Autism in girls and women

At the National Autism Show in June 2021 there was a particular focus on understanding and recognising autism in women and girls. Historically, autism studies investigated behaviours typically seen in men and boys, which then underpinned modern day diagnostic criteria. Initially, clinicians thought that ten times as many males were affected by autism compared to females. However, more recent studies estimate that the ratio of boys to girls with autism might be closer to 3 to 1, although the true figure is still unknown. Jennifer Cook, Siena Castellon and Dr Temple Grandin talk about their experiences on the autism spectrum.

Understanding autism in women and girls

Jennifer Cook is an autism consultant, international speaker and author of the “Asperkids” series. She spoke to us about why the diagnosis of women and girls might lag behind the true picture. “We are all on the human spectrum,” said Jennifer. “And yet everyone who recognises themselves in the autism characteristics I describe thinks they are the only one. I find there are scores of people who think they are the only one, when clearly that is not true.” Jennifer was relieved by receiving her own autism diagnosis at 35 as she had always felt ‘not quite’ in everything.

Jennifer finds that spectrum minds are more associative and less process-based. Just like boys with autism, girls have special interests, but these might not fit the more stereotypical diagnostic areas such as trains and cars. Girls’ special interests can often be more mainstream, such as anime, fashion and fiction – it is more the intense degree to which girls follow them that is associated with autism.

Autistic girls don’t act out, as boys often do, as much as they act in. They direct their anger at themselves not outwards to others, which can lead to self destructive behaviours such as eating disorders. Autistic girls might struggle with female friendships, as they are based on storytelling, might interrupt out of turn and don’t naturally take other people’s point of view. However, it is not true that autistic people do not have empathy. One type of empathy is stepping into some else’s perspective without having it explained, which people with autism may not do naturally. Once the other person’s perspective is pointed out, autistic people are very empathetic.

Jennifer finds that autistic girls tend to memorise information on social rules and sexual expectations to compensate for not picking these up instinctively. They often try incredibly hard to live up to people’s expectations, leading to issues with perfectionism. “For me, biographies are a favourite way to ‘learn how to be’. We have a missing sense of self because we don’t see ourselves very clearly,” explained Jennifer.

Perfectionism and a need for artificial control can lead to eating disorders and for Jennifer these are a big red flag. Autistic women and girls are more likely to manage anxiety, depression, trauma and low self-esteem through self harming behaviours such as cutting and skin picking.

Girls might also find less detectable ways to limit or avoid eye contact, such as looking at the space between people’s eyes. They might also engage in ‘show womanship’ instead of spontaneous or one-on-one interaction, for example by pursuing careers in teaching, narrative presentation, law or performance or have a hyperfocus on one best friendship that’s all or nothing. All of these behaviours can be strong indicators of autism in women and girls but are not fullly included in the diagnostic tools available to clinicians.

Education and autism

Lisa Camilleri and Naj d’Silva from Holmewood School spoke about providing specialist schooling for girls with autism. Initially, they had very few girls in their school compared to boys but have been gradually growing their female population. Setting up a Girls Club has helped girls to find their own identity within a school with a high percentage of boys.

While they have focused on supporting their female cohort, Lisa and Naj are also very aware that gender identity and sexuality are more varied among autistic people than in the general population. Some studies show that autism is more common among people who do not identify as their assigned sex than it is in the general population, perhaps 3 to 6 times as common (Warrier V et al 2020).

Lisa and Naj see first hand that autistic girls are diagnosed later in life and have greater emotional and mental health challenges. Autistic girls rely more on the intranet for friendships and have higher social anxiety. They struggle with how to respond to and resolve social conflict and find that close intense friendships can become all consuming. Sadly, there are also higher levels of assault for autistic girls making them highly vulnerable.

Autism and the impact on self esteem

Siena Castellon is author of The Spectrum Girl’s Survival Guide. Siena was diagnosed with autism at 12 and felt she was seen as eccentric, shy and aloof. She was sensitive to noise, touch and texture and felt rejected and ostracised by other children. Autism still seems to be perceived as a mostly male condition and for girls an autism diagnosis is seen as less valid or debilitating.

“If your autism is denied by others, it might be meant as a compliment,” said Siena, “but it really isn’t. The reality is that after diagnosis, for me nothing really changed. My diagnosis did not improve my life or stop the bullying.”

Autistic girls often ‘mask’, which means hiding their autistic traits – effectively changing their personality and behaviour to appear ‘normal’ and be socially accepted. This might include observing and copying others’ behaviour, assuming the personality of someone they like or preparing and memorising a script for conversations. Girls might also suppress their stimming behaviours or special interests.

