April 30, 2014, by Tara de Cozar

Addressing the imbalance — WinSET conference 2014

I attended a planning meeting for the WinSET conference 2014 yesterday, and the programme is looking good. I’ll give you a quick overview…

The keynote speakers are Baroness Brenda Dean, honorary president of WinSET, and Sarah Dickinson, Policy Manager at Athena SWAN.

Baroness Dean was created a Life Peer in 1993 and a member of the Privy Council in 1998.  She joined the University Council in January 2012. She was a member of the National Committee of Inquiry into the Future of Higher Education – the Dearing Committee.  She has been a Council member of City University, London, the Open University and the London School of Economics. She started her working life in the trade union movement and was subsequently elected General Secretary Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT), the printing, publishing and paper trades union.

She’ll be talking about her own career, reflecting on how she might have done things differently. She’ll also be talking about the University’s progress over recent years in the context of WinSET.

Sarah Dickinson will give an overview of the Athena SWAN programme, and the challenges and barriers that it still faces. She’ll also talk about international campuses, as Nottingham’s Malaysia campus is a test case for Athena SWAN.

The speakers will be followed by facilitated discussions on the following themes:

• flexible working
• career breaks/parental leave
• mentoring
• promotions
• managing challenging behaviour
• unconscious bias/discrimination
• Personal Development Performance Review (PDPR)
• workload models
• equality and diversity
• career management and development
• redeployment/talent pool

Each delegate will get the chance to take part in four 20 minute discussions, so you’re asked to specify preferences while booking. Some of the sessions are proving very popular, so make sure you get booked on as soon as possible.

The facilitators will record the key points of each discussion, which will be summed up briefly after lunch. They’ll also be put on the WinSET website after the event. The main problems, concerns and issues raised during these discussions will also be used to shape the WinSET group’s work over the coming year.

You can sign up to the event through eventbrite here. Like I said, it’s booking up fast and space is limited, so get to it!

I’ll be there, live tweeting the keynotes and salient points from the discussion from the @UoNresearch Twitter account. So if you can’t attend, send your thoughts and questions through using the #WinSET14 hashtag. And if you are attending – come and say hello!

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