 Welcome back everyone. It's that morning coffee break on the second day of the rick. It's really hard to come back in and the sun is shining out there and the daffodils are in full bloom. But I can promise you a really engaging and fascinating discussion during the next 45 minutes for this special plenary session. Special plenary session entitled Changemakers, Building a Path to Gender Equity. I'm pleased that we've instituted these special plenary sessions in the rick scheduled to highlight cross-cutting issues and special topics and I'm particularly excited to participate as a panelist in today's discussion. Gender equities essential for organizations to perform at their highest levels and nuclear safety agencies are certainly no exception. A diverse workforce enables a broad range of perspectives that contribute to enhanced decision-making and problem-solving. By not focusing efforts on gender equity, organizations will miss out on valuable viewpoints as well as let's face it just a vast pool of talent. Some of you may remember a special plenary session at the 2022 rick in which former president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and all of our good friend Ramina Velsche discussed the role of women in the nuclear safety community with the NRC's own Brooke Clark. I'm pleased to expand on those discussions today with an esteemed group of panelists from around the world who will share their personal experiences with gender equity as well as their organizations initiatives that relate to this subject. At the NRC we've been actively seeking opportunities to eliminate barriers but like most organizations we have a lot more to do. In order to remain focused on this crucial issue I'm excited to announce Andrea Cook, the deputy director for engineering in our office of nuclear reactor regulation as the NRC's new gender champion. In this role Andrea will provide executive oversight of the agency's participation in international gender related activities. She'll also serve as a focal point to advance agency efforts to improve gender equity within the NRC. Andrea brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to this role and I'm excited to see her make it her own. Andrea is taking over from Brooke Clark who is now serving as the NRC's general counsel and I'd like to thank Brooke for all of her efforts as the NRC's gender champion. Brooke you've been a great asset to the NRC's initiatives in this area and I know you'll continue to be a strong supporter. Now as one of Andrea's very first duties as the agency's gender champion is to join me up on stage for this plenary session. She's graciously agreed to serve as a moderator so that I can join our panelists and without further delay Andrea the floor is yours. Thank you Chair Hanson for the introduction. I think I speak for many of us in this room and outside of this room to say thank you for your leadership on gender equity issues. I'm welcoming the role that you've given me as a gender champion of the agency. I'm really looking forward to working with my counterparts across the agency across the federal government and with many of the people in this room internationally on gender equity issues. I'm really excited to be part of this panel today. I wouldn't consider myself to be one of the esteemed panelists but I'm really looking forward to hearing from our esteemed panelists because they bring such a wealth of knowledge to these issues and I think it's going to be a very engaging session. So for the audience we're going to hear from our panelists and we do have some questions for them to answer. Unfortunately given the time constraints we have for the session this morning we're not going to be able to take questions and answers from the audience but it's going to be engaging nonetheless. So without further ado let me go with introductions. First we have Ms. Annemiek Bohaus who's the chair of the authority for the nuclear safety and radiation protection in the Netherlands. She's held this position since 2020. Chair Van Bohaus is also the co-chair of the strategic working group of the International Gender Champions Impact Group on Gender Equality and Nuclear Regulatory Agencies and you know we need an acronym for every long term. So the acronym for that group is IGCIG. She brings just a wealth of experience to this role. I can speak firsthand for that just in the short interactions I've had with her through her previous work with the United Nations Drug Program and also as a strategic policy advisor to the World Health Organization. Next we have Ms. Dita Kahomo who joins us from South Africa where she serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the National Nuclear Regulator. In addition to this role she's also the chairperson of the South African Council of the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. She's an executive coach and she also is the co-chair of the IGCIG. Next on our panel we have Ms. Maria del Pilar Lucio Carrasco who's a commissioner at the Nuclear Safety Council of Spain. In her role as commissioner she actively works with public and private groups to raise awareness about knowledge on the in nuclear sector issues. She also engages those folks to make sure we're having stakeholder involvement in many of the issues that we are dealing with in the nuclear sector. Next we have Ms. Jennifer Yoll who's the vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute's Technical and Regulatory Services. Before joining NEI she was the director of the reactor safety programs at Jensen and Hughes which is a consulting company for nuclear energy where she dealt with advanced reactors, thermal hydraulics and regulatory affairs. Jennifer also previously served here at the NRC for 23 years in various positions one of those being the position that I'm currently in as the deputy office director in NRR. She was also the deputy office director in our office of nuclear regulatory research and she was the director of our office of new reactors. Finally and really needing no introduction is our own chair Hanson who's had