[Intro Music]

00:00:08:27 – 00:01:05:02
Hannah
Welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. Diverse Educators is an intersectional community of educators who are passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Our vision: everyone is celebrated in every classroom in every school. Our mission: a collaborative community that celebrates the successes and amplifies the stories of diverse people. Our values: promoting acceptance, increasing visibility, encouraging celebration, creating belonging and enabling learning. In series two of the Diverse Educators Podcast, we have ten episodes. In each episode our co-hosts, Mahlon Evans-Sinclair and Jess Boyd, will interview one contributor from each of the ten chapters of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto. Each conversation will reflect on how they have found and used their voice, discuss how identity shapes them as an educator, share the challenges they’ve had to navigate on their journey, and identify the changes they would like to see in the school system.

00:01:05:04 – 00:01:20:13
Jess
Hello and welcome to series two of the Diverse Ed podcast. I am Jess Boyd and I’m a former head of music and currently writing my Ph.D. in culturally relevant pedagogy. I work in initial teacher training and I also run an open access community music project.

00:01:20:16 – 00:01:40:10
Mahlon
And my name is Mahlon Evans-Sinclair and I’m the founder of Educating While Black podcast, and I’m currently the director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at a girl-focused school in Toronto, Canada. In this episode, we’re talking to Jeremy Davies from the sex chapter. So welcome, Jeremy. It’d be great if you could introduce yourself to the audience in a sentence or so.

00:01:40:13 – 00:01:59:10
Jeremy
Hi. Well, it’s good to be here. Yeah. I’m Jeremy. I am the head of impact and communications at the Fatherhood Institute and the founder of the MITIE campaign, which stands for men in the early years.

00:01:59:24 – 00:02:11:29
Jess
I already have a zillion questions just based on that introduction. But to kick us off can you tell us a bit more about the intersections of your identity and how that contributed towards your chapter in the book?

00:02:12:01 – 00:03:36:13
Jeremy
Okay. So gosh, yes. So I guess I come at this from several different perspectives. One is that I’m a dad and it’s through my fatherhood that I became involved in the Fatherhood Institute, which is a small charity that does research, policy and practice work to improve the support available for fathers to be involved, hands-on parents. I came to the fatherhood work through being a father myself and also doing some research on gay fathers. The men in the early years work, which is part of what I cover in the chapter, arose from a project that I got involved with where we tried to improve the number of men who were signing up for early years courses at a college in London, and we completely failed at it. And it’s a long story, but out of that eventually emerged the MITIE campaign.

00:03:36:15 – 00:04:17:10
Mahlon
I feel like even in its name of being mighty, it’s a great play on words. But then at the same time, it is indicative of what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re trying to do. And then I wonder even with regards to, you know, your contribution in the chapter, full disclaimer, Jeremy’s already said that he’s not a teacher, which is absolutely fine because as this podcast is titled, Diverse Educators, so everyone’s voice is valid in this space. I guess what I want to know from what you’ve just intimated is what was your specific narrative? What was the thread to the bow that you wanted to add to this conversation within the chapter itself?

00:04:17:13 – 00:06:44:03
Jeremy
So I think there’s, I think there is a big, I think we have a big challenge in the UK around, I’m going to, I’m going to use the word sex equality, which is that we we think we’ve made a lot of progress for women and for female empowerment. But I see a huge, huge obstacle in female empowerment, which is the extent to which we load pretty much all the responsibility for caregiving and for childcare onto women’s shoulders, and that the assumption of that kind of underpins pretty much everything we do in the workplace, in education, politics, everything. So I suppose all of my work is about challenging that and trying to come up with ways of being inclusive of fathers and other men in the parenting space, in the space of paid education and childcare and so on. So yeah, so I guess that’s where I come from with this is trying to sort of redress that balance. So the MITIE campaign, for example, I created that because it seems absolutely crazy to me that in 2023, in fact the latest numbers have just come out and we’re actually back down to 2%. The early years workforce is 2% male, which is exactly where it was in 1998. So that’s a quarter of a century of zero progress on that. That seems crazy to me [Mahlon: It is] and it seems to me that if, you know, if we want, if we really take female empowerment seriously, we need to, we need to start addressing this stuff.

