Equality Certification and the Limits of Athena SWAN: A 2021 Reflection, Revisited

In 2021, I wrote about a structural blind spot in how higher education institutions pursue equality: the Athena SWAN framework’s near-exclusive focus on gender, which leaves migrant and minority ethnic staff and students largely unseen in the metrics that matter for institutional recognition and funding.

The recent death of Jason Arday, and the wider conversation it has reopened about how universities treat Black and minority ethnic academics, has made that argument feel more urgent, not less. A certification process built around a single axis of inequality can be celebrated as progress while leaving academics who sit at the intersection of race, migration status, and gender with no institutional language to describe what they are experiencing, let alone address it.

You can read the original piece here: Migrants and minorities in higher education – battling embedded inequality (Cois Coiribe, University of Galway, April 2021).