Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the
Joanne Lockwood: Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of
Joanne Lockwood: amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of
Joanne Lockwood: inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better
Joanne Lockwood: place for everyone to thrive. Like to join me in the
Joanne Lockwood: future? Then please do drop me a line to Joe
Joanne Lockwood: Lockwood at m dot co UK that's
Joanne Lockwood: seechangehappen co UK.
Joanne Lockwood: You can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify
Joanne Lockwood: and the usual places. So plug in your headphones,
Joanne Lockwood: grab a decaf and let's get going.
Joanne Lockwood: Today is Episode 84 with the
Joanne Lockwood: title Unlocking Inclusive Communications.
Joanne Lockwood: And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Suzanne
Joanne Lockwood: Worthheim. Suzanne describes herself as a
Joanne Lockwood: linguistic anthropologist, and when I
Joanne Lockwood: asked Suzanne to describe her superpower, she said that she
Joanne Lockwood: sees patterns that other people don't see.
Joanne Lockwood: Hello, Suzanne. Welcome to the show.
Suzanne Wertheim: Hello, Joanne. It is genuinely a pleasure to be here. I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: really looking forward to this conversation. Likewise. We've had a great chat
Joanne Lockwood: and agreement already, so I'm really, really excited about this.
Joanne Lockwood: So, Suzanne, tell me.
Joanne Lockwood: Unlocking communications. Tell me about that.
Suzanne Wertheim: So I said my superpower
Suzanne Wertheim: was seeing patterns that other people can't see.
Suzanne Wertheim: And this is the superpower of almost everybody who
Suzanne Wertheim: is a linguist or a linguistic anthropologist. And
Suzanne Wertheim: so I am here to talk to people here, generally
Suzanne Wertheim: in the world, and here on this podcast, about how can we be more
Suzanne Wertheim: inclusive in our communications. And inclusive
Suzanne Wertheim: communication, in some respects, is as simple as just Bites
Suzanne Wertheim: modern etiquette. It is 21st century etiquette.
Suzanne Wertheim: But if you want to be more pattern based and more
Suzanne Wertheim: behaviour based, I like to talk about inclusive language and inclusive
Suzanne Wertheim: communication as a way of communicating in a set of behaviours.
Suzanne Wertheim: A lot of people will talk about it as a list of words. Here are
Suzanne Wertheim: bad words and here are good words. But I like to go beyond that and
Suzanne Wertheim: have a very behavioural focus. What are people doing with their language?
Suzanne Wertheim: So when we communicate inclusively,
Suzanne Wertheim: people feel seen and heard and valued.
Suzanne Wertheim: People feel like they are taken into consideration and like they
Suzanne Wertheim: matter. By contrast, when we use what I call
Suzanne Wertheim: problematic language, and there are lots of words that people will use that maybe
Suzanne Wertheim: end with IST or ism, but I like to just call it problematic
Suzanne Wertheim: language. Problematic language comes in many forms and has
Suzanne Wertheim: really negative outcomes. It can
Suzanne Wertheim: damage relationships, it lowers trust, it drives
Suzanne Wertheim: people away and it harms all kinds of relationships. And by
Suzanne Wertheim: relationships, I mean
Suzanne Wertheim: personal relationships. So between family
Suzanne Wertheim: members, friends, colleagues, romantic partners. But I also
Suzanne Wertheim: mean business relationships could
Suzanne Wertheim: be still interpersonal between a recruiter
Suzanne Wertheim: and a client, a recruiter and a candidate. But it could
Suzanne Wertheim: also be a marketing message and an audience
Suzanne Wertheim: or customer experience, software
Suzanne Wertheim: interfaces and clients who become so irritated that
Suzanne Wertheim: they stop using your product. So that's what I mean by patterns. The
Suzanne Wertheim: patterns that I talk about for inclusive communication can be
Suzanne Wertheim: both one on one and media
Suzanne Wertheim: and planned communications that go out and affect many people,
Suzanne Wertheim: sometimes millions of people.
