As part of IADT’s commitment to achieve the Athena Swan Bronze Award we have made arrangements to run a number focus groups with an external facilitator – Olwen Dawe around the topic of Dignity and Respect.

The Institute invited staff to participate in one of two focus groups which took place at the Blackrock Education Centre on 7th and 14th February 2019.

The general topic for discussion was Dignity, Respect and Inclusivity. The discussion was designed to explore staff experiences and perceptions as they relate to IADT’s working environment. This important staff contribution will feed into our Athena Swan action plan and assist us in future policy development.

There were 12 places available to staff on both dates in February. All staff were invited to participate and managers were not present at either of these sessions. We really encouraged all staff to participate in the focus groups.

Recruitment and Selection Training was provided by the Irish Centre for Diversity and was organised to analyse our current Recruitment and Selection processes and to discuss how we might improve our processes and minimize unconscious bias.

We offered two sessions of Staff Recruitment and Selection training;

Monday 17th December 2018 for Executive, Heads of Faculty and Heads of Department.

Friday 25th January 2019 for non-Academic Management and members of Governing Body.

Our Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team took part in an away-day at the Royal Marine Hotel, Dún Laoghaire on Thursday 13th December 2018.

We had a number of important guest speakers on the day which included;

Victoria Brownlee, Advance HE, presenting on completing the Athena SWAN application.

Jean Cahill, DIT, discussed tips, advice and reflection on receiving the Athena SWAN Bronze Award.

Every year IADT sponsor two women, one academic and one professional member of staff, to take prat in the Aurora Programme.

Aurora is a great success story. Since the initiative began 4,613 women from 171 institutions have participated, with 1,136 women attending in 2017-18 alone. This highlights the huge commitment of the sector to achieve gender equality and invest in the development of current and future women leaders.

It also represents a unique opportunity to embed strong networks to enable pathways to share best practice, insights and experiences. This innovative development process is for women up to senior lecturer level or professional services equivalent.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Aurora has been introduced to help address the under-representation of women in senior posts in higher education as outlined in the Advance HE’s Stimulus Paper ‘Women and Higher Education: Absences and Aspirations’ by Professor Louise Morley (January 2013).
Many influential stakeholders including vice-chancellors and Office for Students agree the situation calls for immediate action to encourage more women to enter leadership.

Feedback tells us that higher education institutions would like to support more women to apply for leadership roles and feedback from women suggests that early leadership development would facilitate this.

Aurora has been designed to take a partnership approach with universities and higher education colleges. This involves the institution making a commitment to provide mentors and role models as well as participants so that the issues and challenges of leadership progression for women are recognised more widely across the university or higher education college.

WHAT DOES AURORA COVER?

Aurora addresses core areas associated with leadership success:

• Understanding organisations and the sector

• Developing leadership behaviours, skills and knowledge

• Identifying and overcoming barriers and obstacles

• Growing confidence and a leadership identity

• Building networks, coalitions and support processes

Aurora incorporates these areas by using a combination of: development days (four, at approximately monthly intervals); an action learning set and self-directed learning that complements the key themes and supports participants’ own development needs and in-house mentoring.