 There we go. You should be able to see the slides coming up shortly. Right, and I'll hand over. Thanks, Melissa. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you all for coming along to this session. Yeah, we'll be using the chat if you want to, but bearing in mind what the session is being recorded, don't give away any personal information if you might feel anxious about that. Because the session is about diversity, and it's the leadership, and diversity is one of those topics that sometimes there is personal information around diversity. So it does come in there, but so don't feel you have to participate in the chat unless you want to. Okay, so, you know, I'm a member of ALT. I've met many of you. I participate in ALT in a range of different ways. I'm director of learning and teaching and web services at the University of Edinburgh. So I have a quite large learning technology group at that university. I'm also a doctoral researcher at Edinburgh Napier Business School, and what I'm talking about today is the research I've been doing. And it's, I think of interest to the sector. I hope you will find it interesting. I've been doing some research and I've made recommendations as a result of that research. And one of the things that I'm doing now is taking the findings of the research and the recommendations out to various different communities to see whether they chime with you. I mean, if a piece of research is useful, then the things that we discover as researchers should make sense or be helpful or improve or change the environment in which we work. I'm also doing business school research. Obviously it's about organizational development, diversity in terms of equality, diversity and inclusion, those kinds of things. So I'm going to tell you a bit about what I've been doing and also ask you some questions to see whether the kind of things that I'm suggesting chime with you or, you know, whether you may have different views from the people that I interviewed as part of my study. If you would like to know more about what I've done, what I've learned, what I've published, please do follow up with me because this is just a wee part of an enormous amount of writing that I've done on the subject over the last couple of years. And I'm happy to follow up in more detail with anybody or any other organizations if you'd like me to come and talk at your place. So that's my contact information. The way I tried to attract people to come to this session was a bit of clickbait. And this is a game that I've discovered that PhD students play where they try to make their thesis topics sound shocking enough that people will click through to find out more. And so the clickbait that I tried was what IT directors really say about their female black colleagues and why. And that is kind of what I did cover in my research. I interviewed a whole lot of IT directors and asked them about equality and diversity. And of course, there's an assumption there in that clickbait that IT directors are white and male and that they're talking about some other people. And I think that's also part of where I was thinking about the research coming from. What do we know about IT directors? So what IT directors say about their female and black colleagues will shock you. Digital leaders say data doesn't count. That might be because we're counting the wrong data. Ten things you can do to stop premature ageism. Ten neat tricks to improve your social life at work. She took a risk and you will be shocked at what happens next. So all of that is actually the, these are the clickbaits that I thought might describe kind of the things that I was doing. I found it very interesting and I discovered all kinds of interesting things. I'm very happy to talk with you about. But I think just to say I called it digital leaders and I've also called it IT directors. So that's sort of important to say that the people I was interviewing are sort of director level in universities. But also perhaps for me, IT directors, that's maybe sort of learning technology adjacent. I realized that not all learning technologists work in the IT department of universities. And so the people I was talking to were people who define within their organization as directors of IT. Some of them are part librarian, some of them are part e-learning. But they've gotten to quite senior positions in the institution. So they are the kind of people that when we talk about what we need a senior leadership buy in or we need senior leaders to lead on this. It's those kinds of people that I was talking to. But also the CIOs and the heads of IT now increasingly within institutions occupy a space at the top table perhaps. Quite senior roles in the institution that used to be only academics could get to those positions. So assistant principals, vice principals, chief information officers are right there up at the top of the institutions. And that makes them an interesting group of people to study because the changes, how they feel they fit into that organization and the culture of universities is kind of interesting. And it's social life at work. The culture of universities and colleges is very interesting when you start to study it. So my research was looking at sort of overlapping domains of leadership. So it was this kind of digital leadership and what is that? That's not a particularly well-defined area in the literature and also diversity leadership. So the leadership of equality, diversity and inclusion, which does tend to be HR directors and VP of people and culture, those kinds of roles. But actually, if we're going to make any changes in our organization, we need a wider range of senior management to be interested in sort of EDI issues. And part of my thinking was how do we get good understanding of diversity and EDI into those other leadership roles? Or does it always get pushed over to being just an HR issue? So what I've been doing is researching the views of digital leaders on the