Melissa Surgey

Staff and students from across the Division of Population Health, Health Services Research and Primary Care (and wider) came together in March to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) and Women’s History Month. I’ve written previously for Research Hive about why it’s important to mark these events, both as a way to celebrate the contributions women make to society and also recognise and take action on gender inequality.

We took over the weekly Centre for Primary Care seminar to learn more about the issues facing women in academia, the University’s commitments to gender equality and hear from colleagues – both women and male allies – about their own experiences. In organising the event, we realised that often IWD highlights ‘exceptional’ women in the traditional sense of the word, for example women in very senior roles or with lots of accolades. We chose to approach speakers at all levels of their academic careers, with very different experiences to counteract this and challenge perceptions around what it means to be a successful woman in academia. A special mention also goes to the inspiring women we approached who couldn’t speak on the day, often due to balancing work, home and voluntary commitments. This really drove home to us how many of our female colleagues juggle the enormous amount of work they put in – often quietly – behind the scenes to make the Division what it is.

Prof Arpana Verma kicked off the session giving us an overview of practical things the Division and University more widely are doing to support gender equality. She talked movingly about the importance of helping women move up the ‘pyramid’ whereby gender balance skews away from women as seniority increases. This phenomenon is present in academia, and also other female-dominated fields such as health and social care.

Dr Sudeh Cheraghi-Sohi elaborated on the ‘leaky pipeline’ of women in her presentation on women in academia. Across higher education nationally, 42% of academic staff and 63% of non-academic staff are women. However, this only translates to 20.5% of professors and 27.5% of academic managers. At the University of Manchester we have 50:50 gender split in the workforce overall, but still have issues with women in academic roles progressing to more senior positions: 42.4% of all academics at the University are women, but only 27.1% of professors are.

Sudeh talked about the barriers and facilitators to women’s careers in academia. Barriers include:

• Caring responsibilities – both for children and other family members
• Taking career breaks (including maternity leave)
• Constraints on being able to relocate or travel long distances
• Lack of options for part time working
• Gender stereotyping of senior leadership roles
• Senior roles being incompatible with other demands

Whilst these barriers also impact men, they disproportionately affect women. However, universities can take steps to break down these barriers and facilitate the retention and progression of female staff. This can include more inclusive policies around flexible working and paid carers’ leave. Comments about career progression were put in context by Sudeh, who explained that we also need to embrace a culture where we respect and value colleagues (of any gender) who may be happy with where they are in their careers, rather than wanting to focus on becoming more senior.

Dr Jon Hammond provided an overview of the Athena SWAN programme as our Divisional lead for this. Athena SWAN is a national charter mark for universities to support gender equality in academia. At the University of Manchester we currently hold the silver award, and are working towards gold accreditation. Jon explained some practical steps the Athena SWAN team has taken to reduce gender inequality. This has included setting up a fund to cover costs associated with care support so that staff who are carers are able to attend conferences and other events away from home. An important element of Athena SWAN is recognising heterogeneity and that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution that will achieve parity between genders. This also intersects with other identities including (but not limited to) ethnicity, cultural heritage, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, and those living with a disability.

Our experiences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic were a common theme in the seminar. Jon explained that Athena SWAN have been sending our regular COVID-19 impact surveys to understand the positives and negatives of the current working environment and how we are managing. Whilst lots of us have been able to work safely from home, COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted women socially and economically. Sudeh explained that women are more likely to have scaled back their working hours or other roles due to greater caring and domestic responsibilities when compared with their male counterparts. In academia, this is being seen in a growing gender gap in paper submissions and publications in the last year. However, there may be some positives from the new ways of working over the last year. The pandemic has placed a spotlight on the unpaid labour of women both in the workplace and at home. The accelerated pace with which flexible working has been adopted may reduce some of the barriers previously mentioned and make academia more accessible for all – not just women – if permanently adopted.

I concluded the session with a few personal reflections on the importance of an intersectional approach to gender equality and small steps we can take to try and be more inclusive. Intersectionality is where gender and other social identities overlap, often creating concurrent forms of oppression. As a white, cis, straight woman, I experience a certain degree of privilege. Educating myself about the ‘inequality of inequality’ has been a significant learning curve for me in the past few years. Reading and listening to the lived experience of a diverse range of women has helped me understand more about the spectrum of discrimination and how intent plays into this. For example, most of us would not consider ourselves to be actively hateful towards those different to us, but we may inadvertently minimise or trivialise their experiences through our language or actions. I gave a few examples of when I thought I had behaved in an inclusive way but had ‘got it wrong’. What followed were really constructive and supportive discussions with those affected about how I (and the organisations I belong to) could do better and use my privilege to be an ally to other groups and individuals. Whilst I am by no means an expert in inclusivity, a few actions I have found helpful include:

• Believing others’ experiences – just because you haven’t personally experienced something or can’t imagine it happening doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen
• Learning about others’ experiences by reading, listening to, or following a diverse range of people – for example, I’ve learnt a massive amount about people with disabilities’ experiences and what is and isn’t helpful from following @BlondeHistorian on Twitter
• Don’t expect others to educate you. Relying on people from often marginalised communities to re-live negative experiences or give up their time (when often they are not fairly rewarded for their work anyway) reinforces inequalities – Dotty Charles speaks brilliantly about the expectation on her to talk publicly about Black Lives Matter as an example of this here
• You won’t get it right all the time but the overwhelming majority of the time people will appreciate you trying or asking for clarity. I’ve found this especially important when trying to use inclusive language, for example when speaking or writing about the trans community, people with disabilities, or people from ethnic minority groups

We were really pleased to hear the seminar’s content resonated with so many people, some of whom shared their thoughts in the session or have spoken to us privately. Doing a more personal focused seminar was well-received, as often we engage with one another as academics but not as people. Through the Division’s social responsibility steering group, we are continuing to engage with staff and students in the Division about how we can provide more opportunities to discuss equality, diversity and inclusion regularly and create a safe, peer-to-peer space for this as the event’s legacy.

A note on language: the term ‘woman’ is used here to refer to anyone who identifies as a woman. This includes cis-women, trans-women, and non-binary women.

The term ‘ethnic minority women’ is used here. This is in line with guidance from the Cabinet Office’s Race Disparity Unit discussing preferred language to refer to ethnic minority groups as a collective, where specifying individual ethnic identities is not possible.