diversity and inclusion

We love your difference – just please fit in!

On International Women’s Day it seems right to reflect on this year’s theme of ‘better the balance, better the world’ and ponder this in the light of the broader issue of diversity (and the lack of it in our workplaces, our public institutions, the media – I could go on!).

(Very) slowly, institutions are moving towards an awareness of the importance of diversity – heads of D&I are being appointed, unconscious bias training programmes abound whilst the legislative stick that enforced gender pay gap reporting is bringing the conversation into the boardroom and society at large. These are all important steps and any progress made towards creating a fairer, more equal society should be celebrated – but it would be premature to crack open the champagne or don our party hats quite yet.

Diversity is about recognising and valuing difference; it’s about having a varied range of perspectives from a varied range of people. It’s about embracing the unique range of experiences, outlooks, points of view, talents and insights that are created from who we are, be that through gender, race, neurological ‘wiring’, social background, sexual orientation, education – I could go on! It’s what makes being human so wonderful; it brings with it a richness and a depth and breadth to our human experience that has given birth to a wealth of riches – be that across technology, the arts, medicine, science – that we all enjoy today.

But we know that this difference, this sense of ‘otherness’, is also what makes embracing diversity really hard. You just have to reflect on your own experience, both professionally and personally, to know that we generally feel much more comfortable and more at ease with people ‘just like us’: we share the same social cues and shortcuts. (We go on holiday – often to similar locations, we enjoy the same films, books, programmes on TV, we have similar hobbies and interests.) The further we move away from our ‘comfort zone’, the more ‘ill at ease’ we become. And, as developments in neuroscience and psychology highlight, the more ‘ill at ease’ we feel, the less creative, collaborative and open to risk taking we become: we want to ‘play it safe’ or worse still hide (or leave). Research from organisations like Stonewall or this latest survey from the publishing industry confirms that when we experience ‘otherness’ in the workplace and a sense of being ‘different’ we stop bringing our whole selves to work or suffer from feeling ‘the odd one out’. In fact, research shows that 62% of people feel they have to bend themselves into a different shape to be able to ‘fit in at work’. (And that doesn’t just apply to women or minority groups. In a study, even 45% of white heterosexual men felt the same!) And neuroscience shows that feeling socially excluded has the same impact as physical pain – it hurts!

So how do we ‘better the balance’ across all diverse groups to ensure that the very skills and behaviours organisations need to thrive and prosper are realised to their full potential? How do we build organisational cultures that mean that we don’t bend ourselves out of shape (just think of all the energy we waste doing this!)? How do we build psychologically safe environments where everyone feels able to share their views, challenge prevailing orthodoxies and mine for conflict in a healthy and productive way? If most of us are already ‘faking it’ to fit in, then creating more diverse workforces and adding more ‘difference’ isn’t necessarily going to change anything. Yes, it might help tick some diversity tick boxes, but for how long and to what affect?

The conversation about diversity and inclusion needs to balance out. Attracting and recruiting diverse talent to your organisations is one positive step for sure, but if you are to truly realise the potential that this brings and ensure a sense of belonging then organisations need to address their cultures at the same time – and invest as much working on what it means to be inclusive as diverse. (And there is a growing body of evidence that shows that businesses with an inclusive environment perform better than those that don’t!)

So, what does being an inclusive organisation mean? How do we ensure, as we create more diverse workforces, that those very same organisations are ‘diverse talent’ ready? Otherwise we may find ourselves facing a clash of cultures – as leaders are challenged in their expectations of ‘how their people should behave’, as existing rituals and routines are debunked and exploded and as this energised new talent leave more and more of themselves behind at the office door – which doesn’t help anybody, the organisation, their people or the individual.

Organisations need this multiplicity of perspectives if they are to flourish and thrive. Organisations need this diversity if they are to reflect the customers they serve. Organisations need to be diverse if they are to take seriously their role as part of wider society and the imperative to operate in a socially responsible and fair way.

So, as we reflect on ‘better the balance, better the world’ perhaps we should reflect on what we need to do now to adapt our organisations and our institutions to make them ready for the diversity of perspective society so critically needs.

