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Present:
Professor Ros Smyth (Director)
Dr Mona Bajaj-Elliott
Professor Maria Bitner-Glindzicz
Mr David Ho (PhD Rep)
Dr Steve Hope
Dr Philippa Mills (MADS)
Professor Gudrun Moore
Professor Jenny Morgan
Professor Shamima Rahman (Chair)
Professor Pete Scambler
Professor Jane Sowden
Dr Erin Walker
Dr Dan Kelberman (Postdoc Rep)
Ms Kathy Kennedy
Ms Wendy Knowles
Apologies:
Dr David Carmichael
Professor Andy Copp
Ms Lydia Leon (PhD Rep),
Dr Ida Riccardelli (Post Doc Rep)
Dr Andy Stoker
Dr Nikhil Thapar
Ms Lara Thomas (Minutes) Ms Natalie Mark
Dr Sara Mole
1. Minutes of the last meeting and action points
The Athena SWAN budget has been set at £10,000 for 2015/16. This no longer includes the provision for the maternity fund and this is held in a separate contingency account to be drawn upon as and when required.
Shamima thanked Maria Bitner-Glindzicz for her work on preparing the core hours posters which will be included in the supplementary information for the gold application. It was noted that the room bookings page on the ICH intranet will also be amended to remind people that, where possible, key meetings should be held between 10 and 4. There was some concern that smaller meetings, in non-bookable rooms may still be held out of hours and this would be very difficult to assess.
It was noted that where Athena SWAN reps were not already members of Programme
Management Groups they should ensure that they attend these meetings to feed back on
SAT activities. In particular reps should highlight the importance of keeping key meetings within core hours or ensuring that sufficient notice is given where this is not possible.
2. Review of the Action Plan
Role Models
It was noted that we need to identify some new role models to fulfil the requirements of 1.1.B
‘Showcase successful women as role models’. Manju Kurian and Eleanor Main were suggested as possible choices and SAT members were asked to suggest who else we may want to consider and if we should also be including male role models.
Research Excellence Awards
It was noted that progress has been made on section 1.1.E ‘Launch annual Athena SWAN
Research Excellence Award’. Last year 22 people had applied and of these 15 (68%) were women. This reflects the percentage of women in ICH and the postdoc group so was very
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encouraging. However, we do need to encourage more postdocs to apply and it was suggested that increasing the number of prizes from 3 to 5 so that there is one per programme may be an option.
Athena SWAN Handbook
It was noted that the handbook is online and links through to relevant information from other areas of the UCL website. Previously it only contained minimal text and basic links to other pages. However, as part of the website redesign Nicole Hofmans has updated and improved the pages. If SAT members have any suggestions for further improvements or additions then they should contact Nicole to discuss.
Online Diversity Training
We have committed to 100% of staff having completed online diversity training and while the numbers are increasing due to new staff being required to complete this training as part of their induction and probation we are still way off target. Wendy has received an updated list of staff who have completed the training and will provide updated figures for the October meeting. Wendy is also in discussion with GOSH to see if it is possible to get figures on the number of clinical staff who have completed diversity training at GOSH so that we can include these in our figures and no-one should have to duplicate training.
It was noted that there is no record on MyView for staff who have taken the Unconscious
Bias Training courses in 2014 and 2015.
Post meeting note – this is because the training was organised locally and not by UCL. Staff who have taken these courses should manually enter the course onto MyView so that we can include this in the training records. Wendy has a list of who attended each course with the dates and will send out reminders to all concerned.
Mentorship
We need to be able to identify who in ICH has done mentorship training. At present this information is not recorded on MyView. It was noted that it is very difficult to find information on the UCL uMentor scheme on the UCL website and suggested that the ICH HR team should promote this within ICH and that we should ensure that there is a link to this from the
ICH Athena SWAN pages.
Data on invited speakers
It should be possible to get information on the gender balance of invited speakers from
Programme Managers and the Directors office.
Leaver information
3.1.B ‘Annual Monitoring forms and exit surveys to record career aspirations’. It was noted that this information was collected for PhD students but not for staff. It was noted that ICH
HR have introduced a form to go out to all leavers but that very few leavers actually complete the form. It was suggested that we should request information from PIs on where their post docs go after leaving ICH but it was felt that this should be part of the end of contract or resignation process and we need to consider how best to ensure we can collect the data. If the proposal is to do a questionnaire for PIs then this should be used to capture any missing information for the action plan and not just leaver information.
Annual Promotion Workshop (3.5.B)
We need to confirm if HR have attendance lists for the promotions workshops and follow up with attendees to get feedback on whether they found it useful.
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Fellowships
It was noted that ICH HR have recently circulated information to Programme Heads asking them to review all the staff in their Programme who may be eligible for promotion.
Programme heads have also been asked to identify any staff who currently hold a fellowship and those who are in the process of applying or who will be encouraged to apply in the future. This information will be useful background data for Athena SWAN.
3. Survey
Shamima thanked Mona and Steve for all their hard work to date on the survey. It was noted that 195 people had started the survey and 175 people fully completed the survey – which is exactly the same number of staff who completed the full survey last time.
