I recently got an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, from a name I didn’t recognise. I clicked through to the profile and the penny dropped: this person works for a company where I applied for a job quite a long time ago. It all came back to me then: I spent hours jumping through the application hoops, but wasn’t even given the courtesy of a rejection letter.
I recently attended the NUJ’s Reporting on our health services masterclass. It was about how to carry out quality reporting on health issues, at a time when the cuts and restructuring in our health service are mirrored by cuts and restructuring in our newsrooms.
I hope people realised that yesterday’s blog post criticising gender quotas was intended to be light-hearted. Now it’s time to be serious.
I’ve heard a few good arguments lately for imposing gender quotas when selecting speakers for tech conferences. But since the phrase “imposing quotas” seems to bring many people out in a rash, let’s call it “adopting selection processes that lead to greater diversity” or “aiming for a more representative mixture of speakers”.
A acquaintance of mine, a vet, reported today from the “Every Pet, Every Time” UK conference that 70% of human patients have forgotten their doctor’s advice 60 seconds after leaving the consulting room. She commented that doctors and vets have much to learn on communication.