 Well thank you very much, thank you for inviting me to this important event and let me say I echo everything that Yvonne has said and I shall be amplifying one or two of the aspects that she's mentioned. So I'm going to mostly be talking about work that we did in Cambridge when I was responsible for all the staff in the university a few years ago. So familiar story in Cambridge around 50% of our postdocs are female we have 4000 postdocs all together, but only 20, a few more, a bit more than 20% of our full professors are female. We have too few women becoming academics and too few being promoted but the pattern is different in the sciences and the arts and humanities and we might talk about that later. So women are generally more reluctant to put themselves forward for new roles promotion pay rises fellowships and grants. And then to add to that problem committees tend to make appointments in their own image as Yvonne said, and this was a particularly acute problem in Cambridge because we have a very low turnover rate once people are appointed to the positions in Cambridge. So we tend not to leave to leave the one is it matter. Well, it was 50% of our talent and as we heard earlier more diverse boards, more diverse workforces are more effective. So there are there are two aspects to the problem and one is around policy and the other is around culture workplace culture. In the last decade policies have made a lot of progress. We have a qualities legislation we have training for awareness. We try to make gender balanced appointments, fair workload models in theory, but often not in practice. And in Britain, 10 years ago, the National Institute of Health Research which funds will have big clinical research projects. And Athena swan silver award for grant renewals. And at the time Cambridge had a 114 million pound grant, which was it was in danger of losing and that did rather concentrate the mind of the vice chancellor. And I was able to extract from him major resources for Athena swan activities which were encouraging a better gender outcomes. So we have a lot of good policies in place but the problem is culture, and how do we turn policy into successful outcomes. And the kind of responses we would get in Cambridge when we started working on this 1015 years ago. Well, well, we're the best already with the best why do we change now. Or, if I start talking about the long work hours culture, then I said well, but it's an international competition you know in America and Japan, they don't have they don't care how long it we work. I had of course men saying well it's a woman's problem not mine. And a few successful women, especially if they become successful by behaving like them have said well, I'm successful nobody helped me why should we change anything. So there are a variety of cultural problems that we need to think about and to tackle. So an early initiative we had in Cambridge was called wissetti women into science engineering technology, and it was initially focused on undergraduates but when I was involved. We, the first thing that we did was to introduce mentoring of CDs for women who were seeking promotion by neutral volunteer academics from elsewhere in the university. So not their head of department or their manager, but we, we help we look to people to see these we help them to improve them. We identified gaps and initially this was just for women, but it was very successful. And now that's available to everybody who wants to apply for promotion, male and female. But the more we realize that actually there's an important principle here. And that is there's a lot of research which shows that women and also be me start black and minority. tend to be more adversely affected than white men are by poor culture, or by poor management and governance. If we accept that that's true. Then it will also be true that women and BMR BME staff will tend to be more favorably affected than white men will by improving the culture the management and the governance. So, the conclusion from that is that in general, initiatives and schemes should be devised that are open to everybody, even if we expect and hope that women will be the main beneficiaries. If you devise schemes that are exclusively for women it does generate resistance in some areas of the male colleagues. Another area where we've worked hard is around the processes and criteria for academic promotions. We increase the weighting the proportion of teaching and administrative contributions to the overall case, so that research becomes less dominant. We reduce the barrier part time applicant I think this is very important that many of our colleagues have not been working full time in the last five years, sometimes for family reasons sometimes for health reasons. And we've now adjusted the criteria so that someone who's been working less than 100% has to present work of the same quality, but the amount of quantity that we expect for them to be promoted is adjusted so if they're only worked half time in the last five years. We expect half as many papers or half as much grant income. Half as much teaching contribution that makes a very big difference. We encourage everyone to declare their caring responsibilities with we've reduced the weighting of things like international travel this course is pre COVID. If you make international travel a criterion for promotion you will inevitably disadvantage women. And that has to be removed. We invited all the eligible staff to workshops to explain what was happening what was changing. And we have made heads of department responsible for interviewing all eligible staff and to encourage the reticent to imply and they often not always but they're often women and discourage the premature applications and usually that's enthusiastic young men who want to get promoted very quickly. And we also make those heads of department explain to any unsuccessful candidates, why they were unsuccessful, we're trying to encourage an honest discussion between the management and those who are applying. And in the last few years, we've now got the same proportion of eligible women applying as men, which did not used to be the case, and with the same success rate or some or in some areas of the university a higher success rate. We created a scheme called the Recurrent and Care scheme, which provides funds to assist staff in catalyzing and building up their research profiles after they've had a period away from work for family responsibilities. We put together a fund of 300,000 pounds a year we make small grants, and these benefited hundreds of families and careers, mostly female but not exclusively, and many of them are postdocs. Now as popular kind of grant is that when someone wants to go to an international conference after they've been away for parental leave, we will pay for a care of their child or children to accompany them to the conference. So they can go to the conference and take a young child or children with them. And they can combine their family and their work life. And the person who goes with to look after the children, maybe their partner, it may be a parent, it may be professional care, we don't care. And that has made a huge difference to people to get them back into visibility back into networking and community. If they don't want to travel will bring collaborators to Cambridge with this variety of scheme. Very, it's very flexible. An interesting benefit of this is of course it's very popular scheme, the head of department's got to write a letter of support and unexpected benefit is the head of department has now got to think much more than he and it's usually he has had to in the past about work and family interactions. And so in retrospect and this was not intentional but it's a benefit. This is this is a policy which supports and validates employees decisions to combine work and family life. And it's also beginning to raise cultural awareness and sensitivity among some managers who've not thought about it as much as they should have done. We've got some other things I mean we have a fixed retirement age here in