Including whom? Practices and consequences of inclusion and diversity

Kevin Shakesheff:  Well good evening everybody. Thanks so much for coming along to our most recent inaugural lecture. If you don't know me, and we've got lots of people hopefully online as well, I'm Professor Kevin Shakesheff, I’m the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at The Open University. If you've been to these events before, you'll have heard me say that they're one of our favourite events, a celebration of a career of one of our academics, should say career so far, of one of our academics, and they're a real pleasure to hear about the fantastic research that's going on. Yesterday I was reminded of the power of our inaugural lectures. We had Sir John Daniel came to visit. Sir John was the Vice-Chancellor of The Open University. I think he was the third one during the 1980’s. He now lives in Vancouver, and he joins us at nearly every inaugural lecture. I didn't know this, but he joins us nearly every time from Vancouver online. So just to say that these events reach a very wide audience, and people love to hear about what our staff have been doing. So really delighted today that we'll be hearing from Cinzia Priola on her work on inclusion, diversity and inequalities.

Before we start just some housekeeping. We're going to have our normal Question and Answer session. Be ready with questions. Cinzia and I will be over on that side of the stage for those, and then we're going to go downstairs and have some refreshments and to celebrate the inaugural. If you're on social media, please do tell people about the inaugural lecture and use the hashtag OUTalks, if you're able to, just to signal to people around the world that this event is happening.

So now to introduce our speaker tonight. Cinzia is Head of the Department of People and Organisations in our Faculty of Business and Law. She also leads the Athena Swan Charter Team for the Faculty. She's worked at The Open University since 2014 and she joined us from Aston University. She was educated in Italy, completing a taught doctorate in psychology and specialising in work and organisational psychology, and then moved to the UK and was awarded a PhD in management in 2001. I won't say too much about her work, because I think we'll hear plenty about it in her presentation. So on that note, it gives me huge pleasure to welcome Cinzia to the stage to give her inaugural address. Thank you.

Cinzia Priola:  Thank you Kevin for this introduction and hello everybody. I was fearful to speak to an empty lecture theatre, this is not the case. I know lots of people are also watching from home and thank you to everyone. I hope that by sharing my research, I can give you something back for the time that you're taking to come to Milton Keynes especially. I also want to thank the people I work with during the years, in particular my co-researcher and co-writers, and this includes my PhD students. The ideas, the study I’m going to share with you today, are very much the results of a collaboration with all the people I work with. I also want to thank my colleagues at the Department of People and Organisation, my colleagues in the Faculty of Business and Law. As well as celebrating my professorship, which was awarded two and a half years ago now, I'd like to celebrate my 10th anniversary at the OU. As Kevin said, I joined exactly 10 years ago. Finally, I want to thank my family who have joined me this evening here. I don't think I've ever had your attention for such a long uninterrupted time. So I've got to thank the OU, they make my kids sit down and listen to me for one hour.

So what I'm going to speak about today is actually first, as the title of my presentation, I'm going to talk about inclusion at work. I'm going to explain how I see inclusion connected to issues that take place beyond the boundaries of organisations, societal issues, political issues. But I will start by providing some definitions of EDI - JEDI, before moving to trace what has been the development of my career.

So I will start with our focus on three studies, start really from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and one a bit closer and considering how my interest in gender, women's career, gender discrimination, has evolved into interest more on inclusion. I will then discuss, as I said, how we need to look at workplace issues as embedded in sociopolitical environment. Then this will be followed by 15 minutes in which I will try to answer any questions you might have.

So let's now look at the meaning of EDI. You all know EDI means equality or equity, diversity and inclusion. JEDI is a term which is less used in the UK, but becoming more and more popular in the US and the J stands for justice. So when we refer to equity, we recognise that people have different circumstances, and therefore there is a need to overcome the structural issues that prevent them from achieving as much as other people and from achieving their aim. So the focus on equity means to provide opportunity and resources that everyone needs to achieve the same outcome regardless of their circumstances. So when we talk about equity, for example, we need to think why women or disabled people or a transgender person takes longer to get promoted at work, for example. Therefore once we look at the why there needs to be a commitment to addressing those issues that prevent it in this group or other marginalised groups from having, in this case, a similar career path, for example, to white men. This is different from equality, which is the term that we tend to use in EDI. Equality refers to equality of opportunities, equality to access and resources. But everybody is treated the same, and they are protected from being discriminated against, but there is not necessarily that attempt to levelling the playing field as when we focus on equity. The D for diversity refers to differences, including differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, age and so on, and an approach-base on diversity focuses on statistics.

