Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. Today we are holding an oral evidence session on the effectiveness of equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and we have a panel of five in front of us. We have Alex Edmans, professor of finance at London Business School, Iain Mansfield, director of research and head of education and science at Policy Exchange, Dr Louise Ashley, reader and associate professor at Queen Mary University London, Dr Zoe Young, founder and director at Half the Sky, and Peter Cheese, chief executive at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Professional Development. Thank you and welcome to you all. I am going to hand straight over to David.

Thank you all for being here today. As we are pressed for time I am going to direct questions at individuals, and if you have a different opinion then I will bring you in. Let us try to get through as quickly as we can. Zoe, attitudes to equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives have changed in recent years. What do you think are the drivers for this?

It reflects both external political factors and some internal confusion in how EDI is understood and implemented. There has been some influence in the tone of the debate imported from the US, but it is not a wholly imported situation. I have seen programmes pulled and policies changed in UK organisations with US links, but this is not at all universal. What seems to have shifted is confidence and clarity. The language has changed and there is more caution around EDI and more scrutiny—rightly so—over the outcomes of how the promise of programmes and initiatives is measured. It is not only about external political challenges and social change; it is also in part a response to how EDI has been understood and practised. There has been a lack of precision around how different components of EDI are defined and applied and as a result organisations have focused on what is most visible and measurable, particularly representation, rather than how work actually happens in practice. From a workforce perspective, where EDI is experienced as symbolic or disconnected from day-to-day realities, it becomes more vulnerable to scepticism and critique. In other words it is a bit of a perfect storm. Where organisations have made public statements on politically sensitive issues without a clear connection to their internal practice, this can contribute to perceptions that EDI is more about signalling than substance, which can further weaken confidence, particularly if employees are not feeling the link between the external messaging and everyday experience at work.

Does anybody have a different view? Iain, please go ahead. Could you also consider whether the UK and the US are comparable when we look at how EDI is measured?

That is a very good point, and I agree with a lot of what Zoe said, but I would just add a couple of other factors. While rooted in the best of intentions—to root out discrimination and to provide an inclusive workforce—some of the backlash has come from specific programmes and policies which were seen as going too far. For example, I might refer to when a senior executive of Aviva said in Parliament that she would personally have to sign off any non-diverse, higher ethnic minority-only internship schemes. There is a greater realisation by companies that their staff and the public do not necessarily want the more heavy-handed programmes that have come under the banner of EDI. They want non-discrimination, and there is strong support for that. They want people to be treated fairly. For example, in 2024 we conducted polling at Policy Exchange and asked people to pick between two statements: employers should appoint or promote the person most qualified for the job without taking into account factors such as race and gender, or employers should appoint or promote people in a way that creates a diverse team which reflects the make-up of the UK. Some 75% of people went for the first and 15% for the second. Similarly, 50% of people agreed that businesses have been too concerned with taking political positions on contested issues, which matches with some of what Zoe said, with only 18% disagreeing. The UK has generally been in a better position in the US both in terms of overreach and backlash. We have never had positive discrimination here; we have positive action—there are debates to be had about that—but we have not had the full-on affirmative action which you saw in the US, which is a good thing. We have also had less of a backlash in terms of some very heavy-handed approaches by some states in the US. I am not saying everything is perfect here. From our report we think there are things that can be changed but I would hope—just as we often do in Britain—that we can navigate a better way between the two poles of overreach and backlash than some of what is happening in the US.