held his position since 2021. This was following two decades of experience both the private and public sectors in nuclear energy. He is also a member of the International Gender Champions Impact Group and obviously he has spearheaded gender equity initiatives here at the NRC including appointment of my new role the gender champion. So I'm really looking forward to the panel discussion today. I think you'll find that the panelists have a wealth of broad experience in this issue so we're looking forward to hearing their perspectives and on that note let's move to our first segment which is kind of a creative segment and I'm really looking forward to this. So to kick things off we're going to allow you all to hear a little bit more about our panelists background and provide some context for the discussion. Each of our panelists has agreed to share a photo which means something to them in terms of their interest in STEM or gender equity issues and to tell a little story behind each of the photos. So I love this creative way to really break down barriers and build understanding between the panelists. So without further ado we're going to start with chair Van Bauhaus sharing her story. Thank you so much and it's really an honor and a privilege to be here on this panel and before you see the picture of the Dutch women's soccer team and actually in a match with the USA that we lost on the world champions but that's not why it's there. I know you're happy with that. We were a little less but I'm so happy to see this group. I grew up in the 60s and I love to play soccer so on the streets I played soccer with my brother and other boys and girls and then when we were 67 they all went into the soccer teams but there were no soccer teams for girls. So after a while they stopped playing with me because I liked behind and I was put on ballet class. Well if you look at me you see that my physics are a bit more meant to play soccer than ballet. So that was a bit of a mismatch. Well I choose this picture because I see a lot of similarities. Girls that have not been really geared into stem functions and then you know along the line we won't get them. So times have changed. We do have women's soccer teams. We do have more more girls into stem functions and we do have more women now into the nuclear sector but there's still a lot to be done like there is also a lot to be done on the soccer. Still also an equal pace and other things but to me this is inspirational to see these these young women playing soccer and I hope there will be in the nuclear sector as many of these kind of bright young teams. Thank you so much for sharing that. What's what's uh comes to my mind when you talk to that story is the potential to miss all of the talent. For you it was soccer for us it's nuclear energy and stem and the importance of really capturing all of that talent especially with the work ahead of us. So thank you for that. Who knows I would have been a soccer player. Could have been. And so before we move on I just I would be remiss if I'd say you know the United States is looking forward to a rematch by Tom during the Olympics. Okay I think we should probably move on. So I think we'll move on to miss Kohomo for her story. Well thank you very much. Good morning everybody and thank you Cha Hansen for the invitation to be part of this group. So my story the picture that you have on the board is is a stock picture from the internet because I couldn't find the picture of my childhood doctor. So I grew up in rural in a rural village in South Africa and the only doctor within a radius of almost 80 kilometers was a man called Dr. Jerry Mamabolo. So he was our family um doctor and the the professionals that I grew up with. In my primary school years I would see teachers. My mom and my aunt were primary school teachers. I would see nurses, policemen and Dr. Mamabolo when I was sick. So the visits to his rooms left me fascinated because he always wore his coat white coat and he had his stethoscope on and I looked at this man I said I want to be like him when I grow up. So in my primary school years he would ask me what I want to be and I said to him I want to be a doctor. In my mind I thought so his rooms were like 10 kilometers from my village and I thought I am going to be him in my village so I'm going to be the doctor in my village. So I said to him I want to be a doctor and throughout my primary school years all he did and commissioner capital you'll be happy to hear this because this is a story of inspiration fascination and just encouragement. So what he did was he encouraged me to just do well because of course in primary school you don't pick what you study so he said to me do well and as I went into high school during the visits to his rooms he then asked me which school I wanted to go study at when I mean high when I when I go to high school and I said I don't know this was the later years of the primary school and he said to me I need to go to a specific school that was two villages away from where I lived because it was the best school for mathematics physical science and biology so he said if you want to become a doctor you have to go to that school so do well and get into this high school so I passed my primary school and what happened high school of course I went to my Hawaii high school this is the school that my doctor recommended of I went to my Hawaii high school I studied mathematics physics biology all the wonderful things in stem and the rest is history I ended up in university I studied chemistry and as fate would have it I got a sponsorship from the atomic energy corporation to go and complete my university education and I have worked in the nuclear sector since thank you what an inspiring story about how people individuals can inspire other people I love that thank you for sharing that okay let's move on to Commissioner Lucio did you want to share your story well first of all I I really want to to be grateful with you for having invited me I'm very honored to be here and to talk about an issue that is quite relevant in