Joanne Lockwood: You're speaking my language. You're speaking my language. One
Joanne Lockwood: thing that people always come to me and say is they're so afraid of getting
Joanne Lockwood: it wrong. And that creates this kind of lean
Joanne Lockwood: back approach to people, because I've never had
Joanne Lockwood: a conversation with someone who is black, I've never had some conversation with
Joanne Lockwood: someone who's transgender or has a disability or what if I say
Joanne Lockwood: the wrong thing? That's the biggest fear people say, is the fear of getting it
Joanne Lockwood: wrong. It is a thing that I hear as
Suzanne Wertheim: well. And it is one of the reasons that I wrote my
Suzanne Wertheim: book, because people would feel
Suzanne Wertheim: better after a workshop with me, and a workshop would be very
Suzanne Wertheim: dedicated to the precise thing. So if you bring me in for recruiters,
Suzanne Wertheim: I'll do inclusive language for recruiters. If you bring me in for sales team, I'll
Suzanne Wertheim: do inclusive language for sales. So we're covering some things, but we have a limited
Suzanne Wertheim: amount of time together. And people would say to me, oh, my people are still
Suzanne Wertheim: nervous, or I'm still nervous, or executives would say to me, there are
Suzanne Wertheim: so many things I'm supposed to cover in an all hands meeting, or when I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: interviewing with somebody and I'm really afraid of getting cancelled. So some people
Suzanne Wertheim: are worried about the wrath of the Internet or getting cancelled. It's more self focused
Suzanne Wertheim: and some people are more worried about hurting somebody else.
Suzanne Wertheim: And so this lack of resources out there has been bothering me for a
Suzanne Wertheim: long time. And so this is why I realised it wasn't a question of
Suzanne Wertheim: ego, where I thought, I simply must write a book, right? It was really
Suzanne Wertheim: more people kept on being so stressed out and
Suzanne Wertheim: so nervous. And when you're paralysed by fear and you don't say
Suzanne Wertheim: anything, sometimes it really lands just the
Suzanne Wertheim: silence is communication in and of itself and it will land very
Suzanne Wertheim: badly on people who expect you to reach out. So this is
Suzanne Wertheim: exactly why I decided to do the work that
Suzanne Wertheim: I do. And I will say that
Suzanne Wertheim: you might have wanted to ask me this later, and I'm just going to say
Suzanne Wertheim: it right now. One of the reasons that my discussion of inclusive language
Suzanne Wertheim: and inclusion communication is different from other people's is I'm the only
Suzanne Wertheim: person I know that starts with behaviour rather than
Suzanne Wertheim: identity. So a lot of people will come and say, there are so
Suzanne Wertheim: many people in the world, I can't keep track of them. I grew up in
Suzanne Wertheim: a very homogeneous way. My workplace is very homogeneous. I don't know. And
Suzanne Wertheim: so it can feel so overwhelming and so exhausting to think
Suzanne Wertheim: about all the people in the world and all the words related to
Suzanne Wertheim: all the people in the world can feel like too much. So that's why I've
Suzanne Wertheim: come up with six principles that allow you to
Suzanne Wertheim: learn more and also make mistakes and correct them in
Suzanne Wertheim: a way that you feel like you always have a North Star. So I'm just
Suzanne Wertheim: going to say them. I'm not going to wait for you to team me up
Suzanne Wertheim: and I'll just say them. They are reflect
Suzanne Wertheim: reality, show respect, draw
Suzanne Wertheim: people in, incorporate other perspectives,
Suzanne Wertheim: prevent erasure and recognise pain points.
Suzanne Wertheim: So these are always that people want themselves to be treated in some
Suzanne Wertheim: respects. They're kind of a golden rule of interactions. And so
Suzanne Wertheim: if you can be precise about when somebody is different from
Suzanne Wertheim: you, how do you show respect or how do you make sure you're not
Suzanne Wertheim: marginalising them or how do you recognise the pain points?
Suzanne Wertheim: These are things that can be small research projects that people can get a
Suzanne Wertheim: grip on rather than this long list of words that
Suzanne Wertheim: feels nebulous. And PS is changing all the time. So you
Suzanne Wertheim: can't just go by memorising lists of words because by the time you memorised it,
Suzanne Wertheim: there's a good chance that some of the things that were okay aren't okay
Suzanne Wertheim: anymore. Yeah, I think you hit
Joanne Lockwood: the nail on the head there, to use a British term, into the person that
Joanne Lockwood: translates into American perfectly well.
Joanne Lockwood: Excellent. I think the key thing for me is
Joanne Lockwood: you actually care about how the other person's
Joanne Lockwood: going to feel when you talk to them. I think you
Joanne Lockwood: mentioned it in respect and the other elements of your six points, but if I
Joanne Lockwood: have enough care about your feelings, your
Joanne Lockwood: needs, your use the word identity, if you like, your lived
Joanne Lockwood: experience, what matters to you, what makes you happy, what makes you sad. If I
Joanne Lockwood: care deeply about that, I want a positive communication,
Joanne Lockwood: I want a positive outcome from our conversation, then I think that's
Joanne Lockwood: the basis then everything builds on the fact that I want this to go well.