Emotional taxation, but not much representation

In my last blog post I spoke about the importance of stories in connecting us to people and in forming a bridge to others’ lived experiences. So far, 2018 seems to be a year when the experiences of women have started to have voice and, I’m hoping, that voice will continue to get louder and stronger. In this blog post, friend and colleague, Laura Harrison, has chosen to give voice to some of her experiences.

Perhaps 2018 will become known as the year when Time was really Up. When the fight for equality became supercharged. In fact, when it came into its own as a fight rather than a bashful, polite request.

It’s a weird time. I’ve found the openness of apparently powerful women thought provoking. Female actors, leaders, ‘celebrities’ are revealing that despite their fame, money and accolades, their power is limited by context and structure. Their stories have poked at buried memories from my own education and career. Buried perhaps because I normalised them. These incidents are painful to re-encounter. And I wonder how many other women are going through the same: Oh god, yes, me too.

I’m going to describe some of these recollections. All of them leave me feeling vulnerable. None of them are in any way as bad in the humiliation they aroused or the harm they did as many women suffer daily at work. But what they have in common is that I’m sure I suffered emotionally way more than the other party or parties concerned. I paid the emotional taxes for the incident. Why did I bear the larger tax bill? Because my gender is under-represented and is too often treated as the imposter or the exception to the masculine norm.

So, some stories:

I was preparing for an important client meeting that I was due to attend with two, more senior, male colleagues. ‘Don’t worry,’ one said, ‘you’re just the eye candy…’ What was the emotional tax I paid? Ten minutes of seething anger? Boredom at the effort of having to put two antediluvian colleagues straight on this crazy thing called sex discrimination? Nope. The tax was hours agonising that they were taking the mickey out of me because obviously I wasn’t pretty enough to be ‘eye candy.’ My anxiety was that I was being demeaned, objectified and called ugly all at once. I was a professional woman with a good job, but my inner thirteen year old had been needled and I was mortified. My attractiveness, or lack of it, was an issue, and I was ashamed.

A university lecturer offered to coach me. ‘You’re very bright, but you’ve a lot to learn.’ His hand was on my knee and his arm around was my shoulders at the time. The tax I paid was to avoid him for the rest of the academic year, missing all his classes and diving into the loos if I saw him coming down the corridor – and of course to only scrape through his class. Had I ‘led him on?’ by asking for his help? Was I pathetic because I’d freaked out and (literally) run away at his advances? Months more of anxiety. I imagine the tax he paid was the effort involved in shrugging his shoulders; you win some, you lose some. Who was she again?

A trusted male colleague, senior to me, took me out for a drink to commiserate over a project gone sour. At about 4pm, after a lot of wine had been consumed, he lunged over the table at me, grabbed the back of my head. It was not a romantic moment. My tax – horror and shame. Is that what you’re asking for if you agree to go for a drink, alone, with a male colleague? The next day I couldn’t look this man in the eye, nor could I, properly, again. He had no problem. After all – you win some, you lose some.

I was the only girl in my physics class for A’level. The teachers and the other students bantered and joshed – football, sex. The not-very-subtle subtext was exclusion – this isn’t for you. That was a different kind of tax, a time tax, I taught myself physics A’level from the text book. And arrived at university to study science to be greeted by a wall of photographs of the departmental lecturers. Every one of them was male.

Worse perhaps, the empathy taxes, where you want to help but can’t. Because all the channels involve revealing vulnerability, hurt and sometimes shame, which at work must be held at bay. A dear friend was shocked – I guess in the physiological sense – by being sent a digital photo of the back view of a naked woman bent over an office desk. The email came from her male boss. She never complained, she was too embarrassed, was worried she’d done something to ‘ask for it.’ I shudder and feel sick on her behalf at the memory. She was once criticised for not having a sense of humour. A friend was passed over for a promotion she clearly deserved. Her colleagues and team were behind her. An unqualified man, deeply embroiled in a bromance with the male leadership team, got the job. What can you say? Don’t fret, don’t spend money drowning your sorrows over pinot grigio or on retail therapy? See a lawyer? Speak to someone? Resign? Find another job? Whichever way you look at it, the tax bill’s too high.

