2021-06-08

Rob Marchant was thanked for his contributions to the committee as he leaves this academic year. We discussed ideas put forward by the Faculty Athena Swan Committee regarding actions post-Covid and inequality. There was a clear focus on ideas for ART staff that included reduction of workloads to catch-up on lost research, with a focus on those who were particularly hit (e.g. by home schooling). However, the committee felt as though more needed to be done for T&S staff as well as PS staff. The committee also remarked that University funding would be key to making any of the ideas work or other staff seen to have not been affected by CVOID-19 challenges would have to make up the reallocated workload, which would be unfair. We noted that PhD students should also be better supported when they have funding issues, especially from non-UKRI sources.

We discussed the Athena Swan interviews to ensure that we were all happy with the groups being interviewed and the questions being asked.  It was agreed that we will organise some UB training in-house using tools that have been shared by another department.