topic around being a leader and their interest in equality and diversity and making recommendations for action. And I did that through interviews and data gathering. So it wasn't hundreds of people I spoke to. It was quite a small group, a small number of people I spoke to. Quite long, detailed interviews and then gathering the themes out from that. That was the research I was doing. And now I get to see whether it can be applied more widely for understanding. And just in case I don't finish on time, these are my take-home messages. So this is what I'm going to say at the end, which is that what I found, the recommendations, to move forward in supporting diversity and inclusion activities in conjunction with digital leadership. It's important that universities recognize the following things. One is that digital leaders, I think, represent a distinct identity group, as distinct from other professional service areas and as distinct from academic leaders. So a lot of the data about the senior management in universities and a lot of the research about senior management in universities is academic leaders. And then there's a kind of lump of all the other professional service leaders and the data around the gender and ethnicity and age of those people tend to get sort of grouped together. And my thesis is that the IT department, the people who are IT leaders, are distinct from the kind of people who might have risen to the top of other areas of university admin for a couple of reasons. Also the next recommendation is to understand that digital leaders really struggle from the ones I've spoken to, really struggle to find a clear direction from the top with regard to the EDI values of the organizations that they work in. So they come and work in universities and they really can't see a clear indication as to what they should be doing with regard to equality and diversity. They can't really relate to it. And then this other one, the recruitment and retention to the IT department is a highly competitive area with structural and contextual issues shaped by industry beyond higher education. And this is also a big part of what I was studying is that the IT department of universities is an overlap with the IT industry, the tech industry, and particularly when we're recruiting people to come and work in university IT departments. Those people may never have worked in universities before. They may not be particularly motivated to work for universities. They're not academics. They've often been recruited from the city, from the region around, and they've swapped in from other IT organizations. So I'm often recruiting people who have worked for Standard Life, Rockstar Games, Sky Scanner and such in the city. And so they're the ways that I have to compete to attract them to my organization. I'm actually up against other big IT organizations rather than perhaps being up against other universities. And that means that there's a sort of structural, interesting overlap between the IT departments of universities, which is why that I think that they're a distinct identity group. Many of the leaders of IT in our organizations, the CIOs, have come from industry. And you know if you've got one because everybody refers to them as well. They recruited a CIO from industry. And that those people are very interesting in terms of how we think about quality and diversity and inclusion in universities. So worth researching, I thought. So of course there's the issue of diversity leadership. Now this would be a lot easier if there was a definition of diversity. There are neither definitions of equality, diversity or inclusion that everybody agrees on. So EDI is something this has emerged in recent years. And this is the acronym that advanced HE use, for instance EDI. But from reading around all of the things you might find if you try to do some research into diversity and diversity management. Diversity management is also an HR phrase. It means something quite specific in terms of the kinds of approaches that an institution might take. But actually the definition of diversity management or the kind of outcomes you would know if you had diverseness or diversity not agreed. And so in terms of actually evaluating whether an organization is diverse or has achieved diversity or what we can even be working towards, it's not an agreed and shared definition. Inclusion is even more vague and really means different things to different people. So what that ends up meaning is that when we're talking about diversity of workplaces, it kind of comes down to local. It's up to you what you decide to do in your organization. And as a leader in an organization, the choice of things that you might decide to do is very contextual. So if you decide to be a champion for equality and diversity or diversity leadership in the workplace, that's socially situated within your organization. And it's a very specific environmental context. So the organization you're in but also the country and the industry sector and the demographic makeup of the organization even when you start will all influence whether initiatives succeed or fail to a lesser or greater extent. And what that means is that it's very hard to copy or to say, well, this worked in this place. What's worked in your place? I'm going to try it. So what works in one university will not necessarily work in another university. And we should certainly share stories and try to talk about what's worked and what hasn't worked. But we can't assume that because it's worked in one place, it will work in another place. The nuances are so subtle about who is in the organization and what kind of organization it is and how long people have been there and what's been tried in the past and such. So organizations will choose different bundles of activities such as unconscious bias training and recruitment initiatives and setting up anti-racism groups and structuring their reward policy or putting in a women's development program