WHEN's Blog
A selection of insightful pieces written by women who work across the breadth of the higher education sector
Case study: How Essex University eliminated its gender pay gap
By Opemipo Koshemani
WHEN volunteer
I attended the Women Higher Education Network (WHEN) 2019 conference on Thursday 20 June and it was a valuable experience. It was great to network with women from other Higher Education Institutions and attend the workshops focused on achieving gender equality in Higher Education. One of such workshops was a case study on how the University of Essex closed their gender pay gap, led by Susie Morgan, HR Director, at the University of Essex.
As a participant, the session gave me the opportunity to reflect on the approach other institutions are taking to eliminate the gender pay gap. At the same, as a group, we did appreciate there are contextual...
What can a professional services member of staff learn from listening to two highly successful academics share their career pathways?
Sitting in on an academic career pathway workshop at this year's WHEN conference might seem like an unusual choice for a professional services member of staff. But actually, we’ve all faced with similar choices in our careers and hearing the inspirational stories about how Karen found herself to be the Head of the Humanities Department at Oxford University, and how Becky found herself as Director of the UCL IOE, gave me some really useful insights about my own career development. Namely about being pragmatic about the choices I face, seizing opportunities that present themselves to me and about seeking out mentoring relationships.
Professor Becky Francis, Director...
WHEN annual conference 2019: ''Who am I supposed to be?''
On 20 June 2019, WHEN held its second annual conference around the theme of exploring intersectional identities through our labels. This year, we welcomed over 100 women from over 20 different universities around the UK, who set about embarking on journeys of self-exploration as we all attempted to demystify the concept of labels, both those that are given to us by others and the ones that we give to ourselves.
Labels - which ones do I want to own?
The conference opened with a video of women, including many of the WHEN volunteers, confidently sharing some of the labels that people had given to...
