Dear PPMA colleagues and friends,

You will remember from Caroline Nugent’s term as our President last year, how passionate she was about Women in Leadership and likewise the amazing President of SOLACE, Jo Miller has made Women in Leadership a key platform for her term. So this year, to further confirm our commitment to our partnership with The Guardian, we have decided to become a Sponsor of the Women In series. Caroline and I attended the launch of the series last year on behalf of PPMA and it’s really great to see how our involvement has developed since then.

What you’ll see as part of our sponsorship is the PPMA brand prominent in all the Women In content – online and printed. We will also have editorial content and targeted adverts across www.theguardian.com. I’m so thrilled with this as it further reinforces the work we have been doing on our own branding, whilst at the same time supporting the topic.

I was delighted to introduce a Women In event last Thursday in London. We had some incredible women working in healthcare come and join us from across the country. They were incredible as was the panel. The panel comprised:

• Chair: Alexandra Topping, Guardian news reporter
• Samantha Jones, former director of the new care models programme, NHS England. She now works independently supporting people to improve health and care services
• Dido Harding, Baroness Harding of Winscombe, chair, NHS Improvement
• Juliet Bauer, chief digital officer, NHS England
• Dr Aruna Stannard, specialty doctor in emergency medicine with an interest in frailty and geriatric emergency medicine
• Cecilia Anim, president, Royal College of Nursing

The panel question was: How can we make healthcare a better place for women to work?  And the discussion was fantastic. It was humbling, inspiring and supportive. Plenty of ideas were shared but I’m reflecting on the fact that many of the issues talked about are those that we as HR & OD professionals have been grappling with for a long time – much too long in fact. At the end the panel members spent some time in speed mentoring events with participants. For those of you who followed my live tweeting you will know that the event as measured in decibels – was a huge success.

Some of the questions have made me reflect again on something that has been on my mind since I attended the Green Park/MJ Summit on Diversity in mid-June. For those of you who aren’t aware, Green Park produce an annual Public Service Leadership 5,000 report looking at gender and ethnocultural diversity at top leadership roles in Local Government, Civil Service, UK Government fully or partly owned organisations, Healthcare and Russell Group Universities and Educational Regulator sectors.

The results obviously represent a subset of the protected characteristics set out in the Equalities Act 2010 – nevertheless it is a rigorous analysis of data that is available across those sectors. Over time, I hope we will see a much more comprehensive dataset and one that includes an analysis of talent pipelines.

Wherever you are on social media you can see that the volume around diversity is dialled up significantly – that is all to the good. BUT, we seem to be stalling on the progress that has been made in the last 10 years. I think there may be a number of reasons for this and it was a discussion that I had with a fantastic Doctor last Thursday that made me think yet again about our overall approach to diversity.

She had asked me why there were no men in the room.  This was both an obvious but an important question – especially as I had made the case in my introduction that Women In leaderhship isn’t just an issue for Women, it is clearly one for men.

The desire to create mutually supportive networks for groups who are underrepresented is, I think, a perfectly natural response to feelings of being ‘different’ and ‘being treated differently’.  Women supporting women is as understandable as men supporting men, LGBTQ supporting LGBTQ and so on.

I think these groups retain huge value. But in an of themselves, I increasingly feel they are isolating and that we need to put more focus and energy on ‘inclusion’. There are a few reasons for this:

• Diversity as a term is now confused with other meanings, over and above the protected characteristics. Rightly so, we increasingly talk about diversity in the context of social mobility, cognitive diversity, multigenerational workforces etc.
• We are potentially conflating the purpose of EqA with targets. The point about EqA legislation was to level the playing field so that the best people could flourish and not be artificially constrained.
• We don’t yet have a sufficient body of evidence that tells us what interventions works best and why. We do though have a body of private sector evidence that demonstrates that diversity at Board level sees an organisation doing much better financially than those organisations who aren’t.
• We are living in political times where diversity is an increasingly politically charged issue and in my experience that is not helpful at all.
• Whislt mutually supportive networks are helpful – I saw that with my own eyes last week – the reality is that everyone needs to be invested in the issue.
• Under the banner of inclusion, it is perhaps easier to see diversity as an issue of representation of our communities. That seems to be more helpful, but it needs more thought and evidence.
• We also have to reflect on the fact that this will take time. I was especially struck by the recent storm of protests around the appointment of the latest Board member of the Bank of England.  The initial howls of outrage that a man was appointed from a shortlist of 5, 4 of whom were women, completely overlooked the fact that of the 3 interview panel members, 2 where women.

I hope we can have more conversations about this and it may be that we devote our next PPMA quarterly supplement to the issue.

I’d be very keen to hear whether you are interested in that idea.  So please get in touch with me via social media or president@ppma.org.uk.  If you are using my email please copy Grace in on admin@ppma.org.uk.

Best

Hello PPMA members and friends

As many of you will know one of my key themes was women in leadership and how we can improve both the numbers of women in senior positions and working support to us all.  There have been some very interesting debates over the months on this subject, especially around the Women in Leadership group with colleagues in Solace and the Guardian ‘WomenIn’ group.

