The Department of Chemistry is delighted to announce that they have been awarded an Athena SWAN Bronze award.
The Athena SWAN Charter awards have been running since 2005, recognising the commitment of the higher education sector to address gender inequalities, tackle the unequal representation of women in science and to improve career progression for female academics. The Bronze award is given to departments to recognise that, in addition to institution-wide policies, a department has identified particular challenges and is planning activities to address these in the future.
This award marks our collective determination to improve our performance in supporting and developing the careers of young women scientists, and to attract talented women to apply for fellowship and faculty positions.
Our Department has much to be proud of. We are successful at attracting world-class female scientists to Post graduate and post doc positions. In the past 3-4 years we have made considerable efforts to improve life in the Department for all our students and staff. The Departmental structure and management has opened up to be more inclusive; we have made great strides in induction and training, for both post docs and students. We have developed and introduced a career development review (appraisal) system appropriate for use in our Department. Our surveys suggest that the clear majority of our students and post docs enjoy working in this Department and get support when they need it.
However, our self-assessment process has revealed evidence of areas where we are failing: In recruitment – particularly at more senior, fellowship and faculty levels we are failing to attract women applicants. In career progression - we are failing to promote our young women to research fellowship positions and to provide clear role models to demonstrate that a good work-life balance and a successful career are not incompatible. In our culture - we have some very effective supervisors in the Department, but are failing to share good practice.
This Athena SWAN process is very important to us – we aspire to be the best in all aspects of what we do, and our action plan will be the basis for change. The process itself has shown how much can be achieved when a team drawn across the entire Department work together with a single goal.
More details about the Athena SWAN scheme can be found here: http://www.athenaswan.org.uk/