Joanne Lockwood: And if I don't know all the, as you say, every single word
Joanne Lockwood: in the dictionary, I don't have to know every single word, I just have to
Joanne Lockwood: know that I will not always get it right. And I appreciate
Joanne Lockwood: that intent isn't everything. The impact kicks in there
Joanne Lockwood: and bit of accountability as well, making sure I own my words. But
Joanne Lockwood: the important thing there is I have to really care that I want
Joanne Lockwood: you to have a positive experience and for me that's always been the root of
Joanne Lockwood: it. If I care enough, I will do my best to get it right.
Suzanne Wertheim: I think that a combination of caring enough,
Suzanne Wertheim: be open to critical feedback to fix mistakes in the moment
Suzanne Wertheim: and doing some prep work. If you can do those three, then
Suzanne Wertheim: you can have a successful conversation with anybody. I
Suzanne Wertheim: think that there are some people who are on the receiving end of people being
Suzanne Wertheim: ignorant about what their lived experience is to the point where it's
Suzanne Wertheim: exhausting, right? So I don't want to just say that if
Suzanne Wertheim: you say to somebody, well, just educate me, or if I say a wrong
Suzanne Wertheim: word, please tell me. Because a lot of times people who are on the receiving
Suzanne Wertheim: end of these things are just done, just done. But
Suzanne Wertheim: if you show that you've already done some homework and
Suzanne Wertheim: you come in and you say, well, I know this, so is this
Suzanne Wertheim: okay? I know I shouldn't say hey guys.
Suzanne Wertheim: So I'm going to say hey folks, or hey people, is that okay
Suzanne Wertheim: with you? Is a story we can talk about a little bit later about a
Suzanne Wertheim: sales call gone wrong and then gone right again. But I think that if you
Suzanne Wertheim: have that combo and show that you've cared enough to put in some work
Suzanne Wertheim: in advance, then people are going to feel they're
Suzanne Wertheim: not educating you from scratch. The burden of education isn't on them. The burden
Suzanne Wertheim: of explaining to you in a way that won't make you upset or angry isn't
Suzanne Wertheim: on them because you've put in that work. And so that's why I
Suzanne Wertheim: like to recommend people certain kinds of homework, like diversifying
Suzanne Wertheim: your social media. So you start even if you have a
Suzanne Wertheim: homogeneous group, because of the ways that
Suzanne Wertheim: things are set up, like even if you grew up in a homogeneous way and
Suzanne Wertheim: your workplace is homogeneous, social media is a gift, is a gift,
Suzanne Wertheim: gift, gift. And you can eavesdrop on conversations without bothering anybody
Suzanne Wertheim: and learn all kinds of things almost by osmosis.
Joanne Lockwood: That's good. What you just said there, again, it resonates because I talk
Joanne Lockwood: a lot about emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence. And
Joanne Lockwood: both of those first steps in both of those emotional
Joanne Lockwood: intelligence is about self awareness, how you come across. And cultural
Joanne Lockwood: intelligence is all around the drive to develop knowledge. So what
Joanne Lockwood: you're saying here is you have to put the legwork in first, don't turn
Joanne Lockwood: up, expect me to be your educator, which I completely resonate with. So
Joanne Lockwood: you've got to have that drive. You've got to care enough about how you come
Joanne Lockwood: across to build the knowledge. And then for the knowledge you build a strategy. So
Joanne Lockwood: yeah, having that groundwork is really important. I concur.