I’m wondering – and hoping – that the burden of emotional taxation is becoming more evenly distributed. That those with more-than-adequate representation are reflecting on past behaviours and present attitudes and challenging themselves to be better. The media at the moment is full of men apologising. An apology isn’t a tax. The tax would be to take the time to feel the shame or horror or regret at what’s gone before and to resolve to change. And to fight for a reduced burden of emotional taxation on women, and better representation for them too. No taxation without representation.

Laura Harrison is a senior leader in the fields of business transformation and organisation development. Her career has spanned consulting and corporate roles as well as working in the non profit sector. Most recently she was Strategy and Transformation Director at CIPD. You can follow her on twitter @LazMazHarry.

A strategist, consultant and mother to two daughters, Sam Whittaker is a lover of stories with a passion for connecting people with ideas. Sam also cares deeply about driving progressive change in the world, however, seemingly ‘small’. She (& others) blog at the-change.blog. You can follow her on twitter @itsSamActually.

When I grow up I want to be…

A couple of months ago a colleague of old asked me to contribute some words to a blog she was writing on what I would say now to my 16 year old self (you can find her fab blog here) Since then, I’ve been reflecting on those words, that blog and my own experience observing my teenage daughters and their friends as they navigate the rollercoaster of revision, exams, new GCSEs, (already) worrying about student debt and looking a bit embarrassed as relatives and friends ask them what they want to do ‘when they grow up’. (With the rise of automation and reports saying 85% of future jobs aren’t yet created, how do they answer that?) For me, one way to equip our young people for the future world of work is to give them the opportunity to build those critical thinking and creative skills, to be great with people and to be resilient – probably far more than I have ever had to be (and the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtue at the University of Birmingham is doing some fantastic research into building the skills needed for the future). But it’s tough when you’re 16 to know all of this. As noted by experts, young people are under more pressure now than they have ever been before. Increasing numbers of under-18s are suffering from anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other conditions. In addition, more are self-harming and attempting suicide. School stress, social media and pressures to “succeed” are among the key reasons behind this rise.

As the next generation contemplate the reality of the 100 year life and the notion that they will most likely have multiple jobs, doing many different things, and with the need to constantly retrain and learn, we need to give them every opportunity and support as they start out on their working lives.

But I also recognise, as a middle-aged woman, that it’s not really for me to speak on what I think young people need. So, for this guest blog, I invited an amazing young woman, Rose, to tell her story. I met Rose via a terrific organisation, Further my Future, and they, as was I, were impressed by her tenacity, her desire to grow and learn and her bright, enquiring mind.

At 16 years old, I was in my last year of school; juggling GCSE exams, revision, college interviews and career options. I didn’t know where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do and I felt like the only option I had was to do what everyone else was doing, and go to college and then university. A few more exams down the line – and after countless all-nighters, I hated the education system, I was stressed, anxious and highly irritable! I wanted any way out and couldn’t stand the thought of going through the same repetitive process again in college.

Summer of that year came around and with exams finally done, I had some time to myself. I thought about my future and the career choices that I had made and it just didn’t feel right. It was that uncertainty that motivated my intensive research and desperate visit to the school’s careers advisor. During my meeting with her, we came to the conclusion that school, college, and uni were definitely not for me. In fact, none of the typical and “accepted” paths of education suited me. We explored other options together, one of which was apprenticeships. That idea really stuck!

I loved the idea of being hands-on with my learning and getting the training that I wanted at a young age. So, I spent my summer holidays filling out applications and preparing for interviews, but to no avail. The majority of my applications were unsuccessful, and for those that were, I didn’t get further than the interview. The worst part was that I wasn’t getting any real feedback. All the employers would say that they were looking for someone who’s older and think that I’m too young… but that’s it. I felt as though all my hard work was going to waste and that I should stop trying because my age wasn’t something that I could change. But through that process, I learned more about myself than I did throughout my entire time at school. I learned what my strengths and weaknesses are, what I enjoy and what I’m good at, and finally what I would like to improve. I didn’t let people’s stereotypical opinions of me, as a hormonal teenage girl, stop me from accomplishing my goals.