As we know, HR departments in organisations collect the statistics, they can monitor the statistics, but having a diverse workforce doesn't mean that people feel included. Therefore there needs to be action to include people from a variety of backgrounds, include them in governance and decision-making. I'll say a bit more obviously later about this.

This leads me to inclusion. Inclusion refers to individual and group experiences within the workplace and in society, and the extent to which they feel accepted for who they are, valued and able to influence action and processes. So inclusion has two dimensions, the individual and the group dimension. At the individual level it’s about the feeling of belonging, about being accepted, respected for one’s identity, while the group level is about marginalised groups, or traditional marginalised groups, having decision-making power, the power to affect not only the establishment of organisational norms and rules. I think it's not just the power to make decisions, but also the power to influence organisational norms and rules. So inclusion is about readdressing that power knowledge balance. This is an hegemonic group, a dominant group, making the decisions. An organisation cannot assume to be inclusive on the basis of representation of certain categories in their hierarchy. Inclusion is not about EDI policies. Policies might be about diversity or equal opportunities, but it's about translating that policy, and it's about the practices, the cultures, the deeply ingrained ways of learning and changing. There is no learning without changing, and no changing without learning that the organisation needs to do. So it's about feelings, we said at an individual level and emotions, and it is about a balance that can be lost. We need to be careful because this balance can be lost easily.

Therefore we need to work all the time. Inclusion is a life choice and is a collective commitment to question these deeply in-seated assumptions and organisational norms. Inclusion at the level of society, you can't have real inclusion without justice. Justice is about a commitment to address historical wrongs and those structures that result in oppression for certain groups. Reparation, particularly at a social level, is the act of providing material benefit in order to achieve justice.

I said that in this lecture I'm tracing the development of my career and how the focus in my research shifted from understanding gender relations to inclusion. I'm not saying that I forgot about the gender relations, they still remain a core part of my research, but sometimes it's easier to understand something you are familiar with. Following my PhD I moved research area, and I moved to an area I was interested in, which was gender. I focussed on two research projects, on the gender of academia and higher education management. These are two old studies that I'm presenting. Some things have changed, but I will also say what has not changed and why it is important to look at inclusion.

So I want to give a little bit of background of academia. We all work in academia, or lots of us work in academia. Academia is highly institutionalised. It is characterised by traditional, hierarchical and selected culture that provides opportunity for differentiation at all levels, students, staff, academic staff, professional staff, and this tends to produce and exacerbate certain inequalities. They are difficult to eliminate. The dominant culture of academia is founded on set values that are based on white masculinities. I'm not going to say much about this because I'm going to say a bit more later, but we tend not to see these values because they are part of the work we do day in and day out. But it's much like the knowledge we produce in academia. It has traditionally been, and the picture it says, is academia in Athens and those two are the founders of academia, Aristotle and Plato, two men, so it’s the tradition. Women could not go to university so the knowledge is traditionally produced by men, for men, and then for women. If we think about even now, the academic staff are 50% of the university. Often still the references that we use in our research are more men and in management and organisation studies particularly the examples we provide are still all about men managers or not all, but it's still predominantly about men. But it's not only management and organisation study. If you think about medicine, I was thinking about my friends here, medical knowledge has developed by studying men’s bodies, because they are more stable, because they are not susceptible to hormonal changes, and also because the students that attended medical schools they were mostly men. Therefore we know much less about conditions that are women's only conditions, certain gynaecological conditions, we are still learning much more. Heart attacks, they've got different symptoms for women, and we still look at those men's symptoms. So the knowledge we produce, we just assume, it is the way things are. They remain masculine.

