This episode I have three distinguished guests chatting about inclusivity and leadership.

My guests are Mark, Gary and Douglas - see below for more details about them

Mark Freed 

Mark Freed, a trailblazer in diversity and inclusion, co-founded E2W over two decades ago when he left a successful fintech career to become the type of husband and father that he always wanted to be.

Mark grew E2W to become a community with a reach of more than 15,000 women in Financial Services, aiding institutions with best-practice recruitment and retention of diverse talent.

Wishing to accelerate change, Men for Inclusion was born, and Mark shares his own lived experience as to why inclusion benefits all men, providing more opportunities and breaking free from outdated stereotypes.

Mark's distinctive voice is not just heard within this community. He’s a vocal advocate for workplace inclusivity, and recently provided evidence to the UK Government

Treasury Select Committee during their 'Sexism in the City' inquiry, and collaborates on initiatives like the Women in Finance Charter and the Diversity Project.

Mark brings a refreshing perspective to the industry, making him an engaging and

insightful commentator for journalists seeking a fresh take on diversity, allyship,

recruitment, and workplace culture.

Gary Ford

Gary Ford worked as a technologist within Financial Services for over 35 years. He was a Managing Director at JPMorgan where he co-founded their male allies programme for Women in Technology. The programme was rolled out to thousands of men globally and was ultimately launched across the whole firm.

For the last 10 years Gary has actively promoted gender equality. He’s been the male ally advisor to Women On The Wharf, and was a winner of the WeAreTheCity Rising Star award in the Men for Gender Balance category.

In 2020, he co-authored his first book,

'The Accidental Sexist: A Handbook for Men on Workplace Diversity and Inclusion’ (Rethink Press), showcasing his commitment to fostering inclusivity in workplaces.

Gary’s not just a co-founder; he's a driving force behind Men for Inclusion, bringing a wealth of experience and a passion for creating transformational culture change.

A compelling and knowledgeable industry commentator, Gary provides insights and data that will interest those fostering inclusive workplaces through DEI employee

engagement and inclusive leadership.

Douglas Lines

Douglas Lines is a digital first leader with a successful track record of growing and transforming businesses as well as innovating and commercialising new digital business models including successfully launching a global EdTech start-up amongst others. Douglas has been enabled by building a design thinking school in collaboration with Duke and Stanford Universities, appreciating the application of new technologies and having mastered business model innovation and cultural transformation practices.



A purpose led and values driven senior business leader, executive committee member with substantial global commercial experience, operating principally in financial services. Pedigree business acumen underpinned by successful delivery of large complex transactions & portfolio managed businesses from > £1m to £8bn. Highly articulate communicator, C-Suite negotiator & influencer; comfortable engaging with all stakeholders. Motivated mentor & people leader who removes barriers to delivery & celebrates team successes, empowering personal goal development & cohesive team service delivery.

Mark's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-freed-3a496a6/

Gary's LinedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/garypford/

Douglas's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglaslines/

Men for inclusion website - menforinclusion.com

IBEM website - https://ib-em.com/

Transcript

Scott: Hello and welcome to the latest edition of how might we and I've got with me , this week, we've got Douglas, Gary and Mark, and we are going to discussing how might we create inclusive leadership, . And that's not just related to work, but leadership in general and communities, ourselves, our families and with us.

So welcome, gentlemen. How are we all today?

Mark: Great.

Scott: All good. Doing

Mark: good, doing good.

Scott: I'll give you a hint. We're audio. So nodding doesn't help. We are on audio. So the people need to listen to us, but there we go. Okay. So welcome gentlemen. So if we'd like to go in around Robin, just a quick introduction about yourselves.

And then we will start the discussion. So as we've had a quick chat, we'll do it in the same order as before. So Gary, would you like to go first? Yeah, thanks, Scott. Gary Ford [00:01:00 ] former technologist within the financial services industry previously a managing director at JPMorgan Chase author of a book, The Accidental Sexist, and the co founder of Men for Inclusion with Mark.

Okay. Thank you very much. And a nice segue into you, Mark, if you want to introduce yourself, please.

Mark: Hi. Yeah. Mark Freed. So joint founder of Ment for Inclusion with Gary. A long career in financial technology and Turned to become a passionate supporter of gender equality 25 years ago when I left Credit Suisse to set up a firm called E2W which has been at the forefront of promoting gender equality in financial services for the last 25 years.

Scott: Thank you. Welcome. And Douglas again, welcome back.

Douglas: Thank you, Scott. Always great to be back with you. And my name is Douglas Lyons. I am a financial services executive of 25 years experience having been at the helm of a large corporate bank and commercial bank. And [00:02:00 ] absolutely a people leader. I think over that span of that career, I have witnessed and learned a tremendous amount from, from all the teams I've been privileged to work with and the leaders I've been privileged to work with.

I am an international thought leader on a number of areas, an author of a book on innovation. I'm a subject matter expert in business model innovation. But I'm equally a thought leader around executive leadership and the skills and capabilities of executive leadership into the future. And again, that very important topic that you mentioned of both inclusion and trust.

I am a founder of RBEM Group Limited based in London, and I currently reside in London.

Scott: Okay. Welcome back, Douglas. I'm sure we'll have another interesting and fruitful discussion. So, Gary, the title of your book, Accidental Sexist. Tell us a little bit about it.

Gary: Yeah, sure. I mean so I guess that my kind of, you know, starting point for this [00:03:00 ] is whilst I was at JPMorgan, I started getting involved in kind of gender equality and diversity inclusion initiatives by being asked to sponsor women in technology, which was a gender group that JP Morgan set up to attract and retain more women in technology, a sector that traditionally struggles with gender and arguably still does.

And so I certainly found myself in a room with about 50 women. I was often the only man, a deeply uncomfortable experience, if I'm honest. And we were trying to explore why it was that women didn't want to work in tech. So I began to hear kind of additional barriers that women were facing, which up until that point had been completely invisible to me.

And I thought of myself as a decent leader. I was a managing director there. I had around 250 or 300 people working for me. I thought I knew how to do it yet. There was things happening that I was frankly not seeing. So and I thought if I'm not seeing it, I'm sure there's plenty of other men that, you know, equally blind to some of these additional challenges.[00:04:00 ]

So we set up a male allies program alongside a guy called Stephen Koch. So when I left JP Morgan, I kind of thought this male allies idea could be interesting to other, other people. So. The Accidental Sexist was born out of that. I met a woman called Dr. Jill Armstrong, who was our third collaborator in the book, and I think, Douglas, you may have had the same experience.

Like the, the writing a book, you know, as a, you know, as, as a group is a really, really rewarding experience. So and Jill brought a lot of academic research to that book. She, she'd done a three year research program onto gender equality, diversity, inclusion at Cambridge University. So the book's about kind of three things.

The first is this fact that women face additional barriers in the workplace. And actually women of color face, face them even more. Which echoed, you know, the, the female experience when I was at J. P. Morgan. But Generally speaking, the fact is that most of these barriers are kind of quite unintentional, right?

Most, [00:05:00 ] most managers, leaders in the workplace go into work. In fact, most colleagues in the workplace go into work most days and they want to do the right thing. But because we are brought up to think in very deeply gendered ways, these, these, these mistakes often get in the way. And it's not unlike unconscio