WMS Athena Swan Silver Award Renewal Success
WMS Athena Swan Silver Award Renewal Success
We are proud to announce that following the submission of our Athena Swan silver renewal application in November AdvanceHE have confirmed our success.
This was not a given and not an easy period to reference as our last award in 2019 was rapidly followed by globally tumultuous times which impacted some intended actions, especially given our context as a medical school. During this period, we successfully transitioned the executive team from 30% female to a position of equality, shifted our female professoriate from 36% to 44% and achieved equal numbers of males and females represented in our REF cases. But these of course are the easily measurable outcomes and do not represent the significant and schoolwide efforts necessary to underpin the numbers or the lived experience of all of our staff and students.
We were delighted to highlight in our application the impacts of student-led EDIJ training (which trained 176 staff in its first year), our research culture and inclusive education work and the impacts of numerous work streams around specific issues such as period poverty, family support and menopause. Many of the things we have achieved in this timeframe have much wider impacts – widening bursary access for our most financially challenged students, ensuring better representation of our diverse community in both internal structures and externally facing reports and work to avoid perpetuation of repeated short-term contracts for staff have all had benefit.
We have set ourselves an ambitious action plan specifically focussing on issues revealed by our data analysis – improving our understanding of neurodiversity, enhancing the impact of our onboarding processes to build connections across the school, understanding why gaps still persist for black female applicants to medicine, developing and enabling our professional services teams and seeking to achieve equal retention of male and female clinical academics are amongst a few of the things we have identified as needing further attention.
On receipt of the news our Dean Gavin Perkins said:
‘I am delighted that we have achieved the renewal of our Athena SWAN Silver award. It demonstrates our clear and continued commitment to advancing equality, inclusion and diversity at Warwick Medical School. The award has been the result of a lot of hard work and dedication to some fantastic initiatives and excellent practice that we have now embedded within our community. Thank you to all of the colleagues involved in the submission and to those who have led and contributed to all of the work that has enabled our success so far. We will inevitably build on this further over the next five years. Well done everyone.’
Pro Dean People Lesley Roberts commented;
‘Producing the submission gave us a real opportunity to reflect on what had been achieved in a relatively short time frame (especially if we deduct the Covid years!). There are exemplars from across the School in our submission which really reflect how much we are collectively committed to bringing about change where it is needed and making a difference for our community and beyond. The next five years will give us the opportunity to build further on these achievements and showcase the exceptional equality commitment we all have. Thank you to everyone whose work, ideas and compassion for each other enabled this, but especial thanks to the SAT teams and team leads and particularly to Kirstie Haywood who led this work throughout and Emma Hall who curated, cajoled and threatened the data into submission form!’
Kirstie herself was last seen under a mountain of chocolate raisins, which apparently fuelled this achievement but could be heard saying:
‘This is such a fabulous achievement – I am so very proud and grateful to all of those who have listened to the needs of our community, innovated, co-created and delivered on the numerous Athena SWAN, EDI, and culture activities over the submission period. The passion of our community – staff and students working together – is central to this success. You are the real stars! I applaud you all – and hope that this great work towards an inclusive and supportive WMS continues. Thank you for your kindness, support, energy … and, of course, bags of chocolate raisins!’