大象传媒

ANGELA HENSHALL: Hello. So good morning everybody. Thanks for joining me today. For joining 50:50 Festival week, this is for the session for non-大象传媒 organisations. My name is Angela Henshall, I've been the external partners lead over the last year for the 50:50 Project. I鈥檝e building the organisation, building the outreach externally and we now have almost 100 partners around 100 organisations. The majority are still media. So, we are talking all kinds of media from public service broadcasters to private media to sort of small independent audio companies. But today we will talk to some of the non-media organisations. We are moving far beyond that now. So just to get started, before I introduce you to our fantastic panel, we will take a deep dive into what 50:50 has meant for everyone. We will play a short video clip about how the 大象传媒, we have been working really hard to bring new experts and new voices into our content.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

>>: Georgia Clarke is here this morning. Hi, how are you?

GEORGIA CLARKE: Hi, John. Just think, what鈥檚 the value of his home going to be now? Imagine waking up and having Banksy art on the side of your house. 

>>: The past, the ghost, right now it's hurting the most. Where do I go? I'm all alone. I thought my house was my home. 

>>: For me, poetry is about finding my voice and community cohesion as well because I think words have a very strong ability to connect people and inspire people and encourage people to become... 

>>: Let me set the mood. The mood is set. Radio 2 is yours. Let us do three questions on Jamaica鈥�

>>: Let us talk to Claudine Adeyemi, founder and CEO of the company.

CLAUDINE ADEYEMI: Companies need to do a lot more to make sure they are nurturing their talent. Making those spaces inclusive environments and positive places to work so that they can be successful businesses. 

>>: Claudine, really good to talk to you. Many, many thanks.

CLAUDINE ADEYEMI: Thank you.

[VIDEO STOPPED]

ANGELA HENSHALL: So, please, allow me to introduce our fantastic panel this morning. We have William Boss, who is partner at law firm, Addleshaw Goddard. We have Hannah Audino, an economist at PWC. And from the public relations world, from Lansons, we have Clare Parsons, who is co-founder and Chair and Jon Cronin, who is head of broadcast content at Lansons. So thank you very much for joining me. If we can start with William, please. Hi, William. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Morning, how are you? 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Good. So can you tell us a little bit about why and how Addleshaw Goddard got involved with 50:50? Why you are rolling it out? What is the purpose of it for you?

WILLIAM BOSS: Sure. I think 50:50 as a concept came to us at an interesting time. As a business we were looking to do something different, to do something rooted in data. We wanted to do something more around driving better gender balance within the business. So, for us, it ticked all of those boxes. We have started looking at it through a media lens. Obviously, we are not a media organisation, but we have started with media for the obvious reason. Also, because our media is managed centrally within the firm. So, keeping to that principle of those who make the decisions, do the counting. We felt that, to start with, media was the obvious place. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: That is comms for you guys? That means press relations. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Yes, comss. So it is press releases, comms. Press releases, it's award submissions. It's speaking and written engagements with the broader media. So we, we started with that, we started on 1st November. The first month we were around the low 30s in terms of female representation. We saw pretty much an instant hit. So it sort of jumped 8% or 10% in the first few months and Challenge Month we鈥檝e reached the dizzy heights of 59%. It shows that we can do it. Law is an industry where the majority of trainees are female. So we have the talent within the business. I think, for us, one of the real benefits actually is that we ended up doing more, just more media moments generally. So we have more than doubled the amount of external engagements. So, from that perspective of everybody benefitting, we have had, not only a greater percentage of women within the business having their voices heard, but we鈥檝e  also had a greater number of opportunities for men. We have got more organised. So we are training more women, giving them the media training that they need. We have the talent within the business. It's there to find, most of the time. I think, for me, probably the biggest thing is kind of the signposting. So, I don't think there is anyone in the business who doesn't know that we have signed up to the 50:50. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: I was going to ask you about that. The media training, I guess, has been there, but not so many people would have put themselves forward for it. Now you are talking more openly about more opportunities suddenly everyone is like - OK, I will try. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Yeah. We selected people within the business. As I say, it's not difficult to find the talent, we have it. We have linked in to other projects. So we have a mentoring project, we have sponsorship. So we've got female talent within the business being identified and linking it through to the 50:50 that has enabled us to support them.

It's that signposting effect for me. Everybody in the business knows thatwe have signed up to the 50:50 Project. They may not know exactly what we are doing, but they know why we are doing it. They know it's part of an overall drive within the business. It sort of - it hits that point for me. We have also started to get better at the sort of data collection. So I think in the old days we probably didn't count media opportunities, in terms of gender representation. If we did count, it might have been on a spreadsheet that somebody in an office kept somewhere. Now, we have got a very good tech part of our business, so we have engaged with them and now when we do engage in media activity there is a simple dashboard where you can insert - 

ANGELA HENSHALL: You log it. 

