Professor Maggie Cusack:

I agree entirely with everything that was said. I have led quite a few Athena SWAN initiatives over the years. It is quite a blunt instrument but it brings about really positive conversations that change the landscape in a positive way. At MTU, I am really keen to have equality, diversity and inclusion at our top table. It is a very important signal to send about how important EDI is for the university. We all have a responsibility to challenge ourselves in every decision we make as to whether we are inadvertently excluding anyone. It is not about any one approach. Rather, it is very much a multipronged approach and it is about continuing to ask ourselves those questions about inclusion and whether there is anything built into our systems that somehow excludes people.

I will give the committee one example. We have just launched, under pillar 3 of the human capital initiative, our iEd Hub initiative in collaboration with the college of medicine and health at University College Cork. We are bringing together bioscience aspects with engineering at MTU to look at innovation and different ways of learning. In my welcome address for the initiative, I specifically made the point that we have more female students in bioscience and that this was an opportunity to be a beacon and really drive change. It is really important that people see examples of women being involved in STEM subjects and having successful careers in the area.