Can I just add a quick point on that? There is consensus between us in many areas. The questions asked are in danger of presenting diversity and inclusion as anti-meritocratic—the opposite to meritocratic—and I would signal that is not necessarily the case. Just because we have diversity and anti-discrimination measures in place it is not to say that we are making non-meritocratic hires; we are compensating for historical disadvantage that anti-discrimination law does not do on its own. It is quite problematic to position diversity necessarily as anti-meritocratic and to ask a question that in some sense frames that as an either/or is slightly misleading. Finally—back to Zoe’s point—when we look at EDI measures or equality more generally we always move through fads and fashions as we do with all management practices. We can think of that in relation to EDI in a sense. EDI has been in fashion for a variety of reasons. It is moving a little out of fashion and we might talk about this when we come on to the business case. We have to remember that there has never been a consensus around DEI/EDI. There was a surface consensus to some extent, and I would argue that much of EDI is driven by reputational pressures and not necessarily the business case. Those political currents from the States are reducing those reputational pressures and as a result organisations are starting to feel less constrained. There is an apparent collapse of consensus but it is more the fact that we are just seeing that that support was always quite contingent and instrumental anyway.

Peter, please reflect on anything we have spoken about already, but to what extent has political and public support of EDI been affected by movements such as Black Lives Matter and the debate about balancing trans inclusion with women’s sex-based rights?

We have touched on some of those points already. I always say that business is part of society; we have to understand and recognise some societal trends and what is being discussed and debated, which can create challenges. I agree with much of the commentary. As we have already explored, it can sometimes overcompensate for some things. When you are in environments where it is difficult to find consensus in these discussions—as Louise has already said—it can become overly politicised; as a result the reaction from organisations can of course then be very variable. It is essential that we now focus on the outcomes and acknowledge that while there has been some progress there is still more to be done. I do not think anybody would deny that we need to do more in building inclusive cultures in particular, which are supportive and respectful of people and difference and recognise the value that that brings to an enterprise. In business we will always be confronted with political trends; the important thing is to make sure that what we do in business is grounded on evidence. We have to listen to the voices of our employees who—certainly in recent generations—are more vocal on these issues and expect to have their voices heard much more in organisations. We are also a little at the point of saying, “All right. How do we get the balance between just saying everything is up for debate in organisations and every political trend or every conflict around the world—or whatever it might be—is open for discussion in our workplaces?” We have to find a balance. In the past it has been described as the social contract of work: I have my employment contract but I also recognise that when I come to work there may be certain things I have to leave outside the door because it is not helpful to inclusive cultures if I debate absolutely everything. There is some of that conversation going on, which goes back to my point about the extent to which organisations are mindful of societal and political shifts. But at the same time organisations should not just immediately fall into saying, “Right. I’ve got to deal with all these things and I’ve got to have all these campaigns going on internally,” because we cannot deal with it and we have to be very wary of the trends that that might drive.

Alex, can you consider how the sector can perhaps reset itself to gain a broader political and public level of support for the work being done?

This would be to focus on the evidence that some fellow panellists have highlighted. It goes back to the opening question: why has there been a change in the views? In addition to the political and institutional changes there are developments in the evidence. There used to be a strong consensus that demographic diversity, which was measured mainly by gender and ethnicity, was strongly linked to financial performance. However, evidence now suggests that a lot of those studies were weak and flawed and there were a lot of issues with this. We need not go to the other extreme and say this means that DEI is always damaging because that is not the case. Actually there is new evidence suggesting that if we broaden diversity from just demographic diversity to cognitive diversity—it could be socio-economic, background, or education—then we have a link with financial performance. That was the report I did for the diversity project last year, which we launched in the House of Lords in June. If you look at equity and inclusion, psychological safety, places where people can express different viewpoints and challenge each other, that is also linked to financial performance. In the early movements of DEI people did not think, “Oh, demographic diversity is all that matters and we ignore cognitive and inclusion.” People thought it was maybe just a good enough proxy; it was not perfect but it was a reasonable correlation. The new evidence suggests that you are actually missing out a lot of that other stuff. It is not good enough, and it might actually be quite misleading. Some organisations can tick the box on certain visible demographic diversity metrics whereas they are not moving the needle on what truly drives performance, cognitive diversity and inclusion of corporate culture.

Please be quick, Louise.