or everybody wearing rainbow line yards and displaying flags and employee mentoring programs and so on. All in an attempt to meet a perceived objective that we should be having a more diverse and inclusive workplace. And another organization with the same objective might try a different set of activities and one with the same activities might be doing it for a slightly different objective. So this means that it's actually very hard to find what works or what could be done. And it means that the kind of things you have to perhaps try are lots of different approaches. Trying from lots of different angles to try to do things. And a lot of them won't be policy level things. They will be just things that particular leaders have decided to do in their departments for particular reasons. And so that motivation to do that, where people are coming from when they try these things or when they bring in a certain kind of initiative. It really does come down to who the leader is, whether they're up for doing this, whether they feel motivated to do this and how much time and effort they can put into it. So that might be obvious to you all. But that's the other thing about research is they tend to find things that you sort of thought you might find anyway. But it was quite interesting for me to think about how even anything from America that writes about diversity in organizations is coming from a completely different context than Britain and even within Scotland where I was doing my research very different from certain parts of the rest of the UK. So it really does mean that we do local research and then try to generalize or extrapolate that out to larger places. But perhaps it really is always very context specific. So thinking about your context. OK, so Mary, my Amherst assistant, Mary has put into the chat the question that I'm asking you. So could you type into chat some of the various things in the bundle of activities that you have in your workplace? So some of the things that you've seen in the place that you work, have you seen unconscious bias training? Do you think there's equal pay reporting? Do you think there are self networks? What have you seen that you would identify as being a quality and diversity initiatives in your workplace? If you just type them into chat, just brainstorm all those words. Who's going to type something? I feel like this is where we should have some lovely lift music now, Melissa. Well, people are thinking and getting their fingers to work in the chat. Everybody's very shy. Nobody has any unconscious bias training in their organization? There we go. Just slow to come through. OK. Does it have to be the first chancellor for EDI, Katie? OK. So you should... It's interesting if you... There should be quite a range of things because most of the universities at least have something. So like Athena Swan or Women in STEM or any of those kinds of things that you can think of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Aurora, Athena Swan, yeah. Great. OK. Well, but most people could think of something. And the reason I was asking is because there was a survey done by USISA. So USISA is the University Colleges Information Services Association. I think universities and colleges. And there was a survey done led by Heidi Fraser Kraus from who's now at Sheffield, but I think was at York at the time, that did go out to staff in IT departments. And this is 2018. And the question was, were you concerned about equality and diversity in the IT profession? And 80% said that they definitely, probably yes, were concerned. So lots of people concerned. 48% said their institution did not have any policies in place. 57% reported that their IT departments did not have any specific policies in place to support gender equality. This is the problem with surveys is that although it started at the top being about equality and diversity, it then became about gender and lots of people are replying about gender. And so this is why I decided to do interviews rather than surveys is because even the phrases equality and diversity get interpreted by people differently. And sometimes people assume you're talking only about gender. And sometimes the initiatives are only either gender or race or age or class or parenthood. And then they tend not to be intersectional in this way. So, but this did worry me that, you know, so 48% response that they didn't have any policies in place when Athena Swan exists. So Athena Swan is about women in STEM organizations. And of course the IT department of a university is a STEM part of the institution. But I think perhaps people find that Athena Swan only focuses on the academic departments. So even in terms of gender, the women in the IT departments were not aware of Athena Swan. And that or it didn't feel that it was anything to do with them. And that really worried me. So this survey is around and about. I don't know if they ever got formally published. But I was one of the people who got invited to respond. And I felt that I needed to find out more about, you know, if everybody was concerned and there was no policies in place. Now they did ask a question about policies and policy. The word is quite difficult because it tends to send you to the idea that there must be a university published policy on something. And actually it may be that waiting for institutional policy on something isn't a very particularly helpful thing to do in terms of our own workplaces now. So of course policy can mean just a set of ideas and plans, you know, doing something, an attitude or action in relation to an issue. It doesn't have to mean university published policy. So where you are in an institution that has published policies, that's great. But it shouldn't stop us from thinking about the things that are within our sphere of influence as senior leaders in an organization. We can choose to get involved in things without having to wait for institutional policy because there's so many things