my professional life along my professional life and I'm still trying to to approach to this job as a commissioner now so if you see the picture I choose I'll say that once upon a time those girls and most of the women in here were like those girls in the in the audience and little girls plenty of curiosity plenty of interested in technical issues and now most of you have has become a successful professionals doing the job to dream of since you were very young I feel proud as a women to be surrounded for so many talented women I honestly feel admired by all of you but I have to tell you something my message today is not for you my message is for all the other girls like these ones that once in their early life dream about building sophisticated machines like a reactor for example but in their way to get there they just gave up why did it happen since I started working as a regulator for nuclear safety and radiation protection many questions like this one have arrived to myself related to the lack of women in a stem the lack of women in nuclear sector as a sociologist I'm very interested in knowing the deepest roots of social issues so I have analyzed several hypotheses to reasonably understand why there is an imbalance between men and women in the nuclear field I've been searching about substantial differences in brain structure between girls and boys on how they approach to maths or physics but I couldn't find any remarkable reason to explain this gap so far nothing to do with biological reasons another hypothesis are related with the influence of gender stereotypes in the decision of choosing a stem career in here I've found much more studies which clear conclusions one of the most interesting ones I've read is a report published in science journal in 2017 titled gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children's interest so I began to pull the thread the research was done among children aged between six and seven the age you began to play soccer uh to stop playing soccer more or less like the girls you can see at the picture one of the main findings is that girls are less likely than boys to believe them that members of their gender are really smart and at this age they begin to avoid activities that they believe are only for what the children call really smart people of course the report is playing that this self-perception is far away from the real cognitive abilities girls actually have another study from sade school in Spain has shown that girls feel a 50 percent more stressed than boys when they make math tests they also manifest a lower confidence in their mathematical abilities so less than 20 percent of the girls that are more intelligent have the self-perception that they are really good compared to 40 percent of the boys who think they are very good it is important to recall as well that gender bias appears in competitive contexts where generally women feel feel less interested in another paper of 2020 assumes that the stereotypes may influence women decision to choose system studies it's been demonstrated that in countries with weaker gender stereotypes such as northern european countries there are less differences in the marks in math between girls and boys so these girls you can see on the picture are exactly at the age in which educational policies should intervene to break the barriers that can discourage girls to follow stem study studies we all can do many things to attract women to the nuclear field but still there is a huge work to do in education of fighting against stereotypes that are still rooted in our social mindset so to conclude my explanation of the picture i'll say it is on us for these girls to be or not to be sitting among us in the future that's my great inspiration to keep working on this topic very powerful thank you for sharing the i think those stereotypes carry through into adulthood and even as we enter into into stem field so it's really important um we'll move on to dr yule did you want to share your story oh yeah absolutely thank you very much i appreciate being asked to speak on this panel and i really resonate with all of the points that have been made here especially with the commissioner and her discussion about early education and getting away from pushing girls into jobs that or into activities that are more for girls versus boys and it starts very early um now thankfully i when i grew up my parents uh didn't really care if i was playing with barbies and i did um or playing with lincoln logs or legos and in fact my favorite activities were lincoln logs and legos and so i picture on the screen is from a recent bring your child to workday at nei and we asked the children to build a nuclear power plant out of legos and this is what they came up with and i thought it was you know pretty good pretty innovative there too bad we can't build them as quickly as we have a long way to go before we get there ready to license that yeah yeah right so uh but at any rate um at nei we really have bought into this concept of diversity equity and inclusion and playing our role in expanding the workforce so we are trying to work with legos to generate a nuclear power plant specific lego kit um so maybe next year we'll be able to display it here at the rick but i do think that engaging early with children so that we don't bring perhaps our own unconscious biases to to them when they're younger and it prevents perhaps girls from continuing into the the education necessary for an engineering discipline and in fact um looking back at some studies so i probably read some of the similar studies just in english not spanish and there was a discussion about when women apply for jobs ads was brought across all different technical areas and women will only apply to jobs if they are 100 qualified now you compare that to men who will apply to jobs when they're 50 percent qualified and again this was an objective study uh with no real purpose in mind out of a university um so you know we've got to ask ourselves what is causing this why are we selecting ourselves out as a