I will be quick. I just want to make a point on the business case which is really important to bear in mind. The business case has been the primary motivation for equality and social justice in organisations for 10 or 20 years, about the same time that EDI was imported from the States into the UK. Critical scholars have been arguing from the very inception of that agenda that we have to be extraordinarily careful about using a business case as our primary driver for fairness or equality because the business case will always be contingent. It will always be difficult to prove; it is very difficult to decide which aspect of diversity we attach it to. The argument would always be that although we can have the business case in the background it serves as a fig leaf. As I said, most organisations act according to reputational pressures as opposed to a pure business case, but we fundamentally need to focus on our principles and values, because they remain consistent whereas the business case is really difficult to prove in any consistent sense. There has to be a principled argument as well.

Iain, in the polling information you gave, was the sample size around 1,900 people?

That is correct.

Of those 1,900 people, 1,746 of them identified as white, only 83 black, and 116 Asian. How did you choose your sample?

It was a British polling company member. It was the standard way it constructs its sample to be representative of the UK population.

Would there be any effort to make a more representative sample when it comes to those who are affected by EDI policies?

All employees are affected by EDI employee policies. When a company runs an ethnic minority-only internship scheme all the employees or potential employees who are not ethnic minorities are not able to get in there.

Interesting. What funded the report?

Just to be clear, this is a different report from the one we published recently but both reports form part of our core work programme.

What funds your core work programme? What Zoe said earlier about the creep from the US was very interesting. You talked about politicising business. Where is the politicisation on this front coming from? It is really important that we are transparent about this. Given the conversation we had in Parliament today around funding, it is really important that we know what is funding the research that is being quoted.

Policy Exchange is a registered charity. It is fully compliant with its Charity Commission obligations and you can see its returns including accounts on the Charity Commission’s website. It is funded by a wide range of foundations, trusts, corporations and individuals where it is appropriate. We are proud of all our donors but we respect their privacy. Our offices have been vandalised by extremists three times in the last three years and it is understandable why some that donate to us wish to maintain their privacy as they are entitled to by law.

That is awful and I really hope all your staff are okay. We all understand that when you put yourself forward in a public-facing role, those consequences unfortunately come home not just to the people facing the public but to the staff.

I am going to turn to the issue of how we actually define diversity and inclusion, which you have already touched on. Zoe and Alex, what are some of the difficulties in defining, promoting and analysing diverse and inclusive cultures in the workplace?

Diversity is about who: the make-up of an organisation’s workforce and hence the focus. You can count that and you can attach protected characteristics by a count. Inclusion is the mechanism by which diversity brings value for the individual and for the organisation; it is imprecisely defined and very difficult to measure. There is no universal agreement around how to measure inclusion. It is often measured by organisations in people surveys and it is measured by mood. For example, “I feel included; I feel my voice is heard.” It is rarely measured by functioning: how the organisation actually works to ensure that diversity and contribution are leveraged and work for the organisation in creating value. There are imperfect measures, a lack of clarity around EDI interventions and the specific problem they are to solve as well as the lack of measurement around the impact that they might make. It is very hard to compare interventions because they operate at different levels. You might have awareness training, a process or policy change or a system redesign. These interventions are not equivalent and the evidence suggests that progress and impact, say, on progressing women into leadership roles will come from a combination of interventions. It is hard to say whether development programmes for women work because a measurable outcome from that might be participants reporting improved confidence and intention to put their hand up for promotion. Whether that promotion is achieved depends on changes to the decision making, in the promotion pathway, and other system adaptations. It is very difficult to measure but what would help enormously is some focused work on supporting how to define inclusive culture and inclusion as skills and behaviours that can be measured.