in the bundle that we can use. The other thing that I found from doing this reading around the topic is that diversity management practices obsessively focus on numerical outcomes. And it does tend to be types of people that you can get into your organization. And the change at the only way that people evaluate the success of diversity initiatives is to count numbers of kinds of people. And this is a bit old fashioned, hasn't really been rethought, isn't really that nuanced. And obviously there's a lot in the critical literature about the fact that we need to rethink some of this stuff around workforce diversity and not just be obsessed with counting numbers of people. It is also true though that senior leaders, particularly in IT departments may come from a background of believing that quantitative is what's the truth and that you must have data. And so I wouldn't say to stop counting people, but I would say that what we need to count perhaps is all of the different variables and all of the different kinds of people that we have in our organization, not just the HR data. It's also true that when you think that you know, when you try to get the data about who works in IT departments in universities, that's quite difficult because the data is lumped in with other professional staff sometimes, getting down to the actual categorizations of who's in what kind of role is difficult. And the other thing, yes, so that you have to categorize people in some way. And the other thing is that even the categories of people that the HR department got will probably not have been updated since the moment that you applied for the job and filled in the equality and diversity questionnaire, which of course gets separated from your job application. But if you filled that in at the point that you applied, it may be that your actual HR department doesn't have any more up-to-date information about anybody than that. And of course, some people change their various aspects of their lives change. And of course, that list of characteristics that the HR department are allowed to gather is only a certain set of lists. So actually asking people about their identity gets a much richer picture, a much more up-to-date pictures. People may have become disabled, people may have changed their parental status, their marital status, various different things. And of course, their age changes as they progress, as they stay longer in the organization. So we need to have a think ongoing work to understand the experiences of managers in university IT departments in relation to a college university. And that if you're thinking about how we get senior leadership buy-in and how they decide whether or not to be spending time on this, it may be the membership of other identity groups serve to influence their attitudes and experience, making changes in their own workplaces. And that those IT leaders, those senior managers hold multiple identities personally. Digital leaders in universities also navigate a very difficult identity space within the organization. So you have sort of functional identities as well as personal identities and identity groups. So the validation of their roles and identities in relation to Epic staff is a big part of what they said in their interviews with me, how they feel they fit in the organization and how to what extent their leadership domain extends into things like equality and diversity, or whether they really feel they have to just stick with championing IT. And this is one of the findings of my research was that sometimes the choice to either champion digital or to champion equality and diversity is made, and that actually deciding to champion equality and diversity may undermine your ability to champion digital. And that I think is quite important if we're trying to think about who, how our digital leaders might get involved in equality and diversity stuff, if they're deciding not to because they are busy championing digital, how many change fronts can you push forward on at the same time? What is your bandwidth for doing that? So in the interviews that I did, I asked people to identify a variety of characteristics, because I wanted to recognize that people's identities and social positions at work are shaped by multiple and interconnected factors, and all of them have impact on your leadership. So bearing in mind that I was only interviewing director level people, so I knew something about their age, and also I knew them when I was interviewing them, so I was able to make some presumptions about which categories into these things. But these were prompt words that I put up, and I asked them to tell me how many of these chimed with them or how many of these different categories, or which categories is at the start of the interviews that they identified with. Now, you know, I'm fairly comfortable with referring to myself as a white middle-class, middle-aged, Jewish, Scottish American woman, but lots of people don't necessarily think of themselves in terms of all of those different categories and how they might introduce themselves or think about themselves. So I showed them this list of prompt words, which I'm going to give you a little moment to have a look at, because I'm going to ask you to think about how many of those you might choose. Okay, so you don't have to tell me which ones, obviously, but do you think from the words and phrases on there that two or three of those apply to you, four or five is your identity, six or seven of those different things? Obviously, if I've missed some, you're very welcome to volunteer them. And that was something that I asked in the interviews whether people had other words that they would choose as identities that weren't on my list. Okay, so just looking at that, do you think two or three of those, three or four of those, eight, excellent. Okay, everybody got a few? Okay, yeah, we're a complex lot. Yeah, I think multiple identities is really important, and in there is a mix