Equal Opportunity Guidelines for Academic Promotions
Guidelines
- Avoid direct discrimination: do not treat a candidate less favourably than another candidate because of his or her sex, race, disability, marital or parental status, age, sexual preference or other ground mentioned in the University's Global Equal Opportunity policy.
- Avoid indirect discrimination: do not impose a requirement or condition which appears to be neutral but in practice disadvantages a particular group of people covered by the Global Equal Opportunity policy. (For example, denying promotion to part-time or contract staff might constitute indirect discrimination because a higher proportion of women hold part-time or contract positions.)
- Assessments should be made according to the criteria on the basis of the candidate's achievements in the time available.
Family Responsibilities
Most academics like other workers have family responsibilities of which employers must take some account. Family responsibilities affect time available for career-related activities and some allowance may need to be made for academics (usually women) who have the primary responsibility for the care of family members even when they maintain their jobs on a full-time basis. Staff who are relatively free of such responsibilities may be able to produce a greater quantity of work (although not necessarily a higher quality of work) over a similar time-span.
Career Breaks
Women are more likely than men to have interrupted or delayed careers because of family responsibilities. Their achievements should be assessed in relation to the time actually devoted to academic work, which may be calculated in terms of effective full-time career years'. For example, a woman who had two children over a period of ten years may have taken two years' maternity leave, worked half-time for four years and full-time for four. Thus her 'effective full-time career years' would be six.
Staff returning to academic work after a career break for family responsibilities (and this more often affects women) may be disadvantaged because of the time and effort needed to re-establish themselves, particularly in respect of research and professional activities. There needs to be some recognition of this when evaluating the achievements of staff with interrupted careers as compared to those with continuous careers.
Where a career break has been taken to work in another occupation, this should only be regarded as relevant to promotion if the work is shown to be related to the person's academic career and the benefit to the university has been demonstrated.
Self Promotion
There is substantial evidence to suggest that women in general and people from particular cultures tend to be modest about their achievements and reticent in promoting themselves. Committees should be alert to this possibility, although it is the responsibility of heads of departments to ensure that staff receive appropriate assistance in preparing their applications.
Approved by Equal Opportunity Committee, 18 May 1994
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