3.1 Social meaning as governance

A prominent strand of feminist social ontology argues that gender categories and norms are best understood as social constructs, formed within hierarchies of authority and vulnerability that they in turn reproduce (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012). Applied to Athena Swan, this thought suggests that social meaning cannot be understood as a mere overlay on material reality but is rather constitutive of the mechanisms through which material conditions are interpreted and recreated. Of particular significance to my argument is the way shared meanings shape who is deemed authoritative and determine which needs are treated as legitimate and which experiences as harms.

The structure of the UK higher education sector makes the relation between meaning and material conditions particularly strong and direct. An entire institutional ecosystem has developed around this interplay, with audit signs and prestige markers such as Research Excellence Framework (REF) performance, National Student Survey (NSS) scores, league-table positions, and charter marks shaping how institutional reputation is made legible and how that reputation affects an institution’s resources and standing within the sector. Recent work on university audit cultures, together with Shore and Wright’s wider analysis of performance indicators and rankings, makes it evident that such signs cannot be dismissed as inert descriptions but are amongst the means through which institutional reality is organized and governed (Wright and Shore Reference Wright and Shore1999; Shore and Wright Reference Shore and Wright2015b, Reference Shore and Wright2015a, Reference Shore and Wright2024; Murray Reference Murray2025).

Regardless of the social ontology adopted, institutions govern in part by shaping intelligibility. They do so by defining the boundaries of professional speech, permissible emotional expression, rational complaint, and acceptable ambition, as well as through the signs by which institutional projects are publicly designated and made legible. Such designation is never normatively inert. Rather, it serves to activate patterns of association that can become normative expectations, shaping how equality is conceived and what sorts of equality claims appear politically incorrect, overly idealistic, or otherwise objectionable. Put differently, if a policy scheme’s public identity depends on culturally resonant signs and its function includes the organization of institutional aspiration and reputation, then the scheme’s signs will predictably structure aspiration and reputation, shaping what kind of equality practice is admired and what kind is opposed and suppressed.

3.2. Performativity, authority, and adoption

Speech act theory is useful for my argument insofar as it offers an account of how words and certificates can do things (Austin Reference Austin1962). On this view, institutions use performative speech acts to confer status, authorize roles, and establish legitimacy. A charter mark is a paradigmatic institutional credential in this respect, one that certifies (and publicly communicates) the adoption of certain externally approved processes and that on that basis confers a recognized status, enabling the institution to present itself as equality-minded in the public sphere in a form designed to be accepted as credible. Work in feminist philosophy of language identifies an additional important consideration, highlighting that whether speech is received as authoritative depends on existing power relations (Langton Reference Langton1993). Who can credibly describe an institution as virtuous? Who is recognized as credible when they speak about institutional injustice? Who is penalized for saying what is “inappropriate” even when it is true? These and similar questions are central to any feminist evaluation of equality schemes because, although such schemes aim to redistribute authority, credibility, and professional standing, they can also reintroduce the very asymmetries they were meant to address.

The relevance of these questions for Athena Swan is straightforward. The Charter shapes a public communicative and evaluative schema through which institutions present themselves and become legible. It thereby risks creating a discrepancy between institutional speech and personal experience: the institution can say, with confidence and external validation, that it is reflective and committed, while individuals—often and most starkly those at lower ranks or with less institutional power—remain deprived of the authority to contest that speech without retaliation or being labelled as troublemakers, a dynamic that Ahmed’s work on diversity work, complaint, and the figure of the feminist killjoy helps to theorize in institutional terms (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2012, Reference Ahmed2021).

3.3 Myth and the naturalization of virtue

My third conceptual pillar rests on Barthes’s work on myth, with myth understood here not as folklore but as an ideological form that makes historical contingencies appear natural and therefore difficult to challenge (Barthes Reference Barthes1972). Equality schemes are especially vulnerable to mythic naturalization because they seek moral legitimacy. The underlying mechanism becomes apparent when one considers that the more an institution can attach its equality work to culturally pleasing symbols of wisdom and to a wider narrative of progress, the more readily equality can be treated, in external evaluation and internal self-understanding alike, as something that the institution is already credibly pursuing rather than something that remains in ongoing conflict with its own interests. In this manner, symbols can function as moral alibis, allowing institutions to appear virtuous while their underlying structures stay unchanged. Myth is therefore a mechanism of depoliticization that raises the cost of contestation by presenting political struggle as a story of admirable institutional identity that can then be certified and leveraged.

