Oxford Brookes University Survey

A colleague forwarded me the link to a questionnaire, for a study being performed at the Oxford Brookes University. The study is titled 'Addressing Systemic Precarity: Trans Inclusion and Retention in STEM'.

I'm not sure yet whether the survey has or will reach enough transgender people to yield reliable results. I'll expand on some of the answers I gave.

The one criticism I have of the survey is that most the questions are around the respondents' experiences in their current positions, rather than their prior experiences of the field or industry in general. It's an important distinction because there are organisations, companies and institutions that genuinely try to be inclusive, and there are others that are institutionally hostile to LGBT people and women. This is especially true of the tech industries in general.

Currently I work for an organisation that's genuinely inclusive, and it's not because of politics or ideology, or because it's bought into the whole DEI thing. Rather, it's because we want a community that works for everyone, regardless of their background, and our culture is reflective of our mission to provide life-changing opportunities to the disadvantaged. Over the past couple of years, I've learned that differences between races, genders, cultures generations, religions and social classes really aren't insurmountable barriers, despite what we read in the news. Since we manage to achieve this on a fairly large scale, I believe it's something that society can aspire to.

And being genuinely inclusive appears to come with its own advantages. For all our problems, I'd argue that our IT department outperforms those in other organisations, in terms of being highly adaptable, meeting our clients' needs and adopting the latest technologies and software development methods. We're excellent at retaining talent.

The organisation I currently work for is exceptional in that respect, though.

Being transgender can still be career-limiting, the industry being the way it is. That's definitely one of my bigger worries. How easy would it be to get past an interview, or to progress beyond being the token transgender person, somewhere else?

The first company I worked for, just after I'd graduated, got rid of anyone who wasn't part of the clique of straight, white males who frequented strip clubs - this is not an exagerration. I'd also worked within an institution - one that's been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately - in which the bullying and constructive dismissal of women in their 50s was (and likely still is) endemic.

Surely that kind of discrimination is illegal? Yes, indeed it is, but in practice victims are dealing with systems and HR departments that undermine any potential discrimination case, and a culture in which there were personal consequences to standing up for the victims. The only protection against that is to document everything and to involve a union rep at the first hint of trouble.

The section in the questionnaire about whether there's a safe and welcoming environment in my team, my organisation, the industry, the area where I live, and in Britain made for interesting answers.
Again, my colleagues, social circle and the organisation I work for are generally a lot more accepting than the tech industry. I'd like to say that Britain is mostly accepting, but I do 'pass' as female, so that's hard to gauge.

What needs to be done from here? I think the biggest issue we need to contend with is the fallout from the ongoing moral panic around transgender people, and from mainstream media's caricature of us being deranged ideologically-driven troublemakers. It probably makes people initially wary of engaging with a transgender person, if they don't already know someone who is transgender. I think it takes just one or two transgender people to counteract that in a local community.

I think we also need to be more honest with ourselves, especially with DEI initiatives, and that would require ignoring 'community leaders', all the PR, and all that nonsense about 'woke' things in the conservative media. There has been way too much discussion around various abstract 'woke' things and outward representation, and not enough focus on the experiences of minorities and on how they're actually being treated in the industry.