WILLIAM BOSS: We all know in diversity that data is a huge, huge part of it. So, early days. We are focussing on the media. We will move on, and we are starting to move on to client opportunities and also internal engagement, but really keeping to that principle, I think, which is the joy of the 50:50 for me, which is the old adage of - if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Sort of the principle for me is - you get those who are doing the managing and making the decisions to do the measuring, to do the counting. So we are trying to keep to that principle. Yes, early days, but we have shown we can do it. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: It鈥檚 interesting for me a dashboard makes the difference. You are not removing the humans at all from the process, the dashboard is just  your way of collating that data which is how it works for the 大象传媒 internal teams as well. If you don't have a log and if you don't have lots of people within a team participating, you have not got that whole picture across the board. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Yes. It enables us to cut the data in different ways. So we have, there are some areas of the business where we don't naturally have strong voices and it enables us to identify those and to do something about that. Again, I think, sort of pre-50:50, maybe the mindset would have been a little bit different within the business. We would have just accepted that we don't have strong female voices in a certain part of the business. Now, we don't accept that as the status quo. W e say, if we haven't got them, we need them, we are counting and counting with a purpose. So in certain cases we are identifying more talent within the business, giving it the right training and the right opportunities.

It is different. We are not sort of media through and through, but we can see the real benefit in terms of, as I say, that ideology, if you like, that sits behind it around the people who do the counting, make the decisions and that is where you get real change. So, yeah. It's been a strong start I think. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: It's been great. I will bring Hannah in now. Hannah Audino is an economist at PWC. PWC is a different experience entirely, it was focused in a particular department. Can you tell us a bit about what has happened at PWC and what the process was for you guys was? 

HANNAH AUDINO: I am speaking from an economics perspective. I think economics perspective is the pilot in PWC because it is one of the most high-profile media wise. Also, because it's quite a male dominated subject. As such, [break with up of sound]. Two main benefits really in increasing our coverage because increasingly more opportunities in the media, especially broadcast, are for females in particular. So a real opportunity there to include diversity and also to improve the increasing amount of our coverage. So as such, we media trained several younger economists - female economists, sorry, myself included - who would not normally have been put forward for training so early on in their careers. Actively gave them a chance to do things like media coverage, commentary and speaking to journalists as well.

So from my perspective, it's been a absolutely fantastic opportunity to really get involved in this sort of thing more early on in my career than I probably would had the opportunity -

ANGELA HENSHALL: Out of interest, how much earlier is it? Would you maybe have been hanging around for three or four years waiting?

HANNAH AUDINO: Yeah.

ANGELA HENSHALL: Really, OK. 

HANNAH AUDINO: I think so, probably one grade lower than I would have been had I not been given the opportunity otherwise. A really fantastic opportunity, really. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: When, what was the expectation when it started at PWC? Was the expectation that you would kind of increase, improve balance quickly or is it a slow and steady process? 

HANNAH AUDINO: A couple of things contrary to it being quite sudden really. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Your stats are really good. 

HANNAH AUDINO: There were a few departures, so actually the timing of the initiative worked out great because it meant I was kind of thrown into the deep end, but I had had that training because of the 50:50. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Right. 

HANNAH AUDINO: So, yeah, a couple of contributing factors. It's all worked out great. We are increasingly getting some of our female economists more media trained and they are really actively giving them the chance to comment on things in the media. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: That's great. Maybe we can go to Lansons now and I will introduce Clare and Jon. We were talking a bit earlier about how long Lansons have been in. You are one of our founding partners when we started to spread this out beyond purely media businesses. So, Jon, can you tell me a bit about what it has meant for you guys and be where you started to tackle it first? 

JON CRONIN: Good morning Angela and everyone as well. We are fortunate to be one of the founding external partners for the 50:50 equality project. We got involved with you at an early stage. That is for a number of reasons, but I think primarily one is because what this is all about, what 50:50 stands for, is part of what we recognise as being part of what Lansons is as a business. We are a consultancy, we focus on reputation and communications, media and all of those sort of things. As you say, I look after broadcast on our side. Clare is our Chair of the business. When she founded the business, 31 years ago, with her husband Tony Langham, the notion and idea of equality and inclusion was at the heart of the business right back then and it still is the case now. So we were more than keen to get involved with this because it just lines up, we think, as a business.

We have used it for a number of different reasons. We have used it for reflection on us as a business, to learn a bit about ourselves. We have learnt a bit about ourselves, actually. I would like to get into that if we have the chance. We used it to celebrate what we are and what we do. Crucially, we have used it as a means to help the consultancy and advice that we give to clients. We are obviously speaking to businesses that want to engage with you, with the 大象传媒, with numerous other media outlets as well. They need to appreciate and understand how the media landscape is changing when it comes to representation and inclusion. It's, A, the right thing to do. From a business perspective, it's essential. They have to adapt and change if they want to be relevant for the future landscape that we are all part of shaping as well.