It would be a mistake to think that this mechanism is particular to Athena Swan or even to equality-directed initiatives; the same dynamics can develop in structurally similar institutional settings where values are central to how success is defined. Indeed, Murray’s analysis of university audit cultures shows how audit processes such as the REF acquire mythologized meanings that exceed their nominal technical functions, shaping how academics and institutions conceive value and distinguish success from failure (Murray Reference Murray2025). Athena Swan’s gender-equality focus sets it apart, but its underlying mechanics and structure are shared with a wider family of audit practices through which institutions build a mythos of their own worth.

3.4 Credibility hierarchies and epistemic power

Finally, feminist epistemology theorizes epistemic injustice as a wrong suffered in one’s capacity as a knower, for example through systematic credibility deficits and patterned forms of silencing (Fricker Reference Fricker2007; Dotson Reference Dotson2011; Arandjelović Reference Arandjelović2026). Academia offers a particularly useful case—universities are powerful allocators of credibility, distributing resources and intellectual authority through standards that they themselves establish and that govern how expertise, objectivity, bias, and emotional credibility are attributed. Therefore, a scheme that claims to counter the disvaluation of women’s thought must be assessed not only by crude representation metrics but also by its impact on credibility practices, reflected in who is believed when they report harm and whose interpretations become institutionally actionable, as well as in the price of dissent. This conclusion makes it clear that a central risk of charter-mark equality schemes is that they can further entrench credibility hierarchies by enabling institutions to claim credibility on equality matters through external certification, thereby making internal critique easier to dismiss by shifting the burden of proof onto complainants and treating dissent as an exception to an otherwise certified virtue.

Taken together, these four ideas provide the frame for my semiotic critique, showing how a scheme’s public signs and authorized narratives can constrain how gender is expressed and how equality is pursued even when the explicit rhetoric is emancipatory.

4.1 Genealogy and ratification

It is tempting to dismiss semiotic critique as overtheorizing, as reading too much into something that is simply not there. I address this temptation head on. A seemingly common-sense deflection would appeal to genealogy, noting that “Athena” and “Swan” come from earlier initiatives and networks, thereby treating the contemporary Charter as not responsible for their meanings or choice. The University of Bath, for example, describes the Charter as having evolved from work between the Athena Project and the Scientific Women’s Academic Network (SWAN) (University of Bath 2023). While not irrelevant, such genealogical observations may illuminate provenance, but they do not achieve the desired exculpation for at least two reasons.

First, genealogy does not answer but merely relocate the normative question. If “Athena” derives from an earlier programme, the critical issue is displaced rather than dissolved and the question remains why the earlier programme was framed under the patronage specifically of a goddess associated with wisdom rather than, say, an ungainly or morally ambivalent figure (e.g., Eris, Ate, or Melinoë), or an explicitly non-aesthetic and non-patronizing symbol? My contention is not that some alternative myth would have been “better” but that choosing a mythic patron at all is already a substantive act of framing. The move selects a repertoire of associations and invites an interpretive posture toward the project (equality as guided by elevated virtue and validated by authority) that is integrated into an institutional self-image of moral progress.

Second, even if one were to grant that some element of the naming was historically contingent, later adoption is still normatively loaded. In other words, inherited or chosen, names in institutional life are not inert but active, exercising their potency through repeated display, strategic deployment, and usage qua public credentials (Advance HE 2023a). A scheme can inherit a label and still actively ratify it because the retention of a sign as the public face of justice work endorses its usefulness in that role. Athena Swan’s function as a charter mark makes this especially salient—the semiotic package is a constitutive element of the award, which is designed to be legible across contexts, and is instrumental in shaping perceptions of legitimacy both within and outside academia.

These two points already defeat any claim to mere inheritance. But the case is stronger still for the “Swan” sign in particular. It would be far-fetched to treat its convergence on a culturally resonant, aesthetically coded word as normatively accidental. Instead, at least one of the following is true:

• • The acronym was selected partly because it yields a word with attractive public resonance.

