Athena Swan

Strathclyde and Athena Swan

The University signed up to the Athena Swan Charter in 2005 and has held an institutional Bronze level award since April 2011 which was renewed in 2014 & 2018.  We currently have 16 awards at departmental level including a Faculty level award for Strathclyde Business School, the full list of awards is available below.  

The University is currently in the process of applying to renew our 2018 award.

In 2021 following an independent review Advance HE launched the revised UK Athena Swan Charter which builds on the strengths of the existing framework to create a Charter that is more flexible, transparent and supportive.  Transformed Charter principles were published in November 2020 and the Principal formally signed up to these in December 2021. 

The University is committed to creating greater equity across the institution and colleagues are continually driving forward actions, and identifying potential future actions, in order to ensure that we achieve this successfully.  Some recent examples of this activity include:

• The continual review of our family friendly policies. We recently introduced five days paid carers leave for all staff (two thirds of which are female staff) who are registered as a carer
• Measuring ourselves against the Working Families benchmark to allow us to ensure that our policies and practices allow colleagues to balance the demands of work and home life, particularly parents and carers
• A further review of our socially progressive Menopause Policy to ensure that it continues to be sector-leading and the development of a Menstruation Policy
• The introduction of Diversity Action Plans to the recruitment process. The plans require Departments to detail the steps that they will take to ensure they reach a diverse pool of candidates and target applicants from under-represented groups including female applicants
• The requirement for all colleagues who sit on interview panels across the organisation to confirm that they have undertaken Unconscious Bias training prior to advertising a vacancy
• Successful use of a Gender decoder in our Global Talent recruitment programme which is being rolled out across recruitment activity. The decoder identifies whether adverts use too many masculine coded words which can be off putting for some female applicants
• A review of our Teaching & Learning promotion criteria. This includes explicitly stating that teaching staff are expected to meet most, as opposed to all, of the indicators required across the four areas considered for promotion: Teaching, Research, Knowledge Exchange and Citizenship

 More informaton on Athena Swan and the transformed Charter can be found on Advance HE's website.