Helen Beebee Athena SWAN tenth anniversary
Duration:0:04:51
Date:24/07/2015

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Helen Beebee:Hello. I’m Helen Beebee. I’m Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. I’m really delighted to have become a Patron of the Athena SWAN Charter, and I’m really sorry that I can’t be with you today to celebrate your tenth anniversary.

I’d like to start by showing you a little clip. This is from an old psychology experiment of about 15 years ago, and this is going to be kind of by way of a metaphor for what I want to talk about afterwards. Have a look, but make sure you concentrate and follow the instructions.

[Video clip begins 0:00:28].

Male:This is a test of selective attention. Count how many times the players wearing white, pass the basketball.

[Silence 0:00:37-0:01:05].

How many passes did you count? The correct answer is 15 passes. But did you see the gorilla?

[Video clip ends 0:01:15].

Helen Beebee:If you were paying attention and you got the answer right, you probably didn’t see the gorilla and you won’t know what I’m talking about now, but trust me there was a gorilla there. Go and Google this later and you’ll be amazed at how obvious the gorilla is in the picture.

I think the problem of the underrepresentation of women in Arts and Humanities subjects, broadly conceived, is a little bit like the gorilla. It was right underneath our faces all the time, and we never saw it.

Let me give you some examples. In Philosophy and in History, roughly half of the undergraduates are women, but less than 20% of the professorial staff are women. In Theology and Religion, 60% of the undergraduates are women, but only about 30% of the academic staff are women. Those are really serious drop-off rates that we should all be concerned about.

In the last handful of years, we’ve all started to see the gorilla. The British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy produced a report which I co-authored in 2011 on the underrepresentation of women in Philosophy. In Theology and Religious Studies, a similar report was published in 2013, and the Royal Historical Society followed suit in 2015.

Now we can all see the gorilla, it’s kind of amazing that we didn’t see it all the time, because it really was right there in front of us. That’s why I think it’s a really perfect time for the Athena SWAN Charter to be rolled out to the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Business and Law. We can all see the gorilla now, and so we’re all ready to take action.

The other thing I want to talk about is the fact that local action is often what’s required, and often quite discipline-specific action. Let me give you some examples. It might be a matter of making sure that more texts by women are included on your reading lists, so that being acquainted with research by women is just regarded by male and female students as just normal. It might be a matter of making sure your staff seminar falls within normal working hours, arranging childcare facilities if you’re organising a conference. In my own discipline it could be a matter of making sure that the undergraduate seminar discussion is not dominated by the very confident school debating society types, which are very often male.

As some of those examples show, there can be quite a lot of variation between subjects when it comes to what kind of action is going to work, or indeed what kind of action even makes sense. Talking about reading lists isn’t going to make much sense from the point of view of Maths or Computer Science.

More generally, we know from Social Psychology that phenomena such as stereotype threat and implicit bias are not only pervasive, but can have quite really large consequences. We need to know what the dominant stereotypes are in any given discipline, how they arose and how we might combat them. A History seminar, for example, is going to be a very different beast to a neuroscience lab, so if we want to make it a place where women feel comfortable and where they can succeed on an equal footing with men, the kinds of actions we might have to perform are going to be very different.

That brings me back to the Athena SWAN charter. Because the Charter enables individual departments to apply for awards, it recognises the importance of local action, and the fact that that action might need to vary from discipline to discipline. I think that’s a great strength of the scheme, and one of the reasons why it’s been so successful. I feel very optimistic about the difference that this is going to make to everyone who works in and aspires to a career in the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Business and Law.

I’m proud to be associated with the Athena SWAN Charter, and I wish the Athena SWAN Charter a very happy tenth anniversary.

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