• • Even if the acronym originated without such intention, its continued institutional uptake functions as an endorsement of that resonance, since it is the publicly resonant word that now does reputational work.

Either way, the resulting sign is morally consequential. A charter mark uses its name as a means of recognition and institutional self-presentation.

4.2 The taming of feminist critique

Consider the “Swan” symbol first. Across much of Europe and in societies shaped by European colonial inheritance, the swan is a culturally saturated symbol, often imbued with notions of refinement and beauty.Footnote ² These associations are also frequently gendered, given how traditional ideals of femininity are similarly coded as pleasing and composed. The real-world consequences are observable—when a gender-equality charter is indexed by such a symbol, equality becomes implicitly aligned with the symbol’s public resonance, specifically with an aestheticized femininity that is agreeable and non-disruptive.

Lest I be accused of opportunistic play on an acronym, I elaborate succinctly. Volens nolens, the scheme’s public identity depends on the fact that “Swan” is a word with pre-existing cultural significance. I contend that this is not merely incidental. Would an equality charter whose acronym happened to form a term like “RAT” or “MAGGOT” have plausibly been retained as a flagship accreditation of virtue rather than altered or abandoned? That is well-nigh inconceivable. The continued centrality of “Swan” is therefore best understood as a selection and stabilization of a symbol that is reputationally useful, and that usefulness, in the form of the scheme’s trading on the public associations of the sign, is what makes my semiotic critique ethically relevant. None of this is to say that the desire for beauty is intrinsically problematic; it is not. The key concern is that aestheticization is a familiar route by which institutions latently tame and conceal political demands. Specifically, when women’s quest for meaningful equality is coded as graceful, the most legible and frictionless feminist practice becomes the kind that fits this imposition, one that is institutionally non-threatening. Yet much feminist critique is necessarily abrasive, poised to illuminate wrongs institutions would rather deny, to refuse harm concealment through reputation management—in short, to insist on conflict when conflict is morally required. The tension between such critique and a simple, grace-coded equality that is easier to narrate and certify is clear. Recent evidence on Athena Swan in institutions formally rewarded for gender-equity plans, as well as wider evidence on gendered academic housework, reinforces the concern that legible equality performance comes apart from the actual reduction of persistent intersectional barriers and the redistribution of labour (Crimmins et al. Reference Crimmins, Casey and Tsouroufli2023; Heijstra et al. Reference Heijstra, Steinthorsdóttir and Einarsdóttir2017). The feminist literature on disciplinary femininity has elucidated compelling mechanisms by which women are pressured by non-moral norms of comportment to be restrained and “professional” in a manner that often demands a degree of deference (Bartky Reference Bartky1990; Bordo Reference Bordo1993). A public equality accreditation that resonates with refined grace easily leads to the reinforcement of these, heteronomously imposed and in moral terms arbitrary, norms (Arandjelović Reference Arandjelović2023). The result is that it becomes easier to praise feminism that is aesthetically agreeable and to denigrate and suppress forms of feminism that challenge that institutionally imposed image.

Thus, the “Swan” symbol exerts substantive semiotic power, constructing an affective frame within which women’s quest for equality is presented as something serene, elegant, and safely admirable. This normative frame is morally costly, making it harder to recognize that the pursuit of equality sometimes requires ugliness. Indeed, ugliness may need to be highlighted and exposed, an institution’s self-image may need to be disrupted, compromise with unjust power may need to be resisted even if the injustice is not recognized by the institution. If the public sign of women’s emancipatory struggle evokes associations of graceful beauty, then the institution is encouraged—not subtly but powerfully—to prefer superficial equality practices that preserve institutional poise.

4.3 Sanctioned authority

The Athena sign operates in a manner different from but complementary to the “Swan” sign. The ancient Greek goddess Athena is commonly invoked and widely recognized as an emblem of wisdom and strategic competence.Footnote ³ At first glance that seems fitting as the scheme aims to counter the indubitable historical disvaluation of women’s intellectual authority. Yet, as in the previous case, a deeper analysis readily reveals a more troubled substance.