So I mentioned two studies. I want to give very briefly an outline of the first. I did this study because I was interested in this faculty within a university. It was a traditional masculine faculty but was fully managed by women. The Dean, the Associate Deans, the Heads of Department, I think except one, they were all women. So I conducted some interviews with all the faculty executive and a range of staff. What I found is that women managers they were numerically dominant, but they connected with the culture of the workplace and the symbolism and the gender relations in ways that were ambiguous and contradictory. Their style was more approachable. They were more inclusive. They tended to encourage their team more, but they never challenged the masculine culture which was based on self-orientation, competitiveness, self-promotion which is quite big in academia, autocratic styles. If we think about it these also are the values that in most organisations we are expected to show, to demonstrate, if we want to progress with our careers. So these women had more fluid managerial styles and the focus, for example, of improving qualities in caring, but they are very separated, their private life, they never show their weaknesses. They never talked about whether they had a family or not in order to protect themselves also from the constant, and I had witnessed that, from the constant remarks about “Are you going home to make tea for your kids?”, you know, because the meeting is finishing. The culture, despite the dominance of women, remained. There is a huge body of women in management. I've done other research after this in other sectors, with my colleague, Matthew Branagh from Newcastle University, Sylvia De Simone from the University of Cagliari.  A lot has changed in this time, as I said, it's been 20 years. In particular with COVID when the people and the pets of our home have become part of our work, so we don't tend to do a separation as much. But for me, what hasn't changed is the structures that regulate the way in which organisations function, they remain the same. The access to certain people-centred groups that have the knowledge and power remains limited.

So another example that I want to use today is a second study. They are conducted with my colleague, Liz Parsons from Liverpool University. What we did, we looked at feminist academics. They were working from the inside trying to change the organisation at their universities. So we did an interview-based study, it wasn't a huge study. They worked across Europe in business schools. They were what Meyerson, or we could consider what Meyerson considered as ‘tempered radicals’. So individuals who identify with their organisation, they are committed to their organisation, but they also identify with an ideology that sometimes is at odds with their organisation. So what we found is that actually these women had a range of change strategies they implemented, formal and informal, but this work tended to be contextualised. There were more bottom-up perspectives on change. Sometimes they were mundane. Sometimes they affected a few people. They were micro-changes. Examples were where they were teaching gender, putting gender in all the modules they did, or make sure that every meeting they attended, they raised the issue when some issues were gendered. They ensured that, for example, selection committees were representative. Some others had bigger projects, funded projects that tried to address wider issues, but still within their organisation. So as I said these changes were counted as more totalising approaches or micro-changes but again they didn't affect the structures.

So my learning from this early research is that changes that the women managers in the first were sort of internal activists, we can say, in the second they tried to implement focus on visibility and representation. So more women, more people of colour, more LGBTQI people, more disabled people we have in senior roles, therefore, the more they are visible then the more their voices are represented. Then we can say more inclusive the organisation is. But this is something I really started to question, because the first university I studied, the first faculty, when those women left they were replaced by men. Then the changes they implemented, they were really related to their managerial style and their vision, and therefore they were lost. Some of the projects that those women implemented, the activist women across Europe, when the funding run out, back not to square one but to square two. So what we found is that the equality advancement, in terms of visibility and representation of a marginalised group, they are more volatile, and rarely they are enduring. I'm talking about 20 years of my life, but you can consider much shorter than that. Therefore, for example, when it's in another commercial organisation, when a CEO leaves or when the new management team is appointed, there are new priorities, and therefore those EDI priorities or JEDI priorities change, or might change.

