HUGE THANKS to everyone who worked with us in 2021.
It’s been an incredibly busy year for us, and a very satisfying one! We added two full-time staff this year, and have employed a further 9 project staff. And we hope to continue to further our work on equity, inclusion and justice in 2022 with an expanded team!
Our clients this year in Ireland, the UK and Europe included:
International Organisation for Migration
Higher Education Authority
Department of Education
Maynooth University
Trinity College Dublin
NUI Galway
Irish Network Against Racism
Coalition of Disabled People’s Organisations
Irish Deaf Society
Irish Council of Civil Liberties and Irish Refugee Council
The Centre for Human Rights and Citizenship Education, DCU Institute of Education, is delighted to invite you to the fourth annual ‘Brian Ruane Lecture on Human Rights and Human Rights Education’ to be held on Thursday, 9th December, 2021 at 6pm. This year’s lecture, Policy windows or open doors? How does anti-racism get into education?, will be given by Dr Lucy Michael.
While education is often espoused as a solution to racism, efforts to create anti-racist education systems often meet with great resistance. Racism is reflected in and reinforced by our education system in a wide variety of ways, and only an explicit effort to address systemic discrimination will reduce the complicity of our education system in its reproduction.
Drawing on the experiences of students and teachers in Ireland of trying to address racism, Dr Michael explores the extent to which the Irish education system appears open to those explicit efforts towards change. How well are the systemic effects of racism understood, and addressed, in state and activist responses to racism in education? And why are we seeing such slow progress in key areas, despite the availability of international good practice to follow?
Time: Thursday, December 9th, 6pm – 7pm Location: The event will take place this year online
Published 18 October 2021 by the Higher Education Authority (HEA)
The Higher Education Authority (HEA) today published its new report Race Equality in the Higher
Education Sector, authored by Dr Marta Kempny and Dr
Lucy Michael. This report captures, for the first time, quantitative and
qualitative data on the race and ethnicity of higher education staff as well as
their experiences at work.
The report is based on a survey taken by over 3000 staff in
higher education institutions across Ireland during December and January. The
aim of the survey was to capture the lived experience of HEI staff in relation
to race equality. Participants described their experiences of reporting abuse,
stereotyping, and at times, the lack of recognition for their work.
Key findings include:
More than one-third (35%) of minority ethnic third-level
education staff say they have been subjected to racial or ethnic discrimination
on campus.
Less than half of minority ethnic staff are on full-time
contracts, compared to 38% of white Irish and 25% white other not on full time
contracts.
Just over 17% of minority ethnic staff earn over €75,000, compared to 38% of white Irish and 25%
of white other
Some
71% said they feel they are treated equally by their colleagues, irrespective
of their background
69% said they are treated equally by students, irrespective
of their background
Few white staff have reported experiencing racial or ethnic
discrimination, but all groups reported witnessing racial or ethnic
discrimination against minority ethnic staff
More than
half of respondents (52%) said they had never seen or heard the use of racist
language on campus or online, while 27% said they rarely have seen such
instances. However, staff across all ethnic groups described witnessing racial
or ethnic discrimination against ethnic minority staff.
Recommendations are made in 8 key areas:
Leadership
Supporting Diversity in Staffing
Making Race/Equality Policies Transparent
Reporting Mechanisms
Awareness and Training
Fostering Diversity in HEIs
Supporting Diversity in Student Recruitment
Data Collection
The findings are potentially significant
for colleges on a financial basis, given that future research funding for
colleges will be influenced by progress on equality. In particular it will help us to
understand and address the institutional policies, processes and practices
which embed and reproduce inequalities between staff of different backgrounds.
In this way the HEA report is also an important educational
resource in highlighting the fact that racism is not just about overtly racist
actions, such as racial harassment and hate crime, which unfortunately are
still a problem in our society.
Dr Ross Woods, the Senior Manager of the HEA Centre of Excellence
for Equality, Diversity and inclusion, said: “Now that we have an evidence
base, the HEA can work with institutions to prevent rather than react to
problems in this area and to keep pace with wider demographic changes in Irish
society.”
