Silver SWAN award for supporting academic women

The Department of Chemistry has recently been awarded a Silver Athena Swan award for good practice in supporting academic women.

The Chemistry department has recently been awarded a Silver Athena Swan award for good practice in supporting academic women. This award recognises the good practices already in place for supporting women at all stages, including undergraduate, post graduate, post doctoral, and early career academic through to professorial level.

In addition the award is based on a plan of future actions. The department has aimed to improve the working environment and processes for everyone, in moving toward this goal the Academic Opportunities Committee chaired by Dr Tricia Hunt has taken inspiration from the Royal Society of Chemistry reports on "Good Practice in University Science Departments"

• Good practice benefits all, staff and students, men and women. However, bad practice adversely affects women's careers more than men's.
• The best departments don't target measures specifically at women because improved working conditions benefit all and make for a happy department: Good Practice isn't about how many women are in the department, it's about processes that are fair, flexible, accessible and transparent to all.
• Leadership from the top, with the Head of Department acting as champion, is critical to changing culture, to making the changes stick, and to changing behaviour.

Contributions from Professor Tom Welton (Head of the Department) in supporting and taking action have been invaluable in making these changes, and planning for future improvements. The Athena judges highlighted that the department has "demonstrated that there was real change going on" and that the plan of activities developed to support, enhance and reward women at all stages within the department "was clear and comprehensive", and they congratulated "the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College on an impressive submission ... "

The departments of Chemical Engineering and Physics and the National Heart and Lunch Institute have also achieved Silver Swan status. Only two other Universities (Nottingham and UCL) reached this level of achievement. Imperial college is a university leading the way in developing good practices for supporting academic women.