I recently saw the film Hidden Figures. If you haven’t seen it, the story follows the lives of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three African-American women working in the computing department at NASA in the Sixties...

Stephen has been opening the discussion on the things we say to and around our children and why the words we choose to use are so important.

One of the first pieces of advice I received from my university career advisor was to actively seek out mentors and build a toolkit of support to help propel me through college, into the workforce and beyond. No matter what stage of life I’ve been in, I’ve actively sought out mentors inside and outside of my sector of international higher education.

It is easy to dismiss “tech” as for young men who like to design computer games in their bedrooms, but this is to diminish, not only female talent in this area, but the vast range of opportunities to get involved...

Imagine for a second that the people you disagree fundamentally with, people whom you’ve probably removed from your online social sphere, have also been doing the same thing with those that disagree with their (unpalatable) world view. With that in mind It's not hard to see why it's so hard to make progress on a whole range of issues. People just don't talk anymore.

This man walks into a bar…and the barman says ‘why the long face’ and the man goes ‘because it’s 2017 and yet even an industry as, supposedly, open and enlightened as international education we are still surrounded by the same entrenched mental infrastructure that shackled the minds of our ancestors in terms of gender equality’. The barman moves to serve another customer…

A Woman Walks Into A Bar…She’s there to network, meet clients and make contacts. All being well, she’ll enjoy it and get some good business contacts, but what does she do if she comes across a client, or potential client, that she wants to do business with, but who makes inappropriate comments about her or other women, or even makes a pass?

Mentoring is different to coaching, but often the terms are used inter-changeably. The way I have been taught is that mentoring is more about giving advice, based on experience. If I am coached, I expect to come up with the options and answers myself.

Women are brought up thinking that they would never have the time to take care of the family if their job required them to be so responsible. I still remember stopping my business partner and sister, Bernice, and asking her to explain why there were so many men at these events. After her explanation, the penny dropped and I realised that even in such a diverse and fantastic industry, female leaders were still lacking.

‘You cannot be what you cannot see’. I’ve been musing on that expression for a while now considering exactly why it’s so important to have positive female role models. In a world where there are more men named John in CEO positions in FSTE100 companies than there are women in the top spots we need all the visible role models we can get.

It has struck me several times over the past year...that finding women to speak at conferences and events in our industry is not easy. In my role as Deputy Chair of EUKSW, I help to organise an annual conference, and looking back over previous years, it would seem that they are populated by 90% men.