Thanks for the question. I will start with cognitive diversity and then I will move to inclusion. In the report that we did we defined cognitive diversity as the range of expertise, experiences, information, perspectives, preferences, and ways of thinking within a team. It can arise from differences in educational, professional and life background, cognitive style, personality and demographics. Let me expand on that. As was highlighted earlier, this is something that is fully consistent with meritocracy. It is to make effective organisations where the whole is more than the sum of its parts and where we have a range of different opinions and perspectives to lead to a better outcome. Indeed demographics is one part of this. Men and women think differently so there is psychological evidence looking at different risk appetite, caution and emotional intelligence; different ethnicities will have different experiences and cultures. However, it is more than that, because sometimes approaches may give the impression that a white man does not bring any diversity to an organisation when his expertise might be in humanities while everybody else is in sciences. He might be the first in his family to ever go to university. Those things are important. It is not that demographics take up 80% of it. In fact all these other factors matter a lot. Personality style matters a lot: are you more risk-seeking or risk-averse? When I move to inclusion, this is a corporate culture that allows people to be themselves, express their viewpoints, challenge each other and seniors and propose bold ideas without the fear of failure or chastisement if you go against a senior. However, it is important not to overextend this, because sometimes inclusion suggests that we should be a space where everybody can say anything even if it is discriminatory and offensive. That is not part of inclusion. It should not necessarily be that everybody’s viewpoint is always included in every meeting or that it gets equal airtime, because there will be some people with more expertise on a topic and we cannot have every decision being taken with a town hall. Inclusion means including all viewpoints that are relevant to the issue at hand. Certainly discriminatory behaviour is not going to be beneficial to the decision being taken, but something which is not coming from expertise or is maybe a less informed viewpoint does not necessarily need to be included. We want to look at the merit of a viewpoint, and if the viewpoint comes from somebody of a particular minority demographic group it should be taken as seriously as if it came from a majority of the group.

You have touched on quite a wide range of different characteristics. Do you think there has been too much focus on protected characteristics and not enough on the wider range of diversity you have just mentioned?

Yes, there is too much focus on protected characteristics. This is not from a malicious or negative viewpoint; we want to start with what is easy to measure. Protected characteristics are easier to measure and we thought maybe that would be 60% or 80% of it. Perfect should not be the enemy of the good. What the evidence increasingly suggests is that this is capturing a small part of the picture and in particular—to the extent to which these measures become much more reported—there will be organisations that want to look good on those metrics, which could be at the expense of what really matters. For example, on company reporting if we focus on quarterly earnings then companies will focus on short-term profit at the expense of research and development and building corporate culture; this could be one of the unintended consequences of focusing only on the visible measures of demographic diversity.

Can I bring in Louise on that whole range of issues?

I am going to disagree slightly on a few of those points. First, Alex mentioned that men and women think differently. I am careful about such essentialist judgments; men and women definitely have different experiences but fundamentally they do not think very differently. These binary distinctions usually work less well for one group, and that group is typically women, so we have to be careful with that. Secondly, though one might start with a level of cognitive diversity, whether that reaches the top of organisations is doubtful, so I am a little cautious about it. Let us not forget that representation matters and continues to matter. For example, even today 60% of senior leaders in the most elite, high-status and highly remunerated jobs in the City of London are white males from upper-middle-class backgrounds. One of the difficult things within organisations is that there are incredible pressures towards assimilation. Often the way to get ahead is to be similar to the people who are already there; that does not really change. Thirdly, a really important point is that embedded within the business case is the idea that discrimination is economically irrational because it means you are not recruiting and promoting on job-relevant factors. It is the classical economic argument behind non-discrimination and in a way it makes sense, but in a way it does not because it assumes that we are economically rational actors and that we always make economically rational decisions. The thing about human nature is that we do not. Depending on our interests it can often be entirely rational to discriminate for non-economic reasons and therefore we have to be careful about using this business case, which is actually not very powerful in driving change.

Could I respond to one of the points?[1]

I am sorry, but I am going to bring in Peter and then I am going to have to update you about where we are with votes.