The key difficulty is that Athena comes to signify exogenously sanctioned female authority, that is, a form of nominal women’s power acceptable only because it aligns with already privileged ideals of rationality, control, and institutional order—ideals that were shaped in historically male-dominated periods in which women’s voices were systematically silenced. Naming an equality scheme after such a figure reinforces the message that women gain standing by approximating the prevailing style of authority rather than by bringing to the table forms of insight and expression historically devalued, and contesting the narrowness of the established forms. Truly feminist aims include not admitting—or not merely admitting—women into existing norms of thought, but also a women-led interrogation of which norms of thought are permissible or desirable.

The conflict I tease out is a familiar dilemma in feminist politics. One strategy responds to sexist credibility deficits by asserting that women are as rational, competitive, and professionally tough as men. Another strategy insists that the credibility economy itself is distorted, that it privileges a narrow affective style—for example, one of coolness, detachment, and overt self-confidence—and treats other registers of speech—say, anger, vulnerability, cooperativeness, moral insistence—as lesser. A scheme named after Athena privileges, and even tacitly promotes, the former strategy of inclusion into a pre-existing ideal of intellectual authority, a strategy that can plausibly improve access while leaving intact the deeper norms by which authority is distributed. Thus, though not in and of itself problematic, in the historically contingent context of the present-day world, the invocation of Athena as a patron readily leads to an encouragement of a comfortable and easily accepted path whereby institutions notionally celebrate women’s wisdom while in effect continuing to police what form wisdom must have. Women may be affirmed insofar as they are intelligible in what one might call Athena-coded terms, that is, as restrained and conventional. That affirmation is itself a form of norm enforcement and entrenchment, the antithesis of the scheme’s nominal emancipatory aims.

4.4 Institutional virtue as pleasing femininity

We can now see how the different symbols within Athena Swan converge semiotically. In particular, working together, “Athena” and “Swan” constitute a composite sign that frames gender-equality virtue in terms of wisdom and grace. This composite is not merely descriptive, possessing instead real-world potency. The signals sent invite institutions to cast their equality work as universally non-offensive, pushing individuals (women in particular) towards becoming the kind of person the institution celebrates, namely appropriately feminist. Such performances are rewarded, while dissent becomes costlier. While the scheme does not literally force choices, what it does do is reshape the net cost of the available alternatives. Therein lies a structural semiotic misalignment: a charter can profess to dismantle women’s disvaluation while circulating an image of women and feminism that remains tethered to paternalistic approval and aesthetic respectability. This point is strengthened by two further considerations, which I elaborate on next.

First, the semiotic framework at hand is not limited to the name and acronym. The award strata (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) and the narrative conventions of various evidential submissions also contribute to a morality of progress, shaped as a graded, externally approved and audit-evidenced ascent towards virtue. Such framing encourages the misleading intuition that equality is a concrete achievement that can be reached and then maintained, thereby painting a rather simplistic picture that contrasts with the real-world emancipatory process, which is ongoing and contestable, and vulnerable to backsliding through complacency, opportunism, and institutional drift.

Second, semiotic frameworks can severely constrain internal dissent, exerting conformist pressure and stigmatizing serious challenge to the status quo. As explained previously, such constraint becomes self-stabilizing once an institution becomes invested in a symbol of equality virtue, since critique then becomes harder and those who speak disruptively can be cast as threatening the institution’s perceived moral identity and reputation. The more the institution loves and proudly displays its accreditations (“Our School received exciting news: it has been granted the Athena Swan Silver award!”), the more likely it is to treat dissent as a potential reputational danger and liability.

A value of my critique lies in its normative implications—the critique identifies what is wrong with, or fragile about, frameworks such as Athena Swan. Succinctly, Athena Swan’s public identity makes certain forms of feminism intelligible and admirable (graceful, wise, progressive) while making other forms more difficult to pursue (dissenting, disagreeable, suspicious of institutional narratives). Lest I be misunderstood, the proposed diagnosis does not rely on the claim that all equality work should or must be dissenting or disagreeable. Rather, it leans only on the claim that justice, including feminist justice, sometimes requires conflict that will not look pretty, that will offend and disrupt, and on the observation that a scheme whose public face is one of aestheticized virtue is structurally biased against such conflict.

