At our committee meeting in December we started to look at the action plan we had set in our previous Athena Swan application. We used a traffic system to highlight the level of progress against each action point we had identified. We discussed a series of initiatives to move forward those action points for which we had achieved little progress.
A lot of discussion was around the support in place for early career researchers (loosely defined as up to the level of first lectureship). Support in a variety of ways: teaching opportunities and the achievement of a Higher Education Academy qualification, highlighting fellowship applications and tailored funding opportunities, but also a welcoming environment. All of this had already been the focus of our Joseph Banks Laboratories Early Career Researchers (ECR) committee, unfortunately the committee has become inactive over the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore we talked about reviving the committee initially through our newly established Teams channel for ECRs and also through our ‘socials’ Teams channel at the school level.