Hello everybody and welcome to Vet Chat. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Malcolm Morley, and the topic of today's podcast is a great one. Male allies and promoting gender equality, specifically in the veterinary profession.
So a little bit about our guest today, Malcolm graduated from the University of Bristol in 1993 and has worked in equine practise since, mostly as a partner and clinical director at Staple Close Epine practise in Hampshire. His main professional interest is pre-purchase examination. He also has a wider interest in the whole profession, particularly the human elements, and is currently president of EBA with the theme of investing in people and championing good veterinary workplaces.
So welcome, Malcolm. Thank you for being here today. Not at all, it's a real pleasure and this is such a good topic.
I feel very honoured to be talking about it. Thank you for inviting me. Brilliant.
So to get started, you might not know Malcolm, but we did a podcast several weeks ago, with Justine, and we looked specifically at the gender pay gap in the veterinary profession, and she touched upon a study that, a group of people had done at the University of Exeter. It might be worth it if you don't mind just sharing a little bit about that just for people who may not have heard from Christine. Yeah, it was a really interesting study where we shared data with 260 UK based managers and directors, and it was looking at a workplace assessment of, a recent grad who was good in some areas and bad in other areas, just very typical.
And the key part of that experiment was that we just changed one thing, which was some of them were Elizabeth and some of them were Mark and got people's perception of that. And asked how much they would pay these people, and what was probably unsurprising is that there was a significant gender difference between how they perceived these people, how they would pay them. What was also striking was that those who were later asked in the questionnaire whether they thought that gender disparity was an issue in the profession.
With the very people who are likely to express the most gender discrimination and bias and offer the male candidates, or be prepared to offer male candidates a higher salary. BVA has also done quite a lot of other work, looking at recruitment, retention and return in the profession, and many of the issues are very similar between men and women, but as part of that survey, there are some significant gender differences with women. Having fewer role models, experiencing more discrimination, less endorsement of long work hours culture.
All of that leading to burnout, job dissatisfaction and people leaving our profession, which is something that we really need to think hard about wherever it lies. Absolutely. It's great, thank you.
And let's have a little look at allies in particular. So what is ally ship? Yeah, allyship is, I think it's a term that has only become really recognised more recently.
I certainly wasn't aware of it five years ago. And we're all on a learning journey throughout life and trying to understand new things. Allallyship is about supporting the rights of a minority or marginalised group without being a member of that group.
Now I don't think any of us would suggest that women are a minority group in our profession, and perhaps that's one of the issues that we have a significant proportion of women, but that doesn't mean that they're not marginalised. Although I think that's not recognised enough. And so allyship is about supporting that.
When we think about allyship, it's really saying that those of us that are not part of a group are the ones that are need to think about that when we think about racial discrimination. If we say that for me as a white person, if I was to say, you know, this is something for people of colour to be concerned with, that's very wrong, it's for all of us, and white people have a significant role in thinking about discrimination of a racial nature, and I think with gender discrimination, men have a really important role to play. Absolutely, couldn't agree more.
So how, how can Men be male allies to help to promote gender equality. I think there's a lot of different levels. It's a very big question.
Yeah, there's and and it's really multifactorial, so let's think about some of those. I travel a lot on the tube and there are posters thinking about how we can call out sexual harassment and support people. You know, that is the most overt perhaps gender discrimination.
But a lot of it is much more subtle. I think that we, BVA had a microaggressions campaign thinking about those subtle things. Some of them may be unintentional.
Quite often, things that I've seen is actually the unconscious bias. People using language that they're not aware is an issue, you know, there's intersections with age here as well, you know. Male colleagues referring to younger female colleagues as girl or saying that, you know, she's a great kid, these things are intersections with age, but I've heard those things said without any malice or, Recognition of that person's bias, but for the person on the other end of it, that is a significant issue if it's repeated again and again.
So sometimes it's calling it out with kindness for people who express these things, challenging stereotypes. It's about making sure that people are heard, acknowledged and recognised for their contributions. It's quite, quite diverse.