Masking can be a double-edged sword. Girls develop a repertoire of personas for different situations that they copy from TV or film but might end up losing their own identity or sense of self, damaging their confidence and self-esteem.
“Having to hide your true personality in order to be liked makes you feel worthless and unworthy,” warned Siena. “Masking can be devastating to mental health. It takes a lot of effort, self-control and concentration and sometimes leads to burnout. Autism can feel like a constant state of panic and alertness.” Siena finds it helps to recharge her social battery by taking breaks from social contact and to use alone time to calm the senses.

Siena experiences alexithyma, a personality trait which causes difficulties with identifying feelings, describing what you are feeling and identifying the differences between emotions and the physical sensations that go with them. This is exacerbated by the greater expectation on girls to be emotionally in touch with their feelings. In fact, autistic girls might express their emotions clearly but in a non-typical way, without using the expected vocal or facial expressions. Siena also has difficulties with interoception, understanding whether she feels hungry or thirsty, tired or frustrated.

“We remain unseen and undiagnosed,” said Siena. “However, we are starting to come out of the shadows so that future autistic girls will be able to reach their potential.”

Dr Temple Grandin is a world renowned autistic author, speaker, activist and Professor at Colorado State University. She spoke with Helen Ellis, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Co-ordinator at the National Autistic Society about her own life and highly successful career as an animal behaviourist and a person with autism.

According to the National Autistic Society, around 22% of autistic adults are in employment. Dr Grandin feels that children do not experience practical activities in the way they did when she was growing up, for example working with tools. For her, this is where great job opportunities can come from. Practical approaches led to her own highly successful career in animal behaviour.

In handling social interactions at work, Dr Grandin’s tip is to treat everything on social media and email as public. It is better to take people to one side to have difficult conversations to limit confrontation. For her, workplace manners etiquettes used to be clearer and are now more difficult navigate.

As many work roles are shifting to a dependence on online communication, it remains to be seen whether this will support or hinder people with autism. With employment figures so low, there is clearly a huge seam of untapped talent in the autism community. Due to late or missing diagnoses of women and girls, there are also many females remaining undiagnosed and unsupported in both education and employment. Understanding better how autism affects females compared to males and what this means for helping them to achieve their best is an area where there is still a long way to go – but with so much to be gained.

Book Review: “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez

I first became aware of Caroline Criado Perez through her campaign to keep a woman on the reverse of UK bank notes, after Elizabeth Fry was replaced by Churchill on the five pound note. This campaign was memorable firstly due to her success – Jane Austen now appears on the reverse of the £10 note – and secondly, from the deluge of threats, hate mail and acrimony she attracted through Twitter as a result. At the time, Twitter did almost nothing about this – the situation is (only) slightly better today due the changes they have made to the way abuse is reported.

Undeterred, Criado Perez published “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” in 2019. Her book is rather neatly summed up by the quote from Simone de Beauvoir she includes in the frontispiece:

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.”

The gender data gap

Criado Perez’s aim is to flag up the huge data gap that exists about the lives of half of humanity. She dubs this the ‘gender data gap’ and it crops up again in again in almost any context you can think of – medicine, product design, protective equipment, town planning, governance. The silence of women’s voices in these areas leads not just to irritations, such as too-cold offices or phones that don’t fit your hand but also to life threatening situations. From stab vests that don’t fit female police officers’ bodies, to cars that are 47% more likely to seriously injure women drivers, to medicines that do not work for women, or actively make them sicker, the assumption that the average male represents the average human is causing unnecessary harm.

Female-specific concerns that men (mostly) fail to factor in crop up repeatedly in the many areas that Criado Perez examines, but fit into three themes: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden and male violence against women. Males of course do experience violence, lots of it, but as Criado Perez says, “…it manifests itself in a different way to the violence faced by women.” Facilities such as suburban housing centres, travel networks, homeless shelters and refugee camps are usually planned by men, and do not take into account the types of activities women need to engage in, nor do they keep them safe while they do them.

There are multiple examples in the book of how women are missing from our data. Data is not only not collected about women, when it is collected it is then not disaggregated by sex. For example, few medical studies or trials specify the sex of the participants. When they do, participants are usually overwhelmingly male. If the sex of the participants is revealed, the results are not always then separated by sex. Even tests on animals or single cells are not often carried out on male and female animals or cells, even though research shows the results are likely be different between sexes. The most common adverse drug reaction in women is that the drug simply doesn’t work, putting their health and sometimes their life at risk as a result. It is likely that many drugs only make it to market because they are effective in men in early trials – anything that might have been a good treatment candidate for women alone is screened out at an early stage because it is not effective in men. And that is before you even address the woeful lack of research into conditions that principally affect women, such as period pain or endometriosis.