October ’17 through to March ’18, I did a traineeship in order to gain the experience that is so valued by employers. Within those short 6 months, I learned everything from incredibly important life skills such as money budgeting, to event organisation and employability. Along with that, though, came a fear of not knowing what will happen next. For those that went to college, they knew that they would most likely be in college for the next 2 to 3 years, whereas my schedule changed every week and one phone call could flip everything on its head. I worked 6 days a week at one point, at 4 different work placements, trying to learn and grow in as many ways as I could. Although I was hardly getting paid, I persevered and made myself realise that the experience that I was gaining was way more valuable and that it wasn’t all about the money. And that is what got me here, 10 months later. Having met the most incredible people, gained heaps of experience and finally secured my dream apprenticeship with absolutely amazing employers, I think it’s safe to say that it was all totally worth it!

There’s a lot of pressure on young people to achieve. The new 9-1 GCSE specification proves just that, as the A* is no longer the highest grade. Many students, including myself, feel as though they have under-achieved because of this, when in reality, they’ve obtained very good grades!

I think that so many people are at a disadvantage with their learning due to there being only one method of teaching. In my case, I can’t learn the traditional way: sitting down with someone talking at me for an hour is just tedious.

Others, like myself, were completely unaware of what’s available to them. I didn’t know what traineeships or apprenticeships were until I reached out to the careers advisor. Nor did I know that I could get help and advice on employment, education and training through the Youth Employability Service and the National Careers Service for free. In my opinion, no practical and genuinely helpful sessions were offered at school to inform about the many services available to young people.

If you are a student, take the time to know the different paths and options open to you. If your school or college has a careers advisor, I strongly suggest organising a meeting with them. If not, get in contact with your local youth support services but most importantly, believe in yourself! Be persistent and follow your dreams – even when people tell you that you can’t.

We need workplaces with people from diverse backgrounds and that includes education as well as race, gender and age. You’ll be surprised at just what young people are capable of!

Rose is currently doing an apprenticeship in digital marketing at Liftmusic which combines hands-on work in the workplace with one day a week training.

That’s not fair!

Fairness, I think it’s fair to say, is a difficult concept to neatly pin down – yet it is a much used word (not least by my two teenage daughters)! The dictionary defines fairness as ‘impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination’. But ask a random group of people to say what they mean when they talk about fairness and how this plays out in practice, and they may well interpret it in a myriad of different ways; they may well also vehemently disagree! Fairness, it seems, often comes down to one’s point of view. Yet, as we wrestle with the lack of fairness that has come to light following the gender pay gap reports, and as we digest the overwhelming evidence of the bias (however unconscious) towards ‘stale, pale’ men, how can we all do better to ensure we are being as fair as we can possibly be in all areas of our lives?

The video released on International Women’s Day of Norwegian children getting to grips with gender equality and fairness is a delightful example of how they not only collaborated to help each other complete their task, but they also recognized the unfairness of how each was rewarded (more sweets were given to the boys than the girls, and so the boys chose to share their prize to make it fair). Similarly, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (thanks for flagging @LazMazHarry!) from researchers at Hult International Business School entitled ‘Do you have advantage blindness?’ spoke about the challenges leaders face in recognizing that their success will have been aided by the advantage of gender, race, class, and so on. To cite the article:

“Our research on speaking truth to power shows there is often a blind spot among the powerful, preventing them from seeing their impact on the less powerful. We call this advantage blindness. When you have advantage blindness, you don’t feel privileged. You don’t notice a life of special treatment; it’s just normal. You don’t think about your physical safety most of the time; you don’t worry about holding hands with your partner in public; when you get angry, no one asks you if it’s because of your hormones; and people in power generally look like you.”

