Facilitating Women's Progression to the Top

Dame Athene Donald is an outstanding Physicist, but she is equally well known for her work on gender equality and has helped increase widespread awareness of the issues. Her talk in Birmingham will focus on her activities in this area and the best practices that Birmingham can adopt. Her leadership role has been recognized in various awards and outside of her discipline such that she has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’. Athene is Director of the University of Cambridge’s WiSETI (Women in Science, Engineering, Technology Initiative), and is her University’s Gender Equality Champion. This means she supports the progression of gender equality (including equal pay reviews), working with staff and students in an advisory and supportive capacity. Outside Cambridge, she chairs the Athena Forum and serves on the Royal Society’s Equality and Diversity Advisory Network. She is on the European Research Commission working group on gender. Dame Athene Donald has been Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge since 1998. She was awarded a DBE for services to Physics in the 2010 Queen’s birthday honours. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society (since 1999) and she won the Institute of Physics’s Faraday Medal in 2010. She is also a member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. Athene was awarded the L’Oreal-Unesco for Women in Science award for Europe in 2009, and in 2011 won the UKRC’s Women of Outstanding Achievement's Lifetime Achievement Award. Athene regularly writes an excellent blog on the Occam’s Typewriter community project and has a large following on Twitter.