Gender

Athena Swan Awards and action plans

Newcastle University holds a Gold Athena Swan award at University level and 6 departmental awards.

University Gold Award

In August 2025, we became one of only four Universities to be awarded a Gold institutional Athena Swan Award. This marks the progress we have made towards gender equality since our first Award in 2009.

We want to thank the many colleagues and students who have helped us reach this milestone. Read more about our achievements and find the links to our Gold application and action plan below.

Our achievements:

• Reduced the mean pay gap from 18.5% in 2019 to 15.5% in 2024.
• Broadened the promotion of opportunities to join senior committees, leading to an increase in the representation of females on the Council from 23% to 52% and the Senate from 35% to 51% between 2015 and 2024. We aim to achieve 50% female representation across all senior committees by 2030 (44% in 2024).
• Increased representation in Academic and Professional Service spaces, for example, an increase in the proportion of female Senior Lecturers from 26% in 2011 to 40% in 2024, female Professors from 21% in 2011 to 34% in 2024, and our most senior Professional Service Grade from 42.5% in 2019 to 53.8% in 2024.
• Reviewed and revamped our Returners Support Programme (tailored funding support for people returning from various types of extended leave) by reducing leave length for eligibility and broadening the offer to include unpaid carers and professional services colleagues.
• Centralised and expanded our mentoring offer. Females are more likely to become mentors in the organisation, we aim to acknowledge this practice in a new Mentoring Strategy.
• Launched online recruitment training modules for hiring managers, improving the inclusivity of the recruitment process.
• Introduced a new annual review scheme, Conversations and Priorities. This aims to empower line managers with greater resources, skills, and confidence to better support employee progression.
• Committed to creating a joint-faculty promotions toolkit to contain guidance and resources to support individuals in developing strong promotion applications. This supports females who historically are less likely to apply for promotion.

We are also leading on initiatives across the sector:

• Creating the UK EDI Charters Network alongside the University of Manchester and Loughborough University aims to create a space for sharing good practice for EDI charters in the sector.
• Commitment to launch national networks for equality analysis and colleague networks.

Our priority areas for the next five years are:

• Visibility and Oversight

• Recruitment and Onboarding

• Career Development, Talent and Succession

• Work Life Balance and Wellbeing

• Student Experience & Outcomes

We believe activity in these areas will broaden and deepen the impact of our gender equality work.

Please use the following links to view our 2025 application and action plan:

Newcastle University Institutional Athena Swan Gold Action Plan

Newcastle University Institutional Athena Swan Gold Application

Get in touch with the EDI team

If you’d like to learn more about our Gold Award, or have any questions, thoughts or ideas around gender equality, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you and welcome your input! To get in touch, email edi-team@newcastle.ac.uk.