So how can we have a more enduring, inclusive workplace? With this question I planned, I suppose I affected this study now in my talk, a study focusing on organisations that were actually inclusive, so trying to explore meaning of inclusions in the practices of people and then in the processes as well of organisations. So I worked with three Italian colleagues, Diego Lasio, Silvia DeSimone and Francesco Serri from the University of Cagliari and we studied social firms. They were organisations which employed disadvantaged people. These people were former convicts, people that had been through their mental health systems, former drug addicts and so on. Their objective was to sustain their work and social inclusion. So their reason to exist in their organisation was to support inclusion. So we developed some questions, you can call them research questions, but our questions were really, ’What processes and practices do these organisations have in place to support inclusion?’ We wanted to understand that, but also, ‘How do they include a category of employees who are not in those disadvantaged categories, but have been traditionally discriminated against at work?’ That's the reason we focused on LGBTQ+ people. We conducted what could be defined as genealogy. Genealogy is the term that Foucault used to refer to embedding the study within society. So we basically intercepted the analysis of organisational processes with the analysis of the historical development of the national culture, the socio-discourses that relate in this case to different sexualities. So we charted different ways that influence contemporary culture. In Italy we still found fascism and Catholicism to be very much a great impact. So the way in which people related to a diverse range of sexuality was very much impacted by the society, by the national culture and social discourses.

So our study revealed that inclusion is actually a fragile and sometimes contradictory concept. Efforts to include are often grounded on normative principles. Normativity is that phenomenon according to which some behaviours and values that are viewed good, desirable or permissible become the standard, the norm, that's normativity, against which other behaviours are bad, undesirable, they are impermissible or deviant. So a normative behaviour guides people’s action and what they are expected to do. We can think about this when we join a new organisation, even some behaviours that were encouraged in a previous organisation, you might realise that people frown upon when you do something in a new organisation, and that is because we tend to be socialised according to the norms of the organisation. So normativity moderates different modalities of inclusion, and also recreates hierarchies within the marginalised group. So in our study, there are LGBTQI+ people but this was also found by my PhD students. In a similar process they studied disabled people in an organisation that employed many disabled people. Gemma Bend found that when disabled people behaved, and for our study, LGBTQ+ workers, behaved in a way that did not deviate too much from the norms, the normative action, they are included to a much greater extent than those that are, using the words of one of our participants, that “flaunt their diversity”. So who flaunted their diversity? In our study there were the gay men, they were too feminine. The lesbian women, they were too butch. With one transgender woman, she was too visibly transgender. Again, in the study of Gemma Bend in her PhD, we also published a paper on it, the disabled worker that was too noisy in his vocal tic was slowly isolated and ultimately was dismissed because it disrupted the whole shop floor. So although I'm simplifying here the findings of my studies, I'm not engaging in any theoretical explanation. What I'm trying to say is inclusion is nuanced. It is not an either/or process. It is people can be included in some things and excluded in others and can be included a little bit or a bit more. Also I think what we need to think about is we need to look more intersectionally.

So we need to look at how the combination of identity categories produce oppression. Intersectionality in fact is exactly the cumulative process in which multiple identities produce a compounded discrimination. So there's intersectional race, gender, class, or other dimensions When they are together they heightened their experiences of discrimination and oppression. Intersectionality is a term that was introduced by Kimberly Crenshaw when she discussed how African-American women were subjected to multiple and aligned forms of oppression, and these were related to patriarchy because of their gender, race and class system. They didn't fit. They were not comparable to white women. They were not comparable to black men. There was no terminology to explain this up to then. So my argument is that also to understand exclusion and discrimination, we need to understand the power of inequalities that is sustained really by our society. Our society, our culture is grounded on Eurocentric and white hegemony dominance. I say Eurocentric because if you think about even in the US it is Eurocentric values that are predominant. This remains embedded in our socioeconomic system. I'm saying here in very simple terms, my academic colleagues will pull their hair, but really what has driven the historical segregation of women to the home, the slavery and oppression of people of colour is the production of capital. This is really in very crude terms, but capitalism, as we know, but since the 16^th century, obviously wasn't invented in the 16^th century, needed women to do the reproductive work, to sustain and reproduce life in the home. Needed so the men could produce more and then nations needed free or cheap labour, and that's when they went to Africa to get it free. This is how really gender and racial hierarchies have emerged, and this is actually also how they continue to be sustained. Women today, even if most work outside of the house, we still have to bear the burden of reproductive labour. If you think about minoritised ethnic groups, they still dominate what is considered ‘dirty work’, so elderly care, agricultural labouring, cleaning jobs and so on. So this hierarchical, racial and gender hierarchies continues to sustain, and that's what we need to look at in society.

