New Athena Swan gender charter mark launched today

Theres a thread with a link to the 2021 update. Athena Swan is run by a charity, and there have also been some recent threads about charity charters and mission drift that might be worth looking for.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4231715-Athena-Swan

Although I can see the appeal.

Pretend you can’t tell which people might become pregnant (sex is a spectrum), only talk about ‘pregnant people’, who at any time will make up a small minority of staff, and then refuse to acknowledge any links between pregnancy and sex (men can also be pregnant).

Sex based inequality solved over night.

And in any case this new gubbins is nothing to do with women at all, so why is it in there? NB people want to identify out of being women, don’t they; so why are they in it all? Just the general bag of women = non-men and men who don’t want to be men, as usual. What a farce.

Looked them up on Wikipedia. I assume this was updated by somebody who supports the new direction.

“The new charter recognises work undertaken to address gender equality more broadly, and not just barriers to progression that affect women.”

They genuinely do seem more interested in promoting a tenuous academic theory (gender/sex is a spectrum), than addressing sex based inequality.

Excellent point Irresistible
Institutions shouldn’t legally be forced to either sign up to genderist ideological tenets of what women are OR not to participate in national standards programmes originally intended to benefit women in the workforce.

Oh and yes someone should take some legal steps in relation to this and forcing institutions to sign up to gender identity ideology in the light of Maya’s ruling. Otherwise are institutions signing up to this going to be effectively in breach of free speech principles/equality legislation? It’s enormously daft given the legal issues beginning to emerge around this.

FFS! I’m emailing the chair of my AS cttee (a man) tmw with my resignation after reading that.

The whole thing is pointless. The boxes and checklists have zero relevance to addressing sex-based inequalities (which in my institution boils down basically to: stop only appointing men; and stop shitting on any woman applying for promotion, especially if she’s had any children).

There is already mission drift in the committee I’m in - lots of people on it (half men, lots under 35) won’t actually now let anyone speak about women at all as a category without reminding us about prioritising race and trans identity and disability every single time anyone speaks. Which is fine, but we have lots of diversity programs, and I thought AS was meant to be mainly about women, and that was the entire point. But this seems to have changed since I was last on it…? Or is it just the general mania for not being allowed to say anything about women until you’ve checked your privilege and been seen to be “intersectional”?

And in any case this new gubbins is nothing to do with women at all, so why is it in there? NB people want to identify out of being women, don’t they; so why are they in it all? Just the general bag of women = non-men and men who don’t want to be men, as usual. What a farce.

I wouldn't be happy applying for this until the wording is revised in line with the law.

And why pay for an endorsement from an organisation that doesn’t seem to understand the law itself?

Oops! Reference to gender as a spectrum is a bit outdated and Mermaidy for mid-2021.

And there is a worrying implication that gender is a protected characteristic: it isn't. Sex is. Gender reassignment is. Gender isn't.

Someone isn't aware of the Act or is confused about the details. Inaccurate Stonewall guidance might be the problem here.

I wouldn't be happy applying for this until the wording is revised in line with the law.

FFS.

Oh look ...

@Bollockstothat, that's what I assumed. Too much to hope, I suppose, that in these straitened times for higher education, somebody somewhere will break ranks and say we can't afford this now. Cost benefit analysis etc.

Is this a bit like Stonewall? Set up with the best of intentions to tackle a specific issue.

I'm not even sure it was set up with the best of intentions, tbh (unlike Stonewall), but they operate in the same way now - as a reputational protection racket.

I did the AS training years ago and christ on a bike, what a bag of shite it was. No understanding of academia other than as a means to access high level management roles - an assumption that everyone is happy to ditch the interesting bits of the job in order to become VCs, and trainers totally uncomprehending when told that the reason a lot of people get into a research and teaching job is because they like research and teaching and they don't actually want to give those up. No understanding, actually, of the specific challenges and pressures of academic administration. No understanding that academics and full-time administrators have different types of jobs, different challenges, and almost certainly different career ambitions. 'Inspirational' speakers whose closest contact with academia was having been an undergrad 25 years ago. Whole days (about 5, I think) of vacuous corporate motivational bollocks that cost participating universities an absolute fucking fortune. And then you have to go back to your university and make positive noises about it because they've paid all that money for you to do it and you don't want to sound ungrateful or uncooperative. So the whole thing keeps going, sustained by cash and bad faith, sucking in more universities and wasting more women's time.

My university have spent fuck knows how much time and effort engaging with AS for years now, and I've seen no difference at all to the reality of women's inequality there. I really feel for colleagues who have had to spend so much time on it - for what? No senior academic management people I know as friends think it's actually useful, but they have to be seen to be supporting it.

Just like the modern iteration of Stonewall, it seems to be run by a bunch of grifters who realised that you can extract large amounts of cash from institutions by saying, in effect "that's a nice reputation you've got there, be a shame if anything happened to it".

