1. WORKLOAD PLANNING EQUALITY TRAINING
Professors Simonetta Manfredi
& Lucy Vickers

2. WORKLOAD PLANNING EQUALITY TRAINING
Session objectives
To develop a shared understanding of:
The legal context which requires higher education institutions to give ‘due regard’ to equality considerations in all their practices and policies
Equality issues which may affect research careers
What does it mean to have ‘due regard’ for equality considerations in the context of Workload Planning?
Examples of good practice

3. Legal Context: Characteristics
Age
Gender
Race/ethnicity
Disability
Religion or belief
Sexual Orientation
Pregnancy and maternity
Marriage and civil partnership
Gender re-assignment

4. Legal Context: Direct and indirect discrimination
Direct discrimination can occur when staff are treated differently because of protected characteristics.
e.g. different work duties given due to maternity leave or caring responsibilities.
Note role of stereotypes in direct discrimination
Note duty of accommodation for disability – where more favourable treatment is allowed.

5. Legal Context: Direct and indirect discrimination
Indirect discrimination can occur when all staff are treated the same i.e. subject to the same requirements, but the requirements put a particular group at a disadvantage.
e.g. a requirement to work full-time may put: women and men with caring responsibilities at disadvantage (although statistically more women are still likely to work part-time)
Note role of stereotypes in indirect discrimination.

6. Legal Context: Positive Discrimination
Section 158 allows proportionate actions:
To minimise disadvantages connected to a protected characteristic
To meet the needs of persons with a protected characteristic

7. Legal Context: Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED)
Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) introduced by Equality Act
It requires public sector organisations to pay ‘due regard ‘ to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunities and to encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic (e.g. gender, ethnicity, disability etc.) to participate in public life.

8. Legal Context: Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED)
What does this mean for the University?
The Duty must be placed at the core of our policies and practices by giving ‘due regard’ to equality considerations.
Which equalities need to be taken into account?

9. Accountability through the Code of Practice to ECU/EDAP
Development
of self-regulation
Rules and processes
Accountability through the Code of Practice to ECU/EDAP
Interest groups: Information, consultation, engagement
Involvement in the process of change

10. Equality issues which can affect research careers

11. Impact of Equality Guidance
Proportion of staff returned with less than four outputs to:
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) %
Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014: 29.2%
(Equality and Diversity in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework)

13. Challenges

14. Stereotypes and unconscious bias
Accumulated disadvantage: Gender schema affect ‘our expectations of men and women’ and evaluation of their performance: ‘men are consistently overrated, while women are underrated’ which results in ‘accumulated disadvantage’
(Valian, 1998:2)
Gender based ‘double standards’: ‘stricter for women than for men’ (Foschi, 2004: 51)
Experimental research shows that male applicants are rated higher than female applicants
(Moss-Racusin et al, 2012)
There can be gender bias in the students’ evaluation of professors (Bug, 2010)
Bounded Rationality: In order to manage the complexity of reality in our decision-making process we use short-cuts (heuristics). This short-cuts direct our brain to look for familiar patterns and base decisions on these
(Simon 1982)
Royal Society unconscious bias clip:

15. Action points to mitigate unconscious bias
When preparing for a committee meeting or interview, try to slow down the speed of your decision making.
Reconsider the reasons for your decision, recognising that they may be post-hoc justifications.
Question cultural stereotypes that seem truthful. Be open to seeing what is new and unfamiliar and increase your knowledge of other groups.
Remember you are unlikely to be more fair and less prejudiced than the average person.
You can detect unconscious bias more easily in others than in yourself so be prepared to call out bias when you see it.
But…
Be aware of conscious bias too!

16. Work/Life balance issues
Lack of work-life balance disproportionately disadvantages academics with caring responsibilities, disability and long- term medical conditions:
“I think there is a culture in academia which assumes that people will work at the weekend and the evening which just isn’t possible when you’ve got little children and you are a single mother.”
“I’ve never been married and I am childless, so I can stay here [at work] until half past nine...or I can work until midnight at home...when I have had caring responsibilities – my father became ill last year – it really did reveal how much of my own time and headspace I was drawing on... it felt that my own working life was crashing down around me like a house of cards and that I was risking my research status.”

17. Work/Life balance issues
HEIs should give further consideration to their responsibilities in relation to reasonable adjustments for staff with complex circumstances and to the promotion of working cultures that enable an appropriate work-life balance for those with both teaching and research contracts
The funding bodies should consider more explicitly assessing measures to promote and support equality and diversity, as part of the research environment element of a future REF exercise
(Equality and Diversity in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, EDAP Report)

18. Disability Disability/illness:
Reluctance to disclose for fear of stigma, eg, mental health issues; lack of support, eg. for dyslexia
‘The signals that it might send in terms of my professional identity, my capacity and capability’

19. Workload planning: A tool to get the balance right
‘An academic must fulfil multiple roles – teaching, research, service both to the university and to the profession’.
‘The ideal, the perfect academic is someone who gives total priority to work’: this disadvantages women and men with caring responsibilities (and with disabilities, long term conditions).’ (Lessons learned from MIT, Bailyn, 2003)
Ensure that WLP tariffs are used to get the balance right between multiple roles

20. What does it mean to have ‘due regard’ to equality consideration in the context of WLP?
How do we identify staff who should be allocated research hours?
Research plans, PDRs
How do we ensure that our identification is fair?
Undertake an equality impact assessment (EIA) to check whether any group e.g. women v men or BME staff appear to be disproportionally less likely to receive research hours (see example from OBBS)
What do we do if the EIA shows disparities?
Investigate the reasons for such disparities from an equality perspective: for example are staff with caring responsibilities, or from a BME background, less likely to be allocated research hours?
If this is the case, is there a justification? For example, some staff are more interested in pursuing a more management/leadership oriented career than a research one.
If there is no justification what can be done to eliminate such disparity?

21. What does it mean to have ‘due regard’ to equality consideration in the context of WLP?
Case studies

22. Example Equality Impact Assessment OBBS

23. What does it mean to have ‘due regard’ to equality consideration in the context of WLP?
Guiding principle:
Promoting equality of opportunities by creating a level playing field between those with equality-related circumstances/ characteristics and those who do not share such equality- related circumstances/characteristics.

24. Suggested good practice
Develop measures to support staff at critical times in their careers: smaller period of leave (e.g. 8 weeks) to complete outputs; flexible teaching buy out; sabbaticals for staff returning from maternity leave; research assistant support.
Distribution of workload: workload models could provide compensatory mechanisms for admin tasks; light terms for staff who had undertaken heavy admin duties e.g. head of department; senior tutor role to deal with complex pastoral care issues.
WLP: Explicit references to having ‘due regard’ to equality considerations.

25. What next? Training to be cascaded by designated faculty trainers.
Support for trainers:
Additional short session
Availability to answer questions
Develop intranet pages with training materials, to share issues, solutions and good practice
Include explicit references to having to ‘due regard’ for equality consideration in the university WLP document