of things, obviously the new to this organization, you know, or I consider myself to be management, nearing retirement, menopausal, background, yeah. Yeah, these are all elements of diversity and also about how people identify. Okay, okay, great. Thank you very much for saying that. Now, yes, I'm, this is being recorded and I'm not going to use your personal data for anything, but I have been writing up and reflecting on these workshops as I've done them with different groups of people. I've done one for you, Siza, and I've done one with Advanced HE. And I'm sort of saying things like five workshop participants indicated that they personally identified with three or more of these identity groupings and that kind of thing. So having your feedback on this is really helpful for me because I am trying to make the case that when we research things we shouldn't just be doing gender, we shouldn't just be doing race, we should be trying to think about all of the different aspects that combine and intersect. So the other thing about when you talk about quality and diversity in workplaces is sometimes, particularly in the kind of bits of the university that we work in, people ask what the business case, is there a business case for this Melissa? Why should we be spending any time on this? What's the business case? So one of the things that I've been looking at is whether there's a business case for quality and diversity. And the people that I interviewed who, yes, our IT leaders, could see a very clear business case for knowing and understanding about quality and diversity. And a lot of that was to do with recruitment. Okay, so they were very clear that they were business drivers, this great strength in being able to attract and retain a diverse workforce so that we can help to meet the demands for increasingly technology skills. From my data, it was very clear that the managers that I interviewed were well aware of the challenges that they face, and the importance of attraction and retention to sort of HRE words. Working in the tech arm of the university, the quality and diversity in our workforce is going to be fundamental to how we actually manage to source talent for the future for a highly competitive market in the war for talents and technology. So on the one hand, there's how diverse is your current organization. And the other hand, there's how do you attract people to come and work in your organization and who are you up against. And there are other companies really busting a gut to also become more diverse. So actually we're in a situation where in the IT sector, certain groups of people are in very high demand. And the big companies are investing masses in marketing and HR to make sure that they recruit diversity into their organization because there are awards to be won and money to follow. And when I go to the diversity and IT awards, I am up against these big companies are putting a lot of effort into it. And so IT leaders, particularly those who've come in from other working in other places, other industries are very aware that that that's the kind of environment where people are looking and they have choice as to where they work. Now within Scotland, the higher education sector and the tech sector are two of the largest growing industries. And the fact that they are two large industries and that they are competing for talent in a quite small country means that there's a very competitive market when we want to be seen to be a diverse and inclusive organization. So thinking about what I had sort of come to my conclusion about who I was talking to, that digital leaders are a distinct group within the university. They have a specific set of relationships in relation to academic staff. So, you know, sometimes we say students, academic staff and professional staff are the three groups and I think there's a fourth group, which is this overlap with industry. I think that obviously managers are different from staff. So from my interviews with them, they very clearly identified themselves as being in a separate group with assumptions and looking to them with different assumptions. And they self assume that managers will behave in particular ways or that staff feel that the senior leadership has responsibility to behave in a particular way or to lead in particular things. That the population of people who are the IT leaders in organizations, digital leaders is actually shaped by the tech sector and you know the tech sector has got historic structural inequalities in it. And actually it is particularly white and male and perhaps something about young and old that you can be the CEO of a startup, a billion dollar startup at 23. But equally, you may have only considered to be a leader in a university if you've got, you know, 30 years experience in using IT. And also that perhaps the IT leaders come from more non-traditional backgrounds than the rest of the academy, I think. So this is something that I found quite interesting about historical inequalities as to who could be an academic. And that in fact the careers of people in the IT department is quite different from the academics in general. So that leads us to think about what digital leadership even is. This is not a well defined area of work either. Lots of things only just starting to be published and very confusing that some people refer to digital leadership as being leaders who use social media or something to do their leadership. But I think that this year particularly in COVID has for universities has really helped us to focus on the idea that your digital leaders are the ones who really understand the technology that the institution needs. But it's, you know, at a time when we're digitally focused and team centric the focus on organizational practice around the culture and design of an organization is very important for leadership development. And if you what you really need is digital leaders who also understand the quality and diversity because