Computer Science awarded Bronze Athena Swan Departmental Award

The Department of Computer Science’s work in advancing gender equality has been recognised with an Athena SWAN Bronze departmental award.

The Athena SWAN awards recognise commitment and success in developing practices to support the careers of women in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) in academia and research.

Professor Michael Wooldridge, Head of Department commented “I’m tremendously proud of this award, recognising our firm commitment to support women in Computer Science.  The Department of Computer Science is a recent development for Oxford University — we trace our origins to the 1950s, which is nothing when set against the University’s eight century history.  But even in the 1950s - comfortably within living memory - an initiative like Athena Swan would have been unimaginable. Since then, the working environment for women in science has surely improved immeasurably. But this is not the end of the story: there is still a lot more work to do, and we will see many more changes in the years to come.”

He added “This is fantastic news, and testament to the incredible amount of work that went into the submission. In particular I should single out Dave Gavaghan for chairing the Athena Swan team, and doing a great job of putting together a hugely complex submission.”

We are one of 113 higher education institutions, research institutes and individual schools and departments to receive an ECU Athena SWAN award in this round.  Oxford’s Departments of Physics, Psychiatry and the Nuffield Department of Medicine also received awards. The University of Oxford was a founder member of the Athena Charter and has held an institutional Bronze award since 2006.  

The awards ceremony will be held on 15 June 2015 at the University of Greenwich. 

Information about the Oxford Women in Computer Science Society (OxWoCs) is available at: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/societies/women/

For more information about Athena SWAN see: www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charter-marks/athena-swan/