Sadly, Professor Haifa Takruri has decided to step down as Lead of Athena Swan in SEE. I am sure you will agree, we wouldn’t have been able to receive our Bronze award without her!
Taking the reins now is Dr Tanja Poppelreuter (T.Poppelreuter@salford.ac.uk), Dr Marina Leontiadou (M.Leontiadou@salford.ac.uk) and Prof Angela Lee (a.lee8@salford.ac.uk). Feel free to reach out and join the team to ensure that all our processes and procedures in SEE support gender equality.
Prof Haifa Takruri and the Athena Swan team in the School of Science, Engineering and Environment can report that we have successfully achieved our Athena Swan Bronze Award!
The process of bringing the former schools together and aligning our previous work on gender equality has taken us a little while and this is by no means the end of the road. But we’re proud of the way we have come together and the action plan we’ve drawn up. The challenge now is to implement that action plan to see the necessary change for our staff and students. This is a challenge for our leadership and all of us in the School.
We’ll be publishing our successful submission shortly so watch this space for more details.
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.
Welcome to the School of Science, Engineering and Environment Athena Swan Blog!
This is a place where we will share progress and invite contributions related to our application for an Athena Swan Award as the new SEE School. As a team, lead by Professor Haifa Takruri, we co-ordinate the work of the school around Athena Swan; however, we also hope to use the blog to champion successes in the School with a focus on gender equality broadly.
By way of introduction to Athena Swan, here are the 10 key principles of Advanced HE’s Athena Swan Charter. They set out the principles institutions commit to embedding within their policies, practices, action plans and culture, and form the framework for our work at Salford.
1. We acknowledge that academia cannot reach its full potential unless it can benefit from the talents of all.
2. We commit to advancing gender equality in academia, in particular, addressing the loss of women across the career pipeline and the absence of women from senior academic, professional and support roles.
3. We commit to addressing unequal gender representation across academic disciplines and professional and support functions. In this we recognise disciplinary differences including:
4. We commit to tackling the gender pay gap.
5. We commit to removing the obstacles faced by women, in particular, at major points of career development and progression including the transition from PhD into a sustainable academic career.
6. We commit to addressing the negative consequences of using short-term contracts for the retention and progression of staff in academia, particularly women.
7. We commit to tackling the discriminatory treatment often experienced by trans people.
8. We acknowledge that advancing gender equality demands commitment and action from all levels of the organisation and in particular active leadership from those in senior roles.
9. We commit to making and mainstreaming sustainable structural and cultural changes to advance gender equality, recognising that initiatives and actions that support individuals alone will not sufficiently advance equality.
10. All individuals have identities shaped by several different factors. We commit to considering the intersection of gender and other factors wherever possible.