The report also featured on the front pages of the Irish
Times, Irish Independent and Examiner. If you’ve missed the publications around
the HEA Report and the responses to it, you can find some of the major
headlines below:
Training for employers and recruiters from New Communities Partnership Mi-Wow (Migrant women into work) Project
We will be delivering a free 3 hour introduction to recruiting diversity of talent, handling qualifications & work permits, addressing equality issues and benefitting from diversity in your team. Group size is limited to 15, to ensure a truly interactive training focused on your learning needs.
“Thank you; this was incredibly helpful. I really liked that it was so orientated towards things we can do as institutions, as individuals who have a part in shaping the institutions, and as individuals inside institutions.”
What will you learn? Here’s what one participant told us were his takeaways:
1. Speed creates bias – Given also that unfamiliarity leads to high anxiety, has your hiring for diversity been well thought through, with robust process and criteria, and definitely not rushed?
2. Systems must help – Both organisational recognition and local mapping of foreign qualifications, and knowledge of work permits are critical. Is your application system currently providing sufficient opportunity for additional narrative, also around experience?
3. End-to-end inclusion encouragement – From the job spec through to the interview form and beyond, is your hiring process encouraging an inclusive approach throughout?
Final thought. When workplace teams reflect their target customers, the entire team is twice as likely to innovate. Fact.
We look forward to meeting you in our next training!
If you’ve missed the series of publications written for the ARK Research Centre of Queens University Belfast and Ulster University, you can review the most recent reports on attitudes to ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees here.
It’s crucial that employers understand and are equipped to address bias in the software used for recruitment and human resource management.
In this new toolkit, we explore the role of human bias and structural discrimination in discriminatory or unethical AI programmes, and provide clear and practical steps to ensure companies have the necessary cultural and technological tools to responsibly digitalise HR systems with the help of intelligent systems.
All welcome to our launch, where we’ll address why it’s essential we tackle algorithmic bias, and how.
We are delighted to have Dr Marta Kempny working with us on a new project on race equality in higher education this month. Dr Kempny, an anthropologist from Poland and Northern Ireland, previously worked with us on the UN CERD Civil Society Report in 2019, and on refugee integration research, and we are excited to have her collaboration on this new project.
I first met Marta when Bryan Fanning and I were preparing the book Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. We invited Marta, an expert on the experience of Polish migrants in Northern Ireland, to contribute her research to the book. Her insightful chapter, Polish spaces in a divided city, drew on ethnographic research to examine changing spatial knowledge, mobility and community resources amongst this migrant group over a decade in Belfast. Her 2010 book, Polish Migrants in Belfast: Border Crossing and Identity Construction, is well worth reading.
Her latest research, Migrant Lives, Presents and Futures, which aimed to raise awareness about migrant lives in Northern Ireland, particularly in the context of insecurities around Brexit and the pandemic, was recently featured on a podcast. Listen here.
We are compiling a Know Your Rights guide for international protection applicants to be published by ICCL and the Irish Refugee Council.
The Guide explains rights within the protection process, under the EU Reception Directive, and a range of broader rights that apply to everyone in Ireland, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights such as the right to protest, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the right not to be subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to education and the right to earn a livelihood.
We would like to hear from asylum seekers, refugees or anyone working with international protection applicants on the contents of the Guide. You can get in touch with us at enquiries@lucymichael.ie
Join a focus group – we are running a series of focus group discussions with international protection applicants in May. Join a discussion by emailing enquiries@lucymichael.ie
Download information about the Guide and our focus groups here
Our team – including Dr Bethany Waterhouse-Bradley of Ulster University – has recently created a new resource for employers to increase understanding of how algorithmic racial bias occurs in new human resources tools, and how to address it.
The toolkit – developed for the European Network Against Racism – drew on discussions with employers by ENAR’s Equal@Work Platform as well as academic and policy research on algorithmic bias. The Equal@work Platform is a space for employers, trade unions, public authorities and NGOS to collaborate for innovative solutions to diversity management. Members of the platform explore how to integrate an anti-racist approach; ensuring improved access to the workplace for people of colour and an end to structural discrimination in the labour market.