That, I think, has been a driving factor for us and why we feel so close to 50:50. I don't know if, Clare, there is anything else you would like to add to that? 

CLARE PARSONS: As a contrast to something William talked about in the organisation, because we have more women who are represented throughout the business, in terms of share ownership, in terms of from the senior to the most junior, it's never been an issue that where men can't have a voice. There isn't a class ceiling is ours. What we recognised that whilst our work demonstrated that actually, when we looked at sometimes our own panels, we found that a challenge. So the metrics has been fantastic to shine a light for us on the things that we hadn't really looked at.

Also, the big issue for us is that we often are creating panels and helping our clients on these sort of things and we have really recognised the old days of manels. You know, that notion of, frankly, mostly men and white men on these are really a sign of the past. So we do a lot of work in both purpose, inclusion and generally with our clients on the face that they want to and should be giving out to the public. So it's in our DNA and it's also part of our job, I think, with our clients as well and the advice we give. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Can you tell us a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of it, Jon? What do you count daily, weekly, monthly? So, for a media organisation, they would count, programmes, shows, number of guest appearances. It鈥檚 largely guests. Largely guests and expert speakers and commentators that you have in in whatever pieces you are putting out. Increasingly this is evolving the more organisations pick up 50:50. For you guys, what do you count kind of week by week, month by month?

JON CRONIN: We鈥檝e modelled ourselves very much on the way that the 大象传媒 counts and in particular if I look at the way that the news website counts what it does. In that respect, I think that's definitely what we can reflect on and count accurately. So we look at essentially two aspects of what we do. Events, which Clare鈥檚 referred to as well. That could be webinars or the events that we host. In the old days, when we were allowed to mix.

ANGELA HENSHALL: Humans in real life.

JON CRONIN: When we could all have been together in the same place. It won't be too long before we are back to that. Those kind events. Webinars like this we run, we measure that. We can control it, we are the editors of that. We can make decisions about who is appearing and who we are inviting and who we are putting up as well. So anything that we have an editorial say on. Then, equally, all of our content that we produce. That is blogs, the newsletters, the insights that we produce, anything that we are, again, editing and pushing out. In that respect, how we write it. Who is the author? How we illustrate it. The faces and the way that we choose to illustrate what it is that we are putting out. So anything that we have an editorial control over.

We have learnt a lot in that. When it comes to events, as a business, we are sort of pretty, over the last couple of years, we are pretty much 50/50. We were more female in the previous year, we are slightly more male in this most recent year. But for content, we learnt a lot as a business. We discovered in our previous year's data that the voice of the business, in terms of content, so blogs and newsletters, was predominantly male. That鈥檚 in a business that is two-thirds female, nearly two-thirds female. It was a really useful point where the data taught us something. We have been able to draw on that and implement that data as a means of learning for the current year. We can draw on it effectively as well. So our figures are 50/50 now, 51% female for content as opposed to 49% male. That is a direct result of the 50:50 Project because we were counting and had a sense of what - 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Systemic.

JON CRONIN: Yeah.

CLARE PARSONS: It鈥檚 a deliberate intent. That deliberate intent means you plan ahead for the output and the outcomes that you want as well. Whereas before, it was who had the time. How can we manage it? Now, we actually go deliberately to say - how are we going to reflect on our last six months? What do we want it to show? Frankly, I think we are doing a really great job in pushing that through. That鈥檚 meant some sacrifices, as we all know. When you decide you want to increase the female voice, William I thought was interesting saying, they have doubled the output. So everybody has a chance. There is only so much that you can do or you should be doing, in communications terms, to put out there as well. So I think there鈥檚 an interesting point about compromise that we all have, as business leaders, who are promoting this, is how we are going to manage it and what will that look like? So... 

ANGELA HENSHALL: If I can bring William and Hannah back on camera, so we can talk across the sort of the different industries. You mentioned something actually, Jon, I have heard from other organisations is that, sometimes a particular topic area that you realise you are only getting men voicing their opinion on. I know from another organisation, at the beginning of last year, it was Brexit. They realised that when they were asking people to comment on a particular aspect of their work and do something internally, so do a blog or a think piece for the internal website, they realised that every single person who had put themselves forward to express an opinion on something controversial, like Brexit. The only people that were willing to voice it were the men, senior men within the organisation. So there wasn't an active approach to getting more diversity of thought around it within the organisation. I think the tracking really helps.

What I was going to touch on was adaptations and innovations. Because we have now moved out of the media space you had to innovate and adapt within your own industries. Perhaps, William, you can talk about what that has meant in law and what other kind of organisations can learn from, sort of, I don't know, improvising a little bit around where else it can go into the business. 

