Analysis and assessment of Athena Swan Culture Survey in an Engineering Department: A psychometric approach to assess gender equality, work-life balance, career development, wellbeing, bullying and belonging in academic organizations

Advance Higher Education has recently generated a transformed UK Athena Swan charter. One of their new strategies to identify improvement areas in the member institutions' culture is through the Athena Swan Culture Survey. This research aims to establish an easy and fast methodology to analyse the results of this survey and assess its validity and reliability. After ethical approval, the complete Athena Swan Culture Survey with six constructs, 28 items and a 5-point Likert scale was populated within the Department of Engineering of the Manchester Metropolitan University. The responses were statistically analysed through descriptive statistic to evaluate the degree of compliance, indifference and room for improvement, bivariant (Correlations, Two-Factor Analysis of Variance) and multivariant statistic (Confirmatory and Exploratory Factor Analysis, Internal Consistency and Structural Equation Model) to validate and appraise the reliability of the survey. The study showed that after a recodification of the "Bullying" construct, all the constructs were valid and had excellent or good reliability with Cronbach's alpha coefficients between 0.916 and 0.856 except the Work-Life balance construct. Chi-squared test and two-factor ANOVA indicated that the responses were not influenced by the gender or ethnicity. The study proves that reliable results can be obtained with a small sample as long as it is statistically representative, and the items present high communalities. Guidelines to calculate the degree of compliance and to faithfully identify improvement areas of the applicants were presented. Finally, suggestions for future research areas and improvements on the Athena Swan Culture Survey were proposed.