Last March the regulator for higher education in England issued a record fine of £585,000 (€685,000) to the University of Sussex. It found that Sussex’s trans and non-binary policy statement had created a “chilling effect” that was stifling free speech on sex and gender. The investigation came after events of 2021 when philosopher Kathleen Stock was forced out of her job at the university following a police warning that she was no longer safe on campus. She had been subjected to a sustained campaign of harassment for expressing her belief that males cannot become women.
The most egregious parts of Sussex’s policy were cut-and-pasted from a template created by UK charity Advance HE. As obscure as this charity may seem, it wields considerable power over Irish universities and its advice is already having a chilling effect on academic freedom in Ireland.
Advance HE run a gender-equality award scheme called Athena Swan. Ireland’s Higher Education Authority has decreed that all Irish universities must sign up to the Athena Swan Ireland Charter and will stand to lose access to research funding if they do not achieve an Athena Swan award within a specified time frame. Notably, participation in the charter in the UK is not mandatory and it is not linked to research funding.
To be eligible for an award, Irish universities must commit to “fostering an environment that creates collective understanding that individuals can determine and affirm their gender”. Universities are similarly required to promote the theory of intersectionality, an approach to equalities described by its creator as “a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory”.
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The Athena Swan Charter was adopted in Ireland 10 years ago to promote laudable goals of equality and diversity and to address the long-standing underrepresentation of women in sciences. Over time, however, its focus has shifted. While the Athena Swan Ireland principles require the active promotion of gender self-ID and intersectionality, they do not mention women at all.
Arif Ahmed, who is responsible for ensuring academic freedom in the UK, has raised concerns about the risk Athena Swan poses to academic freedom. He has pointed out that “the job of a university is to facilitate open debate – not to ‘foster collective understanding’ on any controversial matter”.
Advance HE listened to concerns and changed the wording of the UK Athena Swan Charter. Strikingly, however, the wording of the Irish charter was not changed even though the Universities Act 1997 requires universities to preserve and promote academic freedom.
It is hard to understand why a commitment which has been described as “a charter for thought control” by the UK’s academic freedom tsar could be viewed as acceptable in Ireland. How does one “foster an environment that creates a collective understanding” other than by rewarding conformity and stigmatising dissent?
In response to the fine levied against Sussex, Advance HE has written to UK universities to warn them of the dangers of using their template document. This is not the first time Advance HE has changed its guidance due to legal concerns.
In 2021 Advance HE pulled its UK guidance on data collection on sex from its website. This was after the press highlighted that Advance HE had been telling UK universities to avoid collecting data on the sex of staff and students in favour of gender-identity data instead. This was despite UK universities being required by law to gather data on sex discrimination.
Athena Swan Ireland continues to recommend disaggregating data on “gender, presented by male, female and non-binary staff and students” despite the “gender ground” in Ireland’s equalities legislation referring to a binary category of male and female (allowing for a gender recognition certificate). This means that despite all the data collected for Athena Swan by Irish universities, there are no accurate statistics on the male/female breakdown in higher education.
Numerous other concerns with Advance HE remain unaddressed. Their current guidance appears to be the source for gender identity and expression policies that have sprung up in Irish universities (including Ireland’s oldest – Trinity College Dublin – and Ireland’s largest – UCD) which wrongly claim that it is unlawful discrimination to refuse to use a person’s gender pronouns. According to Advance HE’s guidance, preferred pronouns may include “che/chim/chis/chimself” and “Xe/hir/hirs/hirself”.
If Advance HE cannot be relied upon to provide legally compliant guidance, HEIs might well question what they gain from the scheme at all. The statistics on Athena Swan do not show any positive impact of Athena Swan upon the representation of women in senior roles. In fact, they show that the higher the level of Athena Swan award achieved by an institution, the lower the representation of women in senior roles.
Over the 20 years that the Athena Swan scheme has been running in the UK, the rights of women in UK universities have dramatically declined. Kathleen Stock is simply the most high-profile of a seemingly endless succession of belief discrimination cases caused by attempts to silence academics whose views don’t align with policies that Advance HE has promoted. In the UK, however, at least women with different perspectives are now being heard. In Ireland, the chilling effect is so powerful that many women simply do not dare to speak.
Colette Colfer is a lecturer in religions at South East Technological University. John Armstrong is a reader in financial mathematics at King’s College London
