Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee
Find out more about our team and how we are improving equality, diversity and inclusion within the School
The School's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee is chaired by Dr Sophie Forster and Dr Matt Easterbrook, and has the responsibility to:
- Promote and encourage Equality, Diversity and Inclusion across the School and ensure access to opportunity and development.
- Propose changes to School policy, or lobby for change in University policy, as needed
- Be a repository of information and expertise on equality, diversity and inclusion matters
- Share the above information, as needed, on a reactive basis, with other committees and members of the School.
- Disseminate this information on a proactive basis to other members of the School.
- Coordinate and submit School applications for Athena SWAN accreditation, and any other accreditations/charter marks that are deemed necessary.
- Oversee the Athena SWAN Action Plan, ensuring that all actions are completed in a timely manner
- Carry out initiatives as directed by the Head of School
The Committee was formed in 2015 as part of our action plan for our Athena SWAN Bronze Award. Since then, we have had progressed in:
- Eliminating the gender gap in PhD completion times;
- Supporting the transition of junior academic staff from fixed-term to permanent roles;
- Improving the relative speed of promotion trajectories for female academic staff;
- Increasing the proportion of women in senior academic roles;
- Supporting research of academic staff returning from maternity or adoption leave with reduced teaching and admin load;
- Moving meetings and research seminars into ‘core hours’ to enable those with caring responsibilities to attend;
- Improving communication to staff about policies related to gender equality;
- Increasing the transparency and fairness of workload allocation;
- Contributing to the development of University-level policies and procedures on staff-student relationships and workload allocation.