WILLIAM BOSS: The first improvisation for us was probably the one that I鈥檝e already mentioned around data and tech and using it to capture really good data. Just using the fact that we have a strong tech platform as a business to support us and provide really strong data. That is probably the first thing. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: How quickly did you do that? Sorry to interrupt you. You guys are fast at doing this. I notice with media companies this is taking a while to get that funding and then that tech solution in place to help support. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Look, it's - it went on under my guidance, but not with my detailed input. One of the wonderful things about this business is that the support platform is just incredibly strong because we have - we really have to deliver fast. It was a reflection of the importance that we attached to joining up to the 50:50, we knew that it was all about the data and it was all about quality. You could see that in the early discussions. What counting do we do already? Well, it's somebody maybe keeps a spreadsheet somewhere. We will have to do a lot better than that. I think that is our first piece of innovation.

The second piece, again, I keep coming back to the principle around the counting and the decision-making, so we鈥檝e moved into client opportunities. So any professional service firm will have opportunities to present to clients and to put a team forward. In choosing - that is a moment where you have to choose - who is on the team. You might put a document together that has names and faces in. So what we have devised is what we鈥檝e called a Pitch Badge, which goes on the front of every presentation document that we send out. It's a combination of the 50:50 logo and - a bit like you are marking your own homework 鈥� there鈥檚 a little circle with a male and female signs. You have to count how many men and women are in your documents and you have to put it on the front of the document.  That is a little bit of innovation trying to keep - 

ANGELA HENSHALL: That is going out to a lot of different companies and firms now.  You are sort of making it known within large numbers of 鈥� I鈥檓 trying to get a sense of the number of different organisations that you would work with. So we are talking a huge client book, are we? 

WILLIAM BOSS: Indeed. That is on every - 

CLARE PARSONS: That is a great idea, by the way, William. I love that. 

WILLIAM BOSS: It came to me from a story which someone told me which, I鈥檓 afraid, I only know the vaguest of details. But it was somebody who was doing the Pixar - maybe somebody on the call knows - doing the Pixar transcripts and the scripts for the Pixar films. It was a lady who just decided that when she was typing them up, she would write on the front cover what was the male and female voices in the Pixar scripts. It started off being disproportionately male, but the mere act of reflecting back to the people in charge what they were effectively putting out, meant that they just immediately said - when I heard that.

You are exactly right, Angela, I think it's about鈥� You have to be creative. You have to look around. You have to think. So, for me, it's just a mindset. The slightly wonderful thing about it all is that there is almost no end to the moments within the business where decisions are made and people are in charge. What we are trying to do is to make the playing field more even for the women within the business. There are actually opportunities everywhere. We do reasonably well to start with, but the 50:50 just makes you think about things in a different way. We can't - we are not media organisations. So we are not quite as cookie cutter as it sounds that you are with the 大象传媒 with your various teams and the like. We don't have lots of different teams all sort of doing the same process, but in a different area. We sort of do, but we sort of don't. So the innovation will come, I think, a lso through being in a vibrant business where people are keen to give you their feedback, lawyers are opinionated. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Yeah, opinionated. I was going to say, not backwards at expressing an opinion. That is probably where you would start - I hear it from other organisations as well. It goes from the process where, you are so of making notes on the back of a beer mat - or the international equivalent of the back of a beer mat 鈥� and then it just becomes more of a working group process, where people will come up with new ideas, where they might be able to build it out. You are right on the Pixar story. She actually contacted us. So I would love to talk to start talking to Pixar about what they do. I'm also looking at what they do around prominence for male characters, female characters, non-binary characters as well. I think in an organisation that is pretty creative, it suddenly starts to create a kind of a ripple effect.

I want to go back to Hannah a minute and ask if there are things that you have learnt about being involved in this that you might talk about to other people within the business or other people that might want to learn about best practice or things that have worked or haven't worked or have sort of propelled it forwards for PWC. 

HANNAH AUDINO: I think the great thing has been in the senior buy in that we鈥檝e had from this. Obviously, our chief economist, Johnathan Hawksworth, had quite a high media profile. The perception was - let us have him do all our commentary because he's the most high-profile person in the team. Actually recognising that that is not necessarily great for diversity, but also not the best way to maximise our media coverage. Once senior teams bought into that, I think it's been, it has been a very easy sell the initiative to get them to actively share out some of the commentary that we do, the presentations we do and the interviews that we do. So that has been sort of the key, the key message I would say is getting that senior buy in. Then putting females forward for these opportunities. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: That is great. Has there been an effort to build up slowly from say online, then into radio, then into TV? That is the way we do it sometimes if we have - I'm always really keen to get younger voices involved. It's more of a sort of a gradual process. You don't necessarily want to throw someone in at a live TV show at 7am on a Monday. But, having said that, some people are, it's a steep learning curve and some people will pick it up quite fast. 

