Tag: equality

menopause at work

I was delighted to be invited out to our beautiful Easter Bush Campus at Roslin this week to deliver a session on the hot topic of menopause. We talked about feeling the rage and laughed about losing your nouns. Thank you to everyone who came along.

If you would like to organise a session like this for your dept, here’s the blurb:

Please join us at this workshop to discuss why menopause is a workplace issue.  One in ten women in the UK who worked during the menopause say they have left a job due to their symptoms. Are we at risk of losing some of our best staff at a time when they have the most wisdom and organisational knowledge? How can we adapt to ensure that all our colleagues have the support they need? Is this another leak in the pipeline for women in STEM?  At this workshop we will look at best practice guidance from professional bodies and trade unions and think about how University of Edinburgh can respond.  Your input and ideas are invaluable. Melissa Highton is a senior manager in Information Services Group (ISG) , she works with her leadership teams to ensure that workplaces are inclusive, and together we can tackle this ‘last taboo’. She will join us to discuss well-being, plans, policies and implications of hybrid working. By the end of the workshop we hope to have some actionable suggestions to take forward.

Feedback from the organisers:

“thanks for taking the time to come out to Easter Bush and share this information directly with us, in such an informative and engaging way…I think the participant numbers we got were an early indication to us that the topic was of deep interest to the staff on campus – but more significantly the discussion in the groups, and the enthusiasm that there should be follow up activities, is a further indication of how important this topic is to so many people.”  

adressing the pay gap

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That feeling when you discover that the bit of the organisation  of which you are in charge has a gender pay gap in the ‘other’ direction.

Addressing the pay gap is one of the  commitments directors in ISG have made as part of our EDI plan.

This is, I think, the sort of equality data in which sex matters although presumably sex and gender are being used interchangeably in the reporting context.

The average full time equivalent salary of women in ISG is 16.97% lower than the average salary of men. This compares to 9.59% across all Professional Service Groups and 16.18% for the whole University.

The median full-time equivalent salary of women is 25.48% lower than the median for men. This compares to 14.87% across all Professional Service Groups and 11.10% for the whole University.

Gender pay balance is different in the various Directorates.

LTW has a gender paygap in the opposite direction. I have overshot and I will now seek to correct, as all gaps are bad.

With regard to senior management the gender imbalance and broad salary range within grade 10 have a major impact on the University’s overall gender pay gap. When grade 10 staff are excluded from the dataset, the University average and median pay gaps reduce to 8.8% and 8.5%. However, this is not the case in ISG where the numbers of women and men are roughly equal and are paid much the same ( apart from the CIO/VP who skews the data obv).

The University’s average salary disability gap is 1%; there is no median pay gap. However, at 3%, the rate of proactive disclosure by staff renders it difficult to make meaningful observations regarding any pay gap between staff who have disclosed a disability and those who have not.  For ISG, 4.5% have declared a disability and the average disability pay gap is 3%. Interestingly, when the recent home-working survey was done ISG recorded a much higher rate of disability than our HR data would suggest and than other parts of the University.

The University’s ethnicity pay gap is 1% (average) and 5.7% (median) in favour of staff who have proactively declared their ethnicity as ‘White’. While these have reduced since the 2019 audit (8.8% and 8.4%) there has been an increase in the percentage of staff whose ethnicity is unknown/withheld (to 21%) rendering it difficult to draw overall meaningful conclusions regarding the pay of our BAME staff. For ISG, our ethnicity pay gap is 19% (average) and 24.6% (median) and the demographic of our staff ethnicity declaration is: 75% White; 8% BAME; and 8% unknown. Although our Learning Technology colleague Rachael features widely as the face of the university, including on the equal pay report!

the risky business of equality

One of the striking findings in my research was that there was a mismatch between the answers from the ‘digital leaders’ and the answers from the ‘HR professionals’.  Everyone thought there  definately were risks, but the HR professional thought there were none.  If this is true more widely it would go some way to explain why HR professionals are surprised not to be able to get senior managers involved in championing issues. They have not considered the risks to us in doing so.