A scarily prescient section in the book describes how a lack of sex-segregated data can impact during a pandemic. We know from previous coronavirus epidemics, such as SARS, that symptoms can be more severe in pregnant women. During the last SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 in China, pregnant women’s outcomes were not consistently tracked. “Another gender gap that could so easily have been avoided, and information that will be lacking for when the next pandemic hits,” writes Criado Perez. Here we are, in the middle of the worst pandemic most of us can remember, still without this information. Is data being collected now on outcomes for pregnant women, or will we remain in the dark for the next one, and the one after that?

Gender blind is not always gender neutral

Another gender data gap exists where supposedly ‘gender blind’ neutral policies have an unintentionally discriminating effect against women. For example, US academics in the tenure track system have 7 years to achieve tenure. The years between completing your PhD and receiving tenure, ages 30 to 40, are when most women are likely to have their children. The result is that mothers with young children are 35% less likely than fathers to get tenure track jobs. A ‘gender blind’ policy to give all US parents an additional year to achieve tenure actually decreased mothers’ likelihood of being successful compared to fathers. The extra time gave fathers an advantage over their male peers, while the bulk of childcare and recovery from birth fell to mothers and comparatively decreased their chances.

We are seeing the same phenomenon appearing during the COVID-19 crisis – while everyone attempts to work from home and take on home education, according to Nature, women seem to be publishing far less compared to their male peers. The crisis seems to be gifting additional time to male academics to write up their research and submit grant applications, while at the same time robbing female academics of their chances, as they spend extra time caring for families, home-schooling and prioritising their students ahead of their own research interests.

The burden of unpaid care work

Academia is just one area where women do far and away the greater share of unpaid care work, to the detriment of their careers and to national productivity (GDP). A study of working patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London in the UK shows that due to the disproportionate childcare and housework burden, in households with home-working mothers and fathers, men have three times the uninterrupted work time that women do. 

Even in normal times, the world cannot function without this care work – looking after children, elderly relatives, the vulnerable and disadvantaged. The vast majority of this work is unpaid and is carried out by women on top of their hours of paid work. They fit in multiple extra, short trips every day to support this unpaid work, dropping off children, doing shopping, seeing relatives. These journeys are poorly supported by the radial transport networks designed, largely by men, to serve the traditional daily commute from home to office. As we ‘clap for carers’ every Thursday to express our sincere and heartfelt gratitude for what care means during an international crisis, we shouldn’t forget that the caring burden is a daily reality for most women. For the moment, many of our commuter transport systems are empty. Post COVID-19, should we really go back to investing more and more money in systems that whisk us from home to office, but leave local neighbourhoods under-funded and under-served?

Building bias into the system

While we might be able to understand the presence of bias in humans, it can be tempting to rely on machines to fix the problem. Surely computers are neutral, with their artificial intelligence and gender blindness? Unfortunately, Criado Perez explains why this is not the case, because a large gender gap exists here as well. She describes how women are hugely under-presented in image and speech datasets. Speech recognition technology in smart speakers, phones, medical devices and cars are trained on male voices and struggle to respond accurately to women’s voices. Not only that, the images and text databases that AI systems train on are just as biased as humans, which is not surprising as they are generated by humans. So not only are datasets lacking in data from half the human race, the information that is in those datasets is biased towards gender stereotypes in the same way that humans are unconsciously biased. I encountered more research on this area at the Gender Summit in 2019. This has a real impact on outcomes for women when CV selection systems and even medical diagnostics are becoming increasingly automated using AI.

An individual perspective

If I have a criticism of Criado Perez’s book, it would be that the experiences of one person are sometimes used to make a point about the invisibility of women in general. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence, but does that person represent many? On the other hand, the whole point is that bulk data is lacking in many areas for all the reasons outlined above, so perhaps it’s understandable.