Recently the last day arrived for companies to declare their Gender Pay Gap.  And what a journey that has been! Just when you think you cant see any worse ones, others appear and the constant theme as though it is some kind of excuse used far too many times, is that its ok as there is no equal pay issues, its just that men work in higher graded roles! And therein lies the problem. Just why do we have so many more men pilots in 2018 and so few women?  For Ryanair to have such a huge pay gap of 72% and only 8 (yes I thought that was a spelling mistake too!) women pilots something fundamentally has to change. I was watching a series about Easyjet just this last week and their new shiny pilot training programme and how many women did I spot – 1 yes 1! Now it might just have been a coincidence that all the other women are on another cohort but didn’t want to be filmed (oh look a flying pig) but really this is so unacceptable.  Im 100% sure that there are women out there who would love to be pilots.  We have to fundamentally look at how we are going to support women and how future generations of boys and girls that all work is available to anyone.

We are better in the public sector (but have still reported 9 out of 10 pay men more than women although not as wide a gap – something positive!!) but there are still huge gaps in women in senior positions, and lets face it all protected characteristics are under represented (as well as social mobility which I think will have to become more widely recognised) so we must use this catalyst to bring about change and real change.  We cannot watch a film made in 2050 showing this is what happened in 2020 and look we still have a  problem.  We have had the Suffragettes and Dagenham Ladies – what are we going to need to bring about true fairness and equity. On current figures, more than 78 per cent of the companies that have reported, pay their male employees more than women, while only 14 per cent have a pay gap in favour of women.  What we need is 50/50 and then lets move on to other issues

I have seen so many insipirational senior women really supporting and mentoring the next generations and there is one easy solution.  How many of you mentor?  And if not why not?  We are the profession who should be doing this and if you can look yourself in the mirror and know you are doing your bit to help others then well done.  It is a free way to pass on all your lovely experience and is challenging when you have bright energetic people who will make you also learn and listen.  I find the experience so worthwhile and having a daughter as many of you know, I want her to learn from others this way.

So as I leave my hat to Karen later this month at the Conference, please continue to work hard on doing your bit to change the way we work so we do become a better place.  Public Services should be leading the way.  I’m at the front – where are you on the journey?

Dear PPMA colleagues and friends.

We’re delighted to introduce Stacey-Rebekka Karlsson as this week’s guest blogger. For those of your who don’t know Stacey-Rebekka Karlsson is Head of Partnerships at the Guardian and founder of the “Women In” series.  She’s worked in Media and Events for 16 years and with the Public Sector for almost 11 of those. When she’s not busy at work, she plays Saxophone in a band made up of Local Government professionals, and is a keen baker! Stacey is writing this week on a subject dear to her heart and one that Caroline in particular, has spoken passionately about before.

Stacey is leading the “Women in” series and here she tells us more about it:

“I started the “Women in” series as a result of my own experiences, and my desire to improve things for others.

It’s crazy to think that only 100 years ago, women weren’t allowed to vote in the UK. Even when they did get the vote in 1918, women had to be over 30 years old to vote. And it was only a couple of years ago that same-sex marriage was legalised in England, Wales and Scotland.

Despite it seeming odd to me that what I would consider to be basic human rights being only so recently legalised in most of the UK, there are plenty of places in the world they aren’t.  Same-sex marriage is still illegal in Northern Ireland for example. We have come a long way, BUT that doesn’t mean  there’s not still lots of work to be done, not just for women – but to ensure equality for everyone.

I’ve worked with the public sector for almost 11 years now. In that time we’ve seen huge change, in most ways apart from, that is, gender equality.  The Guardian’s Public Leaders Network recently reported that according to the Fawcett Society, gender equality in local government will not be achieved until 2065. That is beyond most of our lifetimes, and, quite simply, is not good enough.

By striving for, and achieving gender equality, we’ll also be helping ensure the other pillars of diversity are supported. After all, half of the UK population is female. If we ensure women are treated fairly, there’s a good chance we’ll have a much fairer society.

What’s more, it’s proven that more diverse organisations are more successful. Research by McKinsey looked at the relationship between levels of diversity and company financial performance. The research is based on financial data and leadership demographics compiled from hundreds of organisations and thousands of executives in the  UK, US, Latin America and Canada. They found a positive correlation between more diverse organisations and increased revenue. For example gender-diverse companies were 15% more likely to outperform the national industry median, and ethnically diverse companies were a staggering 35% more likely to outperform their competitors. These are compelling results.

I’ve developed “Women in” as a network for women, by women. The team here at the Guardian have worked tirelessly to create a series of content and events that will challenge, nurture and support women across all sectors and inspire the next generation of female leaders.

And we want you to help us shape the content. Please email in any suggestions, or requests to be involved. And by the way, we also welcome positive support from our male colleagues.  The events are all free for public sector employees. We want to facilitate discussions and debates but we also want to provide a platform for professionals to meet one another, help them build their own networks, so that together we can make the working environment a fairer, more enjoyable, more diverse place for everyone.”

Our next events are

Women in Public Sector Leadership  –  3^rd November in Manchester

Women in Public Sector – 21^st November, also in Manchester

Guardian Pride – March 2018 , a celebration of LGBT+ Professionals, London

To get further information or be involved, please contact women.in@theguardian.com or Stacey-Rebekka.Karlsson@theguardian.com

Stacey-Rebekka Karlsson is Head of Partnerships at the Guardian