Obviously with the expansion of capitalism, as I said since the 16^th century, in more recent years this has run parallel to Neoliberalism. Again, in simple terms, the reduction of state intervention and the regulation of markets. This emerged first in the US and then moved to the UK and slowly trickled into Europe and many other countries. So when we think about the values of Neoliberalism, we know the centre on supporting the higher middle class to achieve wealth, to help professionals to climb the corporate ladder or to succeed in enterprise, and these are grounded on freedom of choice, competition and conformity. We mentioned this about normativity as well, but the beneficiaries of Neoliberal policies, who are they? They are those that are culturally, socially and economically advantaged, but also because they've been socialised into those values, competitiveness, individualism, self-promotion. Those that don't fit with this rule often are left out and excluded. If you think about these they are pretty similar to the masculine values that I mentioned before. So who are socialised into these values? From school competitiveness, for example, more boys than girls and therefore men, working class often is left out. So what we found is, I would suggest that those who are socialised into this rule or values can progress in a capitalist society. The others, who are not socialised into these values are often left out and excluded. As I said, other cultures, ethnic minorities, women, they are not socialised to be self-promoting or competitive. Not necessarily, I'm not saying that everyone is the same, I'm talking about tendencies.

My question then is, is there hope for organisational inclusion operating under capitalism and neoliberalism? It is here. I don't think we can get away, certainly not in my lifetime. So I would say ideologically, yes. In practice, I don't think we can get to full inclusion, but we can make every effort that we possibly can to counteract the forces that create these hierarchies within social groups. Doing inclusion at work is very much as doing inclusion outside of work. This is because inclusion is about ideology, is about a belief, is about a personal commitment. It's about knowledge. We need to get close to the struggle. We need to understand. We need to get close to the people who struggle to understand what type of struggles they experience. We get to know them. Then we need to work together, to act together and then action. These three processes, ideology, knowledge and action, they are not separate processes. It is what Paulo Freire, a Brazilian scholar, refers to as ‘praxis’, which is a form of knowing based on action, and this is what makes the difference. So an organisational inclusive praxis would require a commitment to transform the power relations, so the norms, the rules and the assumption can be routinely questioned. It's very difficult. I'm not saying that it's easy to do, but if we want inclusive learning and therefore change towards inclusion, we need to embed a routine and systematic questioning and reflection on the decisions and the reasons for the decision embedded into the decision-making, so that who can influence organisation process is not just a privileged few. This is, as I've said, is not easy, but with a commitment to a politics of transformation, organisations with time and practice can become more inclusive. Sara Ahmed said in relation to feminism, that ‘the politics of transformation is not a programme of action that can be separated for the way in which we live in the world we're in’. Similarly Arendt reminds us that ‘equality politics is about the obligation to the unchosen few’.

How can we establish more inclusive organisations? How can we establish an inclusive praxis. In order to do this we need to act at the three levels, institutional structural level, the level of the organisation processes and policies, and the level of individual and small group. So institutions, if we work only at the organisation level, we cannot understand what are the implicit and explicit assumptions that guide the development of that culture of those decisions. So we need to act at the institutional or structural level, which is, why are we making this decision? What are the deeply seated assumptions we're reproducing with our decisions. At the level of organisation we think we need to mobilise those goals around inclusion and diversity to foster changes. They are systemic, but they're also owned by members of the organisations. We need to engage in reviewing policies and processes, not just a sort of tick, but with a commitment to understand and develop intervention and also EDI. We should not really have an EDI policy. EDI needs to run through all our policies. A commitment to inclusion means assessing all our policies and understand them and make sure that inclusion is a value that they carry through. So at the level of individuals, we need to amplify voices by establishing the mechanisms of communication so that the different voices, it doesn't have to be the voice of everyone, but the different perspectives, the different voices are feeding into the decision-making. Another point I think at the level of individuals, this is, I think, quite sort in relation to inclusion work, we need to balance the workload that is expected of minoritised individuals and the work of the majority. So when we look at the roles of EDI leads, EDI Directors, they are often held by black women. Why is that? They are close to the struggle. They know exactly what it means. But what we need to do is make sure that then they don’t do all the work. They don't need the work. The majority needs to do the work. So this is the balance that we need to do, and this is what it means, ‘getting close to the struggle’, understanding.