5.1 Audit culture

An important characteristic of audit cultures is that their operation revolves around verification (Power Reference Power1997). The foundational work of Power and Strathern provides much of the conceptual scaffolding for this aspect of my argument, while the more recent literature on audit, indicators, rankings, and university governance supplements it with accounts of how extensively audit forms now structure higher education as a competitive prestige economy (Wright and Shore Reference Wright and Shore1999; Shore and Wright Reference Shore and Wright2015b, Reference Shore and Wright2015a, Reference Shore and Wright2024; Murray Reference Murray2025). The starting point of my analysis is readily visible: audit cultures demand documents, metrics, and plans that can be inspected, ranked, and quantified, and through these means they enforce, discourage, reward, punish, and incentivize. In general, and especially so in complex, pluralistic contexts such as that of higher education, audit often yields a distinctive incentive for substitution whereby the production of auditable artefacts comes to stand in for the reality those artefacts are meant to represent (Strathern Reference Strathern2000). In other words, the organization becomes adept at generating auditable artefacts and less interested in confronting what is often of greatest normative importance but hardest to trace, measure, report, and—crucially—remedy, such as fear, coercion, informal retaliation, credibility deficits, and the everyday micro-politics by which power is exercised.

Athena Swan’s application system specifically encourages artefact production through self-assessment, data collection, narrative interpretation, and action planning (Advance HE 2023c), and, because recognition is conferred by panels on the basis of the resulting submissions, institutions rationally focus on optimizing the quality of those submissions. A practical outcome is performativity, whereby equality becomes something to be demonstrated in a form legible to external evaluators rather than something substantive in the real world, thus sidelining the experiences of exactly those who are in positions of least power and are least likely to dissent or speak out. In short, reputational virtue can come to replace actual justice at the level of perception. Such replacement can occur even when the intentions behind the equality work are sincere, for example, because the external award becomes a convenient proxy for outsiders (and insiders) who are incentivized to believe that the institution is worthy of trust and respect. Audit regimes predictably produce such proxies, thus providing an authorized shortcut in place of ongoing contestation, and in doing so, they can shift credibility away from disruptive testimony and towards institutional self-description validated by certification. Any cynicism or opportunism makes the substitution still more likely.

5.2 Performativity

Audit cultures embed a structural weakness that can readily result in a real-world institutional pathology. Its symptoms are captured well by Ahmed’s phrase “doing the document” rather than “doing the doing,” which describes how institutions are incentivized to produce the right narrative artefacts, subsequently used as prima facie evidence that the problem in question is being addressed (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2007, Reference Ahmed2012). In the struggle for equality, the path toward that pathology is especially tempting because genuine change is difficult and conflictual, and as such politically costly. Documents are safer. Documents can be written, edited, polished, signed, and approved according to familiar procedures, making risky surprises unlikely. They can create the appearance of commitment without requiring those whose conduct or interests sustain the problem to be confronted. And documents can display illusory responsiveness while deferring hard decisions, demonstrating progress even in the absence of substantive change.

The picture I have painted should not be read as implying hostility to documents per se. There is nothing wrong with documents as such, and they can serve important purposes. The problem I highlight is that of documents becoming the basis of recognition when the surrounding structures shaping the reasons and incentives for producing them are not suited to achieving the stated aims. When recognition is conferred through documentation, documentation becomes the target of rational optimization, and the more prestigious the accreditation, the more attractive the optimization. In such settings, the artefact ceases to merely record equality work—it becomes what equality work is taken to be.

5.3 Policy scoring

Athena Swan’s bureaucratic structure has already attracted different lines of criticism. Armstrong and Sullivan characterize the framework as a “policy-scoring scheme” and argue that such schemes can reward compliance with scheme-internal norms rather than evidence-based prioritization (Armstrong and Sullivan Reference Armstrong and Sullivan2025). The philosophical point is broader yet: scoring systems cultivate convergence. Once a style of “good” submission becomes recognizable, institutions imitate it, producing the forms of evidence the scheme rewards and thereby strengthening and validating the scheme itself. Specialized positions get created to support this function, and new administrative departments develop around them, redistributing significant volumes of equality labor and academic housework in ways that may leave deeper barriers intact (Heijstra et al. Reference Heijstra, Steinthorsdóttir and Einarsdóttir2017; Crimmins et al. Reference Crimmins, Casey and Tsouroufli2023). Institutions learn what sorts of problems are safe to admit, what kinds of evidence are valued, what aims pass as “realistic,” what tone reads as “reflective” rather than “defensive.” In the end, equality governance becomes just a genre of writing with a repertoire of approved solutions. Related critical work has accordingly described charter schemes as tending towards moderate or managerial feminisms that are easier to anchor within existing institutional priorities (Tzanakou and Pearce Reference Tzanakou and Pearce2019; Yarrow and Johnston Reference Yarrow and Johnston2023).

