UL awarded Ireland’s first ever Athena SWAN Silver Award

UL Athena SWAN Silver –The Department of Physics at UL pictured at the Athena SWAN Award awards in 2016 when they won a bronze award

UL awarded Ireland’s first ever Athena SWAN Silver Award

By I Love Limerick Correspondent Ann Mc Donald

The Department of Physics highlighted a range of impact driven activities and initiatives they have done, including extensive outreach activity to encourage female students to take physics as a Leaving Cert subject and to consider studying physics at an undergraduate level.

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The University of Limerick’s Department of Physics has been awarded Ireland’s first ever Athena SWAN Silver Award.

An Athena SWAN Silver Award is granted in recognition of the positive impact of actions that a department or institute has undertaken to achieve gender equality amongst staff and students in Higher Education.

In the Department of Physics submission, they highlighted a range of impact driven activities and initiatives, including extensive outreach activity to encourage female students to take physics as a Leaving Cert subject and to consider studying physics at an undergraduate level.

The department has seen an associated increase in female undergraduates from 37% to 54%, due to higher numbers of women taking up education courses, supporting their aim to increase the number of female physics teachers in Ireland.

Dr Deirdre Ní Eidhin, a Senior Technical Officer of the Department of Physics and the co-chair of its Self-Assessment Team, said that the underrepresentation of women at all levels in physics is long-standing and reflects cultural stereotypes and unconscious biases associated with physics as a subject, and central to this is the low uptake of physics in schools.
 
“In Ireland, just over a quarter of students taking Leaving Certificate physics are female. Since 2017, we have put practices and career progression measures in place to create impacts in increasing recruitment, development and participation of underrepresented groups in physics programmes. Higher numbers of women taking up physics education courses aligns with the Government’s recent investment in increasing the number of physics teachers in Ireland”, she explained. 
 
In total, twenty-one awards were conferred on Irish HEIS in the latest assessment round for Athena SWAN Ireland.

#ICYMI We are incredibly proud to be the first ever Irish recipient of the Athena SWAN Silver Award

This is testament to our commitment to embed the principles gender equality, and broader diversity & inclusion across all faculties & departmentshttps://t.co/8YoC7otCY0#Limerick pic.twitter.com/nXgyWa7NJH

— University Of Limerick (@UL) September 17, 2021

The Department of Nursing and Midwifery at UL were successful in securing a bronze award in addition to two award renewals, bringing the total number of UL Athena SWAN Awards to 14 Faculty/Schools Awards (representing 27 departments) and positions UL as a leader in the sector.
 
“UL takes great pride in being one of the first institutions in Ireland with Trinity College Dublin to achieve an Athena SWAN (AS) Bronze Institution Award in July 2015. Since then, we have worked hard to embed the principles of Athena SWAN and gender equality and more recently the broader diversity and inclusion agenda across all faculties and departments. In 2018 UL renewed the Institution Bronze Award to the Expanded Charter focusing not only on advancing the careers of women in STEM but on gender equality across all disciplines and the inclusion of Trans Staff & Students.  UL was the first institution to secure several firsts in this regard,” said Dr Marie Connolly, UL Director Human Rights, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion.  

She added, “The impact of embedding Athena SWAN in UL has ensured that gender equality is core to the business of every department. Our overall representation at senior academic grades has grown. The number of women at Associate Professors level (Professor B level) has increased from 6 in 2014 to 24 and at 39% is above the national average of 37% ensuring we are well positioned to increase the percentage of female full professors in the coming years.” 
 
Simon Harris TD, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, said, “Advancing gender equality across Higher and Further Education is a priority for my department. The announcement of 21 new Athena SWAN awards demonstrates the ongoing commitment of our higher education institutions to improving gender equality. I’d like to particularly commend the Department of Physics in the University of Limerick for achieving the first Silver Award awarded to a department in Ireland and hope to see more departments reaching this milestone in the coming years.” 

For more information about the Athena SWAN Awards go HERE 

For more stories about the University of Limerick go HERE