There is so much more I could say. I know that time is up probably, but what I want to conclude is this picture actually. I just found it quite poignant in representing inclusion as a winding journey. There is hope at the end, a pot of gold. Sometimes we don't know how to get there, but we need to work. We need to carve the path. Sometimes the path is easier. Sometimes it's less easy. Sometimes there is no path. So it's just as I said, a constant working at with a personal commitment. Thank you.

[Applause.]

Kevin:  Cinzia thank you so much for a thought-provoking inaugural. We're going to go over and take some questions.

Kevin:  Do we have any questions from the room to kick us off, we're going to go far corner at the top.

Speaker: So you mentioned that we can't easily remove the neoliberal ideologies. I'm an educator in a college, so should we, or how can I, support the young people to have these ideologies as such, like competitiveness?

Cinzia:  How to support two of them?

Speaker:  So should we support them to gain these ideologies and if so, how?

Cinzia:  Again the way I see it, it is about balance. If we don't support certain people are left behind because we live in a society that values competitiveness, so we do but what I try to do as an individual, starting I suppose, is look around you. Is your being competitive at school taking something out of somebody else, or can you work collaboratively or competitively? But also make sure that your actions are not oppressing others. Try to work with people from minoritised groups, work together, encourage. I think, you know, if you're in a school you might find that these people they've got competitive families behind them. They come to school already competitive, and some kids actually are left behind because they've not been encouraged before. So it's more how you bring the other ones and, you know, make those who are competitive realising that they need to work and their competitiveness should not be against the success of others.

Kevin:  Thank you very much. Have we got an online one?

Speaker:  So this has come in on YouTube Live from Denise James, what does full inclusion look like to you? Surely this would be about squeezing everyone eventually into a modified white male world view. Surely this would be about squeezing everyone eventually into a modified white male world view.

Cinzia:  What full inclusion looks like for me. I think socially we're at a point where it is more, more, more, more, more, so we are depleting all the resources. I don't know whether we'll get somewhere but we need to stop. We can't have, you know, as you say, a world in which we all compete. Everybody is competing. You know, everybody is equal, but it's up here. It wouldn't be feasible. Personally, full inclusion I don't think we can get there, certainly not in the world we will live in. For me, it is about a commitment to the experience of full inclusion. If everyone would be committed with the organisations they work with to ensure that people have opportunities to feed in in decision-making. Everybody has got opportunity to feed in decision-making. Everybody has got opportunities to affect those rules and norms. I think that is what we can start from, considering inclusion. We get it wrong. I get it wrong all the time, even if I've got a personal commitment, you know, I get my language wrong. I get actions wrong. I'm not saying that we're all, you know, but it's just that process of learning and process of, I get the feedback, I get socialised. So full inclusion probably now it will be a utopia, but for me it is an objective to work towards.

Speaker: Thank you very much for underscoring the point that those people who are in the minority should not be the ones who are fighting on their own. So the question I have for you, and maybe an action we can ask, which led to the question which you were asked just a couple of minutes ago is, what can we ask the white male to do to help us to achieve equity?

Cinzia:  I'm not a white man so that is a bit difficult. I think the issue really is, obviously it all comes down to power. In my experience people are terrified of losing power. So often the people that hold the power feel that they might lose it if they let other views in, because the other views or the other people giving suggestions, they're undermining their own, which I don't see it in that way at all. But this is what it seemed to me, you know, ‘white men’ again, not everyone, but some white men to be like. So I think we would need to work on those three levels. Which are, you know, the three levels of what social activists work on, you know, the sort of individual level and the organisational level and then the society level. But if people don't understand the mechanism and the assumptions, where they come from, I think it's very difficult that you can reach a sort of realisation that actually power can be distributed without necessarily being lost.

