The Royal College of Surgeons of England recently published the report of its review into diversity and inclusion. I have taken the main points that I feel are perhaps relevant to the Dental Boards, emphasising gender diversity. I hope that I covered the essential issues in this significant report.
Background
The President of the College asked Baroness Helena Kennedy to lead the review. He decided to do this following dissatisfaction from a significant part of the surgical profession. These comments were mostly from women and people of colour. The most recent elections to the College Council had elected four senior white men who came from very similar social backgrounds.
You can find the full report here.
The introduction
If you only want to read a short section of the report. I suggest that you read the introduction. I thought that it was brilliant and pointed out the significant problems that the review group found.
I thought that the most critical and relevant comments were:
“The College has developed in ways that no longer work well. It maintains organisational structures which are excluding and emanate the aura of a gentlemen’s club”.
“The protectors of this status quo cannot see that society has changed”.
“The challenge is simple. How can positions of authority and power be the dominion of any one group of people”.
“The mistake that organisations make is to imagine that placing a few different faces in leading positions will bring resolution”.
I thought that the three critical points were:
“To create real change, it is necessary to look further down the pipeline and identify the blockages that deter diverse groups from advancing to leadership roles”.
“We learn from differences and not from homogeneity”.
“The College needs to learn that there is a growing competition from other professional bodies, some of which may be more congenial to people from diverse groups”.
I thought that one of the most important points was that in order to have a more diverse leadership, you need to become more attractive to a more diverse group of people.
I thought that the three critical points were:
“To create real change, it is necessary to look further down the pipeline and identify the blockages that deter diverse groups from advancing to leadership roles”.
“We learn from differences and not from homogeneity”.
“The College needs to learn that there is a growing competition from other professional bodies, some of which may be more congenial to people from diverse groups”.
I thought that one of the most important points was that in order to have a more diverse leadership, you need to become more attractive to a more diverse group of people.
What did they do?
This review was extensive, and they based it on information on surveys, interviews and analysis of the College Culture.
They found that the “old boys’ network” was perceived as the most significant barrier to achieving leadership roles in the College. They dug deeper into this problem, and this led them to conclude;
“The Council risks being staffed mainly by a self-selecting group with the resources to work within the system. They had little incentive to change it and risk excluding diversity”.
When they looked at the college culture, they concluded.
“The lack of diversity is not going to sort itself out over time. The College needs to get a grip with creating a representative council and pipeline through to the Council. It needs to do this through a lens of culture and environment-listening and adapting its ways of working to cultivate a sense of belonging for every surgeon”.
Their recommendations
They made 16 recommendations. The most relevant to the gender issues in dentistry were:
They made a list of detailed recommendations. The most immediate were concerned with a change of culture. These were:
“The College should make an explicit and high-profile commitment to the vision of the College as an inclusive, diverse, professional organisation committed to fairness, gender equality and anti-racism”.
“College roles will reflect the diversity of the workforce. To underpin this, they suggested that immediately these should include no all-male panels and College members should sign up not to speak at events that do not reflect the diversity of surgery”.
What did I think?
This report was, of course, very insightful. I thought that it was impossible to do it justice in a short post such as this. I hope that I have covered the main points. However, it does not take long to read the whole report, if this subject matters to you.
The most helpful thing that the dental bodies can do with the report is to consider if their organisation has similar characteristics. If this is the case, then the leaders should look at all the recommendations and consider making changes. I cannot help thinking that the traditional approach of “let’s form a working party” is not the answer. The information for dentistry is already out there. We need to read it.
I will be extending this series of blogs to see where the dental organisations that do not have a balanced board compare. So watch this space.
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