we need to be able to recruit we need to be able to do digital transformation need to understand our organization. So I would say that digital leadership and diversity leadership need to overlap within that organizational leadership and there's not much written about the overlap of these these areas. So having said that you some of you identify with 346 10 of those different identities my next question to you as I as I did with my interviewees. To what extent do you think that your own identity influences your interest in implementing equality and diversity initiatives in your workplace. So it might be a range from not at all to definitely yes. So this is about to the extent that you put yourself your time and effort into equality and diversity how much is that influenced by you and your identity. Not at all because you know I would do it anyway or definitely yes because I feel it as an important thing to do because of my background or you would do it for anybody anytime it doesn't matter whether you're own identity. Yeah. Okay. So that's interesting because a lot of the research around equality and diversity does focus on the identities of the people that we know this we know that the often the champions for equality diverse gender equality are the women in the organization. The champions for race equality tend to be ethnic minority staff. Yeah. Okay. So you're saying that the get the extent to which your own identity influences. Okay. So I asked the my interviewees that as well. Okay. Great. Thank you very much. So let me tell you what I discovered they I had given them this list of prompt words. These are it directors in universities. I've given them this list of prompt words and these are the ones the ones in yellow are the ones that I've that particularly came out in the data as being important. I think in terms of what influence them to get involved in things. Okay. So class was a big part of the data from the people I spoke to people identifying as having working class background. And that I would say is different from the other senior leadership at the top of institutions. And again yes of course this is within Scotland. People but it's I think what it's important is how people identify for themselves rather than whether we believe that or what the criteria around that were religious was very interesting in Scotland particularly particularly in the west of Scotland people from the west of Scotland still there's very strong sectarianism and the way they describe themselves particularly Catholics from the west of Scotland. Very keen to tell you about that particular identity that they grew up with and how that shaped their attitude to being insiders and outsiders within organizations. There was several people mentioning about well I'm new to this organization and it is so different from where I worked before. And so I wanted to make a change or I didn't want to make a change or I didn't feel I could or you know so this feeling that you have to be in the academy at least seven years before you can start to change anything. It was very interesting in what they what they said everybody of course I was only interviewing directors but strongly saying about being management and a feeling that that's a particular identity role that shapes their decision making with regard to what they get involved in. And they don't necessarily have the freedom to do just what they might want to do but that there it comes with some some weight around management what they decide to do. And several people mentioning being menopausal which obviously shapes your awareness of various things and you tend to spot that there's no particular support in your organization at that time that it's happening to you. But also similarly parents people who are single parents people who had had to think about childcare and brought that up a lot in terms of whether they knew that the institution had structures and support for parents and parent of daughter came through very clearly in terms of people feeling that they So this quite common there's actually a lot of research about fathers of daughters particularly the parents of daughters so when in relation to equality and diversity issues. The question was about how much of your personal identity influences getting involved in equality and diversity so people who are parents of daughters cited this as a reason to get involved because it had shifted their thinking in various various issues having having daughters. So this kind of thing makes us you know once you have this kind of data you kind of think well to what extent to the activities in our organization that we're trying to get senior managers involved in. How much do we think about what might motivate them to get involved in things so when we ring our hands and say why aren't senior leadership involved and we need senior leadership to get involved in this but they just don't. Is it possibly we aren't actually checking what kind influences those senior leaders to get involved in things and the more we know about them and their backgrounds. The more we can perhaps give hooks or easy ways for them to get involved in things that they would be very motivated to do and everybody agrees that their own identity is a big part of their motivation to do things. So this is what I found in the people I was talking to but then and that made me think a lot about class and religion in Scotland and that meant I'm able to have some different approaches in the organization where I work. But the another question that I asked them when we were trying to think about why people might not get involved in the cause in diversity. So I asked them do you think there are associated risks for some people and getting involved with the quality and diversity issues in the workplace. So I'm asking this question to you now as well. Do you think there are associated risks for some people getting involved in a quality and diversity issues in the workplace. So yes no