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Attaining an Athena Swan Bronze award is, of course, just the beginning of an organisation’s progress towards gender equality. To overcome the problems that have been identified, the Action Plan must be implemented. Progress will be affected by many of the same obstacles and enablers that impacted on the application process, and in 4 years’ time, you’ll need to apply again – either to retain your Bronze or to step up to Silver. Go back to the beginning and restart the game.
The twice yearly AS submission deadlines are important marker-points for a SAT team and useful in focussing its activities, but they should not overly determine decisions about preparedness to submit. The time needed for redrafting, the incorporation of peer review comments, and mechanisms to ensure adequate collective ownership and sign-off of the report should not be sacrificed to a purely externally driven timetable.
The support of senior staff within and above your department or school can help, or hinder, the development of an AS application and the implementation of its Action Plan. Involving key decision makers from the outset, and ensuring that they are kept in touch with the SAT’s work, can help to avoid this pitfall.
The support of senior staff within and above your department or school can help, or hinder, the development of an AS application and the implementation of its Action Plan. Involving key decision makers from the outset, and ensuring that they are kept in touch with the SAT’s work, can help to avoid this pitfall.
As a high profile and externally esteemed award, there is a danger that university management may instrumentalize the AS Charter, viewing it as a means to an end rather than a meaningful process in its own right that is just the start of a long journey towards gender equality. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of AS. It may reduce the application process to a ‘tick-box’ exercise, pressurise the SAT into doing the minimum necessary to complete the process, and prevent members from conducting a meaningful and critical self-assessment. This approach may also foster cynicism and resentment within institutions, and is counterproductive to the core objectives of the initiative.
After working on your AS application – which for most institutions takes more than 12 months – it is often difficult to step back and critically evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Asking a colleague from outside the SAT, or someone at another institution who has negotiated the AS process, for a frank and informed perspective can be very helpful in the redrafting phase.
The more a SAT team can discuss issues, work collectively and draw in others to accomplish tasks collaboratively, the more transformative the AS process will be. Working hard together will ensure collective investment in identifying gender inequalities and deciding what to do about them, making the AS application process run more smoothly.
Many hands make light(er) work. Writing an AS application is a lengthy and complicated process that takes time and varied expertise to complete. To prevent all of the work falling on the SAT Chair, form a core writing team and ask different members to draft various sections of the form. Allow lots of time for redrafting and data checking.
Leading an AS application is a highly complicated and diplomatically challenging exercise, requiring institutional leverage, and well developed interpersonal and project management skills. These combined areas of expertise are more likely to be found in senior staff members, so appointing one of them to act as SAT Chair is likely to ease your AS journey.
Even the best SAT teams can face unanticipated and/or unavoidable delays in developing their AS application due to personnel changes, scheduling difficulties, the complexity of the issues identified or other unanticipated difficulties. Plan your submission timeframes to allow for such slippages.
Even the best SAT teams can face unanticipated and/or unavoidable delays in developing their AS application due to personnel changes, scheduling difficulties, the complexity of the issues identified or other unanticipated difficulties. Plan your submission timeframes to allow for such slippages.
The loss of a SAT team member, especially a person with a key role to play in generating or analysing data, may cause the application process to lose momentum. Ensuring that critical tasks are shared across the team, without relying overly on certain individuals, will not only mitigate potential delays but also result in a more equal distribution of workload.
It can be very inhibiting to a SAT if certain members fail to complete assigned tasks or appear indifferent to the AS process. To ensure that your application is not delayed, or worse, derailed, try to appoint willing, proactive colleagues to the SAT, along with an effective Chair who has the leadership skills and power to compel the minimum level of engagement.
Many Universities have IT systems that have not been set up with AS in mind, and this can make finding, analysing and presenting the data very tricky. To avoid these frustrations, try to have people on your SAT team with relevant statistical expertise and the ability to navigate these systems.
The collegiality and camaraderie built through a dynamic self-assessment process, and the institutional commitments to organisational change, can have additional ‘spin-off’ benefits to an institution, such as increased staff sociability, more opportunities for staff engagement and improved morale.
The type of self-assessment that is required by the submission form will invariably cause the SAT team to look anew at their working environment. Detailed data analysis and qualitative insights from focus group meetings will reveal different forms of inequality and discrimination. Most SATs are surprised by some of the issues they uncover when preparing their application.