00:06:44:05 – 00:09:06:20
Mahlon
I feel like and I know that we’re going to get further into it and I don’t want to necessarily dominate. But even the way how you’ve so carefully worded what you said is actually a really good indication as to your understanding of the sort of the wider systems that men in early years as a microcosm find themselves in. But then also perhaps the wider systemic piece of gender discrimination versus sexism. So yes, it’s true outside of female heavy industry of which there are few men are at the top of every other industry, and sometimes even within education and other perhaps female heavy industries, men still will find themselves at the top of the tree. So it’s not to say that what you’re necessarily trying to do is to redress the balance within these spaces alone. But it sounds like you’re saying is by just saying that women’s empowerment equals giving women more opportunity to do more. It actually is a bit of a fallacy because it doesn’t actually support women’s ability to choose to do less if they’re being asked to do more and part of them being asked to do more is the, sort of, and this is where perhaps the gender based discrimination or the gender inequity that you’re speaking to or the inequality that you’re speaking to comes in, where it says that, well, younger years can never be, they can’t be given into the hands of men. Men can’t do that work. That’s not a space for men to be in. So then if it’s not men, then who? Oh, go back to being women. And so then at the same time, we’re saying women should be able to do everything and anything. But then at the same time, we’re removing the very people that could support the equality, the sharing of space, sharing the load, and at least that one strand. And then, of course, you know, the other piece of my representation, what do young people want to be from what they can see? How do they even find themselves in the world? That other part is not there because it’s physically not there. So it feels like even from what you’re speaking to, it sounds small and it sounds, it could be, let me say that again. It could sound like it is a very small or specific project that you’re working on. But actually the ricochets and the ripple effects of it is actually societal and is far greater than just one specific place. I don’t know if that resonates to what you’re doing.

00:09:06:20 – 00:11:24:13
Jeremy
That’s the way I see it. And it’s very interesting when you start to talk to early years organisations about this they’ll, often well, it’s rare that they won’t have noticed it, you know, that of course they’ll see that there aren’t many men. But they position, they will quickly position the problem within men themselves. They’ll tell you that men aren’t interested. They’ll start coming up with all sorts of reasons why that might be, which are normally to do with, you know, the pay’s too low. To which my answer is, well, you know, there are plenty of men working in low paid jobs, so why wouldn’t they work in this one rather than stacking shelves in a supermarket or whatever? And on top, maybe it’s a little bit problematic that early educators are paid so poorly. No coincidence that, you know, their wages are so crap when you look at how female dominated it is as a workforce. So yeah, to me, all of this kind of, there’s a lot of moving parts to it, but yeah, to me this is, this is absolutely crucial stuff. And to me it has become one of my ways in which I judge the people who govern us and the people who run our education system and so on. And, you know, the lack of energy, effort and investment on this makes me question how serious all of those people really are about gender equality. Because if you don’t get what it is we’re talking about here, then to me you’re just walking around blind, you know.

00:11:24:15 – 00:12:34:29
Jess
What I love about how you articulate that and just what you said about the work that you do, is it, like Mahlon said, it speaks to a very specific drop in the ocean that has a huge ripple effect, but that drop in the ocean is very practical, very clear, very like solution orientated. It’s not this big oh, why, why do we still have this gender imbalance? Like it’s not this big philosophical debate happening. It’s very practical. And you’ve alluded to some of those frustrations. And, you know, I mean, your whole chapter’s around this question why so few men work in early years education, but can you try and share with us kind of with those frustrations, what did you want to galvanate [sic] from the readers? What did you want them to take away from having read this? What I found about reading this chapter in particular is that it was very, it was very in-your-face here are the stats. Here’s how bleak it was. It wasn’t here’s some solutions to change it. It’s like this is a picture in two pages on what it looks like. And it was quite hard hitting and I love that. So yeah, tell me more about your intentions and what you wanted people to take away from what you wrote.

