Athena SWAN Action Plan

As mentioned above, have a look at other people’s action plans and learn from them. Be cautious in interpreting their application and action plan, as it is likely that some aspects of it are better than others, but it’s useful to see what is happening across the sector.

As well as looking at their applications, it may be worth contacting your counterparts in other Universities and asking for a phone call, or meeting with them to discuss their journey and lessons learnt. If you have established contacts in other Universities with a track record in Athena SWAN, you may even be able to ask them to attend one of your SAT meetings, so that the whole team can be involved in the discussion.

While it’s useful to learn from others, don’t be constrained by that. Encourage the SAT to have some fun and be creative in developing actions.

Additionally, where you do see actions from other applications which you think could be useful, look at ways to build on them and make them even better.

It’s important that actions are focussed on addressing cultural and structural inequalities, rather than somehow ‘fixing’ the individuals who are underrepresented. 

While there may be a place for gender-specific training and development courses, think about their objectives and how these are positioned. 

Additionally, think about the root cause of things. The data are almost the symptom, you need to change the underlying issues which are creating the data trends, rather than trying to address the trend itself. For example, if women are less likely to apply for promotion, think about why. What is it about the criteria, process and working environment that is preventing them from applying. And at the same time think about why men are applying, for example, do they receive more informal encouragement and advice (sponsorship)?

Consider how you can develop actions to be useful to the widest possible group and to consider different groups of women.