Kevin:  Thank you. We've got quite a few questions. We're going to start in the middle here, and then can we get a mic right into the centre?

Speaker:  Thank you. I was actually going to ask a question which has completely mirrored that. So I'll just give a perspective as a white male, straight, now middle-aged, maybe getting older, now middle class. I go to a lot of EDI events. I see very few people like me there, and I think a lot of the language across society, but also it's a challenge in the way that we teach our curriculum as well, to turn inclusion into an opportunity and not as a fear factor. I'm going to get this quote wrong, but “People with privilege often see inclusion as oppression”, because it's a fear of losing the things that they already have. So it's a case of trying to build up and celebrate diversity and not just keep talking back about the oppression and about the hardship, but we need to turn it around into talking about opportunity and a better world that comes from that. Thank you.

Viola:  Thank you very much for this inspiring talk. We definitely need more inclusion and thank you for carving pathways for us to think about it. So I was particularly taken by a range of research settings that were available or accessible to you throughout your career. As you said, some of them were more diverse and some of them were less diverse. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the types of resistance in say less diverse, as opposed to the one that is a more diverse organisation. So were there overlaps in how they resist equality or inclusion initiatives, or if you could give us any kind of insight in the types of resistance present in both, that would be great. Thank you.

Cinzia:  If I think of the studies that I referred to today, so the organisations they were social firms so they were very much diverse. The type of resistance. It was really about what I mentioned when it's just too much. So people were put into a place when they were overly diverse, when they were too diverse. We accept it up to a point and I think we can celebrate. We are inclusive, but give us time because, and you know, if I think about some of the interviewees, it takes time. In the last generation we didn't see, for example, men or women kissing in the street, so give us time. It takes time for social changes. So these were the types of resistance that we saw in the study. I suppose probably if I think about my experience as well, I think this is what working in academia this is what I noticed as well. As I said I've been working for over 20 years. So you see things change, and they are changing, but they are changing slowly and they are changing up to a point. I think the structure is the hardest to be affected.

Kevin:  Thank you.

Speaker:  Thank you, a really thought-provoking presentation, and it's interesting to see that actually it does overlap a fair amount with work that I'm doing. That's why probably my question grabs back on my own work as well. But if you talk about lack of inclusion, is the lack of inclusion driven by a lack of perceived legitimacy of the people that we're talking about that are excluded, or is it driven by fear and insecurity for those who exclude, because if you look deeper into the drivers of those reasons for exclusion, the remedies for it will be very different.

Cinzia:  I think it's both though.  I think it's both. The lack of legitimacy goes back to the way in which we are socialised. It's not that you're not given legitimacy because you are socialised into a way that you're not taking that legitimacy, and that is what you talk about the fear of losing power, is that you have taken the legitimacy because you've been socialised in being competitive, you’ve got a place in society. Your parents had a place in society, or you have place because of your, I don't know your personal achievements sometimes. So yeah, it's certainly a combination of both, the way I see it.

Kevin: We're going to go online. Can we just get a mic back down here?

Speaker:  Thank you. There are lots of questions online so I'm going to roll a few of them together. There are mentions of magic wands, of bridging the gap between ideas and genuine action, and a call for concrete action that organisations can take, simple actions that organisations can take to bridge that gap. Are there any that you could suggest?

Cinzia:  Yeah, I think obviously I was at the end of the presentation, and I sort of gave you an example quite briefly, but certainly. For example, large organisations they all have to report their diversity. They have to report their gender gaps. They’ve got to report an ethnicity gap. Those could be interpreted as tick box exercises, or they could be interpreted as a way to actually do something about it. We look at our stats and then, are we having these people included. As I said things are changing so representation is getting better in organisations. We've certainly got more women. Black women probably are at the bottom, with disabled people. Black men are a step behind women. So we are getting to representation. But are those people actually and that is, how can we ensure in organisation terms of what we do? How can we ensure that their views are actually affecting the organisational norms because that is crucial. The structure of an organisation is founded on rules and norms. So those norms, who is deciding those norms ultimately. If we've got a mechanism for ensuring that those norms reflect the views of a range of people, I think that's another way. There are, as I said, we do accreditations in universities. Now diversity and equality is looked at by most accreditation bodies. So we've got something there that we can use then to ensure that the view of people, as I said, let's look at our policies. In the OU we've got I don't know how many 100 policies, loads apparently, but you know, let's streamline for a start. But then let's look at where is inclusion in those policies, let's cut it through as an organisation of value and then talk to people. Do you feel included or are we actually paying lip service?