Joanne Lockwood: We have Google in our pockets, don't we? We have millions and billions of
Joanne Lockwood: hours of YouTubes and podcasts and books and
Joanne Lockwood: Amazon. There's not a lot of excuse really for people not to do the basics,
Joanne Lockwood: is there? Well, although I would say that
Suzanne Wertheim: publishing and Hollywood have been real
Suzanne Wertheim: gatekeepers. So you have to have a little bit of critical
Suzanne Wertheim: intelligence and thinking about your sources. Because
Suzanne Wertheim: if you just watch movies about a group, they might not
Suzanne Wertheim: have been made by that group. And if you just read books about a group
Suzanne Wertheim: that might have been written by somebody who's out group. So that's one of the
Suzanne Wertheim: gifts from social media is this decentralisation and the removal of the kind of
Suzanne Wertheim: the gatekeeping. You might not get the knowledge from a book
Suzanne Wertheim: that you need, right? So, for example, I
Suzanne Wertheim: recommend to people, let's just use disability
Suzanne Wertheim: as an example. So people who are perceptibly disabled
Suzanne Wertheim: are low frequency for encounters for many people who
Suzanne Wertheim: are abled out in the world. So it's not frequently that they'll meet somebody
Suzanne Wertheim: who's deaf or hard of hearing or who's in a wheelchair or who's
Suzanne Wertheim: blind, just for example. And so here's a thing where people
Suzanne Wertheim: suddenly are like, oh, my God, I don't know what to say. And they're paralysed
Suzanne Wertheim: or often when we're so self conscious,
Suzanne Wertheim: the last thing that you wanted to come out of your mouth this happens to
Suzanne Wertheim: me, too, when you're nervous, the last thing that you want to come out of
Suzanne Wertheim: your mouth is coming right out of your mouth. And you're like, oh, I can't
Suzanne Wertheim: believe that I said that. So I talk about this sometimes where somebody gets a
Suzanne Wertheim: bad haircut and in your head you're like, don't mention the haircut. Like, don't mention
Suzanne Wertheim: the haircut. And then you're out of your lips comes, oh, you got a
Suzanne Wertheim: haircut. And then you have to make a comment on it when really you just
Suzanne Wertheim: wanted to say nothing. So what I like for the
Suzanne Wertheim: prep is, for example, I don't think in the book you're going to find stuff,
Suzanne Wertheim: but you can just go to Google or any search engine and type
Suzanne Wertheim: in problematic things said to wheelchair users, problematic
Suzanne Wertheim: things said to blind people, problematic things said to deaf
Suzanne Wertheim: people. And they'll just tell you, like, it's just out there. It takes very little
Suzanne Wertheim: time. So I would say even having these kinds of directed
Suzanne Wertheim: searches, if you're prepped and you're like,
Suzanne Wertheim: then you're ready to go, right? So it might seem
Suzanne Wertheim: like you're trying to care about somebody. So let's say there's somebody in a wheelchair,
Suzanne Wertheim: and it might feel caring to you to say, oh, how is
Suzanne Wertheim: it that you're in a wheelchair? But I'm going to tell you that every wheelchair
Suzanne Wertheim: person, every wheelchair person is absolutely not the thing to say. Your wheelchair user
Suzanne Wertheim: is what I was trying to say. Every person in a wheelchair, every wheelchair user
Suzanne Wertheim: that I've talked with or read things by or heard things by,
Suzanne Wertheim: they absolutely have no interest in explaining to you why they
Suzanne Wertheim: are in a wheelchair. And intrusive questions are incredibly common. And
Suzanne Wertheim: so something that might feel like caring or curiosity to
Suzanne Wertheim: you might land as very intrusive and inappropriate to somebody else
Suzanne Wertheim: who's just like, can we just talk about my presentation?
Suzanne Wertheim: Why are we talking about how do I put on pants? Why is
Suzanne Wertheim: this now part of the conversation? We kind of make a bigger
Joanne Lockwood: deal of it than it really is because that's our insecurity, our
Joanne Lockwood: nervousness, whatever it may be. I've got a great friend of mine,
Joanne Lockwood: she's a black woman. She is a wheelchair user. She has
Joanne Lockwood: cerebral palsy at birth. And I
Joanne Lockwood: remember we were going, I think we're going something to eat. And I said, should
Joanne Lockwood: we just walk to the pub or something? And I was going, oh my God.
