seeing his title associated with so many items. I think I will have to have a meeting with him at some point to go through them all. It will be quite a lot of work! And I trust he already has plenty of that.
I feel like we have momentum now. And it is my job now to make sure we keep it until the deadline for submission. And I hope it will be successful!
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