Chat with Dr Louisa Ashley – Chair of LBU Athena Swan

What is your role?

I’m a Head of Subject in the Law School and have been part of the Law School for 15 years. I took on the role of chairing the Athena Swan working group in November 2023 and so far, we’ve had two meetings and our next one will be held appropriately on International Women’s Day.

LBU now holds a University Mental Health Charter award , as well as Bronze awards for Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter with Advance HE . We are one of the very few UK universities to have achieved all three at once. As Chair of the Working Group, I’m working with the group’s members and our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team to interrogate our institution’s gender equality data and understand more about our colleagues’ and students’ lived experience, taking an intersectional approach.

Working with the university’s EDI team, we set the agenda for each of the meetings, and I chair the working group. A key objective of the working group is to understand LBU’s progress against the Athena Swan action plan that was submitted to Advance HE and helped secure our bronze award. We are looking at where we are, where we need to be and how we’re going to get there.

As a group, we’re also considering what’s not on the action plan, but could be. I think that sometimes Athena Swan is perceived as being only focused on addressing inequality experienced by women, but it’s about gender equality – challenging us to think about gender equality with an intersectional lens, rather than women’s rights in isolation. We are committed to gender equality initiatives that support men, trans and non-binary colleagues and students in our community.

As mentioned previously, Leeds Beckett also has a Race Equality Charter award and is a member of the Mental Health Charter, so I’m keen to further develop communication between all three Charter working groups. This is an exciting development and a offers good potential in starting to understand what’s going on in our staff and student communities.

What is in the Athena Swan action plan?

As part of the award of Athena Swan Bronze, an action plan was agreed based upon three themes:

• Theme 1: Ensuring a supportive culture and environment for women, people of colour (both women and men) and trans and non-binary members of our community.
• Theme 2: Improving the career paths for women.
• Theme 3: Creating equality of opportunity for all our students.

Each theme is addressed via a series of action points. One of the first steps to assist with this has involved the EDI team undertaking a red, amber, green (RAG) rating analysis of the action plan, so we can see which areas we are making good progress against, and those where there is significantly more to be done.

We’ve started to work through the action plan, beginning with Theme 1. The working group is also keen to promote engagement across the university with the Inclusive Self-Assessment Tool that has been developed to assist schools and services in creating a dynamic and open space for identification and consideration of colleague experiences relating to EDI.  

How important is it?

It’s vital in the sense that it’s easy to state what an institution’s values are but to actually implement and operate in alignment with those values is where something like Athena Swan can be a driver and can be used as an indicator and evaluation tool. I’m keen that the work of the Athena Swan Working Group is shaped and informed by our university’s values.

It’s really important to have the action plan, raise awareness of Athena Swan, raise awareness of what Leeds Beckett has committed to achieve, as well as giving schools and services the opportunity to explore matters of equality, diversity and inclusion in their own area.

It’s not just about ticking off areas on the action plan; it’s about understanding the community lived experience and hearing from our staff and student base about what their ideas are for improving that environment. 

This year's theme for International Women’s Day (IWD) is Inspire Inclusion – how does this tie in the with work you do with Athena Swan?

It fits it perfectly – our objective is about creating an inclusive environment and transforming gender equality. We’ve come a long way as an institution and as a society but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Raising our profile across the institution lets people know we’re invested in this and gives them a route to be seen and heard, to work with us by sharing views about what is working well, and where there’s more to be done.

We have fantastic women at Leeds Beckett, and IWD is about championing their successes and supporting their potential. It’s also about recognising the additional and often unseen emotional load that many women carry, with students (and staff) often preferring to reach out to our female colleagues for emotional support.

If anybody wants to contribute to a working group by making a presentation or sharing their own experiences, they can contact the EDI team to arrange this.

What is an interesting fact about you that people might not know?

I enjoy writing poetry and performing at open mic events when I can. I’d like to do more of that - I don’t do enough of it!