Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. Join me in the future, then. Please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot UK. You catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.

So plug in the advance, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 98 with the title striving for fairness, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Pamela Permalloo Bass. Pamela is the EDI coach and consultant and when I asked Pamela to describe her superbass, she said, the skill of intently listening with empathy. Hello, Pamela. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Jo. Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me and it's an absolute privilege to be here this morning, particularly at the start of the year. This is one of my first meetings of the year, so it feels very exciting. So thank you very much.

Yeah, as we were saying in the green room before we've gone live that we haven't spoken for two or three years, it's been absolutely fantastic to catch up and have a good natter before we record the podcast.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we needed more than the designated 30 minutes to have a proper catch up. We've had a good. Too many years have gone by.

Yeah, they have. Anyway, we've caught up now. So, Pavana, tell me about striving for fairness. Why is that important to.

Mean? You've known me for a good couple of years now and I've spent most of my life and my working career working in the field of diversity and inclusion. We're using the word diversity, equity, inclusion more and more now in organisational spaces. But 2030 years ago, it wasn't language that was used. And I like the word fairness because I think it really brings out what I've always strived to do on a daily basis, both in my work and in my personal life. And I think over the years, it's been great that more and more people and professionals are on board in the DNI space.

Yeah, fairness is. I find sometimes it's a tough word because people want fairness and they also want meritocracy, but they don't always balance the two out fairly oxymoron. I appreciate. People have their own perception of what fair means, don't they?

Yeah. And I think it's quite a generic piece of language, fairness, because depending on your own experiences, whether it's cultural, societal, social, you'll have a different perspective of what fairness really means. But I think for me, when we're using fairness in the world we're in right now, in the UK, when we're looking at it from a UK perspective, I think we can link it to issues around socioeconomic status. We touched on privilege as a concept in the green room. And there's also aspects of fairness that really permeate in organisations, particularly organisations that are hierarchical. So I've spent about 15 years working in the NHS and more recently in substantive roles as a DNI director in the NHS with several community based organisations. So the hierarchy within the NHS and how that plays out absolutely will have different experiences for different people in those different roles.