HANNAH AUDINO: No, absolutely. Very gradual. So I did media training on speaking to journalists last summer. Then last month did some media training focused more on like TV and broadcast interviews. So getting the teams gradually exposed to these opportunities and increasing their sort of skills and capability in this area. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Have you found yourself talking about specific subjects? Will you keep to a kind of particular niche that you are most comfortable talking about? I鈥檝e noticed that in technology, actually, I will find new experts who might only want to talk about a particular aspect of AI. That is fine, we make sure we have notes or kind of background prep on which areas they are most kind of well versed in? 

HANNAH AUDINO: Yes. That is actually a really good point. My sort of initial focus was doing a monthly inflation labour market figures. It鈥檚 a great way to sort of gain confidence, I guess, in a sort of specific area. Increasingly I've done a few other bits of commentary to build up my confidence in that area. # I guess we all know that women are sort of more prone to impostor syndrome than men. I think the initiative has been really great to really push female team members to confront their issues with this and get them to step up and take up these challenges and opportunities we have within the team more broadly. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: It鈥檚 moving out of economics, as far as I understand, you are going into different units in the business. We know that is not your unit. There is a ripple effect? 

HANNAH AUDINO: Yes, absolutely. I think it's now FS, tech, tax. It's definitely being more broadly rolled out across the team and across the firm, sorry, given the success we have had within economics. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: You are like the poster children. That is how we do it with the other organisations. I ask people to start small, so that you have this one or two teams that will really sell it for you across the other organisations. It's all well managers coming in and saying - this is great idea. I love this. Why don't we do this? If you don't actually have people who can tell their colleagues - actually, it's not that much of a pain. You can roll this out slowly. We are making a big difference. They are the people who will really sell it across the organisation. That has been my experience so far.

So I guess I wanted to ask what do you think is going to continue to drive change? It's open to everyone really. Are there particular鈥� What are the key things that are going to continue to kind of keep this momentum going across kind of your various industries?  

JON CRONIN: I'm happy to jump in here. 

CLARE PARSONS: Yeah, go ahead. No, after you, Jon. 

JON CRONIN: From our perspective, it's the way that we operate and manage ourselves is continuing to develop. So how we support colleagues and younger colleagues in the business, younger female colleagues in the business to feel empowered to have a voice, to want to contribute more to the written material that we put out. But I think one of the areas where we think there is going to be even more relevance in the future is the organisations, the clients and people we talk to and advise. You were mentioning the media training you have done, we do a lot of that at Lansons as well. I actually run our media training practice. I鈥檓 an old journalist, ex-大象传媒, Angela, like yourself. So I sort of bring a bit of that to it. What we have done, part of the way that we have evolved and innovated with 50:50, is to combine the 50:50 agenda and outlook into the media training syllabus that we produced. So, I touched on it before. When we talk to clients, we talk to them about the need to be aware of this - more than aware of it - to be planning for it as well because it's the right thing to do, but also because they need to do that as a business. So it becomes part of the syllabus, part of what we talk about as an organisation when we are advising clients who want to get on to the Today Programme or Wake up to Money or the 大象传媒 News Channel. That is where I can see an increasing amount of focus for us in the future. We can't control that, in terms of outcomes, but we can advise and try and push in that direction. I guess we have two fronts, really - what we do as a business and how we help and advise the different businesses that we work with as well. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: You are the poster child. Go ahead, Clare.

CLARE PARSONS: I also think that this isn't in isolation. Fabulous work but, for example, we work with the 30% Club. So that notion of women representation on Boards. We work with the diversity project. So this whole notion of the industry is trying to find ways to do the right thing, to be better representative in their businesses and to the outside world. I think these partnerships and activity create a pressure point which come together, that actually creates some proper change in organisations. Each one is fine and does great work, but together, I think that is real momentum.

I just wanted to reflect back on somethings you talked about as well for a moment. The arts industry for many years, led by an organisation called Tonic, have been looking, if you think about theatre, who is the first person on the stage? Who is the last person who comes off the stage? Who has the monologues? Who has the laughs? So the notion of who is on a stage and who commands the presence. So rather than simply, which at the moment we are talking about the how many women, how many men, that is why I like William's notion of his presentations, actually talk about that and therefore it's making a real demonstration of a commitment. I think the subtlety of this is where I'm interested as well. So for us, I try to encourage, not just panellists, but also chairs. Because, ultimately, the future is around those people who can chair things. So our young people are quite keen to say - what are the skills you need for chairing? The visibility is great. I think it's much more a sense of leadership too. Then of course it鈥檚 the voice, the opinion, the consultancy or whatever it might be that you offering as well when you are on a panel. So I think there is quite a lot of subtleties in all of this. I think we can learn from other organisations to bring together as Lansons and as our clients as businesses generally that they have to come together and that is where you get real change. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: I love that theatre group. I鈥檝e not heard about that. 

