Outcome of Athena SWAN institutional submission

Overall, the submission was commended for showing the impact of all our efforts and initiatives at UCL over the past 4 years and for the high-level of innovation of our EDI activities.

As the sector has greatly increased engagement on gender equality over the past few years, the standard of Athena SWAN submissions has improved and so it has become even more challenging to get a Silver award, both at departmental level and institutional level. 

We are currently working on an institutional project to greatly improve the provision of data to departments and faculties to support their Athena SWAN submissions. We have also appointed School-level posts to provide more support and coordination at a local level. 

The issues we have been encouraged to address include:

• Reviewing the professional services data and considering the different categories of professional services staff in more detail 
• Better addressing the under-representation of men in certain areas in the Action Plan 
• Being clearer about how we have built on the achievements of our award-winning departments.
• Including more numerical targets in the Action Plan 
• Including more data from the focus groups we conducted, in addition to the Staff Survey data, to highlight the staff experience.

While the result is disappointing, the feedback we received will be straightforward to address. 

As a learning institution, we welcome the opportunity to continually improve and look forward to resubmitting the institutional application within a year.