00:12:35:02 – 00:16:13:25
Jeremy
Good. Well, yes, I mean, I guess I did want it to be quite provocative because to me, when you hear that figure, you know, this is a workforce that’s 2% male. I get cross about that. I just think this is not good enough. And people need to change whatever it is they’re doing, they need to do differently and better, right? So I would never say that this is an easy nut to crack, but I do think it’s a nut that we need to systematically have a go at cracking. So I think, you know, subconsciously, probably the reason that I didn’t fill that chapter with, you know, do this, do that, do the other thing is that, you know, I know that it’s not easy to solve this because we are talking about stuff that is very systemic. But at the same time, I know, especially from the work I’ve done around fatherhood, that it can be very easy to slip into actually not doing anything because, you know, you sort of reach a sophisticated understanding of the challenges and whatever. And by, you know, however many minutes or hours later you’ve convinced yourself out of doing anything, and most of the time you’ve positioned the problem within them, within the men. So I think for me, it’s very important to move away from that, as one would if one was trying to change a system to support women. We need to start making this system more open and inclusive. And I think, so I think there are lots of very simple ways that one can do that. It should be, it could and should be a community led thing as much as anything, you know. So just go out and do it. Ask them if they’re, instead of assuming that they’re not interested in this work, go in, ask them, invite them into the space and then see what they think. For example. So I think there are lots of sort of practical things that anybody could come up with. It’s about sowing the seed, I suppose, of helping people to see that this is problematic, it’s problematic for the men, is problematic for the women in the workforce. And crucially, it’s very problematic for the children because how do we end up with children who see boys who can see that caring and educating is a valid male pursuit? Girls who can see that about boys and men as well, you know. So it’s not, you know, it’s not just, I don’t know, how many women work on the, in a factory making cars. Do you know I mean? This is absolutely stuff that is deeply important for children and our future.

00:16:15:05 – 00:18:11:14
Jess
I love that. I love that. And you’ve really spoken to the systemic issues, but also as well, those listening who are parents, myself, one of my, I have two sons and also ironically I was raised by my dad as well. So I feel very passionate about this topic. One of the frustrations I have for my son, for my oldest at school, he’s in year two is that the men in his school are fantastic. The men in his school are only on the senior leadership team or the black men in his school are TAs, right, which is both fine. And I love his interactions with all of those men. But I would love him to have a male teacher at some point in his primary school education. He knows that our house is slightly different in the way that I was raised, my husband is very hands on and whatnot, but he still sometimes assumes that mommy just works in the kitchen. Doesn’t have a job working from home. And there is this guilt, despite my upbringing and seeing my dad be extremely hands on in that I still apologise for my career and I still don’t, I’m going to a meeting tonight and I’ve already made dinner so that it’s easier at home. I did not need to do that. But there’s something about, what would your advice be for those muddling through the system as educators with privilege to say something? But even I feel as an educator, I haven’t even told the school that I work in education, that my son goes to. And if I did it, how do I start to have these kind of systemic conversations with them in a practical way, if I’m not, because I feel like much of your work is speaking to the hiring of men in early years, I’m curious what we can do on the ground as people with conscience that want to help towards this, naming this imbalance daily. What can that look like?