Cambridge, which is unusual. And what that means is that people like me who are retiring and mostly male. And a fewer, but the new appointees are more likely to be female than those of us who've retired. That's making us a difference, but it's very slow. We've got much stronger instruction and training for appointments committees. We have equal parental rights parental leave rights for women and for men with a very generous financial scheme to make it easy, getting men to take up the leave is still a cultural challenge. We published a book which celebrates different kinds of success of women in Cambridge, and we asked all all women in Cambridge you know who do you admire amongst your peers. We eventually celebrated 26 in this book which you can see on the web it's wonderful book. And it demonstrates it celebrates many different kinds of success administrators secretaries, as well as some famous professors. There's still a lot that we need to do around workplace culture. And sharing meetings this is something that is not thought about sufficiently but the way that a meeting is chaired is really crucial, ensuring that all members have an opportunity to speak, and ensuring that all constructive contributions are properly acknowledged. Training your chairs to make sure that they are that they behave well is really important part time working is really important. We all recognize that all work we all work part time, none of us work 24 seven, and there's an arbitrary definition of what is full time. I think vital to recognize the value to your institution to your families, individuals, and indeed to society, the value of part time work, which enables people to work and to look after their family and to make contributions to society. And your promotions processes your assessment processes to take proper account of that and this is very rare in most universities. And I would say to anyone who has to leave a meeting early to go and collect their children, don't, you know, traditionally men pretend they've got another meeting to go to, rather than saying I've got to go and pick up the children. It's really important to say, I'm going to go and look after my children now. We have in particularly in Cambridge we have a very long hours culture, which is, I'm afraid quite difficult quite toxic, and we still haven't improved enough advice and mentoring this is something that Yvonne mentioned informal what we call old boy mentoring reinforces the tendency for men to network, you know after work and so on. And it reinforces tendency for men to apply for promotion too soon or women tend to apply too late. So we put in place quite a lot of formal mentoring processes. Honest and well informed advice are crucial. I believe it's essential for women to be mentored by women or men by men. I think if you speak to a lot of successful women they'll tell you that support from men was really important. And we need to encourage nominations for prizes and other recognition that's got to be fair and equitable as well. That tends to be done too much by the old boy network. So here are administrative and caring roles, nurturing roles in your departments. Senior leaders tend to turn to women first and ask and women are more likely to say yes than men. So if a head of department asks a young man to do something that's not research is likely to say no and women are more likely to say yes. But leaders heads of department need to be more even handed in their search when they're handing out these roles. And women need to be stronger in saying no I've got to do my research or I've got to do something else. Ask a man. I recognize that's not always easy. So my final slide is I mean changing culture is what we really need to do. And it all actually all begins at home parental leave needs to be shared equally childcare and other the most domestic responsible is need to be shared properly. And universities employers need to recognize and account for that. And so if you change to start to change the culture the next generation will grow up in a different sort of attitude. And so I'm just going to end on a personal note. When our children were small, my wife went back to work she was a lab technician she worked long hours, no flexibility and when she could leave the lab. So I frequently had primary childcare responsibility I did all the course still do all the cooking. I took the children to violin lessons and piano lessons all of those sorts of things. And then after we all had a meal in the evening I went back to the lab to be with my research group and I wrote a textbook. And I did a variety of things and my message, my final message really to people the next generation is, but also to senior leaders is I had a very family oriented lifestyle when I was young. And it did not mean sacrificing my career. And I think it is possible it must be possible for us, at least in a university system where we have lots of advantages of flexibility in the way we work for us to be able to achieve a successful family life and a successful career. I'm going to stop there. Well, thank you very much, Mr Sanders. Many interesting points are coming from Cambridge thank you very much. So, just a question for me regarding the, the research stay abroad because so a year ago I did a podcast with with the five female researchers here for professors one assistant professor and they all mentioned that you know the research stay abroad after the postdoc was an issue to most women because at that point in the 30s, they had very often a partner in the midst of a career as well, and, and maybe kids as well. So, so do you think that we should reconsider whether research they're brought after the postdoc is is crucial for for your promotion should we should we review. You know, the research stay. In my ideal world, we would. I think now what's happening is people are spending longer and longer as students longer and longer as postdocs. So they get their first academic position, probably 10 years older than when I started. I started my academic career independent academic career when I was 24. That's impossible now I think. Finally, I would take a risk on giving more people tenure younger. You know if you give 10 people tenure and only seven of them turn out to be really successful. Then that's a pretty good success rate. However you define success and I'm not going to I'm not going to go down there right now. If people more security, early on in their career, then they will feel more able to have a flourishing family life knowing that they've got some security. At the moment we have the worst of all worlds where people come for tenure in their mid 30s, which is the worst possible time really for a woman who wants to do both. And so you you you speak about part time and parental leave and part time work is not really an option today in in in academia and that is something that sort of is it makes academia very different from from from the rest of the world. And I guess that's a culture difference there and we need a culture change if part time should be an option because very often we have focus on, you know, progression and speed you have to publish all the time in order to get a promoted. In addition, we review these these criteria as well. I, so I come back to my point we all work part time, you know, what's the definition of nobody works 24 seven we all work part time. I think it is possible for people to work, say, 30 hours a week rather than 60 hours a week or 70 hours a week or 80 which is what we often see in Cambridge. It's possible for people to work a smaller number of hours, particularly at crucial points in their in in their family development and for a promotions process to take account of that. If you know that somebody took a year away from for whatever reason, for ever good reason. If you take a year away in the last five then you only expect 80% of their product of the productivity, and you can account for that quantitatively. There are many universities in their promotion say we take account of course and circumstances, but actually there's no evidence that they do.