School achieves Athena SWAN Bronze award

The School of Computing has been awarded an Athena SWAN award for gender equality work.

The Athena SWAN award recognises the School’s commitment to combating underrepresentation, and advancing the careers of women in science research and academia.

The University was awarded an institutional Athena SWAN Bronze Award in April 2014, which recognised that Kent has established a solid institutional foundation, through the development of policies, practices and systems, to advance gender equality.

Professor David Chadwick, Chair of the Computing Athena SWAN committee, led the School application. He commented on the award: ‘I am pleased that Athena Swan has recognised the good work that we have doing to improve the equality and diversity within our school. We have made significant improvements to our recruitment, advertising and promotion procedures in order to make up for the severe national shortage of women in computing at all levels. We will continue to press ahead with our changes, and we plan to achieve a Silver Award in three years time.’