An interesting read. The research highlights how, whilst some leaders felt challenged and even uncomfortable with the privilege afforded them, others denied an un-level playing field, citing their own hard work, or challenges in their background and childhood that meant they got to their senior positions purely on their own unique merits. The research recommended that, to counter this advantage blindness, the leaders make efforts to own personal prejudice and bias, to develop empathy for, and connect with people who are ‘other’, and to put their personal advantage to the collective good.

So, how do we, as a society, strengthen our fairness muscle? How do we create a more just society, in which everybody has the opportunity to flourish and thrive?

I was interested to come across the work of the American moral and political philosopher, John Rawls, whose thinking has had a significant impact on Western, liberal democracies. His seminal book, The Theory of Justice, published in 1971, essentially posits two (although I make it three!) principles concerned with achieving a just and fair society. Two of the three principles would be something most of us would be familiar with: namely equality of opportunity and the liberty principle, whereby each person has equal access to basic rights. However, what I was fascinated by was what Rawls described as the ‘difference principle’. Recognizing that there are inequalities in every society and that most people would, for example, expect a brain surgeon to earn more than a receptionist, Rawls argued that a just society is one in which, whilst inequality exists, the worst off in society are made as well off as they can be. Of course, being objective about how you might achieve this is hard. Rawls’ notion was to think about what a just society would look like if, knowing everything about it that there was to know, you would be willing to enter it at any random place and know that you were being treated fairly. Rawls called this the ‘veil of ignorance’ and it is brilliantly described by the behavioural economist, Dan Ariely, is this brief Ted Talk – I would definitely recommend a watch!

In Ariely’s talk he describes a large-scale survey he undertook to ask people whether they know what level of inequality there is in society and what they thought it should be. The results were illuminating. Not only was there a knowledge gap between what people thought versus what was the reality (the reality being far more iniquitous) but there was also a big gap between reality and what people desired, which was to have a much smaller gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in society.

Fairness in practice isn’t straightforward. The world is full of ambiguity (I wouldn’t have it any other way) and achieving a fairer society is hard. Of course, there are some obvious places to start that would achieve some quick wins (gender pay gap anyone?). But, as we all go about our day to day lives, perhaps we should try on that ‘veil of ignorance’ a little bit more and challenge ourselves to create a society that, wherever we found ourselves, we would see it as fair.

Time to ‘slow down and fix things’

In last week’s blog post I spoke about the need to challenge the overarching (male) narratives embedded in our key societal structures and the critical need to embrace a plurality of thinking and views. In recent weeks, good friend and old colleague @corney_sarah and I have been discussing (usually over a pint or two) the ‘world views’ and possible biases that are being programmed into the algorithms that are increasingly dominating our world; algorithms that make decisions on our behalf and create ‘truths’. Of course, there is much to be said about the impact of technology on our lives (Cambridge Analytica anyone?!), and on our jobs. In this guest blog, Sarah highlights the need for greater diversity in the tech industry and time to put its house in order. Enjoy.

As a lesbian, I’ve benefitted from the greater levels of legal equality and the shift in societal attitudes over the past 50 years. Last summer we celebrated, and reflected on how far we’ve come (and have still to go) since the the decriminalisation of (male) homosexuality in the UK in 1967.

And as a woman I’ve benefited from the struggles and gains of the feminist movements. In February there was a similar period of taking stock, with the 100th anniversary in the UK of the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the (partial) enfranchisement of women voters. But as Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian in February (Will women be equal to men in 100 years?) reminds us ‘Liberation for women means digging up the roots of human culture, nothing less’. (Polly Toynbee)

So it was with dismay that I read recently of the rise of AI in the recruitment industry. The idea behind these programs is that a good prospective employee looks a lot like a good current employee. But in a workforce that still disproportionately understands a ‘good employee’ as male, white, straight, middle class, and non disabled, when AI turns that data into a score and compares it against prospective employees, who do you think misses out?

At this point in human history we’re rapidly refashioning human culture, to one that is based on technology, founded on machine learning and artificial intelligence.. Are we laying down new roots of inequality, roots that might be just as tenacious and insidious? Roots that might take an historic struggle to dig up?