CLARE PARSONS: I will give you the details afterwards. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: I assumed that some industries are forging ahead in this, but then you will go back in and see there is no system or no tracking. Then you bring in the data approach just to hang over the top of it. Then suddenly you have got some big kind of momentum across the board. Which is why I'm enjoying going into different sectors because there is a different kind of approach as to what might work for your specific - I don't know what will work for your industry. So we really need the drive to kind of come from the different sectors. It's definitely starting. The appetite is totally there at the moment. So, excited to see what happens in the next year. That will be an even bigger kind of phase of it.

One thing I was going to ask, I鈥檓 jumping ahead a little bit. I wanted to ask William and Jon, I鈥檓 afraid, I will talk to men at the moment. Have you experienced challenges being a man leading a gender initiative? One of the things about 50:50 is it was created by a man. It was created by Ros Atkins, it was built up from his show. He was talking to a lot of male editors. We had to have a lot of buy in from management who at the time were still quite male dominated. So do you find it difficult being kind of the male lead on a gender project or is it just a question of making sure that men don't feel pushed out of these kind of projects and it doesn't become like a "women鈥檚" problem or a "women's issue" to be handled by women's networks. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Shall I go first, Jon. Thank you.

For me, obviously, you just don't have a sense of perspective to start with. That, in a way鈥� I was relatively fortunate in that I was encouraged/volunteered to deliver the - 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Pushed forward. 

WILLIAM BOSS: No, it was a really good with hindsight. We had run a survey at the time, about 18 months ago, when I came on board, on cultural issues, unconscious bias. How the firm was responding and the extent to which it was playing a part in the unevenness of the playing field. I was up at our partner conference in front of 250 people delivering the results. As we all know, when you deliver then it sticks with you. I knew from the off that three quarters, nearly three quarters of our male partners within the business fundamentally agreed with the proposition that the playing field wasn't even or as it should be. So I sort of had that in my pocket. I work in real estate, which is a male dominated industry. I have always worked in law firms, which are male dominated. So when I was invited to the female partner lunches in our various offices I had that sort of, that absolutely pure experience of what it feels like to be in the extreme minority. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Minority, yeah. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Discussion of 15 or 20. The other challenges have been around language. You see this across diversity. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: For definite. 

WILLIAM BOSS: People want to engage in a conversation because they want to learn, but in doing that they expose themselves. In the preparation for this panel session I was sent a note saying - don't forget about language. For example, don't use the word "bloke." 

ANGELA HENSHALL: I use the word "bloke" all the time. I say 鈥渉i, guys鈥� almost every morning. I will use it now. 

WILLIAM BOSS: For me the moment was, it was the first time I stopped to think about using the word "bloke". Obviously, in some contexts, it might be the wrong thing to do. Obviously I recognise I don't have the answer. I'm extremely fortunate I have a co-chair, Justine Delroy, she recognised early on that I needed some time to get some cover. So I was on a few calls where I was thinking, they will want a view on this. They will come to me. Please, don't come to me!  

ANGELA HENSHALL: Please don't ask me yet. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Justine would more than capably address the issue and, A, save me from a bit of embarrassment and, B, just articulate and teach me something. So, fundamentally, people respond to what you do. It's not what you say, it's what you do. Action matters. I think that men and women have responded to that, to what we have done. Then they forgive you if there are minor indiscretions you get - if you use a word that perhaps you shouldn't, if they can see that overall the intent is there and the drive is there. So I think broadly I have been very supported by the men in the business. Certain number of them actually sort of breathed a collective sigh of relief that somebody is representing them in this discussion. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: The idea of having a co-lead is really good. I quite often would suggest that in public broadcasters as well. They will create a kind of a 50/50 lead within the project, quite often that might come from the women's steering group or women in news, something like that. Having co-leads is a really good idea. Jon, what do you think? You work in a female-dominated industry. It's kind of a different perspective, but I鈥檓 interested in what your experience has been like. 

JON CRONIN: In many respects similar to a lot of what you have been saying as well, William. 鈥淏loke鈥� is a favourite word of mine as well. I don't know if I need to be careful of that. I have three daughters and they call themselves 鈥渓ads鈥� these days. I鈥檓 not quite sure where we are.

I would say - it's a really interesting question. When you mentioned it, it made me think about that. I would say, in terms of being a male in terms of being part of this project from Lansons鈥� perspective, I don't think it has had essentially any real sort of bearing or beyond the fact that I'm simply one of the senior people that is helping to implement it at Lansons. Of course it goes beyond that. I think, for us, it perhaps sort of has been too obvious, too easy, too straight-forward to simply say 鈥� right, this 50:50 Project team needs to be completely run by female colleagues within the business. I think we cited from the beginning it has got to be that co-approach that you talked about.

