I am spending some time assessing Athena Swan Applications. It is making me ponder a lot of things. Guidance for giving feedback is to focus on what is included, not what is missing.
Here are some:
- The experiences of professional staff are given very little attention and seem to be poorly understood. particularly in relation to career progression.
- The professional staff in academic departments are mostly women. I wonder if this is because IT is so centralised. Bringing all your professional IT and estates staff together in their own large groups makes sense of course in most universities, but it does exacerbate and perpetuate the structural inequalities and gendered assumptions about who does what kinds of work? This is what our students are seeing us modelling.
- Athena Swan is asking applicants to consider intersectionality, but so many more words are being wrangled into a word salad around gender than are being used to describe the different experiences of diversity and intersectionality of women in regards to age, ethnicity, race, disability, religion, class, nationality, parental status or workplace seniority.
- Its almost like we have only just discovered that career progression is completely different for professional and academic staff. No mention of why the responses to a culture survey might be different in these groups.
- There is no mention of technology. Flexible working is described, but no mention of anything hybrid or how access to that might vary by job roles.
- Plenty on maternity, almost nowt on menopause.
- One action plan discussing the impact of COVID. None mentioning the impact of ‘digital transformation’ or AI.
- Interesting to see project management language coming through in the plans for action logs and data audits, One dept using RAG status for reporting. I haven’t seen any Risk Registers yet.
- my computer likes to correct my misspellings of maternity to ‘matter not’.
- No attempt to evaluate the efficacy of training beyond numbers of attendees and satisfaction happy sheets.
- Only one mention of working to remove marital status titles ‘mr, mrs, miss, ms’ from university systems.
- Much inclusive language, but also some highly contested and confusing.
- Almost no mention of technical staff at all ( even in bids at university level)