I found reading this book an eye-opening but ultimately rather sobering experience. Getting into a car to drive, will I feel as safe having read it? I certainly won’t stop feeling absurdly irritated by the smart speaker at home that responds instantly to my husband’s voice but stubbornly ignores mine until the third or fourth attempt. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve nearly dropped my new phone trying to use it to take a photo one handed. As a materials science student at university, the protective equipment we used for welding or casting metals practically drowned me – it seems unlikely it made me safer if I could hardly move without tripping over it. Who knows how many times my CV didn’t make the cut for a science job due to skewed AI algorithms? I need to work flexibly and part-time to fit round my roles as mother of a special needs child, school governor and fundraiser for the National Autistic Society .Realistically, this limits my career options. Minor points on their own perhaps, but over a lifetime they add up, they really do.

Read this book – it will certainly make you think.

Enhancing practice to support Athena SWAN charter achievement

On 14 May, I joined a virtual Advance HE networking meeting on enhancing practice to support achievements in the Athena SWAN Charter.

In what used to be my normal life, I had to work around school pick up times during the week. Getting to full day conferences was tricky, so I’m actually finding I can attend a lot more of the virtual variety than I can face-to-face events. As I am rapidly becoming a serious consumer of Zoom meetings, I’m always interested to see how organisations manage these.

I thought that Advance HE’s approach worked well – they fielded a few speakers via live video feed, kept a staff member on hand to curate the Q&A and we could use the chat box to raise questions or post links. In between speakers, we were allocated to small discussion ‘rooms’ with 5 or 6 others to discuss any challenges we wanted to raise with colleagues. Joining a video chat with 5 strangers made my anxiety levels climb rather rapidly, but it’s probably no worse than facing a room full of delegates during a ‘networking’ coffee. After some initial awkwardness about who was going to speak first, the discussions did start to flow and I felt like I’d made some new virtual friends by the end.

Job sharing in academia

The first two speakers described their experiences of working in (different) job share partnerships. Emma Watton is a Programme Director at Lancaster University and had very positive experiences to report. She felt that the role worked seamlessly across the two of them. She said there is a risk that colleagues can see a job share as more of a job ‘shirk’ but there were no issues with productivity for her, in fact quite the reverse. They have published their experiences in Flynn, Patricia M., Haynes, Kathryn and Kilgour, Maureen A., (eds.) Overcoming challenges to gender equality in the workplace: leadership and innovation. Greenleaf Publishing, Saltaire, UK, pp. 67-77. To find new flexible working opportunities, she recommended contacting DuoMe. Ginibee is another talent sharing platform you could try out.

Dr Claire Senner, Cambridge University reported on her time as part of a job share post doc role at Babraham Institute. Still a rarity as a job share model, she was lucky enough to partner with a researcher whose expertise as a bioinformation dovetailed with her own wet lab skills. She is very grateful for the opportunity that the job share gave her to continue with science while taking time out for family. She is struggling to move past the sense that part time research is still seen as evidence of a lack of commitment. Will the academic community ever stop seeing a career in research as a ‘calling’ that has to rule our lives rather than complement them, I wonder?

Reverse mentoring and culture change

Prof Jon Rowe from the University of Birmingham introduced their reverse mentoring programme, where a staff member from an under-represented group (in this scenario, the mentor) is partnered with a senior manager (the mentee). Reverse mentoring is an opportunity for a senior manager to learn about different kinds of backgrounds and routes through academia that diverge from their own. At Birmingham, the aim of the programme is to raise awareness and drive cultural change. It also provides a chance for often ignored voices to be heard and can evolve into sponsorship for the mentor. Initially, Jon encountered reservations from some leaders about the scheme but he finds that the more you talk about doing something, especially with people other than your direct supporters, the more acceptable it becomes as a concept. Then you swiftly implement when the time is right! He had the following tips if you are tempted to set up your own scheme.

Tips on reverse mentoring:

• Use staff networks to find mentors
• Provide pre-training – remind managers to stay quiet, as they may be used to taking the lead in most discussions!
• Do some pre-screening to identify what the manager needs to learn and what the mentor can provide e.g. experience of returning from maternity leave
• Match people carefully – sometimes the pairings may not ‘click’
• Embed the scheme into senior management training programmes

Jon is also a veteran of many Athena SWAN panels and has probably read more than his fair share of applications. Here were his top ten reasons why a department might not achieve a Bronze award:

Ten reasons why a department might not get Bronze Athena SWAN:

• Ownership by leaders lacking
• Ownership by department lacking
• Ongoing life of the Self Assessment Team – who follows up on the actions post submission?
• Presentation of data – what is the obvious thing that people will see in your data? Make sure you address the ‘elephant in the room’
• Dealing with issues – have these been addressed effectively?
• Not having evidence – don’t submit too soon, wait until you have the evidence
• Weak/vague actions – especially the terms ‘review’ and ‘monitor’. These will not change anything!
• Hiding behind institutional policies
• Using small numbers as an excuse
• Forgetting the purpose of application – the point is to show how you are addressing gender inequality, not describe your Faculty Model in detail.