ANGELA HENSHALL: Buy in.

JON CURRIN: Yeah, exactly. There is a number of fronts there. I work, as part of our team, I work very closely with Clare, but my main colleague that I work with on is a director at Lansons as well. We work very closely together. I think that matters for a number of reasons. One, we bring the perspective of our relative genders to play here. As you say, I'm also, I guess, I'm kind of a share of the male voice in this, understanding if we really want this to have impact, beyond what is an industry of ours that is predominantly female, if we want to have impact beyond that, then we need to get buy in from men to see that men are part of this. This isn't a wholly female run agenda. That it's actually about all of us involved in it as well. I think, fundamentally that is how we felt about it as well. Also, I just wanted to run it because I think it's important. I feel passionately about it. Like I say, I have three daughters and I think about their futures as well. I think it matters, so I want to be a male voice in that as well. You know, voicing views, but also listening and being part of it. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: There鈥檚 allyship there I think, that is becoming increasingly part of it actually.

I was just going to mention that we do have opportunity for Q&A if people have any questions. I failed to flag that a bit earlier, but I'm still happy to keep kind of talking through some of the points that we have been thinking about.

One of the things I was thinking of earlier was the differences between running this as a really big organisation and running this for a small, much smaller company or business. I think for a small business perhaps you would see some of the changes fairly quickly. But equally, at a large business, you might be able to run multiple strands of the project. When you guys are talking to external clients, do they talk about being able to try it out in a small way first? Are they happy to do that? My experience has been that sometimes a large organisation is either all in, across all departments, we will do this everywhere and we will make it an immediate success or they are not kind of bothered, not even dipped their toe in the water. Is that anything that you would reflect that? 

CLARE PARSONS: So if I jump in here. Depends on the organisation, obviously. But there are well developed D&I groups in almost all organisations now. They have champions at all levels in that. Obviously sometimes they speak to a small group of people and sometimes they are more effective and they speak to a wider group and they have influence. So we tend to find that if you can find your, again, allies, male or female, in an organisation and activate them and inform them, then actually they become the people that can orchestrate this and find the potential spokespeople or other people in an organisation rather than the one you always go to.

I remember when Fiona Woolf, was the first female Lord Mayor of London, at a talk that she had. She talked about the problem is habits. The reason we go to the same person to be a panellist or the same person to be a spokesman or the same person to write that article is because they have done it before. They do it quickly. It's an easier ask and you know what you are going to get. Familiarity breeds that notion of, unfortunately, same behaviour. So I think in organisations you have to almost work alongside the people who normally do it, but also try and find those activists and champions in the organisation and reach out to them and they will be able to find new people and create those opportunities. I don't know how Hannah came to be in that role, but that is how I think we talk about making change in organisations and accessing different types of talent and different people because you need from one end the interest in someone to say - this is an opportunity, I feel I鈥檓 courageous and I have the infrastructure around me to allow me to do it and to be able to reach up as well as those people who find it very natural. You have to find different types of people because we are a diverse sort of world and we need diverse voices, it's not just male and female. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Habits is interesting. Habits is definitely what the journalists fall into too. That is the reason that you see the - maybe I'm talking to organisations that are not in media at all, but that is why you see people over and over again. It's a confidence decision. You will have people that you know, as soon as the camera goes live, they can do exactly what they did a few weeks before and give you a pitch perfect performance of some opinion and comment. The phrase I hear in the newsroom as well is often as well that no-one was perfect the first time they did this. So the first time somebody goes on television or does a kind of commentary piece you do need to gain your footing otherwise, if you keep going to the same person over and over again, you never get the diversity of opinion and thought. 

CLARE PARSONS: Building the confidence of the speaker, so that is what we talk about. The first time you will be a bit of a mess. The second time you at least know what to expect. The third time you have a little bit going. By the tenth time, you are an expert. If you try to make that point where nobody is an expert first off, I think that helps a little bit. Your point I think of saying - radio first and then move on. It's how do you nurture people into it to give them the confidence as well? The organisation has to believe in them too. We all know with social media now, your little foibles, the things that don鈥檛 go right, just suddenly go more broadly. So I think the organisation has to be backing the individuals when they look for new people as well because some things will go wrong or not go as right as you hope. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Yeah, it鈥檚 interesting. We definitely have a process now where, at the 大象传媒, more of our presenters and more of our kind of editorial leads are willing to give feedback. So, we have done some familiarisation days and we鈥檝e done more kind of input for people who do take that step to kind of do it, do a longer piece with us. Hannah, have you experienced that or have you had any kind of opportunities to go back to people who have done interviews with you? I would say that is an opportunity now at the 大象传媒. I heard it also is happening at Sky and other places as well. 

