A Voice For Now

"I think of this as a parable. It’s expressing, in a fictional situation, a lot of Dickson’s views about assertiveness – and she has done a lot of work around assertiveness training for women. This is a fictional account putting into practice some of the things she says [about assertiveness], and I find it an incredibly moving book. It’s quite subtle – she’s talking about how to handle very emotionally charged situations. For instance, a young mother who lost a baby and has never had a chance to grieve, or situations at work with colleagues with whom you’re not happy. But it’s not illustrated in the formal, didactic way in which self-help books are done. Instead, it is done within the context of a story of a psychologist who hires someone to act as her amanuensis. The stuff that the psychologist is dictating causes the amanuensis to think about a lot of her own situations and then she starts a dialogue about it. Put simply, it’s about questions of relationships and how to handle them. I think expectations have changed. When I was young, there was never any doubt I was going to go to university but I never thought beyond, I never thought about a career, because for my generation it was still uncommon for women to have careers. That makes a huge difference in the way women portray themselves and the way men react. It’s a different mindset. I think the more women there are in visible, high-level positions, as opposed to just blokes who went to the same school, the more people learn the rules of engagement. And of course diversity is much more than just the gender angle – it may be that your accent demonstrates you didn’t go to Eton, it’s all part of the same thing. We are more accepting of people who are different. But we aren’t necessarily always unbiased in the way we react to them. I have come to believe very strongly that unconscious bias rather than discrimination is a key factor – that people aren’t aware of their own beliefs, and how they judge others might have nothing to do with the individuals themselves. Everyone is guilty of that. I will put my hand up and say I have prejudices, but I hope I’m slightly more aware of them than some people – I know I may think, “this person, I don’t like the way they dress, that proves they’re such and such”. You can do it in all kinds of ways, which may be trivial or may be substantive, but the more people realise that they have these unconscious biases, the more they are no longer unconscious, and therefore you can deal with them. Yes."