gender and i do believe that the early interaction with children will make a difference um hopefully uh like i said we'll see a nuclear power plant lego kit next year um but we know why do we why do we need this why do we need women to go into nuclear well the future of the industry depends on it um the demanding or the demand for energy has never been greater and specifically the demand for carbon-free clean reliable energy is skyrocketing if we are going to be growing the role of nuclear power in the world's energy mix we need to grow our workforce and we cannot select out 50 percent of the population so this is what motivates us and we have a number of activities underway coordinated with the entire industry who believes in outreach to underrepresented groups and uh starting with women and other minorities in the engine engineering fields is the best place to start thanks thanks i really appreciate that and it seems like a maybe a common thread between all the stories is the issue you brought up about unconscious bias and um you know we don't realize sometimes it's implicit it's not it's not direct we just assume things are the way they are without thinking through what the implications of that so i really appreciated that and i'm looking forward to the nuclear reactor lego set maybe we can gain some safety insights from it here at the nrc i don't know maybe that would be innovative anyway so let's move on to uh chair hanson and his story oh thanks andrea and thank all of you for uh being here on this panel it's a it's a real pleasure and privilege to meet to be with you so um this picture uh i actually have no idea when this picture was taken this is a picture of me and senator diane feinstein it could have been any one of dozens of moments well i worked for her for six years in the in the senate and she was a she passed away last year last fall and and she was really a remarkable human being in so many ways she had of course as you might expect of a pioneering woman she had a lot of firsts right the first president of the board of supervisors for the city of san francisco the first mayor of san francisco the first woman elected senator in the state of california um and and as you might imagine also face obstacles right there was an attempted bombing at her house in 1976 in san francisco among other significant obstacles but it was really her um courage that i admired the most um she took a number of um principled and i think courageous stances on a number of really tough issues and whether that was when she was mayor of san francisco during the aids crisis in the 80s or right up until her time in the senate in 2014 with the with the torture report the cia torture report at that time which was when i just started to work for her and i i guess i wanted to display this this picture because with all of that accomplishment and she was a strong advocate for women if you were in the room with her she gravitated towards the women in the room i was in this meeting once where um there happened to be a member of the armed forces sitting along the back wall and of course she was surrounded by all the brass and they were all men and that was she was not interested right it was the it was the woman sitting against the wall and she said well what's your story well i'm a i'm a b-21 bomber pilot oh you know and that was a whole separate separate conversation but for me as much as she was a role model for women i think she should also be seen as a role model for men she should be a role model for everyone because that notion of role models isn't a gendered concept right and the things that that she did in the issues that she took on really tough um thorny issues of direct relevance to society and she always had this she had this litmus test for us that was always well how does when we would go to her and talk about what it was we were doing and the um uh among all of the other tough questions that she asked us and and she didn't take anything uh um uh for granted there was no uh um you know there was you did not walk in there with any of that regular assurance of a of a you know that that is often uh so typical of of of white men right uh she would have none of it she could not least of all she could smell fear but she would always ask us well how does this impact the the single mother in the central valley of california which was actually a really hard question for me given that i had a lot of like national security and research and development items in my portfolio that i had to go and talk to her about but i had to i had to have an answer to that question because that was that was the way she um that was the way she operated that was she wanted to know down at the local level what were the impacts of the decisions that we were making and again that's still uh there's just for me there's a lot to admire there and emulate and um consider when i'm faced with tough choices today again that notion of role model isn't a it's not a um she wasn't a role model just for women she's a role model for everybody so really appreciate that and um the idea of a of a role model and i love what you said about being a role model for men and women and i think both men and women can be role models and i think we'll get to the issue of allyship a little bit later but that that concept plays into that um as well so thank you for thank you all for sharing your stories and giving us a little insight into your background i think that really sets us up nicely for the really interesting part of this which is the q&a session so i'm looking forward to that um the next session um so let's move right into q's and a's um i'm going to start with a question that i think is at the top of everybody in this room's mind um we've talked about it already at the conference over the last couple days and that's the issue of workforce recruitment and retention um let me just set this up a little bit a recent international survey showed that women make up about 25 percent of the nuclear workforce with an imbalance between the number of women in scientific and