EDUCATIONAL CHARTERS ARE HELPING ORGANISATIONS LEARN DEI

by David Braue

Industry guidance is helping entrench diversity within security education

Recent revisions to the UK Athena Swan (Scientific Women’s Academic Network) Charter – an extensive framework to help educational institutions embrace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – recognised the complexity of DEI initiatives and provided practical guidance to help educational institutions formally commit to ideals of equity.

Revised in 2021 as a ‘transformed Charter’ with the guidance of educational practitioners, DEI champions and the charter’s governance committee, the charter provides formal guidelines for DEI compliance as well as self assessment, accreditation and other mechanisms to encourage and reward diversity initiatives at signatory institutions.

Those mechanisms include eight key goals:

• Adopting “robust, transparent and accountable processes” to guide gender equality work, including embedding DEI in the university’s culture, decision making and partnerships, undertaking evidence based self assessment processes and distributing and recognising DEI work.

• Addressing structural inequalities and social injustices that create “differential experiences and outcomes” for staff and students.

• Tackling behaviours and cultures that detract from safety and collegiality in work and study environments.

• Understanding and addressing “intersectional inequalities” with multiple causes.

• Explicit acknowledgement of issues faced by transgender and non-binary people.

• Examining gendered occupational segregation and elevating the status, voice and career opportunities of “under-valued and at-risk groups”.

• Mitigating the gendered impact of caring responsibilities and career breaks, with a focus on work/life balance.

• Mitigating the gendered impact of short‑term and casual contracts for staff seeking sustainable careers.

The transformed charter’s breadth and depth, as well as its maintenance by global higher education charity Advance HE, have positioned it as a model for rallying industry wide change across educational institutions around the world.

Its benefits include not only the encapsulation of DEI best practice, but the provision of detailed, sector relevant guidance and evaluative instruments that save member universities from having to develop their own DEI initiatives from scratch. These instruments include a newly developed culture survey that helps departments evaluate their culture and identify key gender equality challenges.

“In the sector we have made good progress on raising awareness of how important to student and university success gender equality is, and we have made good strides in tackling underrepresentation and addressing many barriers,” said Sarah Guerra, director of equality, diversity and inclusion at Kings College London, which was a bronze charter member of the Athena Swan Charter and has doubled down on its commitment with further accreditation.

“I want us to do even more to recognise and tackle systemic and structural issues that prevent gender equality,” Guerra added, “and to do more to recognise how gender and race inequality aspects are hidden or reinforced by research and teaching methodologies.”

Continuous improvement of the charter will go a long way towards supporting that objective, she said: “removing some of the unnecessary burden and administration [of DEI programs] should mean that more institutions are willing and able to participate,” she explained, “and that we see faster and deeper progress on tackling gender equality.”

All Together Now

The Athena Swan approach has spread worldwide, with Australian universities similarly joining forces to muster sector‑wide support under the banner of Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) –an Athena Swan-affiliated program of reform and awareness that counts 31 universities, seven medical research institutions and five publicly-funded research agencies amongst its membership.

“Working in the STEM fields, and in research more generally, can be extremely demanding,” said Professor Birgit Lohmann, former senior deputy vice chancellor at the University of the Sunshine Coast after that institution joined the growing SAGE membership in 2016.

“The SAGE program is about looking at what we can do as an institution to support gender equity and remove barriers, particularly around senior and leadership positions,” she said. “I think it’s likely that the SAGE process will result in changes that will benefit everyone.”

Despite some improvement, women continue to be underrepresented at senior levels within Australia: 2019 figures, the latest available, show the percentage of women in IT related roles peaking just after completion of postgraduate qualifications, and declining rapidly with seniority. The figures for all STEM roles show a similar peak, albeit a slower

“Studies show that systemic barriers have a negative effect on the attraction, retention and progression of women in academic and research careers,” SAGE notes.

“The loss of such expertise is a waste of knowledge, skills and investment, and impacts our nation’s research performance and productivity. To ensure we benefit from our top-quality academic and research talent, we need to ensure gender balance and diversity throughout the academic pipeline.”

GET IN EARLY, GET IN GOOD

However, the need for diversity does not stop with universities. Companies starved of security skills and desperate to lock in graduates with security skills need to recognise the importance of gender balance. It is also important for organisations to actively engage with efforts to bring security education to members of a diverse student body both in their younger years and as they progress through their private-sector careers.

Many organisations have accomplished this by actively supporting cybersecurity education in primary and high schools, offering internships to those potentially interested in the field, and pairing new security workers with mentors who can help them navigate what are often complex diversity minefields.

A number of organisations are taking advantage of innovative education programs that create new opportunities to bring a broader range of candidates into the security industry. These include the Girls’ Programming Network coding workshops, MassCyberCenter’s Cybersecurity Mentorship Program, youth education programs like CyberPatriot and Norwich University’s Cyber Corps: Scholarship for Service program, which provides government funded cybersecurity scholarships in exchange for several years’ US Government service after graduation.

“Cyber is often considered a challenging subject,” said Dr Huw Read, director of the Norwich University Center for Cybersecurity Forensics Education and Research (CyFER), which among other events hosts a Pi Making Contest that encourages students to build security tools on Raspberry Pi devices.

“These novel hands on projects with our Scholarship for Service mentors let school students explore new areas of computing, chat with those who are already in the specialisation, and create something they can be proud of and reuse in the future,” Read said.

Whatever the programs, education is the key in all of these cases and, by channelling the spirit of the Athena Swan Charter, institutions providing security education can ensure new recruitment and engagement programs are not only novel, but diverse.

“The focus is shifting from equality – this presumption about everybody needing the same thing and treating people equally – to equity, which is about recognising that we’re all very different,” Jennifer Izekor, a cultural intelligence trainer and executive director of UK-based Above Difference, told a recent panel discussion

“Equality is not enough,” she continued. “Just treating everybody the same doesn’t actually give us the results we want, because people are starting from different points – and we have to be really cognizant of what this means.”

Ikezor likened the issue to a tall person who can see over a fence but forgets that shorter peers simply cannot, saying leaders need to remember that every person faces different challenges in their everyday engagements, and that leaders must not let those people be defined by their intrinsic characteristics.

“It’s not enough that we provide bricks for people to stand on,” she said. “We have to begin to take down the fences altogether. And that means really having a perspective of what those fences are; involving women much more in thinking about what an alternative world looks like, and having a real, shared vision of what the world would look like if the fence wasn’t there anymore.”