00:18:11:16 – 00:21:50:08
Jeremy
I think it would be great if we had, you know, a kind of an army of parents who were calling for this, you know. And I do, I know lots of parents who have had fantastic male educators in their children’s lives and have kind of never looked back from that. But they remain such a rarity that I think it’s almost so remote a dream for us that most of us just kind of muddle on without demanding it. And maybe we should be, you know, maybe when we go round nurseries and schools this should be part of how we assess them, you know, and if there aren’t any men, we should be asking the question why? Why are there no men? I also think in terms of the everyday teacher rather than the person who’s in the sort of hiring role. I do think part of what needs to change is the sort of wider cultural expectations that we have of men in these spaces. So some of the research we’ve done, for example, we did a study called Gender Eye that was a partnership between us and the University of Lancaster, and we did lots of interviews with early years settings and so on. And one of the things we discovered was that the actual kind of lived experience of men working in early years was quite circumscribed, I would say, by the cultural expectations of everybody in that organisation. So the men would, you know, just like even stupid things, like, you know, the men being expected to change light bulbs or move furniture around because they’re a man in just the same way as a female educator might be expected subconsciously to be the one to go and make tea or whatever. I think we all need to get better at kind of checking ourselves about this stuff and being quite rigorous in the workplace. These are professional spaces and it’s important that people get to do and are expected to do their job, you know, So it’s not good enough, I’m afraid, for men to be told, oh, you know, you’re off nappy duty because the parents don’t like it or because it’s easier for us as an organisation because we’re less likely to get a complaint or an allegation. You know, these things do come up. They come up often when you have male employees. As organisations, we need to find our way through that, and that’s part of being a professional service, I would say. So, and I think we are all part of that, you know, all the teachers on the staff, the receptionists, everybody needs to be kind of nudged, I think, to get on board.

00:21:50:22 – 00:27:57:24
Mahlon
It’s so ironic as well, like that the example that you literally just gave is kind of still percolating in my head. The idea that like as a male identified member of staff, there are certain gender specific extra additional expectations that you have and then we also rally against the idea that when kids reach primary school, for example, or secondary school, and that the question might be, oh, I need some strong boys to help move the tables around and then people push back on that and say, well, anyone could move the tables around like, you don’t need strong boys to do that. For example, in a girls school, a girl-focused school like I work in, there are no strong boys. The tables need to be moved. Come on, let’s move them. So it is funny how even in as you’re saying, it’s so easy that slips in and people don’t catch themselves when it slips in. And it’s almost like I feel like sometimes catching yourself is more embarrassing to admit that I caught myself in a discriminatory or at least a biased it’s not always discrimination at the end point. But and at least in a biased or a biased action, I think that that culture of admitting, admitting that I made a mistake actually harms us. And I think it’s interesting that it happens in the school environment. I think to what you’re speaking about, it happens outside of school or wider in education. But then I also think it happens culturally as Brits. I think we definitely here are very aggrieved to accept culpability when culpability has happened. And we kind of we have to look at, and I know this is going to be a timely thing, but I guess the BBC, Gary Lineker, who needs to apologise and what the situation happens, we are so reticent to just say, you know what, I made a hasty remark, comment, decision. I take that back, we have new information or we have a different way of thinking. I actually understand and recognise the impacts of what I’m doing. And I think that two things that you said in your essay that I really want to pull out about the takeaways and these might not be the same takeaways that everyone took from it, but I think where you’ve just gone, you know, percolated one of those for me, one is the idea of you mentioned that programs have been initiated and there’s like specific names and you can look to an advert and understand that when we talk about STEM for women or women in STEM, stemettes. All these kind of things are specifically funded, ringfenced, neon lit up like programs that are intended, as said before, perhaps to get women to understand that they can do anything and be anything. But when you think about the same being true for men, that you can do anything and be anything, including these things, the neon light is flickery. It’s not as bright as it could be. So the idea of like, hey men, did you know that you could do all of the same things like the emotional intelligence that we ask of male leaders, male politicians, anyone that’s in leadership. That emotional intelligence comes when you work in early years or when you work in education, for that matter, because you have to really be responsive to what’s going on around you. The same level of working in community, working as a community working group work. It’s not a me project, it’s a we project. How do I, you know, do all of these things? It’s the same sort of I’m thinking about the TA adverts that they used to put out. Right. The Territorial Army. Join the TA, do these kind of things. And they made a very smart calculation to try and say that joining the army isn’t just joining the army, it’s getting all of these life skills through joining the Army. Why can’t the same be true for early years or education for that matter, that you gain all of these life skills beyond the aspects of just what it’s reduced to, which is just the teaching aspects of it. So that’s one thing that kind of came to my mind of one of the key takeaways and then the other one was talking about good old Andrea Leadsom and her doubling down on that foolishness of what her statistical interpretation suggested about men in education spaces and what the propensity would be and what the risk and the scare factors. And again, it really just does a disservice to be thinking about, as you just said, like if the nappy needs changing, change the nappy, if like the kid needs to like go to the washroom, take them to the washroom. The sort of calculation of like, well, I shouldn’t, I mustn’t, I can’t, I shouldn’t. And I see that even play out now in the school that I’m in is all the way through. So earliest to latest, and I see that even some of the men identified folks and again, in the role that I have as EDI, one of the conversations I want to have with them is how do you regard yourself in this space? Like, there are some expectations that we have of you. Like, you know, the uniform needs to be well maintained. So you saying, oh, I don’t want to look at the kid for too long. Look at the kid, look at the uniform. Like if the uniform is not correct, call out the uniform because I’m going to have to do it. And I’m the only male identified person on leadership. So if I’m in, it’s going to fall to me and I’m going to have to do it. So I’m no less of a man or you’re no less of a man for doing it. It’s just we are male identified people in this space. But as you’ve already intimated, the job description says when you see something, respond to the thing that you’re seeing. It doesn’t say but if you’re a man or if you’re uncomfortable or whatever, just do it. So I also feel like there’s, as you said, the environment wraps around to reduce men’s involvement and perhaps give some men, not all, an easy excuse to not want to participate in the work that’s necessary. And at the same time it gives the space the same excuse to say we’ve course corrected, over course corrected for the men in our space to reduce the sight of harm or threat or violence or fear. And in actual fact, what that over course correction does is take it to a whole different path that has nothing to do with what we’re all here to do. So I wonder if, those were my takeaways, but I wonder from those takeaways, what kind of perhaps came out for you, what you wanted to intend other folks to get from writing your essay?

