DIVERSITY & INCLUSION IN THE WORKFORCE
to have a female engineer in the organisation; it shows there is diversity in the estates team. However, and this may sound a bit sexist – men have conversations in places, including on issues such as training, where women can’t go; I’m referring to the men’s toilet, of course. So, I’d see my male colleagues going off and they’d be talking, or they’d bump into somebody senior, and have a conversation. It felt like a bit of a ‘boys’ club’.”
“It can be perceived as a boys’ club,” Kim Shelley agreed, “but I don’t think it’s necessarily deliberate; with a male-dominated industry, it’s a natural way for people in groups to work.”
Young women engaged in STEM activity at a Women’s Engineering Society workshop at Winchester Science Centre.
Trish Marchant added: “I’ve always been very proactive if I found I’m hitting a wall. For example, I’ve had managers criticise me for things my male colleagues were getting pay rises for, as if my ‘going the extra mile’ wasn’t enough. You can’t always fight it, however. On occasions I simply left the organisation and went somewhere else.”
‘Checks and measures’ in the NHS I wondered whether the experience had been worse for Trish Marchant in the private sector than in the NHS. She said: “It’s definitely different in the NHS, where there are so many checks and measures to stop people discriminating. We do all sorts of unconscious bias training; I undertook it last year, and honestly didn’t think I was particularly biased until I did the training. I didn’t realise that some of the thoughts I had were guiding my decisions.”
Take action or ‘keep quiet’? Kim Shelley asked: “When you were faced with discrimination, did you raise the question, or simply keep quiet?” Trish Marchant said she had often ‘just moved on’, adding: “It’s really hard to quantify sexism in the workplace. You tend to have to go through the mill to challenge anything.” Having been a union ‘rep’ for a few years, and having thus sat with colleagues putting in complaints or challenging being complained against, she said: “It’s so hard for an individual to sustain that route of challenge.” She continued: “I challenged one employer when I was ‘blamed’ for something a male engineer had done, and forced them to write a letter exonerating me, but it took months. Even in the public sector, there is significant stress in making such a challenge; it’s infinitely preferable that the organisation just doesn’t have that culture – or deals with any issues promptly and fairly.” Although in the NHS there were ‘numerous procedures’ for dealing with discrimination, unfair bias, and
28 Health Estate Journal January 2020
bullying, Trish Marchant felt individuals in any organisation still needed to be ‘very confident’, and ‘to have a very strong case’, to pursue such routes. She said: “Where a female employee feels she is being treated unfairly against a male colleague, how does she evidence it? It can be hard.”
Problem may be the organisation She added: “If you haven’t got black-and- white evidence – returning to the original question about training, or discrimination over promotion – it’s easy, if somebody doesn’t want to promote you, for them to find the words to explain why – because they don’t have to provide ‘evidence’. You can just tell the staff member they’re ‘not good enough’. I would suggest to those in an organisation where they’re finding it’s hard to progress, that this is attributable to the employer, and that they may need to look for another job.” Kim Shelley responded: “I appreciate your standpoint, but why should you have to move because you’re not getting the support, development, and training you need? I think it’s about changing the organisation’s outlook and culture; stressing that people need to be able to develop.” Kim Shelley pointed out that Richard Branson says: ‘Look after your people, and they will take care of your clients.’ Claire Hennessy agreed: “He’s right; a good example needs to come from the top. We have a relatively new chief executive, who is really keen to promote the Trust as a great place to work. There is a huge plus to being well led.”
Patronising attitudes? Here, discussion returned to wider workplace attitudes to women, with some debate about female engineers being ‘patronised’ by male colleagues or external contacts. Trish Marchant recalled, while in the water industry, working with a young female civil engineer on a pumping station build project, when a site manager kept referring to the young woman as ‘love’. She said: “I took him aside and suggested he should not use that sort of language to a professional engineer. This was 20 years
ago, but even then the idea of not using sexist language was well embedded. The man told me he hadn’t realised it would be offensive. Ironically, I still myself get called ‘love’. While I then think ‘I don’t want to make a fuss’, when will people start realising that you just don’t talk to professional people that way?” Moving onto a slightly different tack – the apparent acceptability among some of the posting of racist or gender-specific abuse and vitriol online, Duane Passman said: “A decade or so ago
there were some quite unpleasant strands in society getting considerable media attention because they were openly Islamophobic, or homophobic. I thought those days had passed, but there’s quite an unpleasant undercurrent that has resurfaced. Such behaviour no longer gets called out as much; it now seems acceptable to be borderline racist, while homophobic attacks and hate speech have increased hugely. Similarly, the number of Islamophobic and anti-Jewish attacks – both verbal and physical – have risen.” Kim Shelley agreed: “The older you are, the more you can see how things are deteriorating, and I totally agree with you Duane.”
An ‘education’ process for recruiters On a more positive front, which showed the impact that female engineers can make in attracting new recruits to the profession, Lizzie Gibbons said that at one of her employers she became the company’s lead STEM ambassador. She and a number of colleagues were then able to go into schools and colleges and spread the message about the attractions of an engineering career to young people. Kim Shelley added at this point: “I said at the end of my Healthcare Estates 2019 presentation, in fact, that it’s not just women that we need in engineering; we need everyone.” “I fully agree,” said Lizzie Gibbons, “so every time I went to a school, I’d make a point of saying: ‘Yes, we need more women, but in general, we need more people in engineering.’”
This ended an interesting first hour of the two-hour discussion on a thought- provoking note, albeit one that will be all too familiar to Estates & Facilities managers across the UK – the struggle, at times, to fill vacancies with skilled and capable engineers prepared to commit to a long-term career in healthcare engineering, and enthusiastic and cognisant about the vital role that such professionals play in keeping healthcare facilities running safely and efficiently day after day.
hej
©Winchester Science Centre
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