Transcript

LURRAINE JONES

Hello. My name is Lurraine Jones, and I’m the Deputy Dean for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Open University. COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement continues to shine a stark light on the racial inequalities that exist through all sections of UK society. Year on year, research evidences that for certain groups of students, especially Black students, the higher education playing field is not a level one. Inequalities, such as racial harassment and stark degree-awarding gaps between Black students and their white peers, cannot be ignored.

Whether one is a staff member or a student, being included, feeling a sense of belonging and relatedness to the University is important for one’s wellbeing and feeling valued. Universities UK released a report entitled "Tackling Racial Harassment in Higher Education," which revealed that almost 25% of students from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds have experienced racial harassment. The soft employability skills that are desirable for jobs, careers, and promotion, i.e. empathy, communication, leadership, and teamwork, are developed in this course.

NATASHA DAVIES

It’s really important actually that leaders, organisations are building inclusive cultures; getting the foundations right with good policies and procedures that don’t just hit the legal minimums but actually strive for best practice; building in equality and inclusion from the very, very top within organisational strategies; making sure that somebody is championing this right at the most senior levels of the organisation, whether that’s around your senior leadership table or any boards; getting the right culture in place, so they’re making sure that policies and procedures are applied consistently; that we’ve got leaders at every level within the organization who are embracing the vision and the values in relation to equality, diversity, and inclusion. And I think, with culture, it’s really important actually that that focus doesn’t slip because it’s really easy to fall into bad habits. And then that can really shift and change the culture that you’ve actually got in place within an organisation.

SAS AMOAH

So there are five key strategic areas within LDS, my unit, Learner and Discovery Services, and those five areas align of wider Open University strategies as well. So the first key area within my department, People, Culture, and Innovation, has lots of subgroups that feed into it. And one of the ones that feed into it is EDI, and I’m the lead for the EDI team. So the team has a number of volunteers from across the unit, which is kind of really useful. But in addition to having volunteers from within the unit, we have a number of volunteers from outside the unit.

So we have representation from a number of different units and people who cut across a number of different kind of categories as well and marginalised groups. But we also have an executive champion in the group, which is really useful. So when we start proposing these ideas, the executive champion can push these forward when it comes to trying to turn them into policy as well. But we also have representation from the central EDI office as well, so that’s kind of our connection centrally. So as we develop these policies and proposals, we have a direct line to the central EDI team and they can help us shape these as we push forward.

Having a number of different volunteers from across the unit is really valuable, particularly because we have a number of people from a variety of different backgrounds, different levels of seniority, from a lot of different personal experiences as well. So what I do find is having all those people together encourages really open and honest conversations, and they’re a really easy way to identify obstacles that particular groups face. So once we’ve identified an obstacle, we do try to develop a policy that would address the particular concern that was raised.

So I know, in the past, policies that are now embedded into business as usual within the units started off in the group. So for example, we now have equality objectives embedded into CDSA, Career Development Appraisals, which is really a positive step. But also, we have ring-fenced career development budgets specifically for people from marginalised groups. So our research suggested that people from marginalised groups were much less likely to take up the training. So by ring-fencing the training development budget, we can ensure that, even if they can’t take up the training early on in the year, they have opportunities later on in the year.

NATASHA DAVIES

Obviously, training and stuff like that is going to be really important as well but not just a one-off. It’s a continued investment in development so that all staff are contributing to a more equal, equitable, and inclusive work environment. And then ultimately, it’s really important that we’re measuring what we’re doing. Have we got KPIs in place that focus on equality and diversity? Are we carrying out staff engagement surveys to actually check whether the culture we think we have is the culture that we do have? Because if we don’t measure where we are, we don’t know when to celebrate successes. We don’t know where we need to learn from mistakes, and we can’t identify areas where we can change and adapt to be even better than perhaps we’re already doing or to fix any problems that we might have.

SAS AMOAH

One of the positive impacts we think we’ve achieved from kind of developing work in this way is creating a more inclusive recruitment process. So for example, a few years ago, we did an anonymised recruitment pilot and we compared the number of staff we received from a variety of backgrounds into traditional recruitment process and when we did anonymised recruitment.

And what we actually did find is that, when we removed a lot of the identifying information, groups from particularly marginalised backgrounds almost doubled in terms of representation and being hired at the Open University. And that became a really strong evidence base for central HR, what we call "People Services," to kind reconsider their inclusive recruitment process as well. So they’ve taken on elements of what we developed and have created a anonymised recruitment process of their own.

For higher education institutions, what would be a key concern to address is the degree-awarding gap between different groups of students. I think that should definitely be a primary focus. And obviously, one of the ways you can start supporting students in that way is by creating a more inclusive curriculum. For staff, I think, if we could start to address maybe the pay gap between different ethnicities and different genders as well, I think, again, that’s a very good, concrete way of addressing issues. And I think those two key concerns are really important when it comes to higher education.

NATASHA DAVIES

I do you think the stuff that we can do as employers, yes, there’s positive action that can be done within our recruitment exercises. But there are other things that can be done around recruitment, around how we’re designing job descriptions, how we’re designing jobs. It comes back to things of like ways of working. Is home-working going to be possible for everybody? No. So we’re making sure that we’re offering different ways of working that will suit different people’s circumstances.