Kevin: Do we have another hand over there straight at the front here.

Jo:  Thank you. That was brilliant. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Agreed with every word, nodding along like an idiot. So I was thinking about the institutional or structural or social level where these changes have to happen, and full disclosure, I held my nose and voted for Labour earlier this year even though they’re certainly not my Labour party anymore. But some of the indications coming out of the first, what are we now five, six months down the line, are kind of positive-ish, an Employment Rights Bill and so on. So I’m just wondering, looking at this government, do you think that when the time comes to re-elect them in four and a half years’ time, they may have actually made a dint in some of these issues at that institutional and structural level?

Cinzia:  Oh, that's a very difficult question Jo, very difficult. I’ve got no idea. Their policies seem still very much into neoliberal values. I don't think they are certainly moving away from neoliberalism. In terms of equality, I mean, what a difficult question you ask. It's also very tricky to say certain things publicly, and everyone there on YouTube. I'm not a politician, you can see that. I don't know, no idea.

Kevin: Let's take another question at the front here. It's probably going to be the last one I think in terms of time.

Speaker:  Thank you so much Cinzia. One of the things you haven't spoken much about is the difference between representation and distribution in institutions. So, for example, 82% of veterinary surgeons are now female, but very few are partners. We know ourselves the struggle to become a professor as a female, let alone with any other intersectional attributes. So I just wanted to, because you were saying if we have representation do we have voice? What I'm trying to point out is that to have voice you have to be in a senior position, and I think that is one of the problems that we haven't addressed, and as we're sitting in a university I think it's 20% of professors are female. I just wonder how we can heal ourselves as such.

Cinzia:  I mean it's an issue and if we think about black professors in the UK, black women professors, I think there was a campaign a few years ago that they wanted to reach 100 or something like that, a very limited number. So as an organisation one thing we can do, and I suppose this is the work of Athena Swan. For those who are not familiar, Athena Swan it started as a gender validation award in STEM to encourage more women, and then it became widely about representation within the organisation. As I said before, the values we are socialised with are values that don't necessarily meet, I struggle all my life. Self-promotion for me was something that I was told ‘You do not absolutely do, you have to be humble’. Women, working class, you can't self-promote, so we're not socialised into that. Then you see people coming and pass you simply because they have told all the world that they've got two publications, and probably we've got 10, and we never said anything. I suppose at institutional level that Jo was talking about, how do we look at the mechanism at organisational level that we can overcome this difference in values. This is what really equity is. It's about trying to level the playing field so that in teaching we've got these pictures. I couldn't use it probably because we've not paid for the copyright, but we've got these pictures where, you know, the equity is represented as a person trying to look over a fence at a football match. You are just put on a higher stool, so you get something that raises you, that gives you advantage. If we think about women who still do most of the child caring, the caring of the elderly, and therefore, even in career terms, we can't necessarily compete in equal terms with men that don't necessarily, I'm not saying every man, but they don't have those responsibilities. So what do we do as an organisation that wants to be inclusive, to support the people that have got responsibilities, how can we help people to level that playing field in a range of ways? So look at the circumstances of individuals.

Kevin:  Thank you very much. We're up on time. So can I just thank everybody for a great set of questions. Thanks very much everybody on online as well.

Cinzia:  Thank you for coming and for listening.

Kevin:  In a second I’m going to ask you all to congratulate Cinzia again for an excellent inaugural but first of all, let's just say that we've got our next inaugural lecture coming up. It should be on the screen, which is Anna De Liddo, who's in our KMI Institute. So I hope you're able to join us, either in person or online for that.  But on that note we're going to go and have some refreshments but let's first of all congratulate Cinzia for a fantastic lecture.

[Applause]