technical positions and other functions clearly this shows that more is needed to encourage more women to enter the nuclear workforce and then remove barriers to their advancement so the question for our panelists is what progress have we made in closing this gap and what more is needed to build a strong pipeline of women entering the nuclear sector um so this one i'm going to start off with dr yule um given her role in promoting the use of nuclear energy and to get her thoughts okay well thank you and in fact we think in the united states the women are making up uh roughly 20 percent of the workforce for a nuclear power now uh as i said but or i alluded to earlier there are so many great attributes about nuclear power pretty much anybody you talk to is going to be interested in some way certainly there's a set of the population that don't trust nuclear power and i understand that but for the majority of people those that are interested in clean air they're interested in nuclear power those that are interested in carbon reduction and climate change they have interest in nuclear power those that worry about energy reliability absolutely we have the over 90 capacity factor for over the last 20 years the list goes on and on national security depends on energy security and nuclear plays an important role there as well no matter who you talk to they can be brought in to understand the benefits of nuclear power so we need to reach out to everyone doesn't matter their race their color their gender their age whether they have disabilities we need everybody to join the or anybody interested in nuclear power to one understand its benefits and secondly consider joining the workforce because as i alluded to before the expansion that we are expecting across the world is significant at NEI we developed a work strategic workforce plan that nrc has had in the past this is a little different it focuses on awareness to the public about about nuclear energy about the great jobs that the that the industry can provide and it also in starts engaging with some of the underrepresented groups the pipelines that we need to build it also looks at training qualifications because people at this age they don't want to take three years to be qualified to do a job they wanted after they graduate from college or a trade school they want to be qualified quickly and we can do that now with the innovations that have been made in training qualification so all of this is going to help us in the future i can see change already in fact when we look at the statistics in the united states those that are recently hired women are about 30 percent but we need to do more obviously so the entire industry is behind the activities in this strategic workforce development activities and it all depends on reaching out to people early in their in their education and it coordinates with an s activities with the center for energy workforce diversity as part of the Edison electric institute we're making connections reinvigorating connections with the navy and the military again it's across the board approach to attract more people to nuclear power and it's absolutely vital to reach out to those underrepresented groups thanks for those insights i appreciate that i'm gonna move on to the next question building on this discussion a little bit another commonly identified barrier to recruitment and retention which we just talked about is a perception that work in the nuclear sector is incompatible with family life we all just live through covid we know that that has increased the work the use of telework in many agencies that which does help to provide some flexibilities the question though is what do you all think is needed to more support balance between work and personal responsibilities and do you see any barriers that remote work is actually created for women in the nuclear sector so for this one i'm going to start off with miss kohomo well andrea thanks for for that question and what i think we need to do in order to to support the balance between work and personal responsibilities and i think it starts off with the organizational policies that we put in place but importantly it is the involvement of staff members in the creation of these policies because they are the ones that are actually affected and so it is critical that when we develop organizational policies that seek to support staff that they are directly involved in the creation of these policies and in the process we need to clearly outline the expectations because if i am going to work remotely i need to i need to know what the employer actually expects or the employer needs to be clear about what they expect from me in terms of productivity delivery reporting and importantly presence at the office because what i think contributes to the or the barrier that i have seen for progression of women since you know since we've had covet and we've had remote working policies in place is that there is now really limited um personal interaction in person it's all good and well to jump on to teams because we want to quickly discuss something what usually happens is that we go straight to the heart of the technical issue that we need to discuss so that shortly thereafter everybody can back get back to their desk and we don't catch up on life on the things that are going on with with our staff so i find that remote work has presented that barrier of we don't get to socially interact and thus i think has an impact on morale of the people and when you have new staff members that are joining the organization they actually cannot quite catch the essence of this organization from the people because everybody's working from home i cannot get this through the computer screen really you need live interactions with people so that you can develop that sense of connectedness to the people that you're working with and therefore to the organization that you are working for and so what we have done in our organization is there is an expectation that even if you are working remotely that you have to be present in the office