After a slew of negative press and scandals (the latest the deeply disturbing revelations of Cambridge Analytica) we’re discovering that our technology isn’t ethically neutral – it’s shaped by the worldview of those who build and finance it.

I work in what we might think of as the ‘empathy’ side of tech – leading teams that build websites and online tools that very much have the user experience at its heart – in design, testing and delivery. I believe passionately in building technical solutions from a position of deep empathy for your end users – all your end users. And I’m increasingly alarmed by the rise of biased tech, particularly the algorithms and AI that we’re building to run our societies, that encode not just a poor user experience but an iniquitous user experience, particularly for women and minority communities.

The trouble with tech (with machine learning) is, as Sara Wachter-Boettcher writes in her book Technically Wrong that ‘the biases already present in our culture are quietly reinforced’. Tech inequality used to mean inequality of access and skills, but we increasingly understand it to mean how historical prejudice is being hard wired into the very system itself.

Investors are making a big bet that AI will sift through the vast amounts of information produced by our society and find patterns that will help us be more efficient, wealthier and happier.

The Guardian, Rise of the Racist Robots

But a few glimpses of the ghost in the machine allude to something darker: a Google image recognition program that tagged the faces of a photo of a group of black friends as ‘gorilla’; a Google ad that shows more higher-pay executive jobs to male job seekers than female; the now-infamous COMPAS program that disproportionately discriminates against black men in the US criminal justice system.

The problem is that these machines learn from vast sets of historical, and therefore often biased, data; they don’t invent a fairer future, rather they codify our unequal past. Without immediate-term intervention they could replicate by orders of magnitude ‘the sort of large-scale systemic biases that people have spent decades campaigning to educate or legislate away’ (The Guardian, Rise of the Racist Robots)

The problem is exacerbated further when these programs are shared with the wider tech community as open source code, using them as the foundation to build further products. For example Google’s Word2vec biased word-embedding program, designed to reconstruct the linguistic context of words. In their paper ‘Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker?’ Bolukbasi et al. argue these word embeddings exhibit ‘female/male gender stereotypes to a disturbing extent’ and their widespread use ‘amplifies these biases’.

These programs not only encode the biases of the training data sets, but also the biases of those working in the tech industry. An industry that is emphatically white, male (and in the US in particular) from a handful of elite universities. A tech industry that prioritises, indeed lionises, programming over all other (particularly liberal arts) skills.

We increasingly have a trust issue with the tech industry. And as societal disquiet regarding its cavalier attitude to personal data and to ethics mounts, it’s starting to experience a backlash, from consumer activism (e.g. the #deleteFacebook campaign) to negative financial impact.

The threat of iniquitous tech needs to be addressed from many angles, with a web of interventions including legislative – there are some legal protections already in place or about to be (e.g. GDPR), but the law rarely keeps pace with technological change – and industry self-regulation (see for example the Institute of Business Ethics briefing February 2018).

There is increasing pressure on the tech industry to take responsibility for the monster they have and are creating. The mantra of ‘creative disruption’ and ‘move fast and break things’ is disruptive, is breaking things: personal privacy, freedom and democracy. And some working in the tech industry are slowly beginning to hold themselves and their colleagues to account (see @MariesaKDale’s Technologists hippocratic oath). Tech academics and thought leaders are also speaking out and searching for solutions to biased algorithms.

As Sara Wachter-Boettcher reminds us in her book Technically Wrong, User Experience (or UX) helped to hoodwink us into thinking that tech was our friend, to give up our personal data, with its intuitive interfaces and cutesey micro content. UX needs to grow up and take responsibility for inclusive user design and ethical testing. Designing for everyone, not just personas and defaults, and ethically stress testing AI-generated outcomes as real world scenarios: ‘would the result be the same if the person was gay, disabled, etc.?’