“In order to further understand the factors which may act as contextual cues for digital leaders in their decisions to champion equality and diversity in the workplace participants were asked to what extent they feel there may be associated risks for those who do take on champion roles. In the interviews participants were making sense of their context and reflecting on how they have seen what has happened in their own experience and those around them.   

‘Critical sense making’ describes the ways in which  individuals make sense of their own local environments  while acknowledging power relations in the broader societal context (Mills, 2010). Part of sense-making is judging the level of risk which might follow specific course of action in your context (Weick, 1995).

Individuals make judgements to appraise threats and risks as part of their own decision making. These judgments are based on perceived or real risks and these risks are plausible because they resonate closely with one’s own experience, or the known experience of others nearby. In their previous answers respondents had clearly identified a range of business drivers which exist in their organisations. They had also identified a number of cultural and organisational elements, which they understood as creating a climate in which equality, and diversity was supported by organisational policy.

Participants all appeared to agree with a general perception that equality and diversity issues were larger than the individual, and understood the role of workplace culture in which dignity, respect and fair pay is valued. Given these findings it might be expected that they would perceive championing these issues as relatively low risk. 

All respondents but one however, were adamant there were associated risks for some people in getting involved with equality and diversity issues in the workplace. The response that there was no perceived risk, or that there should be no risk, came from the interviewee who is the senior HR professional. This mis-match in expectation was analysed further and respondents answers were analysed to identify themes around risk. These include:  risks to oneself (personal risks of image, reputation, how one might be perceived by others personally), professional risks (how one might risk or lose effectiveness in a professional role), risks to the business, and risks to the wider endeavour of equality itself.  The prominence of the discussion of risk in the data makes it worth discussing these findings in detail.”

I have continued to test this finding informally with further groups.  I have been lucky to be able to get gigs doing CPD workshops and conference workshops in February and March.

The first one I did was for senior IT professionals in FE and HE.  I asked the question ‘Do you think there are risks associated for some people in championing equality and diversity issues in the workplace’? I asked for responses in chat : Yes, no, maybe, not sure, some ….. etc

Not everyone chose to answer obviously, but

Yes: Maybe was 3:1   No noes.

I asked the same question again in a session at the Advance HE conference. The session was recorded so I plan to look at the chat if it was recorded too, but this was a group of HR professionals and I saw at least one ‘No, not any more’

At The ALT ( learning technologists) session

YES: maybe was 5:2

menopause and homeworking

My collection of workplace fans.

You’ll remember that in the hot, hot offices of ISG on campus we had a bit of discussion about menopause. It was quite ‘the talk of the Steamie’ after I presented about it at the ISG all-staff meeting in Gordon Aikman Lecture theatre.

I’ll be presenting about it again at the upcoming  Advance HE EDI conference in the Spring.  I’m also presenting about  ‘tempered radicals’, but that’s a different story. Or perhaps not if it is all about heat.

In order to be up to date though we’d have to be thinking as employers about the different experience for menopausal women of working from home. During Covid, but perhaps for longer by choice.

Mary reminded me to update my thinking.

Working from home may infact be the best thing to happen to menopausal women as we now have choice, flexibiity and control over the temperature, number of cushions and our layers of clothing.

There was some evidence previously that working from an office while female and menopausal was so horrible that we lost women from our workforce at just the moment that they are at their most wise. Perhaps now we will be able to keep them.

Is anyone researching this? Of course they are!

Working from home: can it impact on menopause?
https://menopauseintheworkplace.co.uk/articles/working-from-home-can-it-impact-on-menopause/

The health and socioeconomic impact on menopausal women of working from home https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7292903/

Supporting employees through menopause when working remotely
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/supporting-employees-going-through-the-menopause-when-working-remotely/

with the living voice

In completing a reflective portfolio for my doctorate  i have had to demonstrate the link between the theory I have read, the study I have done and my ongoing professional role in a rapidly changing, but under-researched area. Theory and practice are definitely intertwined for me as everything I have done has fed directly back into my practice and I have brought my experience of practice over many years to the analysis I have done. This record of my journey as a scholarly practitioner has given me insights and helped me to learn from my experience. My own reflexivity and commitment to  a feminist research ethic form a key part of my justification of the level that has been reached in my doctorate.

