Athena Swan’s ‘all-embracing’ equality vision may not serve women

For more than 30 years, women have been the majority of undergraduate students in the UK. Yet even now, they hold less than one-third of professorships. Women are more concentrated in lower-paid, more junior roles in higher education, to their detriment during their working lives and after retirement.

Since 2005, the Athena Swan charter has sought to improve women’s career prospects in higher education. Starting as a handful of projects based in science faculties intended to bring women together for networking and mentoring, Athena Swan is now an international industry. More than 1,000 awards are held by departments and institutions across the UK. Most of these are at the bronze entry grade. An award at this level only requires plans to be produced and processes to be reviewed; reductions in inequalities in pay or promotion do not need to be achieved. Athena Swan has international ambitions. It has expanded into Ireland and has links to India and other countries.

There is no estimate available for the total cost of the scheme to the sector. Membership fees are part of that, but the scheme’s largest costs seem likely to fall on university staff and systems, in applying, reapplying and undertaking promised activities. The most recent review of the scheme conceded that the administrative burden on institutions had become a major source of complaint. Of specific concern has been that these impacts fall disproportionately on women.

During 2023, my colleagues and I undertook research into evidence of the charter’s effectiveness, on behalf of the Women’s Equality and Inequality Programme at the University of Oxford. We were surprised to find that the scheme has not created comprehensive comparable time-series data on women’s and men’s promotion and pay across its members. Nor does the scheme’s owner, now Advance HE, appear to have undertaken regular analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) data to test how far scheme membership relates to improved career paths or pay for women. Furthermore, the scheme does not make systematic use of the gender pay gap data that universities have been legally required to submit since 2017.

Meanwhile, independent researchers have repeatedly highlighted the barriers to obtaining clear, detailed data on changing scheme membership over time, without which it is impossible to measure its impact.

The only detailed recent research of this sort commissioned by Advance HE that we could find showed no relationship between award holding and improved promotion prospects for women. This particular finding was, however, sidelined in Advance HE’s announcement of the findings, in favour of a positive subjective view from scheme “champions” within institutions. Subsequent research looking in more detail at scheme “champions” and undertaken independently of Advance HE, however, reported more mixed views.

Moves to recognise that disadvantages owing to sex may be compounded by other factors have led to a more loosely defined set of aims, rather than a clearer focus on certain groups of women. Race has been incorporated as a factor, but social class has not, despite substantial work in recent years to recruit and retain more students from working-class backgrounds. This issue emerged in Advance HE’s own most recent commissioned assessment of the scheme.

In carrying out our study, we found that the expansion of the scheme in 2015 beyond women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to all subjects, and all staff, including men under-represented in certain areas, lacked a clear public audit trail. Similarly, opacity surrounds the claim that “the sector wanted the Charter to recognise gender as a spectrum”. Our research suggests that this call originated from just eight out of 1,578 respondents to a consultation on the charter. Consistent with the “spectrum” principle, women are not referenced in the transformed Charter principles, issued in 2020.

Advance HE’s most recent review, in 2020, recommended that the scheme be revisited every five years, by a committee that reports to Advance HE, and that the next review consider expanding the charter to cover more protected characteristics “with the goal of moving to an all-embracing equality Charter”.

That next review might start with a basic question: how far have the requirements for a bronze-level award been overtaken by the Equality Act’s introduction of the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) in 2010, and why do the implications of this major and directly relevant external development never appear to have been properly considered?

There has been a very large rise in recent years in Athena Swan awards at the basic bronze level. We argue that the scheme is now mainly rewarding universities for taking basic action to meet their existing legal duties under the PSED. Our analysis further shows that some award holders have spent many years at that level. Interestingly, a draft proposal to limit how long scheme members could remain at bronze level was not incorporated into the final recommendations of the 2020 review.

In our strong view, the review of the scheme due next year should be undertaken on behalf of institutions by Universities UK, or some similar body, fully independently of its provider. It should include the best possible assessment of the scheme’s costs, as well as a systematic analysis of the relationship between scheme membership and narrowing the sex-related gap in pay and promotion over time.

To make these observations is not to deny that Athena Swan may have had positive impacts in some places, for some people, or to argue that there is nothing to learn from the scheme’s history, or that all benefits can be easily measured. The question the previous review failed to confront, however, was whether any such benefits are proportionate to the cost, and whether experience now suggests that there might be other, more effective, less burdensome ways to support universities in this area. Such a review should, above all, be based on a clear understanding of what value the scheme is intended to add, and what its purpose is.

When institutions are under exceptional financial pressure and staff are feeling the effects of that across the UK, Athena Swan’s 20th anniversary is the moment for a properly independent review of the scheme, and of how universities are best supported in meeting their obligations to women under the Equality Act.

Lucy Hunter Blackburn is a policy analyst at the Edinburgh-based thinktank Murray Blackburn Mackenzie.