Joanne Lockwood: I said, Walk to the pub? You're a wheelchair user. And I got all heats
Joanne Lockwood: in my brain. She said, yeah, let's go for a walk, that's fine. And so
Joanne Lockwood: she doesn't use necessarily different
Joanne Lockwood: language. She uses contemporary language around the activity. And
Joanne Lockwood: I was making a bigger deal of it than it was because
Joanne Lockwood: I picked up the word walk and is that ableist? And it turned out that
Joanne Lockwood: I was probably overcooking it. I think sometimes we just got to relax
Joanne Lockwood: and learn about not necessarily taking every
Joanne Lockwood: single word we say too literally and apologise for it, but
Joanne Lockwood: just feel the mood. If they said, oh yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: I've got my powered chair, I'll follow you, whatever, just pick up on their
Joanne Lockwood: language. And I would say that that's the kind of
Suzanne Wertheim: thing over apologising is also a thing that I hear from people
Suzanne Wertheim: from marginalised and underrepresented groups who don't want to feel othered,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? So my third principle is draw people in is the reverse of marginalising,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? So there's a lot of ways that we interact with people that
Suzanne Wertheim: highlight difference. People who feel like they just want
Suzanne Wertheim: to be there in belonging and just treated like everybody else
Suzanne Wertheim: end up feeling very othered. And so over apologising is one of
Suzanne Wertheim: the things that happens. So I was talking to somebody who is non binary
Suzanne Wertheim: and they have a manager who can't figure out
Suzanne Wertheim: pronouns at this point, like figure it out, right? But so
Suzanne Wertheim: in early stages we understand and as a
Suzanne Wertheim: linguist, I'll tell you that pronouns are different from other words and
Suzanne Wertheim: language and we store them in our brain differently and they're grammar
Suzanne Wertheim: words. And it's much harder to shift your use of words in this
Suzanne Wertheim: closed set of grammar words than other words. You
Suzanne Wertheim: wouldn't change numbers very easily or prepositions, right? So there are
Suzanne Wertheim: ways that it is very reasonable to have a
Suzanne Wertheim: struggle with pronouns as people say, oh, actually my pronouns are
Suzanne Wertheim: this. And you haven't had unlike young people today, natively use
Suzanne Wertheim: they them for a single person, right? But for a lot of us who grew
Suzanne Wertheim: up earlier, they them wasn't used for a
Suzanne Wertheim: single unknown person or for plural people, but not for a single known
Suzanne Wertheim: person. So it can be a real struggle against the weight. Of all the times
Suzanne Wertheim: that we've used only she or he to talk about people.
Suzanne Wertheim: So the thing that you do is you just do a minor correction.
Suzanne Wertheim: Oh, yes, so and so she, oh, I'm sorry, they and then you move
Suzanne Wertheim: on. But this manager was, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry,
Suzanne Wertheim: I've done it again. Look at this. I really need to respect that you're
Suzanne Wertheim: nonbinary and on and on and on. So the apology
Suzanne Wertheim: itself was a problem, was
Suzanne Wertheim: problematic language because it was highlighting the otherness. So I think
Suzanne Wertheim: that you can take the cues in the moment here's that emotional
Suzanne Wertheim: intelligence and cultural intelligence. You're talking about having the ability to live in the
Suzanne Wertheim: moment and see, oh, I said walk. Should I apologise? And you could say, oh
Suzanne Wertheim: my God, I said walk. They'll be like, oh, no problem. And then aside, you
Suzanne Wertheim: don't have to worry about walk with them anymore. So these are the kinds of
Suzanne Wertheim: things that you file away in your mental database for
Suzanne Wertheim: interacting with that person. But PS, just because one
Suzanne Wertheim: wheelchair user says it's okay to say walk does not mean you can
Suzanne Wertheim: apply it to everybody. So you got to suss that out person by
Suzanne Wertheim: person. Of course, yeah, my experience is my
Joanne Lockwood: experience and yours differs.
Joanne Lockwood: Talking about misgendering, I misgender myself. I spent 52 years
Joanne Lockwood: of my life using one set of pronouns and referring to myself in a certain
Joanne Lockwood: way. For the last seven so years I've used
Joanne Lockwood: she her and I can't get it right every time.
Joanne Lockwood: And my wife is probably better at than I do. She never gets it
Joanne Lockwood: wrong. But it was our daughter's
Joanne Lockwood: wedding a couple of years ago and I remember and I'm still
Joanne Lockwood: dad and still father to our daughter. So I'm extremely proud of
Joanne Lockwood: that in my life, so I'm not going to lose that. But I remember I
Joanne Lockwood: did the father of the bride speech and it's almost impossible
Joanne Lockwood: to not use male pronouns in this because I said
Joanne Lockwood: there's no prouder moment in a father's life than when he gives
Joanne Lockwood: his daughter away. You try and say that sentence with the word
Joanne Lockwood: she in there instead of he. Linguistically, my head couldn't handle
Joanne Lockwood: it. So I did the entire father of white speech and I said at the
Joanne Lockwood: end of it, I've just systematically misgendered myself four times in this speech, but it
Joanne Lockwood: didn't make sense to me to say it any other way, but that's my
Joanne Lockwood: experience. There are other people who want to identify
Joanne Lockwood: as mum or wife or wherever they do and they use different pronouns.