I just have a couple of quick thoughts. First, we have always argued the business case from the perspective of being able to attract and retain the greatest diversity of talents and skills possible—which builds on Alex’s point, although I understand your points on that, Louise, as well—and the fact that our society’s demographics are changing. Secondly, diversity means that organisations reflect the customers they are serving and the communities of which they are part. I have had many conversations with business leaders who understand these arguments without necessarily needing absolute quantitative proof, which we all acknowledge is not easy to find. So I tend to express the business cases from those perspectives as well. In terms of measurement, there is quantitative and qualitative. Of course, we can look at representation but I also encourage organisations that are measuring different demographics to look at things such as retention and progression, because those are also good indicators of what is going on. They can then look at qualitative metrics around surveys and begin to break those down by demographic groups as well. If they ask questions such as, “Do I feel safe? Can I speak up? Am I respected? Do I feel included?” they can break down responses by demographic groups, which can provide a lot of insight. It is where much of the debate is beginning to move now.

The CIPD has also done a lot of work in terms of social mobility on that front.

We have done a lot in that area as well. These are difficult things to measure; there is the complexity of intersectionality and other debates. Ultimately, we are all individuals and trying to categorise too much has been part of the problem in the past. We have said, “Let’s put people in categories based on their ethnicity”—or whatever it might be—“Then train managers about what that particular ethnicity or gender thinks.” That of itself does not create inclusion. We have learned a lot over the past 15 years or so; we are now moving away from those ideas and talking much more about collective inclusion, respect for the individual and a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measures.

I am really sorry, because this is a fascinating session, but we are going to have to suspend it to vote sooner than anticipated. The votes will take an hour, so we will discuss whether we should return afterwards or find another date.

You have to do your job.

I am pretty sure you all have a view on how we could modernise and do this in a much more efficient way.

I want to ask a few questions about what success looks like. For which types of equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives is there the strongest correlation between the intervention and the intended positive outcome, and what does good look like in that space? I am going to ask Louise first.

That is a good question. I am going to go back to two things, picking up on points Zoe has said. One of the problems with measuring success is that there are too many confounding variables; we are almost never able to use a control group because most of the interventions are not big enough to allow that to happen. It is not necessarily a criticism of diversity but there is often a sense that you are trying a lot of things and when one of them works you are not always quite sure which one it is; so we have to be a bit careful. We also have to be careful because EDI is, as I mentioned just now, extremely vulnerable to fashion and imitation. In my world, we call it institutional isomorphism, which means that organisations often adopt similar practices because they are considered legitimate, as opposed to being effective; EDI is very open to that form of imitation. The policy that I would probably pick out as particularly representative of that issue is unconscious bias training, which has been very widely introduced without any evidence of its effectiveness. It probably does not have much of an effect but it became almost problematic because if you did not provide unconscious bias training it would look like you did not care about the issue. We see these movements and snowballs happening that are completely non-evidence-based. Having said that, for the reasons that both Zoe and I have mentioned, it is difficult to get very clear evidence. I will hand over to my fellow panellists, but generally we prefer to see structural interventions: things that actually change the structure as opposed to the culture of an organisation, although the two can work together.

There has been some success in focusing on practices, not programmes; for example, capability building supports managers to manage performance in a humane way. I will offer a case study example of an organisation that I have been working with. It is a mid-sized group of residential care homes with 600 staff, a highly regulated environment, and like much of the sector, a workforce that is predominantly female and ethnically diverse, with a high proportion of internationally trained nursing staff on training visas. Diversity is therefore already a fact; the question is whether the organisation is equipped to make it work. It is a business that wants to grow, but the reality is that the HR infrastructure consists of 2.5 people for an organisation of 600 or so. However, the management and director are very clear that their ability to deliver high-quality care, manage risk, and grow, depends entirely on how well their people work together, which is why it works. Interventions are most successful when they are based on a clear diagnosis of what to focus on. The challenge was not about intent; it was not about policy. It was about everyday interactions, communication across cultures, confidence to speak up when a mistake was made, and how teams handled mistakes in real time. The focus was not on adding an EDI programme, it was on building the capability—particularly of the manager—to set the tone, create clear expectations about how people should work together, and enable people to challenge and support each other. This was happening within the flow of work; people were not being taken off-site for a training programme or anything like that. We were integrating inclusive practices and skills into that environment, and the results were tangible. Vacancy rates are the lowest they have ever been. Staff turnover is also low, and much better than the sector average for that size group. For me, this is a great example of effective inclusion work and what it looks like in practice. It is not separate from the business; it is how the business works.

