Today was spent at the Athena SWAN awards ceremony for institutions and university departments in the University of Greenwich. I’ve been on the departmental Self-Assessment Team since the beginning, so was one of those selected to represent our department.
The general consensus is that the process needs to be made more consistent; especially if people are to be recruited and retained on the judging panels. One idea that found favour amongst those that I talked to was a standardisation of the data presentation.
Essentially, each applicant team would enter the data into a pre-designed spreadsheet, by selecting the appropriate groupings of academics to be compared to for the benchmarking process. Every application team is having to track down benchmarking data – surely it must be a more efficient process to have this centralised and provided to applicants: otherwise, for completeness of reviewing, the benchmarking data used for each application must also be verified.
If the benchmarking data was provided, with space for the applicant teams to insert their data, this could be used to generate graphs and tables that are consistent, allowing the reviewing panels to compare different submissions at a glance.
Teams could then concentrate their focus on creating useful action plans, of monitoring progress and of creating much tighter and shorter applications that refers to the tables / figures generated automatically. This would, in turn, encourage more people to put themselves forward as panel members. I know, that, as it stands, I could think of very few things that I would less like to spend my time doing than wading through a pile of submissions.
In the midst of all the self-congratulating, there was some discussion of the Tim Hunt affair. To me, thus far, there has been a lack of engagement with the issues raised by his “joke” by those running Athena SWAN. The question of whether women require more emotional support and encouragement in research settings – especially in those labs where they are in the minority – is being looked at by many involved in the Athena SWAN process. Issues of confidence rather than competence is a major problem that needs to be addressed when we are trying to widen participation in STEMM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine] subjects. If Hunt had focused his remarks on this – and questioning why this is the case – he would have been applauded.
The response [especially the twitter hashtag #distractinglysexy] has been pretty good humoured. Despite some people saying that there has been a witch-hunt, my impression is that the majority of those responding to the furore have been playing the ball rather than the man.
The reaction has also allowed us to note that comments such as Hunt’s support the reasons for Athena SWAN existing: these dinosaur-like opinions are still out there, especially amongst the older, more senior often quite influential, academics. It gives us a prime chance to motivate proposed changes and to show how they can be advantageous to (almost) everyone.
To be decided 