Meeting to follow up April’s symposium

In early August, Donna Chambers and Angela Smith met Andrea Walters in HR to follow up the outcomes we reached at our symposium in April.

Our three main aims were:

1. To make gender equality issues more intergrated across all levels of the university.  Andrea reports that this is very much an issue that the university is trying to tackle and has made excellent inroads.  We suggested that a lot of the good work done at Exec level is simply not being communicated to those of us lower down.  Andrea made a note of the various ways in which better communication and integration could be achieved and will take this further.

2. To develop faculty-level E&D committees.  This is an on-going issue.  There is already one in FAS, and Donna is in the early stages of developing this in Business and Law.  There is a move to increase the prominence of the one in ADM with Elaine Drainville, and the one in FES will be developed from that which currently covers just Education.

3. To increase the awareness of ‘aspirational’ stories and narratives about staff on the web site.  The new HR system, which is due to be implemented in 18 months’ time, should help resolve this issue and there are also strategies being discussed at Exec level to provide mentoring for members of staff.