That is really interesting; without giving my own opinions on the matter, there is something not very helpful about saying, “We are going to do equality, diversity, and inclusion training today,” as opposed to saying, “This is the organisation we are in and this is how we operate and EDI is embedded within it.” Peter, did you want to add something?

I want to reinforce that point. There is so much evidence now that things work when you have really focused on the culture. You can put all these initiatives in but they are not going to work if the culture is not inclusive and supportive. As we have all recognised, a lot of historical stuff is about saying, “Let’s do something.” Louise’s point is one I have often talked about; it is not about best practice, but best fit. You have to understand the context, and you absolutely have to understand the cultural dynamics that can work against these initiatives. It is about training our managers and making them better people managers. Sometimes a business has been failing for many years because people tend to be promoted on their job competence but not enough is being done to train them and hold them to account for being effective people managers, of which EDI is a core component. Diversity and inclusion initiatives should be integrated into HR practices thinking about them all the way from recruitment to resourcing, progression, promotion, and so forth. They should be seen as integral to what is being done in HR practice. They are not a separate thing over there to which we all have to pay a different kind of attention. It is about integrating EDI into the culture, integrating it into practice, and shifting that mindset.

We have talked a little about what works; please feel free to add to that. In your experience, is there anything that has not worked? I will start with Iain.

I want to add that our laws and the courts can warp businesses’ measures of success, and not always in a very helpful way. If your company is taken to court for racial discrimination, sex discrimination, and so forth, one of the ways you can defend yourself is to show that you have policies, processes, and training in place. Introducing unconscious bias training—I love the word isomorphism that you used—may be completely useless in terms of improving your culture, but if you are the CFO and it means you win the court case and can say you were not at fault, then that is a win. You may indeed be doing stuff that does not help you, but that is how the courts work; the system can encourage this effect. We have discussed whether there is too much focus on protective characteristics; again, if you operate a financial services firm, the FCA says that 40% of your board must be female and one of your board must be from an ethnic minority. So success for you means that you do not have to write an explanation to the FCA, your regulator, on why you failed to meet those targets. One of the things which came out very strongly when we did our recent work is that this is not a case of businesses running away and deciding to be woke or implementing EDI schemes for the sake of it. A lot of businesses and public sector organisations want to do their best for their employees. Yes, they are buffeted by fashions, and yes, they sometimes catch on to things. But when we look at the drivers of this, we need to look at the laws and we need to look at the courts and how the courts interpret those laws, because they are often driving the focus, whether it is on tick-box accounting for protected characteristics, or introducing training and policies just to show that you have training and policies in place. That can be a very major factor. What we should be looking at is the culture; we should be looking at cultures that deliver a fantastic service. In the NHS, for example, productivity has not increased despite a huge focus on diversity. That may be for other reasons, but we need to look at what happens in the financial services. Do we care most about them hitting certain numbers on boards? We might care a little about that, but we probably care more about not having the cognitive blind spots that led to the financial crisis in 2008. Success needs to be considered broadly. Companies should do it broadly. That is not to say that there should be no regulation from Government, but we need to consider how that regulation, as it is written and interpreted through the courts, distorts the success metrics of companies that will be responding to it.

I suppose there are different phases to this: the recruitment phase—how you get your people—and then the culture around how those people operate. Maybe it is worth thinking about it like that as well. Alex, did you want to come in?