But investing artificial intelligence with emotional intelligence isn’t easy. These are complex programs. Some of it can be done programmatically: The Turing Institute’s Counterfactual Fairness Project is leading the way on this thinking; Anupam Datta has designed a programme that tests for bias in recruitment AI. But some of it is down to the organisational culture itself: the tech industry needs to invest in diverse and inclusive teams that are more sensitive to bias and more responsible in the way that they design the programs we all increasingly rely on. ‘If your teams are diverse they’re much more likely to spot if an algorithm’s outputs disproportionately affect marginalised communities’ (Sara Wachter-Boettcher).

We need to encourage more women and minorities into tech. To quote the late Karen Sparck Jones (one of the architects of computer programming) ‘computing’s too important to be left to men’. Professor of Computer Science Wendy Hall Jones writes ‘for the good of society, we cannot allow our world to be organised by learning algorithms whose creators are overwhelmingly dominated by one gender, ethnicity, age, or culture’.

The tech industry must nurture organisational cultures that encourage and support ethical decision making at every level. It needs to hire not just for a diversity of cultural and racial backgrounds, but also for a diversity of ideas and thinking. Product teams that include programmers but also people with arts, social sciences and humanities training, who are better able to understand the historic and cultural context of the training data, who are better able to spot unconscious bias and who can deliver an ethical user experience. ‘From those differences will come a broader characterisation of the problems we face, and wider range of creative approaches to their solution.’ (Wendy Hall Jones)

I will remember that there is art to technology as well as science, and that empathy, craft, and remaining mindful about the consequences of my decisions outweigh the importance of my technical knowledge, the impulse for financial benefit, or allure of status. (Technologists Hippocratic oath)

Which brings us full circle back to those biased hiring algorithms, and why the people profession needs a strong view on this. When diversity and inclusion is part of the solution to building more ethical tech, to securing a fairer future, we need to be championing better, more diverse, more human recruitment.

Let’s hope we’re reaching an inflection point, where societies, governments and consumers begin to respond to the issue of biased and unethical tech. We must demand that the tech industry takes responsibility for the data it collects, how it processes it and the unethical and unequal outcomes of the AI that’s being built upon it. To regain our trust, the tech industry now needs to slow down and fix things.

Featured image is of Mary Jackson (1921-2005) NASA computer programmer and their first female engineer. Mary Jackson was also NASA’s Federal Women’s Program Manager (1979-1985), where she ‘worked hard to impact the hiring and promotion of the next generation of all of NASA’s female mathematicians, engineers and scientists’ nasa.gov

Flying by the seat of your pants – why women should do this more!

I recently caught up with a colleague of old; since working with her she’d gone on to great things (I won’t take it personally, although every time I meet her she does remind me how I didn’t give her that job I’d interviewed her for! 🙂 ) having been CEO of numerous tech and start up companies and now successfully running two new start-ups of her own.

We met, as you do, in a coffee shop (in Hove actually) and she came with her usual effervescent energy and generosity of spirit. In recounting her story of her career journey since we’d last met, she said her success was based on “10% talent, 10% bravado and 80% prosecco” – she’d always been surprised at the roles she was offered. I wasn’t. Her willingness to ‘give it a go’, to challenge her inner critic, to play to her strengths, to keep growing and developing, to be generous with her time, herself, meant that those around her thrived; those around her had the courage to ‘give it a go’ too, to learn from their mistakes, to work as a team and play to their respective strengths (when running her first tech company someone in her team had to tweet for her as she wasn’t digitally savvy!).

Having arrived at the coffee shop in my usual jeans, T-shirt and boots attire, I left wearing red and white boots, blue pants, a red and gold top, indestructible bracelets and holding my lasso of truth. (The inspiration for the original Wonder Woman was taken from early feminists, in particular birth control pioneer, Margaret Sanger.)

In a recent post, I talked about the need for courage; it’s a value I hold dear. Courage to do the right thing, courage to believe in yourself, courage to try new things, courage to make mistakes, courage to fly. Not long after meeting my friend, I listened to an interview (on Late Night Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 – I know!) between the host, Lauren Laverne and her guest, Viv Albertine (guitarist with the punk female band, The Slits, amongst other things).