On top of those, he has also seen some themes in unsuccessful Silver applications.

Reasons not to get a Silver Athena SWAN:

• Speculative applications without a solid action plan from institutes not yet at Bronze award level
• Solid action plan but no demonstrable results

The main thing to remember is that Athena SWAN is about evidenced change. You are not going to succeed by just being good at equality and diversity!

Equality and diversity (EDI) at Reading University

The keynote speaker was Prof Parveen Yaqoob, the first female Deputy Vice Chancellor at Reading. As a British Asian, she spoke powerfully about growing up in the UK when racial abuse was sadly common and open. For her, if your childhood experience is to stay below the radar to avoid violence or abuse, later you may not feel very comfortable with the visibility that senior roles can bring.

She outlined some of the achievements at Reading, which received an Athena SWAN Silver Award in 2020. They are working towards a minimum of 40% of either gender as professors and have closed their Gender Pay Gap from 11% to 9% (compared to a national average of 18%). For the last two years, Reading has featured in the Stonewall Top 100 employers and they have an active network for disabled staff who they are consulting about accessible remote working.

Prior to the COVID-19 lockdown in March, they were planning a series of roadshows to encourage a collaborative approach to equality and diversity, and to bring home that it is everyone’s responsibility. At Reading, EDI activities are captured under a ‘citizenship’ criteria when applying for promotions.

Goals of equality and diversity roadshows

• Understand the diversity goals and how it impacts on your role
• Participate in surveys openly and honestly
• Engage as a mentor, champion or ally or join a network
• Become culturally competent
• Become a spokesperson for diversity issues that are not yours
• Welcome ideas that are different from your own and support your team members
• Communicate and educate
• Commit to continuous improvement

For Parveen, the challenge is to move beyond just complying with legislation and to start to normalise discussions about race and ethnicity. Reading sees charter marks as audit and improvement tools to help create SMART action plans. Parveen advises us to think about what is going to change as a result of any new initiative. What will be different after doing the activity? It’s important to focus on impact and how it will change your institute for the better.

Essentially, achieving impact is the secret to Athena SWAN success!

Diversity, inclusive leadership and maintaining momentum in a crisis with Toby Mildon

We find ourselves in what some would call VUCA times – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

Toby Mildon has personal experience of working during a crisis. He was employed by BA during the 9/11 attacks and he has implemented IT systems in A&E, where everything has to work first time. He has worked at the BBC during bomb threats and protests and produced software to hard deadlines such as general elections and the Olympics.

Toby’s specialism is in inclusion and he has recently published a book on Inclusive Growth. At the moment, many companies are not really focused on growth. However, Toby contends that more inclusive organisations will bounce back quicker. Many diversity and inclusion leaders are currently asking themselves the following questions:

1. What are the new and current challenges for the D& I leader?
2. What can the D&I leaders do to support their businesses?
3. How might things change post crisis?
4. How do we ensure D&I remains a priority during the economic crisis?
5. How do we maintain D&I momentum during the crisis?

“Practice is now more important than ever,” says Toby. “We need to put words into action.”

From the D&I community, he is hearing that there are 3 main challenges.

• Remote working and different ways of working
• Leadership and momentum
• Wellbeing

It is a struggle to maintain D&I front and centre when leaders are focused on keeping the business afloat. We must be careful that D&I does not fall victim to cost cutting measures as a ‘nice to have’. While many businesses are cutting productivity right now, the end of year is likely to be very busy and there is a risk that D&I will be deprioritised in the rush to expand.

Time to reset

For D&I leaders, now is the time to stop and take a breath. We should resist the urge to jump into fixing mode and instead try to work with senior leaders to implement business critical solutions with an inclusive lens. We should take stock of our existing activities and assess what needs to be put on hold or postponed, or modified e.g. put online.

It’s vital that we listen to employee experiences right now and identify the roadblocks in their way.  Leaders need to identify at risk employees and find ways to support them remotely, ideally designing and implementing fixes rapidly.

As business activities pick up again, we should look out for opportunities to improve D&I as we reinvent in the next phase.

“Businesses that may have formerly paid lip service to remote working or flexible working are now having to support it properly,” said Toby.