building for certain activities one you have a predetermined interval by which you should come into the office it can be every two weeks it can be once a month but it is there and you will show up then there are certain activities that you must show up for there are some team meetings where teams meet in person just to maintain that sense of connectedness and then sometimes you have our expo meetings are always in person so there are certain activities that we've just determined that let's get together when we have to do these and then others is we have started some you know coffees with the CEO so twice a month I host several staff members is a group of about between eight and ten bigger than that you cannot have one conversation so we have coffees and we just sit we catch up last month I got to meet a staff member that joined the organization in January and had it not been for that little gathering it would have possibly taken me a year or 18 months to ever have a one-on-one conversation with the staff member because of where she is placed and the work that she does there's just there was just no chance of me being able to have a one-on-one conversation with her and she jokes she said to me that when the people in the laboratory she works with the head that she's going for coffee with the CEO they ask who do you know at a high levels you just got here how come you're already coffee with the CEO but that's just a sense of you can see that staff members want this interaction so it is for us to create those opportunities that are going to help them maintain contact even if they're working remotely because I think it is definitely a barrier thanks hey a lot of the challenges you talk through are not specific to women they also apply to men so that that's an interesting part of that and we're having a lot of those same discussions here in the United States so I appreciate that so let me turn to Commissioner Lucio do you see anything different from a European perspective in terms of workplace flexibilities of where you are and what more is needed and what barriers might be in place well I'll say that probably at the nuclear sector there are some barriers that happen in some other sectors too but I'll say that if we are able to build a friendly environment for women in the sector and it means that is a place where you can develop your your profession you can you can feel accepted by the whole you can get the same opportunities to improve your career this is a safe place that most women want to work in and it's quite difficult to get to that if you are just 25 percent of the of the staff that's real because it's not it's nothing that we do on purpose but the behavior is different when you feel accompanied by women and you feel that your male colleagues trust you and you feel that you are exactly the same and it is I mean most of the people take for granted that question mostly in I don't know some countries in Europe because we are supposed to be equal because we have opportunities to go to university to do but finally it doesn't happen I what I say that the beginning it's a real thing not many women getting to esteem careers because because still there are many stereotypes and probably families say okay let let how the mats go on with another thing but inside the job inside the the nuclear field it's it's it's quite important that women are a reference for the women we have to we have to congratulate our our female colleagues for having succeed in their careers we have to be role models inside our our inside the not only of course regulators but the mostly industry I think and we have to believe in that we as a women because they are colleagues I think that maybe sometimes we don't even believe ourselves when when we have to we have to be a model for for the ones so and I think that it could be a point to be self-confident and to try to to show to in our a job environment all the capacities or the ability all the abilities and all the sensibility to we we have as a women you spoke about the sense of belonging and I think that's so important it's another one of those things that it's it's implicit it's not direct and some of the things we've been talking about in terms of workplace flexibilities and unconscious bias and some of these issues they all weave into that making people all the people inclusive feel like they are part of an organization and connected that's really important so I'm going to move on now kind of moving out more to the macro level stepping back a little bit we talked about the global momentum toward nuclear energy and the importance of building a diverse capacity in that in that context I want to ask the panel if you were to choose one success that you've seen in your agency over the past one to two years to share with the audience what would that be and conversely if there's one one thing no it's that one thing you feel like we need to do to move forward on gender equity what would that be either in your organization or more broadly so for this one I'm going to turn to chair van boulehouse thank you that that one thing in the last two years I think we had a tremendous opportunity as we need to grow as an organization because of the nuclear ambition so there's really growth of 30% more or less so we really needed to rethink our hiring practices and of course it's hiring retaining and everything but I just focus on the hiring practice now so what we did is first we had to come a bit out of the shades and make our organization more known so we went on socials and we you know to create an image of an attractive organization to work for for everyone so we invested on that and then next we really changed the way we we improved really our labor mark communication so our vacancies so we changed the text to make it more inclusive and accessible in language and take out some of the qualifications we always asked for a lot and we know that women tend to only react when they you know have everything so we asked for a bit less in the text to get more people on board and it's it's not only actually