Update as we coming up on 2000 Signatures

We are just coming up on 2000 signatures to our open letter to the Equality Challenge Unit and University VCs, available here: https://platform.organise.org.uk/campaigns/open-letter-to-equality-challenge-unit.  At this moment it's at 1935.  If you have not already done so we invite you to read and (if you agree) sign the letter.  If you have signed it, now that strikers is back at work at most Universities, we invite you to share the letter with others at your institution who may not be on twitter.

Other pieces of news.  Claire Marris (initiator of the letter) has resigned from her Athena SWAN activities at City, and you can read her resignation letter. And the Changing Universities Cultures organisation has withdrawn from working with UUK, explicitly stating that "pensions are a key equality issue"  and citing the brilliant article on the topic by Martin Henaghan, Jo Grady and Liam Foster.

We have tried to apply rigorously a policy of what you might call "Yes platforming".  As long as people are courteous and reasonable in debate (everybody has been so far) we have no intention of silencing them.  In our previous post we published the response from ECU to us, and invited debate.  So far my impression (speaking personally) is that the response was particularly lacking in our fundamental point  that pensions are an equalities issue.

Less obviously if you don't obsessively follow twitter, we made sure to retweet a critical tweet asking people not to sign our letter by Francine Morris. Francine thinks it's wrong to withdraw from Athena SWAN work, and we understand that this is an important dilemma that we wish everybody to grapple with for themselves.

Finally, we have been somewhat taken aback at the uptake we have had on our letters. We invite people to continue sharing and signing the letter, and over the coming week or so will be working out what steps we should take in delivering the letter more formally to Vice Chancellors and inviting formal responses.