Inevitably any change process, particularly one that addresses historic, systemic privilege and unequal distributions of power, may generate resistance. Even staff who are committed to an AS application may differ in their diagnosis of the issues and what to do about them. Managing this conflict is essential if you are to work together productively in preparing your application.
Chairing the SAT is a substantial, high profile administrative role. The chair must drive the self-assessment process, manage the SAT team and take responsibility for future actions. Institutions need to recognise this, ideally by awarding teaching buy-out (estimated at least 0.2 FTE). This is especially important given the preponderance of women in these roles, and their personal investment in AS success.
AS applications require a strong evidence base for diagnosing gender inequalities and measuring the success of the actions proposed. It is crucial to include in your SAT team some staff who have access to, and aptitude in dealing with, statistical programmes and data processing systems.
Identifying, at the outset, the right people for your Self Assessment Team (SAT) will ensure that your Athena SWAN (AS) submission runs smoothly and swiftly. Important considerations include: the capacity of staff members (in terms of both time and skills), their levels of commitment, and ensuring that key constituencies are represented. Gender balance is very important, and choice of the right SAT Chair is absolutely pivotal.
When embarking on an AS application, it is very useful to seek advice from others within your organisation (even in quite different disciplines) and from colleagues in other Universities (in allied disciplines). Before starting your application, look at least one completed, successful application form, and try to talk to others who have experienced the process to gain tips and advice on best practice.
Juggling the care of close ones and dependants with the high demands of an academic career is always challenging but can be made slightly easier when the workplace is willing to show adaptability and listen to its staff: are staff informed of their rights when it comes to maternity, paternity, parental or compassionate leave? Are there breastfeeding, milk-pumping or changing facilities for infants and their parents? Are there nursery facilities? Can staff demand flexible hours based on their caring requirements?
Despite legislative prohibitions against gendered pay differentiation since the 1970, the pay gap between men and women academics has persisted and remains elusive and somewhat intractable. If higher remuneration is tied to seniority and other ‘meritocratic’ markers of labour value (research outputs, grant capture), how is this discriminatory? To tackle systemic barriers to women’s career progression (and therefore lower pay), thorny questions need to be raised about gendered cultures of individual salary negotiation and differential rewards for work (e.g. research vs teaching and admin). Is there pay transparency and equality amongst the (gender imbalanced) professoriate, as well as across the pay spine? What impact might maternity leave or career break have on ‘REF-ability’ or, longer term, eligibility for final salary pensions (or years of employee contribution)? How gender balanced is senior management (which garners the highest salaries in most institutions)? And what are the strategies for collective action around a highly private issue where colleagues are tacitly completing and ‘playing off’ against each other?
If gender remains a marker of inequality in academia, other categories of differentiation (which sometimes intersect with gender) also produce discrimination. What about senior/junior distinctions? Racial, ethnic and/or religious discriminations? What about social class? What about disability? A feminist agenda must take intersectionality into account to empower all under-represented groups, either colleagues or students, including by making the curriculum an inclusive and diverse one.
Hiring is a major place where unconscious bias is exercised against under-represented groups. Are hiring committees diverse and do they represent multiple views? Are there any questions in the interview that ask candidates to mention the ways in which they have supported gender equality or inclusion and diversity more broadly, either through their research or in their previous institutional commitments?
Because women are implicitly taught not to make professional demands or ask for pay raises, it might be necessary to put in place mechanisms that actively encourage women to seek promotion, either through mentoring or by offering training and workshops to familiarise them with the promotion process.
How do you create new initiatives and opportunities (mentoring, carers’ networks, curriculum revisions, etc.) without overburdening the staff or creating overlapping structures? how do you get people on board even if it means threatening the privilege of the most established members of staff? how do you keep momentum and departmental cohesion while fighting inequality and opacity?
This infographic was produced by Prof Abigail Woods and Dr Alana Harris for the project 'The Impact of Athena SWAN on Humanities Departments.' The project was funded by Advance HE. A full report is available on the Advance HE website. Research assistance was provided by Dr Dorothee Boulanger. Tiffany Ong of King's Digital Lab was the digital designer and Ben Peppiatt (Freelance Designer) was the creative illustrator.