You asked two questions: what works and what may not work. In terms of what works, there is modest evidence that cognitive diversity is linked to financial performance, but I have to stress that the evidence is modest. Before I wrote the study for the diversity project, I hoped I would find really strong evidence that if we expanded diversity beyond demographics and looked at cognitive diversity there would be a strong link. But I found that even cognitive diversity was not enough because it needs to be accompanied by inclusion and a culture of psychological safety. Often organisations have what I call an add diversity and stir approach. They say, “Let’s just assemble a cognitively diverse team and wait for them to do their magic.” But intentional management is required in order to harness the benefits while attenuating some of the costs. In terms of what does not work, there has been research into the effect of quotas on performance. For example, Norway had a requirement that 40% of company board members should be women. It had treatment and control groups. There were companies that were more in compliance and ones that were less in compliance; those that were more affected suffered worse long-term performance. But again, we should not over-interpret this and say that gender diversity is always negative. This was just a false measure of diversity. If you required 40% of board members to be professors you would probably have worse performance because there is just not enough of a supply. Gender diversity is something which could be a source of demographic diversity. I was a bit surprised by the earlier comment that men and women do not think differently. There is a lot of psychological evidence that they provide useful differences. There is evidence regarding overconfidence: men typically attribute success to themselves whereas women credit other people. When failures happen, men blame the circumstances but women take responsibility themselves. This manifests in their decisions: men trade more speculatively than women and women trade more cautiously.

Alex, could I just stop you there as we are in danger of regurgitating some of the discussion? Could you send us the evidence that you have on that front? That would be really helpful.

Absolutely. It is just one source relating to cognitive diversity.[2]

From your perspective, Zoe, how easy is it for employers to stop an EDI-related initiative if it is not going well and is not having a positive effect?

It is quite easy, although it depends on whether the intended focus and target for change are understood in the first place. But for the reasons Louise has said, there is a peer pressure with fashionable initiatives that can rather grip. I want to echo the point that the diagnosis of what to do in the first place that is best for that particular organisation does not always take place and there is not necessarily a clear line of sight to an outcome. There is certainly a lack of sharing evidence of impact between organisations as well; it is kept very private, so there is good stuff that we do not get to hear about, and equally we do not get to hear about things that have not worked, unless they are part of an academic study or a controlled trial.

I agree with Zoe. I do a lot of my work on social mobility and one of the interesting things is that there are numerous groups in different sectors or industries that look at social mobility within their organisations. For example, there is a group in accountancy called Access Accountancy, one in finance called Progress Together, and many more. Sharing failure can be difficult and quite confronting but these groups act as semi-closed groups in which experiences can be shared more openly. That model can be really useful to talk about what works and what does not in a relatively supportive environment.

Thank you very much, Kim; that brings us nicely to the close of this session. [1] I would like to respectfully address a point raised in the previous discussion. Dr Ashley stated that men and women do not think differently, which is contradicted by the evidence. I was surprised by this because one of the main arguments for diversity initiatives is that, on average, men and women exhibit differences, supported by a significant body of evidence. Of course, not every individual conforms to averages, and gender is only one dimension. Indeed, my comments were made in the broader context that demographic diversity is just one component of cognitive diversity: I stated, “It is not that demographics take up 80% of it … other factors matter a lot.” But demographics still play a role and should not be ignored. (Prof Alex Edmans 10 April 2026) [2] As this was an evidentiary hearing, I responded by citing relevant evidence. However, I was unable to complete this point during the session, as I was interrupted on the basis that I was “regurgitating” earlier material. I would like to clarify that the evidence I was presenting was new and had not previously been cited. My intention was to ensure that the committee had access to the strongest available evidence when evaluating differing claims made during the discussion. I appreciate that time constraints are always a factor, but I hope it is helpful to place this additional evidence on record for the committee’s deliberations. (Prof Alex Edmans 10 April 2026)