I'll out myself here as an Athena SWAN lead for a significant section of my university. We currently have the first sticker, and aren't due for renewal/getting the next sticker (I see it as a sticker chart) for a wee while, so our focus has been on addressing exisiting policies, and creating an environment in which women can talk freely about issues that affect them, and working to address those issues. So in that sense, I hope we're doing something positive and necessary. But as I said earlier, the sticker-chart part of the whole thing bothers me: I think it's not right in principle, and I think the applications are a massive pile of work that keeps people from their research (our AS committee is about 50/50 men and women, so at least the pain is spread more equally!). I'm now unsure if maybe I should stay on board and try to do useful stuff until just before the next application crunch kicks in, and then bail...

Is this a bit like Stonewall? Set up with the best of intentions to tackle a specific issue. Very successful in gaining acceptance as THE body to turn to on this issue. Money rolls in from organisations who want to be able to say 'Look, we've solved that problem, we've got a badge to prove it and we got it by filling in a lot of forms and forcing our staff to go on training courses!' Everything gets very corporate.

On the ground, though, nothing much changes in the bodies paying for their badges, and the body issuing the badges now has staff who want to keep their jobs, so have no incentive whatsoever to say 'Job done, now we can wind up and move on'. So they look for ways to widen the scope of the badge-issuing and keep expanding.

Yes, that's what I was thinking.

Athena Swan's supposed definition of 'gender identity' (in the 'ECU Gender Charter' ) is vacuously circular: 'gender identity' , it says, 'is a person’s internal perception of their identity' . (www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Gender-Equality-1.pdf)

This document remains online.

Athena Swan's policies in this area, thus, remain based on empty definition. As an organisation, Athena Swan either does not understand, or does not care about, the intellectual vacuity of its policies as written. Either way this is a somewhat horrifying state of affairs given the intended place of this body within academia.

As currently explicitly constituted, Athena Swan are a waste of everyone's time. Leave them be and do not engage with them unless and until they change. Explain to your colleagues, your employers and Athena Swan themselves.

It would be good to get some stats from before the scheme was introduced to the present day as to whether more women got those senior positions, and whether being in the scheme or not has had any impact at all.

Oh God! I hate ‘gendered impact of caring responsibility’ - there is no such thing, it comes down to sex.

I think part of the issue is that we use ‘gender’ in place of sex because many (immature) grown adults titter at the word ‘sex’. And then when ‘gender identity’ comes along it confuses people.

I thought Principle 5 might be buried in a larger document, but there are only 8 principles.

It doesn't mention sex once. Just a reference to 'gendered' impact of caring responsibilities and career breaks in point 7 as though you can somehow escape the impact of being the the sex that has to deal with the consequences of pregnancy by claiming your right to determine your own gender identity.

FFS. But unsurprising. Universities are fast becoming the wokest places on the planet.

But principle 5 as written, I can sort of get behind, as long as AS still centres women and the problems we face in our academic careers. I can cope with bringing other people along with, I cannot cope with replacing women’s rights and needs with others’. Academia is still a (white middle class) old boys’ club, in the senior positions, although at PDRA level I worried for my male team members as opportunities for speaking slots dried up.

Is this a bit like Stonewall? Set up with the best of intentions to tackle a specific issue. Very successful in gaining acceptance as THE body to turn to on this issue. Money rolls in from organisations who want to be able to say 'Look, we've solved that problem, we've got a badge to prove it and we got it by filling in a lot of forms and forcing our staff to go on training courses!' Everything gets very corporate.

On the ground, though, nothing much changes in the bodies paying for their badges, and the body issuing the badges now has staff who want to keep their jobs, so have no incentive whatsoever to say 'Job done, now we can wind up and move on'. So they look for ways to widen the scope of the badge-issuing and keep expanding.

but may suffer less prejudice than somebody a woman

Fostering collective understanding that individuals have the right to determine their own gender identity, and tackling the specific issues faced by trans and non-binary people because of their identity.

Aaaaargh!!!!!!

Your personal sense of your own gender identity is completely and utterly irrelevant to how you are treated by others. All that matters is what they perceive.

Somebody perceived as female cannot escape sexism by identifying as non-binary, but may suffer less prejudice than somebody who does not identify as trans but is more gender non-conforming.

Pregnancy, periods, endometriosis, menopause etc happen regardless of identity.

This ideology is all about an individualist demand for affirmation and has nothing whatsoever to do with protection of rights - of women or trans people who are all viewed as part of an amorphous blob of the 'marginalised/oppressed' with no distinguishing features.

The most anti-women, anti-working mothers, old boys’ network sexist on every level workplace that I ever worked was an Athena Swan place. Where men using the women’s toilets and showers was also fine. I couldn’t hack it and left. My earning power has never recovered even to the same level and I still get the rage thinking about it. That absolutely fucking useless award can go fuck itself from a height.

So there is a direct example in the guidance about men in nursing for example