International Women’s Day

We had pleasure, as ever, working with the Diversity team at the University to help suggest speakers for the International Women’s Day celebrations. The University had planned to pull together a panel of speakers so we threw in some names of female alumni who we thought would be inspirational speakers. All arts grads: Rebecca Howard, Jane Nolan and Teresa Graham.  Great to see them on campus and talking in terms of how their days here shaped their future career. But also great to hear how being a women makes them different and its that difference that has driven them. I had an interesting chat with the Chair of the evening and suggested that the visibility helped. Well you are a woman, so you would appear different, particularly in male dominated settings, but how did this run parallel with the same experiences of LGB where visibility wasnt on the agenda. The answer I got was very much, we are academics, those issues are non issues. Which is fine but not all of us are academics and the whole point is, and we are going back to basics here, that visibility is required, particularly in large organisations and communities of people where it is pretty white, male, middle-aged and where the girls are just starting to peak through. I sense there is  a cautiousness out there in the upper echelons of the University and they struggle with the value of something like Mosaic even though the same struggles and values experienced by women have very clear similarities to those of the LGB and T community.  Maybe next year we could have an in conversation style event for the rainbow crowd. And why not! I could raise my fist across the dinner table and shout pinky power. That would meet one of my new year’s resolutions.