Absolutely. And. If, if there was, some male listeners, most of the listeners in this podcast tend to be female, but if there was some, male listeners listening right now, what sort of, practical tips could we sort of give to them to help to reinforce this message?
I think a lot of this comes down to practise culture and workplace culture and and our own awareness of things around us. It's not just about . Verbal communication, but often about the nonverbal cues.
If you have to say to your female colleagues, you know, my door is always open, you can come and talk about this. It probably isn't, you know, we all need to try to make our behaviour such that we, it's psychologically safe for people to raise issues and, and say, say things that need to be said. Absolutely, no, that's brilliant advice.
Thank you. . And do you have any other tips, for people in practise, any other sort of effective ways that we can help to promote gender equality, specifically in Veterinary world.
So I think we need to, we can think of this at quite a lot of different levels. Let's start with equality. And equality is a really obvious one.
We've talked about the gender pay gap, making sure that we've got fair and transparent compensation and promotion procedures. I. I think that that is not at all challenging when we hear about it, but we know from SI's survey as well that there is a significant gender pay gap right in year one, from the moment that somebody graduates.
So though it seems so obvious, we have to be challenging this. Equality is not always enough. We need to think about equity and ensuring that some people will need different support from others to achieve equality.
Now, particularly in an employment situation, that is different, it's quite challenging to offer different people levels of support, but I think we can create workplaces which create equity by trying to look where the problems are, for instance, flexible working benefits that are equally applicable to all are a great, Equality move that it that actually moves towards equity because it's more likely to support some people than others. And actually as as somebody who works in a practise where almost everybody works flexibly, there are huge benefits to that, to the business as well. I think a lot of the things that we're talking about here are about creating a workplace culture that then has benefit to all of us.
You know, this actually is not just about benefiting. Women, it's benefiting all of us to create those kind of cultures where everyone feels equally valued. We've talked about there about equality and equity, let's talk about inclusion, because it's OK to say, you know, we need to pay people equally, but inclusion goes further, it's about conversations, it's about how we relate to our colleagues and the respect that they're given.
So, even one of the things that came out in BVA's survey is that, male colleagues were more likely to be asked for advice about clinical cases, and that female colleagues could feel marginalised by that. So inclusion is about including people in conversations, particularly when those things are about asking for advice and decision making. Ensure that you are asking everybody equally and that you have, sometimes it's it's often unconscious bias that leads to these things, I think.
It ties back into what you said right at the start about falling out with kindness as well, doesn't it? So because people might not actually be aware of what they're doing. Yeah, calling it out with kindness is a really key thing which.
When you see somebody who's doing something which may be discriminatory or inappropriate, is trying to think about ways to have that conversation which is non-confrontational, I have been on the other side of that on many occasions. I've worked with some really interesting and inspiring people. I think we're, again, we're all on a learning journey.
I referred to one of my junior colleagues as a girl when I should, it was not the right word to use. And one of my other colleagues said, do you know that just wasn't the right thing to say, but raised that in a way with me that was non-confrontational, and I realised immediately how that could come across to the other person. I think with the inclusion piece that we, we, we can turn inclusion on its head as well.
There is the sort of what you might call the non-promotable workload, the workload in a business, which is not gonna get you any brownie points towards promotion, it just needs doing. And we also need to make sure that we're all equally sharing that side of things, and I think that there is something about gender inequality that is quite easy for some of those things to be, To end up being what we think of as more likely to be done within the women in the workplace. I hope I've expressed that right, Catherine, it's challenging to even talk about some of those issues.
Mm. No, absolutely, no, you did definitely Malcolm. Thank you.
And I think as you say it, we're all kind of learning as we go, you know, we're trying to educate ourselves, aren't we, with these sorts of things, listening and learning on topics such as these are so important, nobody has all the answers. I think what's also really interesting is when we think about a really important topic like male allyship and gender discrimination. Against women, if we start to approach some of these subjects, we can also then just create workplaces which are psychologically safe for people to raise challenging issues and even extends as far as just clinical safety and thinking about cases.