In the interview Albertine talked about all the brave things she’d done; play in a band when she ‘couldn’t really play’, break the conventional ‘rules’ in the 1970s (through dress, through attitude), direct films, write a book and tell an ‘untold story’. The Slits were on a mission to ‘change things for girls’ a mission that caused them to experience some threatening and scary situations. As Lauren Laverne described it, they were ‘pantsing’, flying by the seats of their pants, and challenging the status quo and existing structures as a result.

In another Radio 4 interview (I know, I know!) I heard the film director, Sally Potter (famed for Orlando amongst other films) talking about how women have interiorized the (male-dominated) structures out there, and how, as a result, in addition to battling against the lack of gender equality in society, we also battle against our own ‘self-limiting unconscious chorus of disapproval’. Potter’s brilliant response was to “try and write faster than the speed of my doubt”.

So, today, as we celebrate International Women’s Day and it’s 2018 campaign to Press for Progress, don’t limit your own selves, don’t censor your own voice, don’t under estimate all that you are capable of.

Whether it’s M&S, Victoria Secrets, Thongs or Big Pants, women of the world, let’s pantsy!

Radical change and rainbow alliances

In last week’s blog post I made mention of the importance of voice and, in the spirit of championing a diversity of voices, I asked an old colleague and friend, Sarah Corney (@corney_sarah), who is passionate about LGBT rights to write something in celebration of LGBT History Month. Enjoy.

February is LGBT History Month (#LGBTHM18) and a moment to reflect on our #LGBThero (s). And so I found my thoughts returning to my early encounters with lesbians in literature. After reading The Well of Loneliness (yes, really!) at 19, I was surely ready for Rita Mae Brown’s breakthrough lesbian bildungsroman, RubyFruit Jungle and the sassy, sparky Molly Bolt. But my joy soon turned to disheartenment. As our hero Molly walks into a downtown lesbian bar and clocks the butch clientele, she declares:

“What’s the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man? Hell, if I wanted a man, I’ll get the real thing not one of these chippies.”

Rather than viewing the butches at the bar as people who subvert and challenge gender identity, they’re viewed as women who embrace patriarchy’s strict binary codes. But, it seems to me that Brown was also seeking to change social attitudes by claiming legitimacy for an emergent (real, femme) lesbian identity, by setting it up in opposition to the (delegitimised, butch) Other. Can we only have #LGBTHeroes if there are #LGBTVillains?

February 2018 also sees the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which extended the franchise to women over 30 (as well as adding 5.6 million more men to the electoral register).

This anniversary has seen much comment on the subject of how much has changed in 100 years. And watching this clip from 1970 election night special – and the supernova levels of condescension meted out to Janet (now Baroness) Fookes – it’s true that sexism is at least (generally) less overt than it was in my mother’s day. But with the backdrop of #MeToo and almost-daily scandals (the Presidents Club and the ‘swimsuit sexism’ of the gambling industry just the latest), there’s also much reflection on how much more needs to change.

Women may have won many legal rights over the past 100 years, but we have yet to live in an equal society. Many of the old structures of patriarchal power are still in place.

Never underestimate the size of the task to reverse all history since time began. To recreate society so women are fully equal to men, we are making a revolution more radically profound than any other ever. Forget French or Russian political revolutions, liberation for women means digging up the roots of human culture, nothing less. (Polly Toynbee)

So it was depressing to read of the current battle within the Labour party between (some) feminists and (some) trans activists over access to all-women shortlists. As Gaby Hinsliff writes in The Guardian, “it seems odd … to exclude a minority not currently represented in parliament from measures to make it more representative’.

If gender equality is a revolution that means nothing less ‘than digging up the roots of human culture’ there is neither room nor time for internecine squabbles. Legitimising and empowering one group by Other-ing another undermines the broader momentum for change.

Radical change is only possible when we don’t merely accommodate but celebrate difference and work together to deconstruct the neo-liberalist, patriarchal paradigm to build a more equitable society. Progressive political alliances, rainbow LGBTQI networks and intersectional feminism all recognise, as Jo Cox put it in her maiden speech to Parliament, that ‘we have more in common than that which divides us’.