Essay 08: Culture change starts at home
How striving for gender equality can create a culture at The Bartlett that works best for everyone.
We aspire to be a catalyst for culture change across the built environment
When first learning of the Athena SWAN Award, I was sceptical. My assumption was that it would be a form-filling process that would symbolise progress towards gender equality, but in reality do little to bring about genuine change. I was pleased to be proven wrong. The process demanded a thorough, evidence-based understanding of issues and convincing, realistic solutions.
Athena SWAN is a charter founded in 2005 in order to address imbalances and therefore promote the careers of women in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM). From 2011, when the charter was linked to research-council funding, it gained significant momentum.
For The Bartlett, there is no mandatory requirement to apply for an award. What’s more, the application isn’t easy. It requires time, resources and commitment to develop a genuine understanding of the issues and to build a team with purpose and commitment to implementation in order to meet the goals set.
It’s obvious that there are gender imbalances at The Bartlett: only 18% of our professors are women. And what happens within our faculty – the habits, patterns and behaviours – contributes to a broader systemic under-representation of women in the built environment professions. So by being able to identify and address the root causes of this, we aspire to be a catalyst for culture change across the built environment. We are in a position to, and I would argue have a responsibility to, influence our peers across the higher-education sector, as well as our industry partners. But we must start at home, with us.
A more diverse staff and students body will enable us to do better work. Fact. Or view it the other way: our current lack of diversity is limiting our ability to fulfil our potential. Countless studies prove the business case for diversity. A study by IBM in 2014 proved that organisations with strong diversity and inclusive working environments had half the staff turnover, double collaboration, triple productivity and quadruple innovation compared to organisations that don’t.
It was a proud moment when The Bartlett received the Athena SWAN Award in October 2016. It was the culmination of 12 months’ hard work from 21 self-selected individuals from across the faculty. It also signalled the start of a much longer journey. The Award recognises that The Bartlett has a clear picture of the issues it faces with regards to gender equality.
We’ve crunched student and staff numbers, conducted a survey and held interviews. Some issues were easier to quantify than others: under-representation of women in senior roles might not be difficult to spot, but identifying that undergraduate female architecture students perform, on the whole, less well than their male counterparts, was more difficult. But awareness isn’t enough: we have to be able to demonstrate that we have a plan to understand why these issues happen and how we’re going to address them.
So, in architecture, we’re breaking down the programme to see if specific parts produce discrepancies between men and women. We’re then going to address the way we teach – to ensure that our methods supports all students. The point is not to isolate women, but to create environments that enable all students to achieve the best.
Athena SWAN is focused on promoting gender equality but the majority of our actions address wider issues around transparency, inclusion and diversity. For The Bartlett, the consideration now is how to use these outcomes not just to further gender parity but to create a culture that works best for everyone.
The newly formed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group is the forum in which the Athena SWAN actions will be driven forward. It’s also where The Faculty will begin to identify and prioritise actions that, once implemented, will not only address issues of gender inequality, but racial inequality too.
Alice Chilver is Business Development Manager with responsibility for strategic initiatives at The Bartlett. She coordinated the faculty’s application for Athena SWAN Bronze Award, which it was awarded in October 2016.
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