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University of Reading

Diversity targets and next steps: Join us in March and share your views

Friday, 12 February 2016

Ellie Highwood and Simon Chandler-Wilde

Colleagues,

We are excited about the new Diversity and Inclusion targets announced by the Vice-Chancellor on Tuesday.

These are challenging targets, but ones we can achieve by learning from successes at other Universities and beyond, and by building on the many excellent diversity and equality initiatives across the University, involving staff across the University in shaping and delivering initiatives.

We will be working collaboratively over the next 12 months to build detailed action plans, in the first instance for each of the University diversity priorities of gender, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and with the immediate focus on gender around our April 29 Athena SWAN institutional submission.  In each of these areas work is already underway, but we expect these plans to evolve and develop substantially, with input from across our University, and welcome comments and feedback at any time – see below.

So far, in our first six months in our Dean job-share, we have been focusing on:

  • Engaging with staff and RUSU, particularly key staff with a diversity remit
  • Renewing the University’s Athena SWAN award, including a detailed action plan to meet our gender targets
  • Enhancing external engagement and raising the profile of Diversity work at Reading
  • Learning from the feedback from our applications for equality and diversity charter marks, and thinking through next steps

These will remain our priority over the next few months.  In more detail:

Engaging with staff – We talked through part of our Athena SWAN action plan with the University Leadership Group last month. In the next few weeks we will start to share our approach to the Diversity and Inclusion targets more widely, including key elements of the proposed Athena SWAN action plan, and are keen to hear your views. As a first step, we have scheduled the following sessions:

  • Wednesday 2 March (12.30 – 1.30 pm) in Palmer 108
  • Thursday 3 March (12.30 – 1.30 pm) in Agriculture 1L16
  • Wednesday 9 March (1.00-2.00 pm) in National Grid, Greenlands
  • Wednesday 16 March (1.00 - 2.00 pm) in LO22 G01, London Road

You can also write to us at diversity@reading.ac.uk or connect with us on Twitter @UniRdg_diverse.

Athena SWAN – The renewal of our Athena SWAN award is important to our ambitions on diversity. STEMM subjects have traditionally suffered from an under-representation of women. An award is made to acknowledge the efforts an institution is making to address this, and for an ambitious but achievable Action Plan for the future. The scope of Athena SWAN is expanding beyond STEMM to be inclusive of all subjects - and of all staff (not just academic staff) within a University - and our new action plan reflects this. Together with our Diversity and Inclusion Support Officer, Frances Raimo, and the Deputy Director of HR (People and Talent), Alison Hackett, we have put in place a new support system for School applications – starting a year prior to submission – worked hard with data suppliers to understand what can currently be produced and communicate what our future needs might be,  led an awareness raising workshop with the leadership team, and formed a new Self-Assessment Team with staff of all categories from across the University and RUSU representation. The submission is due on 29 April.

External engagement and profile-raising -The Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) run Athena SWAN gender charter mark and the Race Equality Charter Mark, and are a key resource for guidance and sharing of good practice. We have built in the last few months a strong relationship with ECU:  we have visited on several occasions for meetings and feedback; we, and other colleagues, have been members of Athena SWAN assessment panels, and Simon has chaired one; Ellie has been invited to be part of a national working group on the Athena application process over the next year. More generally, through attending a range of Equality and Diversity events, we are starting to raise Reading’s profile as a University that is committed to actions around Diversity and Inclusion.  We are also starting to appreciate and gets to grips with the considerable body of research on diversity issues that takes place across Reading, and to think of ways to highlight this both internally and externally.

Race and Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation/LGBT+ - We are meeting, together with the Chair of the LGBT+ staff network, with Stonewall on 25 February to get feedback on our September submission to the Stonewall Workplace index. We will work with the LGBT+ network and other colleagues to prioritise initiatives in this area, accelerating work on this after the Athena submission in April. Likewise, we need to turn our attention to a more detailed consideration of the feedback on the University’s (unsuccessful) Race Equality Charter Mark application in April 2015, and develop actions to go forward. We recognise that achieving BAME targets will require a variety of different approaches, and we are keen to hear your ideas. Initiatives agreed in the last few months and progressing include work on developing individuals – with staff for the first time this year attending both the StellarHE programme for BAME aspiring leaders and the Leadership Foundation’s “Diversity academic leadership” programme – and a trialling of anonymization of applications for recruitment of non-academic staff.  Following our presentations on 2 and 3 March we will write again to staff to seek volunteers for a consultative group to help shape the University’s future plans in this area.

We look forward to sharing more detail and hearing your views at the face-to-face sessions on 2-3 March.

Ellie Highwood and Simon Chandler-Wilde

Deans for Diversity and Inclusion