We aren’t starting from scratch and many people have contributed to the important work on Athena Swan and gender equality in the SEE School and our previous form as separate schools. We’re thankful to them for their work. Indeed, as we have come together as a new School many of the same people are still working hard in this effort.
We were at different stages as a group before we came together, so it’s been a process of getting to know each other better, working out where we had all gotten to and learning about each other’s disciplines a little more. As a starter, here are the existing Athena Swan Bronze Awards held by our former School of Computing, Science and Engineering and School of Environment and Life Sciences.
As an institution the University of Salford is also working on gender equality and to help set out our current position, you can read out institutional Gender Pay Gap Report from 2018. The gender pay gap for our institution is in the region of 11.2% to 11.6% (median and mean averages respectively). This is one of the issues we’re focused on in our work related to Athena Swan.
Our next steps are to work on what is called an interim award, this is designed to help us explain how we have unified but also to work through some of the complexity of bringing together diverse disciplines and work together in tackling gender inequality in our work. Watch this space for future updates.