EDI within the School

Maintaining and promoting equality, diversity and inclusion within the School is governed ultimately by the Equality Act 2010, which outlaws discrimination (direct or indirect) on nine grounds: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation.

See further:

• Nine protected characteristics

The Advice Place, run by EUSA, is an excellent source of advice.

• The Advice Place

Students with disabilities may receive advice and support from the Student Disability Service:

• Student Disability Service

The Athena SWAN process focuses on gender equality and work-life balance, but the equality, diversity and inclusion activities of the School go beyond this. In particular, we recognise the intersectional dimensions of gender inequality.

The Equality Challenge Unit has recently launched a Race Equality Charter Mark, which the School hopes in due course to participate in.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the University

Information about all equality, diversity and inclusion issues is available from the University's Equality and Diversity Unit:

• University's Equality and Diversity Unit

Members of staff with concerns about equality, diversity and inclusion issues may wish to know what Human Resources policies exist to help and guide them. All policies have some equality, diversity and inclusion relevance, so the following policies are just a selection. They have been chosen because they are directly relevant to protected groups under the Equality Act.

• A-Z list of Human Resources policies

More useful links

• University of Edinburgh Trans-Equality statement
• EUSA Women's Campaign
• EUSA LGBT+ Campaign
• Staff Pride (LGBT+ Network)
• EUSA Disabled Students' Campaign
• EUSA BME Campaign

The School of History, Classics and Archaeology was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver Award. The award recognises academic institutions and their commitment to gender equality both to academic and support staff.

 HCA Silver AS Action Plan 2020-2025 -- partially redacted (928.55 KB PDF)

The action plan submitted as part of this award forms the basis of much of the equality, diversity and inclusion activity in HCA.

As part of the Athena SWAN process the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion committee meets regularly, and ‘Working Culture’ surveys of both staff and postgraduate students are carried out.

The School's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee meets regularly, every few months; it reviews School policies and takes its own initiatives. It includes both staff and student members: full and up-to-date membership, as well as minutes etc can be seen by internal users on the HCA Sharepoint site.

The committee is convened by the School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Co-Directors, Dr Emily Brownell and Dr Lilah Grace Canevaro.

You can find information on the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS), Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee and EDI leads at the link below.

EDI in CAHSS

The Archaeology and Classics subject areas are currently developing their statements on Decolonizing the Curriculum within the School.

History - Decolonizing the Curriculum

The History department at Edinburgh University is committed to working to decolonise history. We recognise and draw on the long traditions of historians and other thinkers who have worked to understand the operation of power in all its forms. We acknowledge and build on the long struggles of racialised and colonised people inside and outside the academy to transform structures of power. This means that we recognise:

• that  empires, especially in our context European empires, have had a fundamental impact on the world in which we live, research and teach;
• that the modern university, the discipline of History as it exists today, and many of our archives and sources, were formed during an imperial age;
• that a colonialist curriculum is not only a distorted but a damaging curriculum, that perpetuates and legitimates racialised disadvantage in the present.

We therefore work to:

• contest imperial ideologies that privilege some sources and perspectives, and some peoples, places and periods of history over others;
• expose and challenge the racial, colonial and civilisational hierarchies that have shaped, and continue to shape, western approaches to the past;
• understand the connections between contemporary racial inequalities and injustices with histories of colonialism, empire, displacement, slavery and race;
• uncover and overcome racialised disadvantage in our classrooms and our department.

Our efforts to decolonise history have four areas of focus:

• What we teach (at programme level and within individual courses);
• How we teach (pedagogy);
• Who is doing the teaching (diversifying our staff);
• Who we are teaching (diversifying our student body);

These efforts are important across all our areas of teaching and research. They will be plural, ongoing, and will take different forms including consultation with students.

We welcome all suggestions on how to develop and improve equality, diversity and inclusion within the School, and suggestions can be made via the link below. Please note that the suggestion form is not a complaint nor a reporting mechanism. You can find more information on these at Guidance on making a complaint and Support for reporting from the Equally Safe Team.

Make an EDI suggestion

Gender Pay Gaps

We received a query in our EDI Suggestion Box regarding our use of binary gender language in the presentation of the Equal Pay Report at our School Forum in April. We are very grateful for this feedback, and have inquired with College HR, and wanted to provide a response to staff since this was query with wider implications. Unfortunately, at the present moment, the University is unable to report on non-binary staff pay due to gaps in our data. While both ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ fields are provided to staff, with the former capturing binary data and the latter providing more response options to better reflect individual identities. The gender identity field, however, is largely unpopulated and therefore reporting on it would not allow us to satisfy the University’s legal obligations.  You can find both of these fields in the EDMARC/EDI Data reports have here EDMARC | The University of Edinburgh.  We hope that in the future we will be able to provide better data that more accurately reflects the diversity of our staff. For now, we will be more careful to clarify the limitations of our data when presenting to staff.

The School hosts events around topics of EDI throughout the year as part of a wide-ranging events and seminars programme. You can find out more at the link below.

Events