Doing the work has had impact on my ongoing practice in several ways. It has provided a framework and structure for me to engage with some thinking I needed to be doing in my own role to combine digital leadership and diversity leadership. One of the findings in my data was that digital leaders have very little ‘bandwidth’ available to engage with EDI issues in any nuanced way, over and above their day jobs. This would have been equally true for me had I not set aside this time to engage with the research.   My practice is undoubtedly now more research informed, and I hope better as a result.

Doing an up to date literature review  has also given me the confidence and credibility to talk about EDI issues in professional fora. Previously I would have been drawing only on my own experience and opinions whereas now I am able to reference more published evidence which is academically credible rather than the management consultancy reports from Gartner, PWC etc. which flood my inbox. Engaging with feminist research philosophy has helped me to think about what the elements of feminist practice can be, and has served to make me more able to engage with my academic colleagues who write about being a feminist manager.

One of the recurring themes which appeared in the literature I was reading was the importance of data driven decision-making in organisations.   In my professional role I continue to engage surveys and gather data about university IT staff experiences. I have a data researcher who works with me. In the period we have done 2 large surveys; one on workplace experiences of EDI and another on EDI elements of working from home during Covid lockdown. These surveys provide data which will be the basis of  management decision making in my organisation as we move forward. While these new surveys  ensure that I will continue to present, contribute to and practice leadership in digital and diversity leadership. I will disseminate those findings to the sector, applying what I have learned from my time as a research student  in years to come.

When I began my thesis there was relatively little published research looking at the experiences of managers in professional groups in higher education and even fewer looking specifically at university IT departments. In the course of the 3 years there is now a bit more published research about professional staff including a 2018 book which explores a range of aspects of working in universities  but still very little about the group of which I am part – those with specific digital leadership  roles, or my specific area of investigation – managers’ experiences of equality, diversity and inclusion. It is precisely in this area that this study has attempted to fill an important lacuna in practitioner research.  The other researchers working in this area have similarly highlighted that this area is a gap, and this serves to make my study even more timely, relevant and of interest to the sector.

In their 2018 book ‘Professional and Support Staff in Higher Education’ the authors note the absence of input from any digital, HR or IT professionals and suggest that  there is more work to be done in integrating the contribution of these groups to leadership and to scholarship.

“we (as contributors, colleagues, and more broadly as institutions) must take some deliberate steps to promote greater inclusion amongst authors contributing to research regarding professional and support staff, especially those who do not currently see themselves as part of the scholarly conversation. Professional and support staff within higher education are diverse, their roles multifaceted, and their contribution and experiences under-examined.”(Bossu, Brown, & Warren, 2018, p. 460)

The findings of this study may also be of particular interest or usefulness to practitioners and researchers working in universities who are interested in understanding how colleagues in professional roles relate to their larger organisation when they think about leadership of equality, diversity and inclusion.

to gather data about equality in university IT teams

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In February 2018 an attempt was made from within UCISA to gather data about gender equality in university IT teams and to understand what focus there was on gender equality. An email survey of 20 questions gained 126 responses from 53 institutions.

The results are not formally published but have been presented at UCISA events in 2018 and influenced the decision to have a focus on gender equality at the UCISA leadership conference in 2019.  While recognising the limitations and unscientific nature of the email survey study it serves to highlight the need for further research and practice to support equality and diversity in IT departments in higher education in the UK.   Many of the respondents indicated that they did not think that their institution had in place policies to support gender equality and that in their workplace they could see that gender diversity was not widespread across teams, with project management and helpdesk teams having more women than other areas.

In the UCISA study the majority of respondents were concerned about gender equality and diversity in the IT profession – 80% indicated ‘definitely’ or ‘probably yes’ they were concerned, 11% were ‘not concerned’. 48% of respondents said their institution did not have any gender equality policies in place, and 57% reported that their IT departments did not have specific policies in place to support gender equality. (Fraser-Krauss & Priestley, 2018 unpublished?)

