DCU receives Athena Swan Silver Award in recognition of gender equality progress

Dublin City University has been awarded the Athena Swan Silver Award in recognition of its commitment to advancing gender equality and creating cultural change within the university. DCU is the joint-third university in Ireland to be awarded ‘Silver’ status. 

The Athena Swan Ireland Charter was first launched in Ireland in 2015, and was redeveloped in 2021 to incorporate intersectionality. Engagement with the charter is a key pillar of Ireland’s national strategy for gender equality, with progress linked to institutional eligibility for funding from Ireland’s major research agencies. 

Responding to news of the award, DCU President Professor Dáire Keogh said:

The achievement of the Athena Swan Silver Award is a welcome recognition of DCU’s commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Our ambition ‘to transform lives and societies’ begins with ourselves, and to achieve this we must continue to ensure that our University is a community where everyone feels equally valued, respected and empowered.

Since gaining the Athena Swan Bronze award in 2017, DCU has achieved the following milestones:

• Achieved appropriate balance of gender representation on Senior Management and  University Executive.  
• Doubled female representation at Head of School level, with 52% females in this position as of 2023. 
• Created a balanced pool of genders at Associate Professor level, with 50% of positions now held by female colleagues. 
• Increased female representation at Full Professor level from 21% in 2015 to 34% in 2023,  with a commitment to achieving at least 40% female representation by 2028. 
• Attained eight departmental Bronze awards between 2021 and 2023. 
• Proactively increased the number of men availing of paternity leave by 300% since 2019.

Speaking about the next steps, Deputy President Professor Anne Sinnott said: 

This award gives us renewed energy and enthusiasm for the next stage of DCU’s Athena Swan journey. We have developed an ambitious and transformative action plan for the next five years that will deliver positive change in areas including gender balance, workplace culture and career progression.

All of Ireland’s universities and institutes of technology, as well as several colleges, participate in Athena Swan Ireland. 

DCU’s Silver Award Action Plan is set to run until 2029, with key priorities including enhancing practices on inclusive leadership, achieving appropriate gender representation across all staff grades, strengthening transparency of career progression pathways, supporting work-life balance, embedding inclusivity in policies and practices, increasing the University’s ability to capture data across all equality grounds, and ensuring a continued safe and respectful working and studying environment for all members of our University community. 

About Athena Swan

The Athena Swan charter was first launched in Ireland in 2015, and was redeveloped in 2021. Engagement with the charter is a key pillar of Ireland’s national strategy for gender equality, with progress linked to institutional eligibility for funding from Ireland’s major research agencies. All of Ireland’s universities and institutes of technology and several colleges participate in Athena Swan Ireland. The objective of the Athena Swan Ireland 2021 charter framework is to support higher education institutions, academic departments, and professional units in impactful and sustainable gender equality work and to build capacity for evidence-based equality work across the equality grounds enshrined in Irish legislation. For more information, visit their website.