00:27:58:15 – 00:33:09:00
Jeremy
It’s about being systematic and being rigorous in all sorts of ways. So starting from, you know, an analysis at organisational level, where are we at with this? How many, you know, like how many men have we got? Maybe you’ve got no men at all, or maybe you do have some men. But when you sit down and think carefully and talk to them and analyse, not just talk to the men, but talk to the women, too, about what’s going on around gender, which I would say you should be doing, you know, regularly. You know, have a look at what’s coming back and address it, you know, set a program up to get better at it because chances are you’re probably not doing everything you could do to support everybody in the team. This is not just about the men in the team, you know, it’s about the women in the team as well. If you’ve got women on the team who are, I don’t know, they’ve been on the team for ages, the way they present themselves in the workplace is, you know, they kind of, they’ve essentialised this kind of idea of themselves as the natural care giver and therefore, you know, some bloke comes in, how does she react, how is she responding to that, what implications does that have for how those two individuals work together? Do you know what I mean, because she may well be kind of feeling like she wants to step in and correct him because he’s a bloke and blokes are just not naturally as good at this stuff, you know, for example. She may also be justifiably resentful if he turns up and there’s like this big song and dance made of the fact there’s like a guy on the team, like, woo hoo, amazing and you know, and it will probably be the case because, you know, the research suggests that accepting that we’re talking about a tiny proportion of men are in the workforce, but within that proportion, it does look like they tend to move onwards and upwards faster. So suddenly this guy, you know, is like has become your boss, you know, and you’re supposed to be all excited about having more men in the workplace. All of that needs unpicking, you know, and it’s not just about him and what he’s doing or what’s in his head. It’s also about the women, too. And so I feel like there’s a lot of work to do to create the kind of spaces where this stuff can get talked about. And so, yeah, I don’t know. I guess my takeaway, my main takeaway would be that, you know, there are things that you can do as an individual teacher or educator to improve your own kind of practice with this. But you know, a lot of it, I would say, does sit with organisations, with the commissioning authorities, with the government and so on and so on. But I guess we can all push for a change and participate in thoughtful discussions about it all because I feel like that stuff is, is very important. You know the best early years, the organisations that are doing the best on this, and there aren’t that many, but the ones that are they have leaders who take this stuff seriously. They have scheduled space for conversations about gender. They think about the, you know, things like what are these staff called? You know, if you call it a nursery nurse, that’s not going to help you get men into the space. Yeah. So early years educator is better. Some places they even just call them teachers because, you know, it’s like, well, yeah, on some level that’s what they are. Think then about, how you kind of advertise your roles. You can see organisations that have kind of got it, you know, and so a lot of it is about leadership, but it’s also about the whole team moving, moving with the times, you know.