HANNAH AUDINO: I haven't had that myself, but I would really echo everything Clare just said. I think there is a real tendency for, myself included, when I first asked to do this I was like, why would you want to hear from me, when you can hear from our chief economist? It鈥檚 kind of breaking down that barrier of 鈥� OK, I may not have the most experience, but I have something different to say, or something new to say or a new perspective and really getting in that mindset across the team, both junior and senior. Everybody has a voice that can add value in the media. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: It鈥檚 interesting. I would encourage people to start to do this, to see if you can get feedback from hosts and presenters that had you on your show. That you have discussed with. Also, that will build rapport with the people that are kind of regularly booking you or regularly will think of you when there is a big story in your particular area. I know the 大象传媒 there is definitely more time for presenters to come and sit down. I know Ros does this, for example, on Outside Source.  If he has a new person come in, he will take a bit more time to talk to them. You can have a look around the set if you want to. There are no stupid questions and people can kind of ask a bit more about what does it really involve doing this? Do I need to wear something specific? Will you have someone from makeup come in? How long do I need to take time off for? The one I often get is - do I need to book the morning off for an interview? I鈥檓 like - don't book the whole morning off. It really won't take that much time and that will cause friction with your manager. So there are questions that you can keep asking and not feel too concerned about.

So we are coming up to our time. I just wanted to ask the panel really if there was any parting bits of best practice or advice you might have for organisations that are starting to do this? We always have a lot that will start to talk to 50:50 about what does it really mean? Can I test this out? Do I have to make it super public when I start? You don't. I guess I would like from you each an idea of what is a good bit of advice you would have now that you have started to roll it out where you are.  

CLARE PARSONS: Shall I go? 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Yes, you go. 

CLARE PARSONS: One is - step up, the moment is yours. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Get on with it. 

CLARE PARSONS: The old regime now isn't actually what is going to sort of constrain us. We can be anything we want to the organisations want us to be. I think if there is anyone out there who wants to make a difference, the moment is now. I think that is across the board. So I think there is a moment of change and that is empowering. I also think, on the other side, there used to be people on the radio and TV who we would say to our clients to be really careful they will stitch you up. I think now you are much more open to new voices. You are nurturing and you help them in a way that actually it is then a meeting of both sides. So, the individual can feel confident and I think you want to seek the best of them as well. I think that makes me feel this is a great time for organisations to empower. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: To do it. I would agree. I would totally agree. William. 

JON CRONIN: Can I add very briefly to that from the Lansons' perspective. That be prepared to sort of learn a little bit about yourself as well. The figures, if you implement them properly. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Your company? Yes, embrace it. 

JON CRONIN: Exactly. You may have a sense of what you are as an organisation and the figures will possibly back that. They may also teach you something else as well. I think that is very empowering as well because I think you can use that data and you can use that positively. I think be prepared for that and to use it as well. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Yeah, I totally echo that. I think you have to embrace that first month and just look at where you are currently without, you know, kind of hiding away from what you are doing day by day. Yeah, that is your starting point. William. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Yeah, I echo what both people have said. For me, the obvious one, which is - you don't need to be a media organisation to benefit. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: Yeah. 

WILLIAM BOSS: Then a follow on from that is, two things really. One, you stick to the principle that, look around your organisation. Look at how the opportunities are dished out and then work out how you can get the people who are dishing out those opportunities to start counted and how they operate in teams, apply it from that perspective. The massive upside is, as a business, you bring the 大象传媒 brand into the business. That is something that people are excited about. Not being a media organisation, we don't rub shoulders all day, every day. So we hold the 大象传媒 in extremely high regard. Why wouldn't we. It's a fantastic thing to be associated with and that signposting impact you can have around the business is huge. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: It carries. Yeah, I would agree. 

HANNAH AUDINO: One final thing from me is just about how to embed it within the team and what you usually do, so that is all about data. So we now monthly report on our 50:50 stats and that gets reported to the Board and just more widely across our team and across the firm. That is really helping to move from it being a pilot initiative to really being a fundamental part of our day-to-day media operations these days. 

ANGELA HENSHALL: That is what makes it work. That is exactly what happened to the 大象传媒. It went from being - oh, this is a new thing, we will try it out and see how it works until it became workflow, day by day. Nobody really notices so much that they are doing it any more, it's just part of what you are expected to do in your job every day. It's just part of the deal.

Fantastic. Thank you so much everybody. It has been really interesting for me and hopefully everybody else to find out what these pretty diverse businesses are doing in taking this approach further. As I mentioned, I think this year is going to be really interesting for the project because we will take it 50:50 far beyond where it's been so far. The report on Thursday will kind of show how well we have all done and you guys have done this year by joining up and letting us know how your results were for March. So thank you once again.

If anybody else who is on the call, who wants to get involved, please do drop us a line. The 50:50 Project is always keen to hear from new organisations and happy to chat to you. So thank you very much everybody. Goodbye.