New initiatives to support female staff announced

Imperial's Provost Professor James Stirling

Imperial's Provost outlined actions to advance gender equality as part of Women@Imperial Week, a celebration of Imperial's women.

During a Gender Summit held on International Women’s Day Provost Professor James Stirling summarised staff feedback from questionnaires and focus groups which looked at what the College does well to support women, and what it could do better.

The Provost then outlined the actions the College was committing to take in response. These actions will form part of the renewal application for the College’s institutional Athena SWAN Silver award, with the Athena SWAN framework being used as a tool to help challenge and inform the College’s work to address gender inequality. The framework also means that the College will be held accountable for these actions at the next renewal milestone, and the next staff survey will be used to measure progress.

Consulting staff

The questionnaire and focus groups looked at themes of recruitment, retention and progression of female staff, and explored where the College currently does well as well as what more could be done to support female staff. 

Areas where staff felt the College was doing well included family friendly policies, the Learning and Development Centre, the prominence of senior role models, and the College’s work on equality and diversity.

The Provost highlighted variations in the feedback across different job families, and announced a number of actions which the College had committed to, in areas where staff felt improvements could be made.

Actions include:

• Search committees to be a standard requirement for recruitment for academic posts. Search committees will take responsibility for seeking women candidates and encouraging them to apply.
• A new ‘Know Your Pool’ initiative aimed at making sure the group of candidates who have applied for a given academic role reflects the pool of qualified candidates.
• A new workshop on the transition to lectureship for academic staff.
• Departments to consider all eligible academic staff for promotion each year, and faculties to run ‘promotion clinics’ to offer advice and support.
• All academic departments to have a Postdoc Champion, responsible for arranging postdocs’ induction and supporting integration.
• Make opportunities for flexible working clearer and less variable across the College.
• Build and publicize profiles of skill sets and career profiles for professional, technical and operational job families, and publicize cross-College opportunities.
• Wider briefings for staff outlining and explaining the job level review process.

The Athena SWAN Charter was expanded in 2015 to include support services roles and the arts and humanities, and the College’s renewal action plan and application will consider all staff at Imperial, across all job groups and disciplines. Work is already ongoing across the College, in central support service departments as well as in faculties and academic department, and the Athena SWAN actions are designed to complement this parallel work.

The Provost said: “I would like to thank all those involved, right across College, but particularly Dot Griffiths for her outstanding and tireless leadership. This is a long journey, and there is no silver bullet, but we are making progress.”