In their 2018 book ‘ Professional and Support Staff in Higher Education’ the authors note the absence of input from any digital, HR or IT professionals and suggest that there is more work to be done in integrating the contribution of these groups to leadership and scholarship:

“we (as contributors, colleagues, and more broadly as institutions) must take some deliberate steps to promote greater inclusion amongst authors contributing to research regarding professional and support staff, especially those who do not currently see themselves as part of the scholarly conversation. Professional and support staff within higher education are diverse, their roles multifaceted, and their contribution and experiences under-examined.”(Bossu et al., 2018b, p. 460)

The UCISA survey, however informal,  further informed the need for further, ongoing work to understand the experiences and perceptions of staff in university IT departments in relation to equality and diversity practice.

Here’s some data from University of Edinburgh IT Services Dept which we can add to the endeavour. EDI ISGReport Summary Report 2020

 

being a lert

PERFORMANCE COSTUME 2009, LEILA DEARNESS © Edinburgh College of Art http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/xc5j6y

Let me just say, being a woke IT director is exhausting.

Not only do you end up writing theses about ‘diversity and digital leadership‘, you also find yourself employing OER service managers (to research and promote equitable distribution of resources), E-Safety Officers (to support students and staff who discover that the internet is not a safe space), and Data and Equality Officers (to ensure that your services and workplaces even know what they are doing).

You end up talking about digital accessibility  and inclusion at every meeting and you keep your antennae poised to nip any potential carcrashes in the bud.

So much of what we do is actually just about how we communicate it.

This month I’ve suggested:

  • That ‘Race Sub Group’ may be a difficult name for a good effort.
  • That ‘Welcome Period’ sounds odd too.
  • As do ‘Courses to help you with transitions’
  • That  Estates and Digital Infrastructure (EDI) is not the same as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)
  • That using a picture of Chinese students wearing masks might contribute to Sinophobia on campus
  • That there’s not much evidence that  ‘EDI training’ actually works.
  • That some staff may want to attend more than one ‘identity network’ in the workplace.
  • That we could add rainbows to Teams backgrounds instead of distributing rainbow lanyards to people’s homes.
  • That even if you are wearing a mask you should still wear a lapel mike.
  • That Teams, Zoom and Collaborate may tend to search for white faces on camera more easily than black ones.
  • That those huge video files you are struggling to upload to Media Hopper are the same ones your students with low bandwidth will struggle to download.
  • That as well as removing the name ‘David Hume Tower’ we should check the slavery credentials of George Brown after whom the square is named.
  • That no EQIA was done on the decision to not fund an improved subtitling service.  ART was offered several options but chose to accept the risk of putting the workload on to individual owners of their materials.   The nature of these speech to text robots (and many other algorithms) is that they are structurally biased. The data sets on which they are trained are largely spoken corpora from business settings, in male voices and with US accents.  So the burden of correction will fall disproportionately on women, people with accents and anyone teaching disciplines with words the robots do not already know.
  • That students choosing to study online rather than come into class isn’t evidence that the online learning is excellent, only that it is more attractive than catching Covid.
  • That working from home may infact be the best thing to happen to menospausal women as we now have choice and flexibiity and control over the temperature, number of cushions and our layers of clothing.

 

Diversity and digital leadership

Something I’ve been working on for a while:

Diversity and digital leadership: Understanding experiences of workplace equality and diversity and inclusion

Doing a doctorate part-time while working full-time has been exhausting and invigorating in equal measure. It has occupied my annual leave, evenings and weekends as well as two periods of prolonged industrial action and the covid lockdown. I have learned all kinds of new stuff, including a bunch of new digital and infolit skills.  As I get ready to submit my final thesis, here’s how my abstract is looking:

Abstract

The aim of this research is to gain an understanding of the experiences and perceptions of workplace equality and diversity issues amongst digital leaders in higher education. The participants interviewed for this study are digital leaders working in universities in Scotland in 2019. The study provides a snapshot of data which has been interpreted to provide an understanding of the participants’ experiences and attitudes towards workplace equality, diversity and inclusion. It is the first study of its kind as it focuses on overlapping areas of leadership (diversity, digital and organisational) amongst digital leaders in higher education, a group rarely researched. This study makes a contribution to both both theory and practice and is timely and useful for the university sector.