This is a semiotic outcome emerging from an audit dynamic. Convergence stabilizes a public image of what gender justice looks like, one with a distinctive narrative tone, a template for solutions, a set of familiar interventions. Over time, the scheme governs feminism itself by regulating the aesthetics of institutional self-description. Eventually, it becomes easier to be recognized as gender-just by reproducing the genre, even if the deeper credibility economy remains unaltered and disruptive testimony continues to be discounted, than by actually confronting these underlying problems.

5.4 Commodification

My most aggressive claim concerns commodification. It is common to defend equality schemes by reference to representation metrics such as how many women there are at a certain pay grade, how many women are in leadership positions, what proportions on committees, and so on. Some form of accounting of this kind can be useful. Much as in the case of documents, it is not accounting itself that concerns me. Rather, my claim is that, in the context of audit governance, quantification becomes morally substitutive, making it rational for institutions to treat the achievement of the right statistics as the realization of justice. Within this dynamic, individual women can become exchangeable, treated as commodities rather than as individuals, an outcome that starkly contrasts with the stated aims of the Charter and its participant institutions. What ends up mattering is that “a woman” occupies the slot, not who she is as an individual … for any other will do. The institution’s evaluative target becomes the category distribution and individuals become the means to the institution’s end that is the accreditation.

A further consequence of governance by targets is that its indifference to particular persons is not restricted to those it purports to benefit. When success is judged by aggregate outcomes, it becomes rational to treat appointment and promotion decisions as moves in a compliance game in which individuals of all genders become either troublesome obstacles or useful means of satisfying the target. The wrong here comes from the deeper structural feature already identified, namely that persons are approached as fungible inputs to an externally rewarded distribution, rather than as individuals whose claims to respect, authority, and fair assessment must be addressed in their particularity. In that sense, the audit-and-accreditation regime does not just risk betraying women but also corrupting the institution’s evaluative relation to persons as such. This dynamic instantiates a form of commodification whereby individuals are treated as substitutable instances of a category that can be managed for external validation. Relevant philosophical work warns that treating individuals as fungible units in market-like schemes can undermine the recognition of persons as ends (Anderson Reference Anderson1993; Radin Reference Radin1987). The foremost concern here is of a distinctly moral nature: when institutional virtue is produced by meeting category targets, individuals are only too easily sacrificed to become tokens in a reputational transaction. Feminist work gives further reason for concern—analyses of educational leadership and neoliberal governance, together with recent discussions of genderwashing in universities, show how women’s presence can be recruited as a sign of organizational virtue while leaving the underlying conditions of vulnerability intact (Blackmore Reference Blackmore1989, Reference Blackmore2016; Fuller Reference Fuller2022; Mavin Reference Mavin, Gardiner, Fox-Kirk, Elliott and Stead2024).

The structural hypocrisy is thus all the more striking. The Charter’s stated aims are unmistakably both moral and epistemic, seeking to counter women’s historical disvaluation as thinkers and valuers, and yet an audit-driven credential regime can recast women as countable inputs used to prop up institutional legitimacy—the institution can claim to affirm women while primarily valuing them for the legitimacy their presence provides. My thesis has testable implications for institutional behaviour:

• • The institution will care about the distribution of women across ranks insofar as it affects recognition.

• • The institution will be less structurally compelled to care about whether particular women can genuinely think and act freely.

• • The institution will tend to prefer equality interventions that are legible as “progress” while avoiding interventions that generate reputational risk by exposing persistent wrongs.

Audit feminism makes these implications more likely because it creates external rewards for legible distributions and legible narratives.

