Has DEI Increased the Representation of Women in Higher Education? A Time-Series Replication Analysis of the Impact of the UK Athena Swan Scheme
1 Department of Mathematics, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
2 UCL Social Research Institute, University College London, 55–59 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0N, UK;
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 15 Nov 2025 / Accepted: 16 Jun 2026 / Published: 10 Nov 2026
Abstract
Athena Swan is an award scheme designed to recognise higher education institutions’ (HEIs’) commitment to advancing ‘gender equality’. This paper uses time-series analysis to conduct a replication analysis of the relationship between Athena Swan status and both the proportion of women in senior roles and change in the proportion of women in senior roles. A previous study, using essentially the same data set, found that ‘Athena SWAN members showed greater and faster growth in female representations’. We apply time-series analysis methods to show that effects found in this previous study can be explained by two factors: (1) changes in the set of institutions that hold Athena Swan awards; and (2) the fact that it is more challenging to improve levels of female representation when they are closer to 50%. Once we controlled for these factors, we did not find any impact of Athena Swan awards on changes in the number of women in senior positions over the time-period studied. We conducted a power analysis which places bounds on the maximum size of effects which we would be unable to detect. In addition, we find that institutions with a low proportion of women in senior positions are more likely to be members of Athena Swan and are more likely to hold an award.
Keywords: Athena Swan; higher education; women; gender; replication analysis; DEI
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
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CITE
Armstrong, J.; Sullivan, A. Has DEI Increased the Representation of Women in Higher Education? A Time-Series Replication Analysis of the Impact of the UK Athena Swan Scheme. Controversial Ideas 2026, 6, 19.
Armstrong J, Sullivan A. Has DEI Increased the Representation of Women in Higher Education? A Time-Series Replication Analysis of the Impact of the UK Athena Swan Scheme. Controversial Ideas. 2026; 6(2):19.
Armstrong, John; Sullivan, Alice. 2026. "Has DEI Increased the Representation of Women in Higher Education? A Time-Series Replication Analysis of the Impact of the UK Athena Swan Scheme." Controversial Ideas 6, no. 2: 19.
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