GDS director bans staff from speaking at events that aren’t diverse enough
- Summary:
- Stephen Foreshew-Cain, executive director of GDS, has committed publicly to tackling gender diversity.
The executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), Stephen Foreshew-Cain, has publicly committed to making his department one of the most “inclusive and diverse in government”. And given it’s International Women’s Day, Foreshew-Cain took the opportunity to outline how he and GDS will be tackling gender equality.
Part of his plan is to ban GDS staff from speaking at events that don’t appear to be doing what they can to properly represent women working in the technology industry.
I’ve written a lot about diversity in recent months, both in terms of gender equality and encouraging LGBTI people to feel comfortable being themselves at the workplace. It’s a topic that attracts a lot of attention, but it’s rare to see a leader in the field putting strict guidelines in place for his organisation to follow. Let alone publicly doing so.
Earlier today, GDS also announced that it’s new Digital Advisory Board was launching with a 50/50 gender split.
In a blog, Foreshew-Cain said:
There is a gender diversity problem in the digital industry. There are still many more men employed in it than there are women, a problem that's made (and looks) even worse at the conferences and events we host and attend. Too often, the speakers on stage at those events are mostly, sometimes even entirely, male. That has to change.
Absolutely! It’s a long-running ‘joke’ in the technology industry that conferences are more often than not attended, and represented, but mostly white, male delegates. It’s surprisingly rare to see a woman on a panel, let alone anyone that’s gay or a person of colour.
However, GDS will tackle this head on. Foreshew-Cain said:
So. In future, no-one from GDS will take part in a panel discussion of two or more people unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the chair. (Yes, that comes from Owen Barder's Pledge).
In future, no-one from GDS will speak at an event unless the event's organisers are clearly working hard to address gender diversity on stage. It's hard to put a number on this sort of thing, so we will make that decision based on what we see on each event's draft agenda.
We'll hold ourselves to the same standards where GDS is the host, for internal events and public ones too.
Ideally, when GDS is invited to supply a guest speaker for an event, we’d like to send women to speak just as often as we send men. That means that sometimes, some of our male staff (especially those on our management team) will be encouraged to step aside and suggest a female colleague to speak instead of them. There are plenty of women at GDS who are excellent speakers and experts in their field - but the opportunities to speak need to be present for them.
It’s worth pointing out that Foreshew-Cain is speaking at the upcoming Think Cloud for Digital Government event (click on banner below for more details), which is chaired by diginomica and organised by EventCentre. He will be on a panel with a woman who isn't a host, while the rest of the day is pretty balanced in terms of male and female speakers. We care about these things!
Foreshew-Cain went on to say, however, that GDS will also be doing more when it comes to its own events. He said:
Our Sprint 16 event in February had some women as speakers and panel members on the main stage, as well as leaders of break-out sessions and discussions. But not enough. We want to do better. The theme of the day was “Transforming government together,” and that’s impossible without meaningful diversity. (Not just gender diversity, but also diversity of ethnicity, age, ability, sexual orientation and more. There’s work to be done in all those areas. We won’t ignore them.)
For our next big event - whether it's Sprint 17 or something else - we aim to have an even gender split, 50-50.
This is not tokenism. This is important. This is us doing our bit, and taking action.
My take
I know this is an important topic to Foreshew-Cain. And it’s not because it’s diversity for diversity’s sake, but because diversity means representing the people you’re providing services to and encouraging open and creative ideas.
More of this please.