Athena SWAN Bronze award for School of the Arts

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Athena SWAN logo

We are delighted to announce that the School’s recent application for an Athena SWAN Bronze award has been successful!

The award is in recognition of the depth, quality and rigour of our analysis into the current state of gender equality in the School of the Arts and, just as importantly, the action plan devised to address areas of gender inequality in the School. The analysis was both quantitative and qualitative, drawing on staff surveys and data in the School about everything from student recruitment and achievement patterns through to progression and promotion of academic staff.

Thank you

The application was the work of many hands, including:

  • The Academic and Professional Services Leads Fei Chen and Steph Kehoe who coordinated the application, with oversight and overwhelming support from the Dean and Head of School Operations Peter Buse and Steve Winterton.
  • Members of the self-assessment team, Departmental EDI champions and other members of the EDI Committee, Heads of Department and Associate Deans who all contributed to or wrote parts of the application.
  • Members of the HSS EDI Committee who provided critical feedback to sections of the application based on prior Athena SWAN application experiences and best practice.
  • And we also want to recognise the groundwork laid in 2019 by Sara Cohen and Sam D’Arcy in our first application, which was ultimately unsuccessful, but through which we learnt a huge amount about gender equality in the School and about the Athena SWAN process.

Next steps

Even before we heard the wonderful news, we started progress on the action plan which was submitted as part of the application. We will be implementing and measuring these actions against defined targets over the coming years to ensure we are addressing the identified areas of gender inequality.

We are also expecting feedback on our application before the end of October which will give a better sense of why we were successful and the areas where the panel was particularly impressed.

If you would like to know more about the Athena SWAN charter, you can find more information here:

Athena Swan Charter | Advance HE (advance-he.ac.uk)

Whilst Athena SWAN is an important part of our EDI activity, the School’s EDI Committee investigate and identify other areas of inequality within the School. You can refer to our intranet site for updates, which can be found here. or look out for our quarterly newsletter updates.