not only gender we really are striving for diversity in broader sense so we did that and we also everyone involved in in hiring and in being in the interviews they went to a bias training and that was really a very important step because we all have biases and only to be aware of your biases already helps in the job interviews not to to step in those pitfalls so everyone all the team leaders everyone had to go through that training so we and we talk about it we talk about it a lot when we hire and when there are candidates so those are the things that we did in the hiring and I must say we attract more and more not only women but more diversity in in general which is good and I'll come to that later but so this is this is the part that I'm quite proud of that we made this change yeah I appreciate that we're having a lot of those same conversations in the United States let me ask Dr. Yol from an industry perspective what would be your one thing that you think is going well and one thing you think we need to do better well I mentioned our workforce strategic plan we're very proud of that it was an all industry effort and that involves collaboration with numerous groups across the industry what I what I'm most proud about it is the way we went about putting it together we looked at a lot of data and we are determined some of the contributing factors to why underrepresented groups are not coming to nuclear energy to the industry or or maybe are getting there but are leaving early just to give an example of course a lot of young people are interested in carbon reduction and wanting to make the world a better place and they are coming to the nuclear industry they're trained and and qualified over you know a probably longer period of time than they thought was necessary but then they're not staying part of the reason why they're not staying is that the innovation the rate of innovation across the industry is not as high as they would like to see it I can point to the use of digital instrumentation and control if you go into control rooms at least in the United States you know most of those operating plants have older technology so they see that that's demotivating and one of the things that we're trying to achieve is to understand the root cause or contributing factor to some of the lack of diversity in the workforce and address it so as a result we've got cause and effect so we're really pushing innovation now is that going to help well I think so we are seeing more people coming to the industry to work in areas of the use of artificial intelligence neural networks the use of drones remote sensing digital INC so we are seeing a change personally at the many working groups and advisory committees that we have at the nuclear energy institute I am seeing a much more diverse crowd when I first got to NEI there were no female CNOs chief nuclear officers now we have three is it enough absolutely not but we are making progress at the working group level which is more mid-career I was at a meeting it was about 40 percent women so and the age group is the average age is declining we're seeing more young people so as we focus on the root causes of the lack of diversity I think that's the best way forward to fix things so that we can attract train and retain people from all walks of life all right thanks for sharing that from the industry perspective and then let me just ask Chair Hanson do you see any similarities or differences between what you've heard from a European regulator or US industry perspective and where we are at the NRC yeah thanks Andrea I mean I really liked a couple of things one was drilling in on the root causes all right and I love it it's really a nuclear industry concept right contributing factors very nuclear but the other part of it too was Chair von Bullhaus's comments about having a questioning attitude about questioning ourselves right which is kind of a foundation of nuclear safety culture as well and as a nuclear concept right these are things this is a vocabulary that we already possess I think one example and we're we're looking to build on this and others that the NRC has done is in our senior executive kind of training program really that speaks to the pipeline of future leaders of the agency one of the things we did a few years ago was in the initial application stage we had we scrubbed all of the applications of identifying personal information and just looked at the content itself because we had seen a situation where a lot of the cohorts of those development programs were there were a lot of similarities of the members of that and how did we how could we again attack the root cause of that problem and increase diversity and this ended up being actually a very straightforward way of doing that and we've seen an increase I completely echoed Dr. Yule's point which was we've made progress we still have we still have a ways to go but we've seen significant progress in in the diversity at all level but particularly the gender diversity of that development program thank you for sharing that I'm going to move on to I think we have time for two more questions so I'm going to move on to our second to last question here in late 2020 the international gender champions impact group was formed as a separate of a complementary gender equality group from the IAEA and NEA efforts so I'm going to ask the co-chairs who we happen to have on this panel Ms. Mann-Bollhouse and Ms. Cajomo what are your goals for achieving the results with the IGC-IG and how do they complement the work of IAEA and NEA let me start with Mr. Mann-Bollhouse yeah well thank you so much well I think it's important to note that it's not separate because actually we have three co-chairs and the third co-chair is D.G. Grossi so there is this this constant link with the IAEA and we are also linking with NEA so the group that started there and so there is and I think it's really important that we join forces and that we don't do separate things because that would really be a pity and reinforce each other so I think that's the first