ESE celebrates gender equality achievements with Athena Swan Silver Award

The Department of Earth Science and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial has been honoured with an Athena Swan Silver Award, recognising its sustained commitment to advancing gender equality across all areas of its work.

The award marks a significant milestone for the department, which has made clear progress in addressing barriers to women’s careers in science, engineering and academia more broadly.

Sophia Quazi, ESE’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Coordinator, said: “Achieving Athena Swan Silver is a very proud moment for us and this award belongs to everyone in the department who has worked to make our culture more inclusive.

“It also gives us the momentum to keep pushing forward with our collective efforts to make a difference and to continue holding ourselves to a high standard on gender equality.”

What the Award means

Athena Swan awards, administered by Advance HE, are a national framework for recognising and rewarding higher education institutions and departments that champion gender equality.

ESE has held a Bronze award since 2021, which acknowledges a solid foundation and a detailed action plan. A Silver award takes this a step further, signalling that a department has not only identified challenges but has begun to implement meaningful, evidence-based changes, and can demonstrate the impact of those efforts.

For ESE, the Silver Award reflects a long-term, strategic approach to improving representation, progression and workplace culture. Key to this has been a focus on recruitment and promotion practices, ensuring that processes are transparent, fair and free from unconscious bias. The main priorities of the Silver action plan includes representation of women, awareness and transparency and career development,

EDI has been embedded into the department’s day-to-day operations too. This includes improved data collection and monitoring, so that decisions about workload allocation, committee membership and leadership opportunities are informed by robust evidence rather than assumption. There has also been a deliberate effort to increase the visibility of women in senior roles, providing role models for students and junior staff alike.

Looking ahead

Crucially, the Athena Swan Silver Award acknowledges that this work is not complete. Departments are also required to set out how they will build on current progress and tackle remaining inequalities in the coming years. In this sense, the award is both a recognition of achievement and a commitment to ongoing improvement.

ESE joins a growing number of earth science and engineering departments across the UK that hold Silver status. This collective progress is important because fields such as geoscience and engineering continue to face well-documented gender imbalances, particularly in senior academic and professional roles.

Looking ahead, the department has committed to strengthening its pipeline of female talent from undergraduate level through to professorship, expanding support for underrepresented groups intersecting with gender, and continuing to monitor and report on progress transparently.