Working with community groups, trusted leaders within different communities because trust is a big issue as well. Particularly, for example, if we’re talking about people from ethnic minority backgrounds, racism is still rife. Discrimination is still rife. There are so many stories of bad experiences within employment, particularly within areas where perhaps there is a particularly smaller population of people from an ethnic minority background, which is why we see huge numbers of young ethnic minority people leaving south Wales, for example, to move to places like Birmingham and London because there’s a sense that that’s going to be a more welcoming and inclusive and safer environment for them.

So I think that trust piece is really important, and we can do a lot with local communities. Thinking about routes in, is there more that we can do around apprenticeships, internships to give people a hands-on opportunity to come in and find their way? And bringing that positive action measure in as well I think is a really important thing because we don’t live in a meritocracy. I wish that we did, but the reality is that sometimes we need to treat people differently in order to make sure we have fair and equitable outcomes. And until we actually get to the point where we have a level playing field, that’s going to be a requirement, I think.

DAVE SNOWDEN

I remember giving a lecture at Google once and they picked it up, which said, if you really want to recruit good coders, you could look at people with Asperger’s Syndrome. And most people who are really good at coding are really good at maths, are at that end of the scale. There’s nothing right or wrong about it. I’ve written several articles for somebody who’s a synesthesiac, so she sees text as colours. And it’s not just cognitive diversity. It’s also physical and experiential diversity.

So one of the big things that we need to start to look at, at the moment, is to realise that consciousness is not co-located with the brain. This is called "post-Cartesian understanding," and that’s the mind-body dualism. The Cartesian concept has been deeply problematical. So we know actually the body makes a lot of decisions for you. The brain only fires after you’ve made your decision, to check if the automatic response was right this time or not.

We also know from Andy Clark’s book, my work, and other people that social narrative provides a form of extended scaffolding in which your consciousness sits. Yeah? And that links in with delusion concepts, for example, of assemblages and the complexity concept of strange attractors and the narrative concept of a trope. So effectively, you’re in this highly complex ecosystem. It’s not that you get data and you look at it logically and you make a decision. Yeah?

There are affordances operated by the environment you’re in. There are assemblage structures which determine what you see or don’t see. And then you’ve got these fundamental cognitive issues, the degree of agency you’ve got, the degree of understanding you’ve got. So say, if we start to look at that differently, the way we work now, is you would present a situation, for example, to the whole of your workforce. They would interpret that situation, and the human interpretation is key.

We use what’s called "semiotic signification" or "high-abstraction signification" so that nobody knows what the right answer is. That’s really important. Otherwise, you get gaming. And then from that, we draw what are called "fitness landscapes." This comes from evolutionary biology. So they show the evolutionary potential of the current state, dominant areas where the decision will be easily accepted, areas where it would be more difficult. And then critically, those outliers, those people who’ve seen a gorilla. And we can now do that so an executive can see those results within five minutes. Just punch it out, get the results, never to talk with. And that breaks that linear-type process.

MATT FINCH

I think one of the big questions that communities face in changing times is the notion of inclusion and inequality. And this applies at every level, from geography and population, right down to individuals and how they are made welcome to a space and to a community and to an institution. And there’s been some interesting foresight work that I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of through the European Commission Horizon Europe Program called "IMAJINE," which looks at the changing dynamics between Europe’s nations and regions.

And I think one of the things that’s really important to bear in mind, particularly when it comes to digital inclusion, is it’s not purely about technical skills and capacity, that it’s about changing values. It’s above all about a changing sense of identity. One of the things that we noticed was that you can’t simply run the numbers when it comes to justice because it’s about values. It’s always something which is qualitative, which is shifting, which is subject to debate and discussion. And if you think about going into a court of law and they talk about deciding something on the balance of probabilities, it’s not really about probabilities and numbers even then. It’s still competing stories seeking to persuade people.

So one of the things we need to think about is identity and about people’s values and even the power imbalance that’s implied in inclusion. To what extent is the institution or the community itself saying that we’re going to remain unchanged and we’re going to welcome you in? To what extent are we also going to change to adapt to newcomers, to the changing flux of the make-up of the different communities that we live and work in? I saw a really interesting comment recently from a doctor in New Zealand who had changed the notes he made about his patients. And he said, I used to write "patient doesn’t speak English" and now I write, "doctor doesn’t speak Arabic" or whatever the language is.

So one of the things to think about is, how does power play out in these different settings? And things like ‘Islands in the Sky’, let us look at if those dynamics shift. Traditionally, there’s been an urban-rural divide, but the poles of that divide might change over time. And we saw, with pandemic and with the vogue for remote working, the extent to which people might actually flee the cities, the idea that digital technologies might create new opportunities for people to live differently, including where they live.

But then it’s about access, not just to the infrastructure, not just to the technical skills that let you lose these tools, but it’s also about those questions of culture and values and justice. And the truth is, because these things are playing out now, it’s necessary for us to imagine different possible contexts in order to really understand what’s going on. Because those value judgments aren’t just about what we think is right and wrong now. It’s about how things are going to play out in times to come.