Graduation address: Professor Ruth Woodfield
Friday 28 June 2019
Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, everyone.
I would like to start by congratulating you all on your huge achievement. Attaining a degree is a considerable cause for celebration and today is one to mark your achievement and to reflect on all you have accomplished, congratulations. If you look around this hall, you will see happy and proud faces from a diverse array of backgrounds. This is another cause for celebration. Over the past decades, thousands and thousands of students have graduated from this University, but within my lifetime there have been some very notable changes between what this hall looks like today and what it would have looked like 50 years ago.
For example, in the 1960s approximately three-quarters of the students graduating from UK universities were men. Today, more than half are women. Around half of young people now attend university. In the mid-1960s only about 10% of young people did. Very many people who could have benefited from higher education did not attend university.
I was the first person in my family to go to university. But I was not the first to want to pursue university. My mother left school at 15, learned shorthand and typing and business skills, and secured a job until she married at 19. When she later sought to improve her career prospects, she had two young children and no childcare. She worked hard to build up her qualifications but thoughts about progressing further were ultimately thwarted because she could not attend the two-week summer school at the Open University, because my father was in the Royal Navy and infrequently at home.
In his turn, my father won a scholarship to art school, but his family asked him instead to earn money to contribute to the family income. He left home and became a submariner. The Navy then was an all-male, high-pressure environment, where each sailor was allocated what was affectionately referred to as a ‘tot’ of free rum a day and hundreds of duty-free cigarettes a month. It is worth noting that a tot was about one-eighth of a pint of 50% proof rum. What could possibly go wrong?
The ‘tot’ was abolished in 1970 following the Admiralty Board’s proposal – and I quote - ‘that the rum issue is no longer compatible with the high standards of efficiency required now that the individual's tasks in ships are concerned with complex, and often delicate, machinery and systems upon which the correct functioning of which people's lives may depend’. The proposal was not without its critics. A lively debate in parliament saw MPs arguing against the ban on the grounds that it was ‘unfair’ and had plunged their constituents into ‘gloom and horror’. One MP from a medical background stated: “... it is recognised and known, not only clinically, but in ordinary life, that a small dose of alcohol improves the performance of the recipient. This therefore makes the abolition of the humble tot all the more inconceivable and incomprehensible.”
As this example testifies, workplace health and safety, and worker wellbeing, has progressed significantly in my lifetime. The casting of women as primarily carers and men as primarily breadwinners has also significantly lessened.
Legal and policy frameworks in the UK and everywhere in the world seek the equal treatment of women and men from a wide range of different backgrounds. Many organisations have taken great strides towards making their workplace environment one that is fitting for anyone who wants to join it, so that a diverse group of people may feel fully included and may make a positive contribution.
To illustrate how far we have come, last year the Royal Navy was named in The Times Top 50 Employers for Women. The efforts of this University to become a place where diverse cohorts of staff and students can flourish has also recognised by the awards of, amongst others, of an Athena SWAN charter for its promotion of gender equality, a Carer Positive award for supporting carers, and a Stonewall Diversity Champion award for its work towards LGBT inclusion. There is much work to be done of course, but also very much to be celebrated.
You are graduating with a far more diverse cohort of students than that of fifty years ago; you have far greater spreads of choices in your life. The workplace has been transformed in the UK and many other places around the world. Today you will find a greater emphasis upon an individual’s merit, rather than on their gender, sexuality, ethnicity or social class. You will find crèches and nurseries, the opportunity for paid parental leave, flexible working patterns, organisations taking some responsibility for the wellbeing and health and happiness of staff. I would like to take a moment to savour these changes. Passing your degree remains one of the most transformative of achievements. It provides you with significantly greater life chances across a whole range of health, happiness and wellbeing measures, and far beyond the kind of career or salary you might enjoy. On top of this, the fact that you will stand a very good chance of moving into workplaces and family roles where you have so many choices, freedoms and higher expectations of how you will be treated, recognised and rewarded, is certainly worth appreciating.
As you look to the future and your contribution you will make to society, take a moment to cherish the choices that are before you, and the expectations that you will be treated with fairness, respect and dignity. These expectations are likely to be far greater than those available to your parents and grandparents.
These are not shifts that we should take for granted. The path of progress is not linear. Hard-won changes need defending; laws and policies are not always upheld. There are always countervailing voices against the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion. There are probably quite a few people who think that having a free, hefty ‘tot’ of rum at a strategic point of the working day sounds like a perfectly good idea. (There are occasions when I do I'll be honest.) As graduates you are more likely to be in favour of equality and be more tolerant of difference. This in itself is wonderful, and you are a wonderful generation, but it probably needs to go further than this. For those of you who are minded to, I would ask that you champion equality, diversity and inclusion everywhere. Who knows what might be achieved in your own lifetimes?
To offset any impression I mught have given that I belong to that "monstrous regiment of women" referred to before by John Knox, I'd like to end by passing on some excellent advice that I received from one of my professors on my last day of university. He was a profound thinker and a charismatic speaker - the kind of professor who often attracted students who weren't taking his courses, to his lectures. When asked on the last day what advice he could give for a life ahead he simply said "Ah, that's very easy. Find out what you like doing quite a bit and do quite a lot of it." This advice, experienced as a little disappointing at the time, I've subsequently found to be an excellent motto to live by. It doesn't matter whether it's swimming or cycling or knitting, or staring at the stars, or spending time with family, or the underrated spending time on your own - it doesn't really matter what it is. Find out what you enjoy doing and spend a bit of time doing it.
And finally: congratulations again all on your degrees. Enjoy your day with your friends and families, raise a ‘tot’ in celebration if you want to. Thank you.
Professor Ruth Woodfield
Assistant Vice-Principal (Diversity)