Athena SWAN Silver Award for our Engineering and Computing Schools

The Schools of Chemical and Process Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computing, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering have been awarded Athena SWAN Silver award.

This is evidence of our strong commitment to supporting women in engineering and computing, and our broader inclusion strategy, which uses gender as catalyst to address broader challenges faced by students and staff from under-represented groups (including gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability).

This prestigious Athena SWAN Silver award from the Equality Challenge Unit, the national body that promotes equality in the higher education sector, is given in recognition of our strong and continued commitment to gender equality and reflects the significant progress made over the past five years.

Our sustained outreach programme, extensive use of role models, and carefully planned web and marketing materials have helped us to attract outstanding female students. At Faculty level:

• 21% of our full-time undergraduate students are female, and this has been consistently above than the national average;
• 25.8% of our full-time postgraduate taught students are female, with increase in applications in recent years;
• 30.5% of our full-time postgraduate research students are female, and this has been consistently above than the national average.

Through a series of actions to attract and grow female staff, we have significantly increased the number and proportion of female research staff within the Faculty:

• the percentage of female researchers has grown in the past 5 years from 18.7% to 24.9%;
• the overall academic-research-teaching female percentage has grown from 17.8% to 20.1%;
• 33.3% of our University Academic Fellows are female;
• both male and female researchers are equally successful in awarded grants over the past three years;
• women represent 73% of fellowship award-holders over the past three years;
• women are associated with 24% of the total value of research funding.

Our diverse professional, support and technical staff are invaluable members of our community. We provide a wide range of support to reflect their needs across a broad range of roles. 

Find out more about our diverse student community from example profiles of our current students and alumni.