I am as aware as anyone else of the reputation of AUDE (the Association of University Directors of Estates) for being something of a white male club.
As the Executive Director of that club, I think the reputation is less and less true with every passing year, though of course I would say that. The association is very much on a journey on EDI issues, but we are doing more than you might imagine.
Our small office team is undertaking ILM Level 4 training on managing equality and diversity. We are looking at inclusive design and have recently published a new guide to neurodiversity design and management. And we are looking more closely at the association membership itself to read between the lines of the demographic patterns available to us.
What we found
Our membership identity data is patchy: we’ve only been measuring this since 2022, and it isn’t compulsory for members to share. 47 per cent of those members we can measure are women. That starts to seem something like parity. But at the most senior level of membership, of those colleagues making it through to a director role, the proportion is more like one in six, significantly below the level in other professional services. We wanted to examine the barriers to women’s progress in estates, and did so in the recently published report Well the assumption is…: Conversations with women leaders in estates and facilities which is available to colleagues across the sector on the AUDE website.
The report looks at the career experiences of women in estates – colleagues that are leading on the fabric and the development of your campuses today, vital to the successful and financially viable functioning of your institution. And it highlighted a very consistent set of obstacles, including the lack of a visible career path, the constantly undermining nature of casual sexism– anything but casual and at its worst deployed in abhorrent and confidence-wrecking verbal hand grenades – as well as issues around health, maternity and menopause, and more.
Responses to the report
It taps into the frustration of women telling us their stories and processes them into an emotive document that is quite unlike the tone of anything we’ve published before. I recommend a read. We’ve had several very consistent reactions to this work.
The first is most common from women. “Yes”, they have told us, “This is the experience exactly. You haven’t missed anything out. I recognise these stories from my own life”. In private we’ve heard further stories, of things happening now, that would bring many of us to an abrupt and shocked halt, and more than reinforce every word of the report. I’ve spoken to many female members of AUDE, and it doesn’t take much work to uncover experience and attitudes that are damaging and have held us back, or acted as entirely unwelcome and unnecessary obstacles, including several in my own career which are referenced in the report.
A second common reaction has been from male members of the association scrambling to get past the sheer embarrassment of having it spelt out to them how awful other men can be – in their teams, in their universities, now. This group includes colleagues doing great proactive things to quickly learn from the report and have fruitful conversations with others about what needs to improve. Those colleagues are swotting up on pay gap information, talking to HR about family friendly policy and blind recruitment processes. They are opening their eyes to the issues, seeking a greater level of understanding including within their own teams, challenging the status quo, and taking steps towards becoming EDI allies within their institutions.
But we’ve also had a reaction which can best be expressed as – and in awareness of a very un-Wonkhe-like word coming up – “Why have AUDE been so arsey about this? AUDE have slightly embarrassed themselves here by being so visibly annoyed. What bad taste they’ve shown. We’re going to stay silent and dignified.”
For me, it takes a particularly adept form of mental gymnastics to be more annoyed by the tone than by the message. Yes, with the help of the dictionary definition, we have been bad-tempered. Collecting and listening to our report participants’ stories as we did, bad-tempered is what we felt.
Refreshing honesty
The entire EDI agenda faces more of a pushback, right now, than for decades. Silence in the face of grotesque disadvantage may seem dignified to some. But to others it will seem altogether darker, a caving into the status quo that is impossible to justify. Many people can see the difference and have thanked us for calling out the unacceptable, and our “refreshing, real, human honesty”.
Those women participating in the report’s production were immensely keen to give full credit to the many men who had acted as career mentors and role models. But such solidarity was far from the only experience. People don’t like being forced to confront difficult issues, but it is what we have asked of the AUDE membership with the publishing of this report. This is a difficult issue, and it is right under our noses. If (male) colleagues will not trust the take of our report, trust other things. Speak to the women in your family as your first port of call. Casually undermined at work by men without the experience or the understanding or the insight of the woman in the conversation? That’s the least of it. When was the last time you truly listened to some of the quieter voices in your institution? What would you hear if you did?
What’s next?
We fully acknowledge our shortcomings. The report, about women’s experiences, was commissioned by the man that leads our EDI group and written by the man that leads on the association’s comms. Not everyone will like that. We fully understand we haven’t dealt with intersectional experiences in an attempt to understand the differences that faith or disability or sexuality or ethnicity may add to the mix.
From my perspective the association is late to the party so can hardly expect congratulations on finally arriving; our (construction) industry is behind the times; our colleagues (via a September 2024 benchmarking report on salary and conditions) tell us that the institutional stance on EDI is highly significant in their decision to stay in HE roles; and corporately, buy-in to EDI is expected of us at every level of seniority, and a gap in this area could rightly hamper our promotion prospects.
Culture change takes a long time. We don’t want to be an obstacle but an enabler. This is exactly where we should be – learning, changing, and bringing others with us whenever we can. I’m proud the association is on this journey.