WiSET Annual Report 2006/07
The Women in SET (Science, Engineering and Technology) network group remains one of the University’s most active and self-driven networks.
Over the last year the group has:
- Developed its website and marketing campaign to publicise its work to other women studying and working in SET disciplines within the University
- Held the annual Campbell Lecture which this year was a combined effort celebrating the anniversary of the School of Electronics and Computer Science by inviting world leading computer scientist Professor Deborah Estrin to speak about wireless sensing systems
- Organised an audience for women in the university with one of the deputy vice-Chancellors, Professor Caroline Thomas, to provide an insight to the career path of a senior female academic within the University
- WiSET is the driving force behind the submission to upgrade to the Athena Silver Award as an institution
- Members of the group have been involved in advancing a mentoring scheme for post-docs in the School of Medicine and evaluating its effectiveness
- The group has been active in the Action learning Sets project with the majority of members involved in one of the Sets. In addition many are pushing for an extension of the programme to include women in level 5 as a glass ceiling has been identified at this level
Successes:
- The number of female professorial staff in the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths has doubled from 3 to 6.
- Women academics in FESM have risen from 26 to 37 between 2004-7 (corresponding to a rise from 6% to 8% in terms of the overall proportion of women academic staff in the Faculty)
- The University completed its second equal pay review this year and this showed that that the equal pay gap for the Education. Research and Enterprise career pathway reduced from 14% in 2005 to 6%
- In the recent Times Higher Educational Supplement article on equal pay in Universities, the University of Southampton had the smallest pay gap of all the Russell Group Universities
- Reporting processes and data extraction from our existing system is improving to give us better indicators of where issues lie. The University is in the process of introducing a new computer system that will continue to improve our ability to benchmark our successes.
Plans for the future:
- The Gender Equality Scheme was published at the end of April and this outlines the steps the University will take over the next three years to reduce the gender pay gap
The Women in SET group is producing an action plan to support the submission for the silver award and this includes actions such as developing more school focussed reporting, setting up an induction programme in the school of medicine, rolling out the school of medicine post-doc mentoring scheme to other schools, raising the question of the structure of part-time contracts within the university and being clear as to the University’s targets with regard to promoting women in SET.