Race and gender equality ‘not on par at universities’

Efforts to improve gender equality are taking precedence over race equality in some universities, researchers have argued.

In their research comparing the Athena SWAN Charter—the marker of gender equality—with the Race Equality Charter in universities, Kalwant Bhopal and Holly Henderson discovered that in some institutions, Athena SWAN was seen as occupying the majority of the resources spent on equality work. The Race Equality Charter is held by only 10 institutions.

Speaking ahead of the report’s launch in Birmingham on 13 March, Bhopal told HE: “I wasn’t surprised by the findings at all. There is a huge amount of evidence, my own research included, which shows that there has been a precedence of gender over race at all levels within universities, where gender has taken precedence and race has been left behind.”