As with our last meeting, this month the committee focused, for the large part, on going through our draft application for the upcoming Athena Swan school-level submission. With the internal submission deadline for application approaching, we revised the draft text and Action Plan. A lot of work has been going behind the scenes to obtain the data needed for the application. The data encompass students (undergraduates and postgraduates), academic, technical and professional staff as well as applicants for our degrees and candidates for new positions.

During the meeting, we discussed a new draft policy on committee representation and composition which we will pass on for discussion and approval to the School Management Committee. This is to ensure that committee representation is reviewed regularly, reflects any changes in staff, and ensures principles of equality, diversity and inclusion are embedded in every committee.

Our meeting this month was spent, for the large part, going through our draft application for the upcoming Athena Swan school-level submission. We learnt that, in a proactive move, Advanced Higher Education has moved the application deadline to the 28th May 2021 in recognition of the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the work of the Self-Assessment Team, in particular the closure of schools and the most recent lockdown of January 2021. In addition, the application will also feature a specific extension to the application word limit to consider the impact of Covid-19 on the application.

During the meeting, we identified a number of key challenges and actions which will inform our application.

In our first meeting of 2021 we discussed our forthcoming submission for the Athena Swan award. We are trying to access all the various data that we need, which will need to be sourced in some cases directly from staff, but mostly our Human Resources department will provide. Meanwhile, lots of equality and diversity activity is happening behind the scenes, both at the school and at the college level. At the college level, the university launched a call last summer 2020 for members to join the College Inclusion Committee. Now that the work of the college committee is under way, we, as equality and diversity committee at the school level, have a more direct and simpler route to escalate any actions that go beyond the school remit.

Key discussion topics centred around our forthcoming coaching scheme in the last phase before the official launch, the results from our latest staff culture survey, and the re-launch of the early career researchers committee. There’s lots more work that should come to fruition in the coming months.

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.

One of the first items that our committee discussed in this month’s meeting, was how to keep the social interaction of a school during the pandemic. Specifically we considered those groups that are not interacting as before, students, early career researchers and staff. We’ve therefore set up two new Teams channels: one for early career researchers to revive the ECR committee which has not met during the pandemic, and one for staff/student socialising, a sort of ‘coffee break’ online space to mimic the ‘corridor chat’ that is not happening with the move online.

In other items, Iain Stott and Sheena Cotter were elected as vice-chairs of the EDI committee and we discussed preparing the application for our Bronze application next spring 2021.

Today the committee met and we discussed a variety of points. One of those, was the Athena Swan application for a silver award of the School of Psychology and in particular which actions they have implemented at school level in that respect.

The committee then discussed our newly launched blog and how to add this to the main website presence of the School of Life Sciences so that it is easily accessible for all. We also worded an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion statement that is going to be added to the welcome statement of our Head of School.