Dr Sadie Hollins @_WISEducation

‘How you are seen may affect how you are heard.’  This was one of many lines in Prof. Jennifer Eberhardt’s book ‘Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do’ that resonated with me. In this context Eberhardt was talking about the gender bias in the historic hiring of female classical musicians for orchestras. Mounting criticism over the lack of female musicians during the 1970s led to many orchestras adopting ‘blind auditions’ so as to not reveal the identity of the auditionee, and therefore avoid any bias that may unfairly affect the outcome.

by Vivienne Porritt @Vivienne Porritt

Two of WomenEd’s campaigns are about the representation of women in leadership roles in education, with a particular focus on women with an ethnic heritage. We know the stats show men are disproportionately represented and the pace of change in altering what leaders look like is glacial.This is a key reason for our partnership with The National College of Education in England.

by Gwawr McGirr (@gwawrmcgirr)

As lockdown in March 2020 became inevitable I can remember feeling a sense of shock. At times like this – being a musician – I draw on the tremendous resource that is music, and I felt a really strong sense that as a Music Department we should share a few occasional pieces of music to the staff team, to keep people’s spirits up, whilst also providing a means to connect with other staff. My HOD, as ever, was very supportive of the idea and told me to work away!

by Christalla Jamil @ChristallaJ (National Leader for @WomenEdEngland)

 This year’s International Women's Day 2021 was marked by a campaign focused on 'challenge'. When we support each other, women accomplish amazing things. For me, once again, this was illustrated on Saturday 6th March when the three regional networks that I am honoured to work with, gave a platform to a community of new voices to share how they #ChoosetoChallenge. I would like to extend my thanks to all three #WomenEd regions: @WomenEdSE, @WomenEdEastern and @WomenEdLondon.

by Zoe Enser @greeborunner

I never really understood networking. It was something which was increasingly mentioned as I moved into leadership, but I never knew quite what it meant or indeed why it was a good thing. People said it would help me with my career and enable me to do my job better, but never really told me how. It was also based on the premise I was ambitious and wanted to progress, as opposed to just being happy in what I was doing, but that is a whole other discussion. Networking had also become a bit of a dirty word to me.

by Lizana Oberholzer  @LO_EduforAll

Women play a pivotal role as role models to inspire the future generation of female leaders in education, whether it is in schools or in Higher Education. According to Hewitt (2020) and Osho (2018), 56.6% of the university student body is comprised of women. The Higher Education workforce, however, reflects a different picture where 45.3% of the workforce are women, as outlined by the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s (HESA) data. What is interesting to note is that the representation of women in the leadership and management workforce is even lower at 27.5%.

 by Anna Ambrose  @AnnaAmbrose

On Friday 6th March, 2021, I noticed a thing on my Facebook feed. It was the last day (for now at least, fingers crossed) of home-schooling for families in England. And men were busy thanking their amazing wives* for home-schooling their children. There were gifts. Flowers. Champagne. The works. How lovely.

[*Obviously not everyone is married. But these posts were genuinely all about wives, so I may over-use the word in what follows.]

by Kerry Jordan-Daus @KerryJordanDaus  #IWD2021

International Women’s Day 2021, a call out to challenge, there is a choice to be made. But what is IT I am choosing to challenge?

For me, this is a choice about what would make life fairer. I want to challenge the unfairness that is so deeply embedded in the everyday that IT is not noticed as unfairness. IT is normalised. IT has become learnt behaviour.