Discussing Gender Equity at our second annual conference

"Feeling very grateful to have been surrounded by amazing people at our Rail Unites for Inclusion gender equity conference, which I opened and closed today. We had 2 brilliant panel sessions one on attracting and retaining women in our industry and the other around tackling violence against women and girls hosted by my fellow Industry Inclusion and Belonging Leads Odis Palmer and Dante Frederick. We also held 3 break out sessions.

The online breakout was opened by Emma Roberts and Nicole T. sharing some of the work Railway 200 are doing to inspire the next generation including their Inspiration exhibition train. Amit Kotecha Pratisha Tailor and Georgina Reidy Assoc CIPD supported by the lovely Grace Robinson focused on industry engagement and how we can inspire more women to join our industry as only 17.4% of our workforce are women so there's a lot of work to do! 

The second breakout focussed on women's welfare and wellbeing, facilitated by Lynn Chamberlain-Clarke who also hosted one of the 3 mini breakouts on women's welfare facilities, period dignity was hosted by Sonia L Hazel, menopause hosted by Andrea Henry and Suzanne Donnelly. 

Finally I supported my partner in crime/virtue Odis Palmer with a dialogue around tackling violence against women and girls, which led onto the final panel session. 

Thank you to all the inspiring panellists Laura Shoaf, CBE Daljit Kalirai Darren O'Brien Gina Godsiff Jacqueline Starr, Khadiija Mohamed, Primrose Jeanton, Sam Painter, Baroness Shaista Gohir OBE 

There are so many more people to thank for helping me pull together this event, which has taken quite a while to plan.

Looking forward to continuing on the dialogue and action and welcoming some new members onto our Rail Unites for Inclusion team to join us on our mission to make our industry more inclusive and diverse so we can be more reflective of the customers and communities that we serve, in order to better serve them.

Photo below includes some of the in person attendees who joined us, standing on the stage, and over 100 people across the industry joined online too."