The study uses a feminist approach to research design and data analysis which serves to highlight the issues of power and privilege which shape the experience of the participants. It takes an intersectional approach to understanding the diverse identity characteristics of digital leaders, recognising that people’s identities and social positions at work are shaped by multiple and interconnected factors, and the significance of these factors for leadership.

In this study an insider researcher was well placed to investigate perceptions and experience and to make recommendations which influence ongoing practice. In order to be credible and useful to the sector research findings are presented with rigour which addresses concerns about assumptions and unfounded interpretations. The process of achieving this by research design, particularly in the formation of interview questions and data analysis is described. The original data gathered from participants is reported and presented alongside references to relevant literature where these serve to explain or shed light on how the data have been interpreted.  Quotations from the raw data have been included to demonstrate how interpretations of the data have been achieved and to illustrate findings. This ensures reflections of the participants are presented in their own voice and brings a lived experience and credibility to the findings by ensuring that data interpretation remains close to the words said. The data are presented against themes arising in the data, several of which reflect the themes highlighted as arising from the review of previous literature.

‘Digital leadership’ is an emerging area of leadership studies which is gaining popularity as organisations seek to ensure that their businesses are best positioned to thrive in an increasingly digital world. The role of senior management in leading change in organisations is well understood and increasingly researchers and practitioners now recognise expertise in workplace equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as a significant area of valuable knowledge. ‘Diversity leadership’ is also an emerging discipline defined by combining diversity principles and leadership competencies for workplace development.

Digital leaders in higher education are a group of professional staff who lead specifically in areas of the organisation where the use of technology is key to the strategic delivery of higher education such as IT, AV, learning technology, student systems, business systems data and IT infrastructure.  Professional staff in higher education remain a much under-researched population of leaders. With increased professionalisation amongst these staff more now occupy senior executive positions within universities; roles that were previously only held by senior academics. The knowledge and skills which this group of senior leaders have are essential to the success of their institutions. The data in this study indicate that digital leaders do identify their own and organisational values as drivers for action around equality and diversity at work, and that these are negotiated and balanced in context and that that context includes policies, practice, leadership and risk.   This study offers a number of insights for understanding the importance of diversity knowledge as a leadership capability. The data show that the ways in which managers approach and apply effort to issues in their workplace is heavily influenced by their own identity and personal experience. There is a risk in any sector that assumptions are made about the types of people who are managers and the kinds of things which will motivate them to champion issues over and above their day to day functional or multi-functional roles.  Although the participants in this study have no formal workplace designation as an equality and diversity lead in their organisation they are not ignorant of the organisational development and social justice reasons for engaging with EDI, and they see it as part of their leadership role. Digital leaders in this study were clear that they make choices about where to spend their time and that involvement in diversity and inclusion was just one of many areas which make calls upon their resources. Respondents highlighted that where they found it easier to get involved, they would, and they saw this as a help in delivering their jobs as leaders. They made a different set of considerations however, when deciding to become ‘champions’ themselves and this is inextricably linked to their perceptions of the associated risks. Digital leaders in this study  highlighted areas of personal, professional and reputational risks to themselves.  In some cases these risks were sufficient to discourage them. They found that championing equality, diversity and inclusion risked limiting their own social and cultural capital. Significantly they found that championing diversity could work against their leadership of digital thus undermining their leadership effectiveness.  Understanding these perceived risks, and the interplay of diversity and digital leadership is essential for moving forwards in developing digital and diversity leadership within organisations.

This study provides future researchers and practitioners with a starting point from which to study diversity and digital leadership activities in similar organisations and other universities, colleges and schools. Diversity management in the digital sector and higher education risks falling behind if it is slow to respond or support its digital leaders in this work. The findings of this study are a contribution to professional practice which may hope to facilitate a speedier response to the equality and diversity issues which are becoming increasingly high profile and urgent in higher education and in wider society as we embark on the 2020s.

Key words:  Digital, diversity, leadership, power, organisations, equality, inclusion, intersectional, interpretative, feminist, risk, business, higher education, professional, widening participation, women, STEM, class, race, IT, UK, human resources.

learning from demographic differences of lockdown

Graphic design from ISG BITS magazine

I wanted to know how the lockdown and working from home was experienced by staff in the University of Edinburgh. And I wanted to know whether this was experienced differently by different demographic groups.