In 2016, Bourke and Dillon identified 6 traits of inclusive leaders:

• Believe in diversity and inclusion
• Have courage
• Aware of their own biases and blind spots
• Curious
• Cultural intelligence
• Collaborative

Inclusive leaders of remote employees

Toby believes that in the current COVID-19 crisis, belief, courage and collaboration are the most important of these traits. “We should help fight cabin fever and isolation as an empathetic coach and try not to crack the whip,” advised Toby.

His tips for supporting remote employers are:

• Make sure their work space is set up well, as they may be fighting for shared spaces (senior people tend to have a better workspaces at home and might not realise not everyone has the same resources)
• Increase 1 to 1 meetings in length and frequency
• Establish rules of engagement – are people doing shifts with childcare, when are they most available or productive
• Over communicate – repeat communications if needed, via multiple formats
• Motivate, for example with virtual coffees, informal meetings – right now we have no clean breaks between work and family life via the usual commute
• Be especially aware of vulnerable employees – disabled people may not have all the adjustments they need at home; levels of domestic violence have increased

Reinvention in the short term

There are opportunities for short term reinvention that we can take advantage of.

• Identify the non-inclusive journeys or experiences e.g. onboarding
• Understand the user context and needs
• Understand the business needs
• Build solutions e.g. for those with hearing impairment, Google hangouts provide subtitles
• Implement, test and review

How might things change?

Ultimately, Toby and many other D&I leaders believe that we are not going back to the way things were. “The world will feel like a smaller place after this shared experience,” explained Toby. “Even more people have gone digital, including older people who have never had to engage with online ordering before.”

It’s important to scale back up in an inclusive way. It could be tempting to regress to old ways as businesses ramp up again. We should also be prepared to respond to the aftermath of staff wellbeing. Many may not simply be able to bounce straight back to work. There may well be a greater demand for flexible and remote working now that businesses have been forced to implement it – the genie is now out of the bottle! Men who have begun to play a more active role in childcare might want to carry on doing this and there may even be a spike in resignations as people re-evaluate their life.

There are some critical questions to answer in order to drive inclusive growth post crisis:

• Growth – how do we want to grow now and what does it mean for us?
• Clarity – why is D&I important to us, what are employees saying?
• Culture – how has our culture changed?
• Change – how to implement the change we want to see?
• Colleague experience & design – how has this changed, what roadblocks are in the way?
• Cyber – how has this changed post crisis and how are we now using tech?
• Collaboration – do we have a new sense of belonging, how can everyone work towards a more inclusive workplace?
• Celebration – telling stories of how people have got together to help the community, show how we are an employer of choice

Developing organisational resilience

Some businesses have been able to capitalise on the recent new ways of working to deliver innovation. These are characterised by higher levels of innovation, faster decision making and adaptability.

According to BSI Business Standard BS 65000, the outward signs of resilience are your products, processes and people. For example, do your staff reflect the diversity of your users? Resilient companies are resilient in their operations, supply chain and information domains, showing the qualities of robustness, adaptability and agility.

During a time of retraction and then sudden growth, as D&I leaders we need to switch to becoming an inclusive crisis manager, followed by an inclusive growth leader.

“Effectively the businesses are slamming the brakes on, causing a traffic jam which will take a while to clear once the crisis is over,” described Toby.

During the response to a downsizing crisis, it’s important to focus on…

• Wellbeing
• Inclusive downsizing or furlough e.g. not selecting people according to biases
• Inclusive remote leadership
• New inclusive ways of working

During the growth phase, pay attention to…

• Rehiring, be careful not to revert to our biases when hiring quickly and use inclusive ways of interviewing
• More flexible working
• Innovations developed from the crisis

“Now is not the time to rewrite your corporate values,” advised Toby. “Go back and consolidate the ones that you have.” Ask yourself…

• What needs to happen to keep the business going?
• How can this be done inclusively to protect the workforce and future-proof the business?
• How can you demonstrate that an inclusive approach will add value?

Maintaining D&I as a priority in a time of crisis

Finally, Toby advised on how to keep D&I a priority in a time of crisis:

• Keep it simple – a few key stories, no more than 3 to say why D&I is still important
• Concreteness – keep it to concrete initiatives, nothing too academic or abstract
• Emotions – be aware of employees anxiety and worry, sensitively use emotions to get your message across
• Stories – use stories to get your message across, empowering employees to tell their stories internally and externally e.g. how they are working from home, managing their mental health, demonstrate your good practice to the outside world

You can check your organisation’s own inclusive growth score here: www.mildon.co.uk/discover-your-inclusive-growth-score