maybe not sure not anymore. So when we think about why would people not get involved in these things why wouldn't senior leader put themselves forward and champion these. Yes so we don't so the HR literature does not recognize that there are risks for people. And in fact of the people that I interviewed there was very striking difference in the data the HR professionals said that they didn't think there was any risk. And everybody who was in a not HR role kind of in a digital leadership role or librarian or head of the learning or whatever absolutely said yes. And that I thought was very interesting because there's a mismatch there about our HR colleagues who presumably don't experience any risk because it's so clearly their role. And yet if it isn't your main role because your main role is digital digital leadership head of IT or something to get involved in a quality and diversity there's risks that go with it. And that of course means we should try to study what those risks are and understand them better. Okay so all of the respondents but one were adamant that they were associated with they've seen that happen and they use this kind of phrases that you're using head above the parapet target on your back all kinds of things. And the kind of risks that they described risks to oneself personal risks and risks to your reputation how you're perceived by others, but also professional risks how you might risk losing effectiveness in your professional role. So this I thought was very interesting that if you choose to champion EDI all of those other things in your role get lost. So you're no longer seen as the top developer you're seen as somebody who champions women's issues or something you're no longer invited to meetings to talk about data centers you're only there to talk about the gender pay gap or whatever. So you get kind of it becomes difficult to maintain leadership in one area if you seem to be championing leadership in another area. They also talked about risks to the business. And partly that was to do with disability and accessibility and the idea that organization can get paralyzed by accessibility issues and not know what to do it's just so huge or that way of accessibility and IT accessibility and disability inclusion as it's something that can actually almost make some things grind to a halt because we don't have to do it correctly or putting captions on every single bit of media is, you know, it just, you know, that's a risk to your business on within that gets in the way. But also risks to the wider endeavor of equality itself so colleagues very concerned that they might do it wrong, and that they might not that they might do it wrong and that it wouldn't that it would actually work as a work against the idea of improving the situation for various people by getting a backlash. So there's lots of talk about backlash and how it might turn people off things or just that it wouldn't sit well or, you know, so there was lots of discussion about risk and this is a very rich data set that I got. And again, I'm happy to come and talk with any organizations who would like to see more of these quotes and understand them. But it's a personal risk and there's a professional risk of being a troublemaker because you want to raise issues and you want to fix things. There are things that colleagues maybe are branded or identified with that may not be advantageous for them. I don't know whether if we said you're an equality and diversity champion, whether that would be seen as a positively or neutrally or negatively. And if I don't know that, then it's probably not positively. These are senior leaders thinking about how they would be viewed by other people in their organization. So thank you, Tim. So, okay, so it's a more close looking at these issues in the workplace is a challenge to perceived power structures, certainly a challenge to others perceptions. And there's a lot of straight white middle class privilege that people just gain. And I think that when you're starting to promote quality and diversity, people can feel challenged by that. Okay, so this is several of these. See the male leaders of IT talking about how people will feel very strongly. You could be challenging people to change views which they've held for a very long time and they feel quite comfortable with. And you're putting them into a place where you're asking them to think quite deeply about some very big issues for them and things that are quite important to them. And so the question is, you know, if we're doing that to each other, if we're making other senior leaders, if we're senior leaders in an organization and we're doing this, we're making other senior leaders uncomfortable thinking about issues that are quite challenging to them. Is that actually doing us any good as digital leaders? Are they then going to invest in the learning infrastructure that we're also asking for? Or have we actually sort of made them uncomfortable in somebody that they caused them to have to rethink something which is quite personal to them? So I think there's all this weighing up about how uncomfortable you would want to risk making anybody, whether that impacts on the ask that you're making with regard to digital leadership or change in learning technology or investments in the library and such. So there are these sort of personal and professional risks to senior leaders who raise uncomfortable issues at the very top of organizations. So partly I then wondered whether, so this is a question to you again, if you chose to champion a diversity issue, do you feel that you would have the support of colleagues? Because if we know that there are risks and you've all said that there are risks. So there's an activity that we know is risky. What are we doing to make sure that the people who are doing it, who are taking that risk, how are we supporting them, you know, any kind of risk management, any kind of risk assessment. We should be doing risk assessments