These cultures are really worthwhile promoting. Is that, if there's anybody sort of listening in who's from. Practise and they're not necessarily in a practise where they feel like they've got a good culture.
Do you have any sort of tips on where they could improve that or? Is, is there anywhere that you could turn to to get more advice to enable people to have that safe space in practise to really enable people to want to have these conversations and feel comfortably to do so? Yeah, I think we should all be in workplaces where there's a culture that everybody can make a difference to them, but it's much easier as a leader in a workplace to do that.
I think that if you are not in a leadership position and you don't feel. It's safe for you to raise these sort of issues that can be particularly challenging. And do you know what, Catherine, I wish I had a better answer for you as to how to do that when you don't feel it's a safe space to do it.
It's probably. Yeah, it's never easy to change if you're not in a leadership position. So what do you sort of see Malcolm's the next steps in veterinary medicine where we can improve gender equality?
I think it's got to come from everybody really. It's not just for people in a leadership position. It is for everybody to make small differences, but organisations like BVA with our good veterinary workplaces policy, recently we've had policies around flexible working, difficult conversations about pay.
We've got another one coming up about menopause. The, some of those things intersect with gender inequality and are really useful, but all of us need to do that. I think encouraging male allyship is important.
I hope that listening to this podcast are. Male vets who can really identify with this, I think we need to be visible and championing this issue, acting as other role models because there are barriers to it, you know, what are the, what are the barriers to male allyship? That's a, that's an interesting thing.
I think often it's lack of awareness, the feeling that perhaps. Because we have an increased number of women that gender inequality is not an issue anymore, that's clearly not the case from the data we have. I think apathy is a thing.
Well, those of us that feel strongly, acting as role models is an issue, and I think there's an element of fear, you know, people don't want to put their head above the parapet and. Say, hey, that's not right, but yeah, the thinking about how to call it out with kindness and be bold enough to stand up for these things, I think is really important. No, that's brilliant, Malcolm, thank you.
You touched upon a lot of policies and things there that might be useful for people to take a look at. Where's the best place for them to go and find them if they need any more information? So a lot of those things are BVA resources, which are for BVA members.
If they're BVA members, they can log into it. Some of our good veterinary workplaces stuff is not just for members. You can see the overall framework of that, and you can find that on BVA's website.
Fantastic. That's brilliant. We always like to do a, blog with these podcasts as well, so maybe we could link that up in our, blog so people can find it easily after the podcast goes live.
Yeah, and for anybody that's doubting whether gender discrimination is still an issue, I'd really like to give you the research to link to from the University of Exeter, especially about the experiential, you know, what, what's it like to be in practise? Why are people not staying? And yeah, most of that is the same for men and women, but there is a clear gender difference.
As part of that, we, and we've touched on this a bit, is about role models. There are some really inspiring female leaders in our profession at all levels in within practises, within the organisations. But at this point I'm almost tempted to start naming them.
I could name them, but the very fact that I could think about naming them, you'd asked me the other way round, to name some male leaders, that would have been a strange question. The, you know, maybe one day we won't even have to have to name them. But you know, they are great role models and, and we all need role models to feel that we can, we can do these things.
Absolutely, so, so important. We're nearly out of time already, Malcolm, but is there any sort of final comments that you wanted to share with our listeners today? I hope that, this has been inspiring to people.
I think that, if there are male vets or female vets listening to this, share it with people who you feel could be those allies, I think. It is really important to our profession and the future that we try to do the very best we can. Don't just think of it as a wider societal issue and certainly don't think that because we have a, a, a large number of women in our profession that it is either female dominated or there is no gender discrimination.
That's brilliant, Malcolm. Thank you. Absolutely.
Thank you so much for your time. It's, it's been short and sweet, but it's been great. We've, I've definitely learned so much to take away and it's been really great to have this conversation with you, and I've definitely got lots of thoughts going through my mind now that we should definitely think about moving forward.
So thank you so much for being here today. Not at all, I feel honoured to be talking about this subject. Thanks so much for inviting me.
Thanks, Malcolm. Take care, see you soon. Bye.