00:33:09:28 – 00:35:03:15
Mahlon
That was one of the things I was going to say is true. It’s just the idea of like it brings it to the function of the job versus the person in the job. So what is the function of this person being in the space, you name it that, it reduces perhaps the gender bias split or the sort of idea that only some could do this particular thing. Because whoever is here that is titled with this job description, anyone, everyone, you’re all supposed to be doing it. So I think that’s a really helpful thing. I know Jess is going to come in in one moment with a question, but I think I just wanted to emphasise one thing. It’s not a question. But just to emphasise it. If there are people listening who have a, you know, where do I start? What can I do? I think, Jeremy, you just gave a really great case study scenario and a really good setup up of how to use it. So that case study scenario perhaps of a male identified teacher moving to the school, comes in is, I don’t know, disciplining, interacting, supporting whatever with a student, a female identified staff member who has been there for a while feels some kind of way about this. You know, what are the sort of historical biases that both people might have? What are that contextual biases that both people might have? What is the situation of school. So like really trying to break down what might be going on in her head, his head, and in the spaces sort of head, as it were, to kind of get a sense of what might cause them to come at it in a sort of acrimonious way. And then how can we course correct for it to be more harmonious or helpful? And in what you just said about really ringfencing time, maybe this is a PD thing for June, July. A conversation that says this is what we’re specifically speaking to. Biased moments in the classroom or our school. Here is one that we’re going to focus on. Here’s the case study, here’s the set up. We go away, we discuss it, we come back and we talk about it. I think you’ve just given a really good example for those who are listening of something that they can do and I’ll pass over to Jess now.

00:35:03:18 – 00:35:37:14
Jess
No, not at all, again, it just gives no excuses. It’s what I love about your work, Jeremy, is you’re giving less excuse to the, oh, I didn’t know how it got like this to the like this is what you can do and I love that. So thank you for that contribution. If we then looked 20 years time down the road, we’ve all acknowledged our biases even more and rolled our sleeves up and done stuff. What would the system look like? And if we leaned into to being less biased and less, yeah, just less biased?

00:35:37:16 – 00:35:45:26
Jeremy
Well, yeah, that’s a very good question. I suppose from a, I could tell you my ideal world and…

00:35:45:26 – 00:35:46:25
Jess
Tell us.

00:35:46:28 – 00:35:53:07
Jeremy
But maybe I should give you a sort of ideal world tempered by the evidence.

00:35:53:09 – 00:35:56:16
Jess
Oh, no, no. Come on. Optimistic.