5.5 Semiotic amplification

The commodification worry connects with my previously developed semiotic account of Athena Swan’s public face. In particular, the “Athena” and “Swan” signs give commodification a morally appealing veneer, making its underlying logic easier to accept and to respect. They veil managed representation in a pleasing myth and a narrative of wisdom and aesthetics, making it easy for the institution to present gender management as moral progress, with the semiotic framework providing the moral alibi and the audit framework the instrumental incentives. Together, interlocking and complementing one another, these elements constitute a powerful mechanism for institutional self-congratulation and a positive feedback loop that reinforces it.

Importantly, this interaction operates not only at the systemic level but also at the level of individual moral psychology. An accreditation with appealing mythic and aesthetic resonance reassures individuals within the institution that their equality work is morally worthwhile. While the work may very well be worthwhile in some cases, the confidence generated by this mechanism does not reliably track its actual worth and can inhibit scrutiny of whether the work is genuinely transformative, merely performative, or non-performative in Ahmed’s sense, with the auditable narrative foregrounding a commitment that is not followed through on in practice (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2012). The more emotionally rewarding the symbol, the easier it is to confuse possessing the symbol with possessing, and acting on, the virtue.

5.6 Dissent as reputational risk

Audit feminism also interacts with and shapes credibility hierarchies. An accreditation-oriented equality scheme creates pressure to preserve coherent narratives of progress and organizes institutional life around them. Disruptive testimony (for example, about harassment, exclusion, retaliation, everyday mistreatment) can be reputationally costly, and can therefore be treated primarily as an inconvenience. Ahmed’s work illustrates this conservative dynamic too. The complainant may have to establish not only what happened, but also why the incident should not be treated as a mere outlier, and why it contradicts the institution’s presentation of itself as committed to equality (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2021). This attitude can intensify epistemic injustice, with the very individuals who speak about persistent harms being treated as less credible because their testimony conflicts with the institution’s certified self-image (Fricker Reference Fricker2007; Dotson Reference Dotson2011).

Lest I be accused of utopianism, none of the foregoing is premised on the assumption that some perfectly “gender-blind” institutional existence is possible or even coherent as a notion. The lesson is not that every task or role must be evenly distributed across genders, nor that gender should never matter. My point is that a credential-and-audit regime can entrench a moral economy in which people are valued primarily for the legitimacy they provide (as counted units) or for the maintenance work they perform (as producers of the equality narrative), rather than for their intellectual agency as persons. That is a feminist concern even on pluralistic, non-utopian conceptions of justice.

6.1 Semiotics versus the material

The objector to my thesis may argue that semiotic analysis distracts from material outcomes. I grant the premise that material outcomes do matter, first and foremost, because people as individuals matter. That much is compatible with my argument. However, material outcomes are not self-interpreting. What terms such as “safety,” “credibility,” “fairness,” and “freedom” pick out in the material world depends on social meaning, and so an equality scheme that shapes social meaning thereby shapes what outcomes can be pursued and legitimately demanded. Moreover, in a reputational contest, the symbol is itself a means of securing outcomes—institutions pursue the accreditation because it has social potency and confers power. Set within the UK’s higher education landscape, that potency is amplified by audit signs, rankings, and proxy measures whose meanings feed into recruitment advantage, income, funding, and institutional confidence (Shore and Wright Reference Shore and Wright2024; Murray Reference Murray2025).

My deeper point, though, is epistemic. The accreditation can alter what people believe about the institution, including what they believe about the plausibility of testimony alleging harm. Therefore, if the accreditation reduces the perceived likelihood of wrongdoing, it can latently make an actual wrong harder to detect. That is a material consequence mediated by meaning, which, as I explained, is socially constructed.

6.2 Interpretation of the symbols

Another objection that can be put against my thesis is that most individuals do not interpret the “Athena” and “Swan” symbols the way I suggest. My response is that a symbol can perform normative work without being explicitly interpreted. Indeed, social meanings operate largely through habitual association and institutional repetition, not necessarily through conscious thought. Thus, the relevant question is not whether everyone reads the symbol in the same way, but whether the symbol makes flattering readings sufficiently likely that it becomes institutionally useful.