thing and maybe to explain a bit what we want to do with the group and it's still in draft because we are there but I think we work on several levels and we have some goals one is within the group and that's something I would like to say to me that's very important the group itself that we make sure that there will be the chairs the highest people in the organisation and not the highest woman in the organisation because often gender issues are being seen as something that is mainly for women so you need women to do it and so one is the group and then the second thing is that everyone who is in the group they actually say well we are going to work within our organisation to improve the situation in the organisation so that's the second layer then the third layer is that you have to get involved in your own country to see what you can do in the sector to integrate that and then we also said that we will be active in our regions to reach out be ambassadors in our region to reach out and make sure that you are in panels and do things and then the last layer that we want to be active is also and that's something that D.G. Grossi also asked to reach out to other international organisations that have STEM positions like the Meteorological Institute and see how we can link with the gender groups there or to initiate so those are more or less the different levels that we are working on or we want to start working on and then of course the main issue is to really go for as much gender equality as possible and exchange our experiences and monitor what is going on but I think maybe you can add something to that D.G. Yes I can add I think there is recognition in the group that at an organisational level much of what we do is guided by national legislation and even the definition of these terms that in many ways we are guided but what happens in our individual countries but what we are trying to do at a group level is to share experiences and inspire other members of the group to learn from how those that have progressed much further on this issue how they have done it what is it that I can learn from my US colleagues what is it that I can learn from my Dutch colleagues but also what is it that I can bring and so we are trying to create mechanisms of sharing this information reporting templates that can be used to for instance share what are the our organisational positions our policy statements as it relates to gender equality so if I'm a regulator that doesn't have that in place I can already begin to get ideas of how others have done it and so as a group we hope that we will get inspiration from those that are leading in this field and also inspire other regulators that have not yet joined us to join the impact group of course and that we tackle this really challenging issue together Yeah can I just add a little thing to that again that as we said we started with not being in isolation it's it's very important to see where we can put the issue of gender into different contexts as well so actually this afternoon there is a panel on safety culture and there is such a strong link between having a good gender balance and safety culture so I'll be in that panel and then make the link again to gender so I think it's important that we don't treat gender equality equity as a separate issue but try to link it to other things and therefore see it's not only about that we need more women you need a different kind of workforce which will improve nuclear safety So I totally agree and I'll be at that panel session this afternoon I know we only have a little over a minute left but I did want to touch on one last question and Chair Van Bolhaus you already touched on this and this is the importance of allyship and your comment that that gender equity is not just a women's issue so I want to turn the last question over to Chair Hanson I think there's a recognition that many men do have a genuine desire to move us forward in this area but they're uncertain about how to engage given that dynamic what would you leave us with at the end of this panel session in terms of how men can become allies for this cause That's a great question Let me I love this point about the importance of gender equity to nuclear safety culture I think it's absolutely integral and I also link it to risk informing because as we think about how to risk inform our processes how to interpret data risk acceptance all of these things are going to require really diverse perspectives and to incorporate all of those I think it's and in order to see real change I think men have to be need to show support and they need to get actively engaged in this stuff and that's certainly why I'm here and by way of example also to say wherever they can yeah what she said what enemy said what Dita said what Pilar said what Jennifer said because the amount of wisdom and perspective and just sheer brain power on this stage is substantial and to Jennifer's earlier point the challenges in front of us are too great to leave half of the the talent on the sidelines I'm grateful at the NRC that this isn't just a priority for me it's priority for other commissioners Commissioner Caputo Commissioner Wright and others Commissioner Kroll and it's great to be part of a team that that cares so much about this issue okay well I'm not sure I could top that we are at a time so I'm going to close out this session and just say thank you sincerely to all our panelists this was a very rich discussion I think the experience is shared they're they're coming across the sector whether you're in the industry or you're a regulator you're United States, Europe we share common issues and and I'll just finish up where Dr. Yule started which is and we heard from Commissioner Kroll this morning that we're at a now or never moment with regard to moving forward on nuclear energy and and I think this issue is part of that now or never moment and so I'll just leave you with that thought as we close out I don't want to stand before everybody in lunch so hope you enjoyed the session and thank you very much for attending