To achieve institutional Gold, the independent review panel said the university demonstrated strong evidence of success in promoting and improving gender equality institution-wide.

This includes our sector-wide work on visibility and gender equality for technical staff, such as the Technician Commitment, for which Director of Technical Skills and Strategy Kelly Vere was awarded an MBE in 2022 – as well as the variety of impactful and valuable projects at the university that work to break down barriers and promote equality.

Another example of this is the current leading work taking place across Nottinghamshire to diversify the workforce in all anchor employers in the region. Building on research by two of our academic colleagues in the Centre for Applied Linguistics, our HR teams have created an inclusive recruitment toolkit that has now been adopted as good practice by several organisations in the region, including the City Council and NHS.

As an institution, the university was one of the first to join the charter and was awarded an Athena Swan Institutional Bronze Award in 2006, an Institutional Silver Award in 2012 and the Institutional Silver Renewal in 2017.

Individual university departments have successfully gained gold level awards in previous years, but this is the first time that an institutional gold award has been achieved by a university since the Athena Swan programme was launched in 2005.

The university has been steadily working towards this accreditation, with twenty-one of our twenty-two schools currently holding Bronze, Silver or Gold Athena Swan awards, and our Faculty of Engineering becoming the first in the country to gain a Gold award for its sector-leading work in gender equality.

Read more about the university’s commitment to Athena Swan