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Advancing gender equality through the Athena SWAN Charter for Women in Science: an exploratory study of women’s and men’s perceptions

Overview of attention for article published in Health Research Policy and Systems, February 2017
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About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • One of the highest-scoring outputs from this source (#4 of 1,358)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (98th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (99th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
17 news outlets
blogs
5 blogs
twitter
99 X users
wikipedia
1 Wikipedia page
googleplus
3 Google+ users

Citations

dimensions_citation
118 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
239 Mendeley
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Title
Advancing gender equality through the Athena SWAN Charter for Women in Science: an exploratory study of women’s and men’s perceptions
Published in
Health Research Policy and Systems, February 2017
DOI 10.1186/s12961-017-0177-9
Pubmed ID
Authors

Pavel V. Ovseiko, Alison Chapple, Laurel D. Edmunds, Sue Ziebland

Abstract

While in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, higher education and research institutions are widely engaged with the Athena SWAN Charter for Women in Science to advance gender equality, empirical research on this process and its impact is rare. This study combined two data sets (free- text comments from a survey and qualitative interviews) to explore the range of experiences and perceptions of participation in Athena SWAN in medical science departments of a research-intensive university in Oxford, United Kingdom. The study is based on the secondary analysis of data from two projects: 59 respondents to an anonymous online survey (42 women, 17 men) provided relevant free-text comments and, separately, 37 women participated in face-to-face narrative interviews. Free-text survey comments and narrative interviews were analysed thematically using constant comparison. Both women and men said that participation in Athena SWAN had brought about important structural and cultural changes, including increased support for women's careers, greater appreciation of caring responsibilities, and efforts to challenge discrimination and bias. Many said that these positive changes would not have happened without linkage of Athena SWAN to government research funding, while others thought there were unintended consequences. Concerns about the programme design and implementation included a perception that Athena SWAN has limited ability to address longstanding and entrenched power and pay imbalances, persisting lack of work-life balance in academic medicine, questions about the sustainability of positive changes, belief that achieving the award could become an end in itself, resentment about perceived positive discrimination, and perceptions that further structural and cultural changes were needed in the university and wider society. The findings from this study suggest that Athena SWAN has a positive impact in advancing gender equality, but there may be limits to how much it can improve gender equality without wider institutional and societal changes. To address the fundamental causes of gender inequality would require cultural change and welfare state policies incentivising men to increase their participation in unpaid work in the family, which is beyond the scope of higher education and research policy.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 99 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 239 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United Kingdom 1 <1%
Unknown 238 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 36 15%
Student > Master 25 10%
Student > Ph. D. Student 22 9%
Student > Bachelor 16 7%
Student > Doctoral Student 15 6%
Other 44 18%
Unknown 81 34%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Social Sciences 45 19%
Psychology 17 7%
Business, Management and Accounting 16 7%
Medicine and Dentistry 14 6%
Unspecified 8 3%
Other 45 19%
Unknown 94 39%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 234. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 24 May 2023.
All research outputs
#158,777
of 25,075,028 outputs
Outputs from Health Research Policy and Systems
#4
of 1,358 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#3,487
of 316,642 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Health Research Policy and Systems
#1
of 30 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,075,028 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,358 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.7. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 316,642 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 30 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.