Athena SWAN Award

We are committed to the principles and beliefs of the Athena SWAN charter.

Athena Swan Bronze Award 2018

Athena Swan Bronze

We are delighted to announce that in April 2018 our centre retained its Athena Swan Bronze Award for progress and commitment to the Athena Swan Charter. This award underlines our progress and commitment to equality and diversity within our centre and the wider university.

I am delighted that the Centre for Environment and Sustainability has received the Athena SWAN Bronze Award. Advancing gender equality is key to sustainability, as identified in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal five “Gender Equality,” and is thus also central to CES’s ethos. Professor Angela Druckman, Emerita Professor of Sustainable Consumption & Production

About the Athena Swan Award

Participation in the Athena Swan Charter is a key part of  our ethos here in the Centre. Staff, students and alumni here work every day to help build a more sustainable world and, as part of this, we are committed to putting sustainability at the heart of our Centre. Athena Swan plays a central role in this because we see equality, diversity and inclusiveness as integral components of sustainability.

The Athena Swan Charter encourages and rewards work to promote gender equality in universities. The charter covers academic, professional and support staff working in all disciplines, focusing on their representation, progression of students into academia, and the journey through career milestones. The aim of the charter is to ensure a fair working environment for all, regardless of gender. In 2015, the charter was updated to explicitly include trans-students and staff. 

Our Athena Swan team includes masters and postgraduate research students, as well as staff at different stages of their careers.

We have taken several steps towards equality, with more being planned on an ongoing basis. We are the first (and only, so far) department to arrange unconscious bias training for our masters students and are working to increase female postgraduate applications.  Additionally we are monitoring and taking steps to ensure an equitable balance in the ratio of male to female guest speakers at our seminars and on master modules.

Our Athena Swan team includes representatives from our academic staff, research fellows, professional services staff and postgraduate research students. We are ambitious to build on our bronze award by seeking the recognition of a silver award for our commitment to building on our successes in making us a diverse, equal, and sustainable place in which to work and study.