Joanne Lockwood: As I say, that's my experience. That's the way I
Joanne Lockwood: treat myself and everyone else is different. So, yeah, you
Joanne Lockwood: can't know everybody by knowing one person.
Suzanne Wertheim: And I would add to that that
Suzanne Wertheim: not everybody uses they them pronouns. Some people who
Suzanne Wertheim: are genderqueer or in other way non
Suzanne Wertheim: binary will have pronouns that are very, very low
Suzanne Wertheim: frequency. So this is again why I have these
Suzanne Wertheim: principles. Oh, to show respect and draw in
Suzanne Wertheim: this person right. To show respect for them and draw them in. I
Suzanne Wertheim: have to remember that they're using fay fair, right.
Suzanne Wertheim: So that's also a thing that happens. I think misgendering yourself
Suzanne Wertheim: is okay because of the complexities. I mean, that story
Suzanne Wertheim: is fantastic because it shows the complexities of being
Suzanne Wertheim: very prescriptive about how a person is supposed to be.
Suzanne Wertheim: And let me tell you this, that let's just go to Gatekeeping right?
Suzanne Wertheim: So this happens with disability. I don't know if it happens as much with
Suzanne Wertheim: transgender people, but people who are really trying
Suzanne Wertheim: to walk the walk and be good and learning can get very
Suzanne Wertheim: judgmental and gatekeeping and will lecture people about
Suzanne Wertheim: the language they use for themselves. So I
Suzanne Wertheim: read a few books by disabled
Suzanne Wertheim: activists and in one of them one of the authors
Suzanne Wertheim: talks about how she's a wheelchair user. And so
Suzanne Wertheim: the question of and in the UK and the US, people have landed on different
Suzanne Wertheim: sides of things. Do you say a person with a disability or do you say
Suzanne Wertheim: a disabled person and which one is the right one? So I was listening to
Suzanne Wertheim: somebody recently who does research, disability research, and
Suzanne Wertheim: they publish in English for both a UK and a US audience. And so they're
Suzanne Wertheim: really stymied as to what do I do for the most inclusive choice. And
Suzanne Wertheim: so I think for those, sometimes you have to do a little preface and say,
Suzanne Wertheim: I'm going to be using this language. But in any case, this wheelchair
Suzanne Wertheim: user named Emily Lido said that she
Suzanne Wertheim: had switched over to saying disabled person. And people would say to her,
Suzanne Wertheim: oh no, you should really say person with a disability.
Suzanne Wertheim: And she would say, but I'm disabled. Well, don't talk about yourself like that.
Suzanne Wertheim: I don't think of you as a disabled person, right? So I talk a
Suzanne Wertheim: lot about stigma. Stigma is a thing that happens a lot in
Suzanne Wertheim: society where a group is socially devalued, is marginalised. It's part
Suzanne Wertheim: of what comes with the marginalisation and the lack of access to power is
Suzanne Wertheim: you get a lot of stigma where a group is just seen as less than,
Suzanne Wertheim: and sometimes not just less than, but stigmatised in some
Suzanne Wertheim: way, right? So for example, people with mental health issues, that's very highly
Suzanne Wertheim: stigmatised, people with
Suzanne Wertheim: disabilities, disabled people, depending on what people prefer.