00:35:56:18 – 00:40:08:08
Jeremy
Which is that it takes ages to really get to where we would want to be. So Norway is the country that has made the most progress on this, and they’ve kind of been at it since the 1970s, and they are still only at 10% male. So that’s the bad news. Although what’s interesting is that if you talk to people in the Norwegian system, they’ll tell you that behind that 10% figure lies quite a lot of variation. So that would still be quite a lot of settings in Norway with like almost no men. And there would be some that are more like 30% or even 50% men. And once you start to look at those settings, you see how different things can be and so, I mean, you know, I suppose my ideal world would be if we could jump up to like a third to half the workforce in every setting being men. And I think it could be really interesting. And I think there’s a lot that we don’t know because one of the problems is, and going back to like the origins of the MITIE campaign, when we went to the DfE to pitch, you know, for a bit of funding to do some work on this, their first question inevitably is, well, what you know, what’s the evidence that having men in the workforce, what’s the evidence about the impact of that on children? It’s like, well, there isn’t any because we’ve got pretty much zero men. So all we can say is if you fund us and continue to fund things like us for a while, then in the end we might get to the point where we could look sensibly and say, okay, so there are enough of these now to say, okay, if you look at, I don’t know, 20 settings with 100% male staff and 20 with 100% female and a mixture of, you know, different levels of men and women in different ones, we might be able to find some differences, but we’ll, what we’ll probably find is an awful lot of similarities too and you know, my other response to that is well what evidence have you got that it’s great to have women running these places, too, right? You don’t have any. So, yeah, I think from the Norwegian experience and what they say is that once you get up to like beyond a quarter or 30% male, you get to the point where it just feels natural and normal. I’m going to use the word normal, sorry, to have a bunch of men in the space. It’s normal for, you know, and so it kind of works in the same way as it does when you think about like, who are the parents in the playground that you know, you will find places in the UK already where there’s a decent percentage of the parents in the playground are men and they’ve got to a point where, you know, whether he’s a man or woman is kind of not really, you know, I mean it’s not, it’s no longer of that much relevance because what all of those people collectively are is a bunch of individuals who are interesting, skilful, insightful and so on.

00:40:08:13 – 00:40:09:19
Jess
Not a novelty.

00:40:09:22 – 00:41:39:13
Jeremy
Yeah, not a novelty. And so I think what, you know, where we need to get to with this is to have the, is to really focus on the systems. I keep going back to the systems and the rigour of counting numbers. You know, how many men applied for that job. If it’s zero, then your recruitment effort wasn’t good enough. So next time you need to do something else. So try that. Maybe then you’ll still get zero, in which case, try something else. And so on and so on and so on. So you have to be systematic about what you’re doing things, because that’s part of how as organisations we change our collective behaviours. And so I think that’s where we should be focusing our efforts. And hopefully over the years, then what you’ll get is a steady kind of increase because you’ve put the effort in and it’s like a rolling stone gathering moss. The more men you’ve got in the space, the more they will snowball and you’ll get more men saying that that’s something they could do too. It just becomes a normal experience. So I feel like that’s the only way you can make progress.

00:41:39:21 – 00:41:41:19
Jess
And that’s what we call representation.

00:41:42:08 – 00:41:43:05
Jeremy
Absolutely.

00:41:43:08 – 00:42:14:23
Jess
Goodness me, it sounds so simple. And yet the minefield of the like biases and the subconscious work that we all have to do is thick. But thank you for your contribution and the work that you do because you’re chipping away at something that’s very important. And I’m hopeful I’m going to stay hopeful for the entire education system on behalf of my sons. That representation is happening across the board for everybody. So thank you again for your contribution and your contribution to this chapter and to the field. And it’s been great chatting with you.

00:42:15:27 – 00:42:19:00
Jeremy
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

00:42:19:03 – 00:42:36:14
Mahlon
No problem. So that is another great episode and we just really hope that you take a lot from it. Please relisten and there’s so many gems in there and we’ve been Mahlon Evans-Sinclair, Jess Boyd and Jeremy Davies. And this is another episode of season two of Diverse Ed podcast.

00:42:36:17 – 00:42:40:05
Jess
Bye.

00:42:40:07 – 00:42:54:26
Hannah
[Outro Music] Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Diverse Ed podcast. Check out the show notes for the recommendations of today’s guest. We would love to hear what you think, so do leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with another author from our book Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.