Improving diversity and inclusion – Women in STEM

The Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy EDI team are dedicated to improving diversity and inclusion at the School and listening to feedback received.

After doing extensive research and collecting data, we realised that one of the major diversity issues was the underrepresentation of female academics, female guest speakers and female job applications.

After identifying this issue the EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) team made several changes to improve the situation. One such change, to address the lack of women applying for jobs at the School, was to include a female contact name on job descriptions. This was done as a scheme piloted in the School of Mathematics found that including a female contact name and a male contact name on all job advertisements led to many more enquiries, and more female applicants. Therefore this process has now been implemented on all our job adverts.

As a result across all positions advertised, the proportion of females since 2014 has risen from 29% to 47% of applicants, 19% to 39% for those shortlisted and 17% to 71% for those appointed. Furthermore, representation of females on academic pathways has increased dramatically since 2012, from 4 female academics in January 2012 to 12 in July 2019.

Here at the Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy, we often invite guest speakers to perform lectures, inspire the students and inform them of possible career paths they could pursue. However, the majority of these speakers were male, this is not ideal as representation of women in STEM is important to show younger generations role models and examples of similar people who have achieved great things in their respective fields.

In response to this issue the Head of School, Hayley Gomez, has acknowledged that sometimes female speakers may be geographically further from Cardiff, especially in a discipline where there are few female researchers. Therefore, organizers have been told to request additional travel costs if necessary to reach these targets of better female speakers representation.

Additional, changes include unconscious bias training and ED&I training now being mandatory for all staff and offered as an online course. Our current uptake of the training is at 60% for the Unconscious Bias training and 64% for the ED&I. We are working hard through the line management training course to ensure staff and line managers are held accountable for completing this training. One of our actions is to increase those completing the online course and to offer alternative face to face training once a year to those who prefer a personalized approach.

The following graphs show the steady progress in recent years.