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Sunday, 27 June 2021

ED&I Hats

I'm gathering hats these days!

For a few years now I have been on the committee for the disability staff network at my work. For those of you know me predominantly through my role with the HSP Support Group, those HSP activities are all voluntary, I also have a salaried job which keeps me busy during the day! I work for Atkins (https://www.atkinsglobal.com/homepage) and there is a staff network here for people with disabilities. Atkins has recently become a Disability Confident employer, and we're working on: helping those without disabilities understand more about what it means to have a disability, providing a supportive community which people with or affected by a disability can take part in, and making sure that the companies policies and procedures are appropriate for those with disabilities.

Actually, there is nice matching between the staff networks and the protected characteristics of the Equalities Act, so what our group does for disability, other groups do for gender, ethnicity, parenthood and so on.

My latest hat is for the ED&I group which is being set up by the Institute of Acoustics (https://www.ioa.org.uk/). My profession at Atkins is an acoustician, and I am a member of the IOA, which is the professional body for those working in/with acoustics in the UK. The ED&I group at the IOA is aiming to cover all of the different areas where people face inequality or exclusion. Naturally, I bring a disability perspective to this group which complements the perspectives of the others on the group, and between us we start with nearly all of those protected characteristics covered.

You can see a photo of our initial meeting (held virtually, of course) here:


I borrowed this pic from this tweet: https://twitter.com/TheANC73/status/1407286245903015947/photo/1. Angela who took the photo is the IOA diversity champion, and was invited to take over the Association of Noise Consultants twitter for international women in engineering day (INWED).

Those that haven't seen me for a while may note that I am wearing glasses in this picture. These are my latest "getting older" accessory!



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