Department of Psychology achieves Athena SWAN award

We are delighted to announce that BU’s Department of Psychology has achieved the Athena SWAN bronze award, in recognition of their commitment to working towards gender equality in higher education.  

Ellen Seiss, Senior Lecturer and the new Athena SWAN lead for the department said: “The Department of Psychology has worked hard to improve our policies and practices, striving to offer a supportive and inclusive environment for all staff and students.

“We are delighted that this work has been recognised via the Athena SWAN bronze award, and are already working hard to ensure the action plan we submitted as part of the application is implemented.”

BU’s Equality and Diversity Adviser Dr James Palfreman-Kay said “I‘m really pleased to see the work the department has undertaken on gender and more broadly on equality and diversity being recognised through the achievement of a departmental Athena SWAN bronze award.”

The award is valid for four years and during this time the department will continue to raise awareness of gender equality within their teams and demonstrate how their action plan is making a positive difference to achieving gender equality. 

BU now has three departmental awards, with the Department of Life & Environmental Sciences achieving their bronze award earlier this year and the Department of Media Production gaining the same last year. In addition to the departmental awards, BU as an institution was also successful in our submission for an Athena SWAN bronze award in May.

These four successes in the past year is a significant achievement and provide an excellent foundation to help us move forward in our goal to achieve gender equality.

BU’s commitment to equality and diversity is an area of focus in BU2025 and we will be supporting all academic departments to make their own submissions for this important award.

More information about Athena SWAN can be found on the Advance HE website.