It was noted that the survey had been sent to the ich.all-users email address, which is received by over 1000 people including students, honoraries and associated staff in the library, IT and estates. 582 recipients are ICH staff, of these 104 are academic staff, 284 are research staff, 39 are teaching staff and 155 are professional services staff. Taking the total number of staff, this gives a response rate of 34% which is not unreasonable for a web survey.
The survey subgroup will now meet to analyse the data and feed back to the October meeting. It was noted that it was encouraging that most respondents were aware of Athena
SWAN and that many had included detailed responses in the free text section which could be very helpful.
It was noted that the Action plan proposed that the survey should be conducted annually but that there was a danger of ‘survey fatigue’ so we should be careful of asking staff to complete too frequently and every two years may be a better target if we can make use of some of the information from the UCL staff satisfaction survey. A final decision on the frequency of the survey would be made once the committee have considered the results from this year’s survey.
4. BRC Open Day
It was noted that the BRC Open Day is an important beacon activity and that we need to recruit around 9-10 volunteers to help Jenny and Erin organise this year’s event on the 24 th
October. Dan will circulate the information to post-docs and Shamima and Jenny will encourage staff to get involved in this.
5. ASWAN post doc awards
Jane was happy to lead on the post doc awards again this year and updated SAT on the changes which were proposed to clarify the criteria for eligibility as there had been some confusion last year. The guidance would be amended to make it clear that the research must have been conducted at least in part at ICH/GOSH by the applicant who would still need to be at ICH. Joint applications would be welcome and joint authors should apply together rather than separately.
Papers should have been published between the 1 st
January 2014 and the closing date for applications, and papers submitted to the previous round will not be considered.
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The awards will be presented at the ICH Open Day on the 18 th
November. The awards will need to be advertised very shortly and the closing date should be brought forward from the end of October as it was last year to allow the judges more time to consider the applications.
Applications should be sent to the new Athena SWAN generic mailbox.
The judges will be Pete Scambler, Jane Sowden, Jenny Morgan, Dan Kelberman, Gudrun
Moore and Nikhil Thapar.
6. Senior Staff ASWAN Award
Jenny Morgan advised SAT that this was a new award for promoting Athena SWAN values and that she had proposed Shamima Rahman for this, seconded by Gudrun Moore. The committee were very supportive of an award but felt that there should be a more formal process and asked Jenny to prepare a short document outlining the process and criteria for the award. This should then come to the next meeting in October for a decision.
David Ho was welcomed as the new PhD rep. It was noted that Ida Riccardelli had joined the
SAT team as Postdoctoral representative and David Carmichael to represent the
Developmental Neuroscience programme, but unfortunately neither was able to attend the meeting.
Philippa noted that there had not been a lot of activity since the last meeting due to the school summer holidays. John Claydon has volunteered to take over from Andy Duncan to help organise MADs activities.
The recent resuscitation workshop was a great success and the MADs group will look to make this an annual event.
Unfortunately Emma Sweeney’s talk on the new child tax credit scheme had to be postponed as due to a legal challenge the introduction of the new scheme has been delayed by approximately 12 months. As soon as the new rules are clarified the talk will be rearranged.
9. Preparation for Gold application
Shamima has been through the gold application form and it is very similar to the silver form.
The SAT group need to identify who will work on each section so that writing can start shortly. The following sections were allocated among those at the meeting:
Head of Department Statement – Ros
The self-assessment process – Shamima
Picture of the Department – Maria
Key Career Transitions – Jenny/Wendy/new SAT support
Career Development – Gudrun/Dan
Organisation and Culture – Erin/Maria/Pete
Flexible working and Career Breaks – Philippa/Wendy
It was noted that a number of SAT members were not present and may be able to help with some of the sections above.
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In terms of the data needed for the gold application it was noted that we need to provide 5 years of data – a continuation of what was submitted last time to show progress and improvement and we also need to provide any data for new activities from the action plan.
It was suggested that we should collate data for the last two years by Christmas to help identify areas which still need work before we submit the gold application.
We also need 3 SAT case studies for the next application. David Carmichael and Eleanor
Main were suggested and if SAT members have any other suggestions they should e-mail
Wendy with the details.
Beacon activities will be vital for the success of a gold application. MADs, the Maternity fund and the BRC Open Day are all excellent beacon activities but we need to identify a number of others and SAT members were asked to consider what else we could do.
10. Revised meeting dates
Dates for current SAT meetings are currently being revised as to enable Ros to attend as many meetings as possible. As soon as dates are finalised these will be circulated to SAT members and displayed on the Athena SWAN webpages.
11. ASWAN support
Following Michael Williams’ departure the Senior Programmes Manager post will not be replaced per se. Instead a job description is being written for a dedicated Athena SWAN support post to support all SAT related activities including the career workshops and MADs.
It was noted that the new post could be responsible for assisting with the development of a workload model which will be a huge piece of work.
If SAT members have any suggestions for other responsibilities or activities which could be included in the job description they should e-mail Wendy with details.
12. A.O.B
It was suggested that one of the PUW meeting rooms could be renamed in honour of Sue
Malcolm who passed away recently. This was agreed by members of the committee and would be referred to SMT for consideration
13. Date of Next Meeting
The next meeting is currently scheduled for Tuesday 6 th
October 2015, 2.30-4.00
June Lloyd Room, ICH. However, it should be noted that this date may need to change depending on Ros’s availability and SAT members will be notified of the confirmed date as soon as this is known.
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