on becoming an equality and diversity leader. We know there is a risk. Okay. And I wonder whether sometimes we leave those people out there. Sometimes we don't think about what the risk to them is and sometimes we say, well, you know, if you can't stand the heat. So this is a strange area of business that even though we know there's a strong business case and yet people who put themselves into that space are at risk. And then we kind of leave them there to take that risk. So the business has basically abandoned them and is not supporting them. So many of you saying that you think you would have support, which is really good. But certainly in what I'm interested to find out about is more about how we support people who do choose to put themselves up as champions of equality and diversity when they don't have to, because it isn't their act, their name to job. Okay. So these are the questions that I've asked you during the session and Mary have been putting them in. So just a review of those questions that I've asked you in case anybody's just tuned in to the session and wondered how it started. And the recommendations that I'm making. And obviously this one I touched on at the beginning. Leaders of professional service areas are different from academic leaders. I think we should gather more data to understand this group of people as distinct from other groups of people because I think they are very interesting and other people might not think that, but I'm going to continue to do this and I hope that you will to think about the what data you have about the people who are digital leaders in your organization. I think that given that they come from a kind of different background area and then academics and students. They, they struggle to think about what the EDI values, particularly in relation to recruiting in the tech industry are. So where we advertise our jobs, how we describe them, whether the job titles in universities are anywhere near the same job titles as you would find in standard life in Sky Scanner and Rockstar Games and such. How would we, how do we attract people to our organization to come and be in these roles that universities have made up the title for? It's really difficult and are we paying and are we competitive in tackling the structural and contextual issues shaped by the IT industry? And these are the practical steps that I think organizations can take. So highlighting IT staff as a distinct group in organizational data reporting so that it can be tracked, evaluated and researched, including diversity leadership in programs explicitly. So you go to a diversity leadership within the organization. I think that that overlapping sector with the tech sector is really important. And I don't think that lots of people understand how important that is to recruitment into the population of people who work in university IT. Getting a better understanding of the career trajectories of IT and digital leaders. And then thinking about how we can support the digital leaders, our colleagues, our bosses, who, when we do want them to engage with equality and diversity, if they know there's a risk, we know there's a risk, we all agree there's a risk. How do we support them to address some of these power inequalities? And even though there's a clear management business case, everybody seems to agree for equality and diversity. That's a good thing to do for our organization. The reality is that the digital leaders who are delivering it risk, personal and professional risk, a lot of backlash and defensive routines by colleagues. And are we thinking about how we support those people in their jobs, in their workplace, so that senior leaders can champion this area of work in our organizations? So if you'd like any more information about that and what I've been researching, we'll see that's just a snap so I could talk for hours about this. And I'm hoping somebody will invite me to do so. But really unpicking those risks and also lots of great quotes from the people I interviewed and the different things that they suggested for IT departments in universities. I'm very happy to share that further. So that's got me coming to the end of what I had to say and I need to say thank you to those of you who put answers to the questions in chat. And I hope that that's been useful for you and maybe has made you think about the CIO and the heads of digital in your organization. And just thinking does it chime with you that they are kind of from a different background from the other academic leadership or do they seem much the same? And do they seem to want to champion equality and diversity even though so many staff in that besides a survey said that that would be important? And I know that within ALT, obviously learning technologists are much more enlightened group than general IT staff in institutions. I think we can all agree that. So it might be that our profession and our community are slightly different from what I've been talking about. But I think it's our local colleagues. And sometimes we do have to work in IT departments and understand them a bit. So I hope you think that that research is interesting to think about who are the digital leaders in your organization and what they might be interested in. I'll stop talking. Thank you very much. If you have questions, then you're very welcome to chime in. There's anything I can clarify. Thank you, Melissa, just to say thank you ever so much. That was really, really great and really thought provoking. I'd never considered all those different identities. That was so really interesting and really great to see so many people participating in the chat. So thanks everybody for that. And that's my alarm. You are absolutely spot on time. Look at that. I'm going to stop the recording now. OK, but we do just have maybe a couple of minutes. I think Melissa is still going to be here for a couple of minutes if anybody does have any questions. So I'll stop that recording now.