Moreover, the public audience matters. Charter marks are designed to circulate. Even if insiders treat “Swan” as a mere acronym, the public resonance of the word can still shape how the accreditation is perceived and what it signals.

6.3 Performativity and action

One may also argue that performativity is not an issue if it accompanies meaningful action. This objection does not clash with my argument. My claim is not that documentation excludes action but rather that audit incentives make it rational to favour auditable actions over transformative actions, and to prioritize the coherence of institutional narratives over the disruptive truths threatening that coherence. This preference is made all the more potent by the difficulties of acting and the ease of documenting in this context. And it predictably produces the substitution effect identified in classic accounts of audit culture and discussed earlier (Power Reference Power1997; Strathern Reference Strathern2000). As I noted, the more recognition depends on documents, the more documents become the object of optimization.

The question is therefore comparative and structural in nature, namely whether, in a world of scarce time and political capital, the scheme directs effort towards what is legible to an evaluator or towards what is ethically urgent even when it is illegible or reputationally costly. Audit feminism tends to favour the former.

6.4 Representation versus commodification

The objector may also dispute my thesis by claiming that I am misreading representation. I grant that representation is not commodification, but that does not challenge my thesis. While representation need not be commodifying, it can become such under certain governance forms. The relevant criterion is fungibility, that is, whether individuals are treated as interchangeable instances whose value lies primarily in satisfying a category target rather than in their recognition as ends in themselves. Audit conditions thus promote fungibility by rewarding category distributions. Indeed, philosophical critiques of commodification are not limited to markets in the strict economic sense but also apply to any regime that treats persons as substitutable inputs to the achievement of an external good (Anderson Reference Anderson1993; Radin Reference Radin1987).

The above also clarifies my normative claim, namely, the condition under which an equality regime becomes morally objectionable. My critique is not that increasing representation is itself undesirable but that an accreditation-and-audit regime can turn representation as a proxy into a moral substitute while leaving intact conditions of mistreatment and vulnerability. That is why I stress the structural tension whereby the scheme can celebrate women as a category while failing to treat women as individuals with distinct voices and values.

6.5 Auditing and accountability

One may also protest that auditing is necessary for accountability. Yet neither auditability (in the usual institutional sense) nor auditing itself is necessary for accountability or reliably conducive to it (Power Reference Power1997; Strathern Reference Strathern2000). Indeed, auditability often reorients answerability towards external evaluators and reputational audiences, thereby prioritizing what is easily legible over what is morally central and generating incentives for artefact production that can substitute for material change. As a consequence, an audit regime can make institutions accountable to external panels in legible ways, while leaving them insufficiently accountable to those actually harmed and then failed by the institutional response. For example, Murray’s discussion of proxy measures such as the NSS illustrates how a formally aggregated “student voice” can carry more institutional force than actual students’ voices because it is attached to prestige and funding mechanisms (Murray Reference Murray2025). Thus, the question is not whether evidence is important—this is not contested—but whether the scheme’s evaluative structure allows the right things to count as evidence. If the scheme rewards coherence, legibility, and pleasing narratives, it can undermine accountability to disruptive, dissenting testimony regardless of its truthfulness.

6.6 Overdemandingness

Lastly, the objector may claim that I demand too much in a non-ideal world. I grant that real-world conditions justify compromise. But that does not mean that they justify complacency about structural tensions. A tool can be instrumentally useful while also entrenching deeper patterns (epistemic injustice, respectability constraints, fungibility). Recognizing this motivates plausible design improvements—my critique suggests which features to preserve (attention, resources, structured reflection) while rejecting those that predictably produce virtue-by-accreditation and commodification.

6.7 Scope and limitations

In the foregoing I presented a philosophical analysis of institutional semiotics and audit-oriented accreditation as a mode of governance. As such, the analysis does not offer an overall quantitative assessment of Athena Swan’s causal effects, nor does it claim that all participating institutions act in bad faith or exhibit the same tendencies to the same degree. The universality of my claims is limited to the shared structure, concerning predictable incentive effects in environments where recognition is conferred through auditable artefacts and publicly circulating credentials. For that reason, the argument remains compatible with the possibility that Athena Swan can produce local gains while still distorting what counts as success, whose voices are heard, and what kinds of equality work become institutionally legible.