The use of algorithmic decision making can reduce time for HR professionals and hiring managers in screening large numbers of applicants, improve selection processes, and provide the potential for predictive analysis. Recruitment is the principal arena in which AI functions are being adopted. This includes targeted recruitment advertising, bulk screening of CVs and applications, providing recommendations to human decision makers on who to invite to interview and analysing candidates’ performance in selection tests and interviews.
As awareness grows of the problem of racist attitudes in recruitment – particularly with the popularity of the ‘unconscious bias’ approach and growing market of solutions to address it – many employers assume that automated decision making is more effective at reducing bias than human hiring managers.
AI is now recognised to reproduce and amplify human biases, and the particular capacity for this to exaggerate bias in HR processes is widely acknowledged as deserving of attention. Algorithms can reinforce discrimination if they focus on qualities or markers associated only with particular (already dominant) groups. While some of these markers are easily recognised (e.g. career gaps and gender), the current lack of racial diversity in workplaces across Europe makes markers of racial bias less well recognised.
Algorithms which reinforce these biases will further reduce diversity across the European labour market and reduce corporate flexibility in long-term workforce planning as well as the development of markets. In spite of awareness of these emerging problems, the scale of the potential issues is often understated, and the focus often on the technical aspects; or fixing the tools. This serves to both increase the likelihood of these effects being overlooked, and to shift focus away from the structural and institutional problems which often lead to the production of undesirable outcomes from the use of AI.
Diversity in the workforce is key to business success today. There is a direct correlation between the diversity of a workforce and the breadth of its perspective. Diverse workforces are also more productive, so employers should actively seek ways to recruit candidates into the workforce from different backgrounds.
But trust in algorithmic decision making can be decreased by poor recruitment outcomes, public accountability for bias, and errors in selection and performance functions, leading to ‘algorithmic aversion’. Building confidence amongst HR and D&I Managers that AI can reduce risks for firms in respect of discrimination and recruitment costs is a valuable service to business.
Outline of toolkit
This toolkit is designed for Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion Managers, as well as Programmers, to ensure that consumers of off the shelf and custom AI solutions for Human Resource Management have a clear guide to challenges, solutions and good practice, in a format which supports conversations with Programmers providing solutions.
The toolkit explores the role of human bias and structural discrimination in discriminatory or unethical AI programmes, and provides clear and practical steps to ensure companies have the necessary cultural and technological tools to responsibly digitalise HR systems with the help of intelligent systems.
In doing so, HR and D&I managers will come to understand bias reproduction and amplification, and gain the confidence to address bias risks produced by inadequate or inappropriate training data, simplistic or reductive classifications or other human errors leading to biased outcomes of algorithmic decision making. Importantly, it will support HR teams in effectively transferring existing knowledge of discriminatory hiring practices and building diverse workplaces to the responsible deployment of intelligent systems to aid in those objectives.
The International Organization for Migration – UN Migration (IOM) has launched a new Guide for Practitioners on the Home Office Indicators of Integration Framework 2019 at a well attended online event hosted by the South East Strategic Migration Partnership on 16 March.
The Indicators of Integration (IOI) framework, published in 2019 by the UK Home Office, is designed to create a shared understanding of integration, how to measure its progress, and considerations for strategic planning. With a suite of tools including a comprehensive bank of indicators and guidance on data collection, the IOI framework seeks to support those assisting migrants in improving interventions across a range of key areas.
IOM, in partnership with the Home Office and DISC initiative, has been supporting local authorities, statutory partners and civil society organisations in building their capacity to use the framework through a process of consultations with staff in each sector tailored face-to-face and online trainings, and the development of the Guide for Practitioners on the Home Office Indicators of Integration Framework 2019.
Dr Lucy Michael, co-author of the IOI framework, has led the training work and is the author of this new Guide. The Guide informs practitioners about the use of the IOI framework in integration measurement and interventions, and how you can use it in your activities, and provides a signposted step-by-step learning process to support practitioners to implement the framework in their planning, delivery and evaluation of integration projects.