Luckily I have a Data and Equality Officer working with me.

We conducted a survey at university level during 26th June – 6th July to better understand the experiences of staff members while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 5069 staff members participated in the survey. We used ONS standard questions on Wellbeing measures so we could benchmark and compare with similar studies.

The key purposes of the survey were to:

  • Understand EDI and other impacts of the COVID period and home working.
  • Serve as data for immediate decisions on how to better support staff working from home.
  • Serve as data for next steps for academic schools and Professional service groups on decisions on their return to campus plans.
  • Serve as data for decisions/discussions on longer term home/hybrid working and other reshaping thinking both locally and at a University level.

A report  was produced and a ‘power BI dashboard’ was  created so that managers and other staff members can interrogate the data (including demographic differences where this was possible) independently.

The Power BI dashboard however, does not highlight where differences in responses are statistically significant, and the overall report highlights where statistical difference is associated with high percentage differences. So Lilinaz produced a further report  to fill this gap by including all statistically significant findings for all demographic groups.

This report will be of interest to EDI officers and anyone who likes dis-aggregated data.

Professional staff were more likely to be interested in complete homeworking in the future. This was the case for more than a quarter (27%) of professional staff, compared to 12% of academic staff who were less likely to be interested in complete homeworking in the future.

Staff Homeworking Experience Survey Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Report – Comparing Demographic Differences at University of Edinburgh.University of Edinburgh Homeworking EDI Report

You can read the whole thing, but here’s a taster:

Gender

  • Men were more likely to report a large negative impact of space, internet, working hours, and non-work responsibilities while working from home. They were more likely to report an overall large negative impact of home working on their work experience. Men were more likely to report low ratings for life satisfaction. They were more likely to not be interested in homeworking in the future.
  • Women were more likely to not have previous experience of home working, and were more likely to have their equipment wholly supplied by the University. They were more likely to report a large positive impact on working hours, non-work responsibilities, and other caring responsibilities while working from home. However, they were more likely to report a large negative impact on childcare while working from home. They were more likely to report a large negative impact on their research output. They were more likely to report an overall large positive impact of home working on their work experience. Women were more likely to report much more productivity than before. However, they were also more likely to report much more tiredness than before. Women were more likely to think that they are kept informed about matters affecting them, and be satisfied with the University resources in place to help them at this time. Women were more likely to report very high values on happiness, and high values for anxiety ONS measures.

what about Chris Brand?

Last evening I attended a very interesting talk by Angela Saini in conversation with Dr Shaira Vadasaria about the concept of race, from its origins to the present day.

It was an event hosted by Race.ED and was very good.

During her talk Angela mentioned Chris Brand and his time at Edinburgh, and suggested it was worth having a think about why he was here so long.  I was a student at the time. I remember Chris Brand. The anti-nazi league used to protest his lectures and security was brought in to protect him. He was fired after 27 years in 1997.

I thought I remembered that  there had been quite a long, drawn-out process to remove him, because of academic freedom. In the end, I think I remembered that it was the IT regs which brung him down, because he was writing offensive stuff on the university hosted website.

I was not 100% sure on this memory so I had a little rumage today.  According to contemporary reports, he was fired for conduct that “brought the university into disrepute” but the University had to change its statutes to do so.

“The procedures Edinburgh University used in the case of Mr Brand were new and designed to protect the interests of both the staff member and the institution. They were modified in the wake of the Education Reform Act of 1988 and subsequent 1992 Ordinance of University Commissioners, which established model statutes designed both to protect academic freedom and ensure that university disciplinary codes are sufficiently rigorous.”  THES April 1998

He sued and the university settled. The thing is, it also meant that “Statutes [were] changed to allow institutions to remove tenure, so that new staff could be fired because of financial exigency and not just good cause.”  and that, as the man himself said,  means that “Edinburgh University and any other university can sack any academic for any ****ing thing it likes at any time of the day or night.” THES April 1998

So, the work the University did in getting rid of him changed the landscape for academic freedom forever.  It would be interesting to research this in the University archives.