Suzanne Wertheim: And so you can hear that stigma in don't talk about
Suzanne Wertheim: yourself like that or I don't even think of you as disabled. I have black
Suzanne Wertheim: friends who also people have said to them, oh, I don't even think of you
Suzanne Wertheim: as black. And it's like, is that supposed to be a
Suzanne Wertheim: compliment? So there's that kind of gatekeeping. I can imagine a scenario where
Suzanne Wertheim: somebody who's being very assiduous and is just learning how to do
Suzanne Wertheim: pronouns, right, would come up and say, whoo, you really need to get better
Suzanne Wertheim: with your pronouns. I hear people who are in group getting
Suzanne Wertheim: lectured by out group people. And so part of my this
Suzanne Wertheim: can be like a lot of navel gazing, inclusive language. Well, what exact
Suzanne Wertheim: term, what exact term? And my feeling is by showing
Suzanne Wertheim: respect, you use the term that a person prefers. And if you're
Suzanne Wertheim: with a group of people who aren't monolithic, then you start to get complicated
Suzanne Wertheim: and you have to explain yourself a little bit more and say, well, for this
Suzanne Wertheim: group of people, I'm going to use the terminology indigenous, but I understand
Suzanne Wertheim: other people prefer native. Or you like a hyperlink or an
Suzanne Wertheim: Asterisk and a footnote to say, I understand that not
Suzanne Wertheim: everybody likes this term, I'm choosing it for these reasons. So people know that
Suzanne Wertheim: you've put in the work rather than thinking that you're blithely just
Suzanne Wertheim: doing a thing because you don't know any better. Yeah, I completely
Joanne Lockwood: agree with that. And often when I'm doing talks or running
Joanne Lockwood: training, I would tend to use multiple
Joanne Lockwood: ways of describing an identity, a
Joanne Lockwood: characteristic, whatever it may be, in very short successions. So I might say
Joanne Lockwood: a person with a disability or a disabled person, as a matter of fact, in
Joanne Lockwood: a sentence. So acknowledging both terminology and
Joanne Lockwood: sometimes I might even say, I know that people have a different way of describing
Joanne Lockwood: themselves and I don't want to judge. I know that people are very proud of
Joanne Lockwood: being disabled first, and some people prefer to be described as
Joanne Lockwood: person with a disability. Then you meet someone who has
Joanne Lockwood: neurodiversity and they prefer to or they use
Joanne Lockwood: autistic person rather than the person with autism. They're very proud of the
Joanne Lockwood: autism first. So it's a real minefield, as you say, you
Joanne Lockwood: have to be very adaptable, very in tune, do your research or
Joanne Lockwood: at least your basics, as we talked about having that base level of research
Joanne Lockwood: first. And
Joanne Lockwood: where I know there's ambiguity, I try and use
Joanne Lockwood: all the different language I know to sort of say
Joanne Lockwood: I'm aware of the discussion points around this, which is why I
Joanne Lockwood: use both. And if people ask me to clarify, I say, well, I've got some
Joanne Lockwood: great friends who really are proud to be a disabled person. I've got some great
Joanne Lockwood: friends who prefer to be a person with a disability or a wheelchair user
Joanne Lockwood: and those kind of words. So yeah, I think if you coach it in, it's
Joanne Lockwood: not my language, it's words that I'm using that people have explained to me or
Joanne Lockwood: their language. I'm just using the language I've been educated with by
Joanne Lockwood: my friends and my contemporaries. Which language do you
Joanne Lockwood: prefer? Which is your chosen language? And it allows you to show that education
Joanne Lockwood: without assuming or without using your own, if you like bias
Joanne Lockwood: or stereotype about people. And I find so let me
Suzanne Wertheim: throw a term at you, which is metal linguistic. So
Suzanne Wertheim: metal linguistic language is language about
Suzanne Wertheim: language. So I used to say meta, now it's a giant
Suzanne Wertheim: company. So I would say to people, go meta, and now I can't do that
Suzanne Wertheim: anymore. But I like to educate people. So I talked about my
Suzanne Wertheim: superpower being seeing patterns, right? So when
Suzanne Wertheim: you explain patterns to people so they can see
Suzanne Wertheim: them, I think of it as giving people x ray vision. How much can
Suzanne Wertheim: I what is currently opaque to you or feels unrelated? And I can
Suzanne Wertheim: show you that. I've been digging, digging, digging, and there are these skeletal structures
Suzanne Wertheim: that connect them all. Like, how can I show that to you? So if you
Suzanne Wertheim: can name something, if you can talk about it, it allows you to
Suzanne Wertheim: more fluently use metal linguistic language and talk
Suzanne Wertheim: about language. And talking about language is one of the best
Suzanne Wertheim: ways to remove ambiguity and to remove negative
Suzanne Wertheim: feelings and to let people know that you're aware of what you're doing and that
Suzanne Wertheim: you're doing it very intentionally and consciously. And it allows us
Suzanne Wertheim: to bypass hurt feelings and misunderstandings in all
Suzanne Wertheim: kinds of ways. So I do encourage
Suzanne Wertheim: people when it comes to inclusive communication, to really be
Suzanne Wertheim: able to talk about language. And that's why getting educated about how
Suzanne Wertheim: language works really facilitates the ability. Because before
Suzanne Wertheim: I said that, I divide language into two
Suzanne Wertheim: sets, or language practises into two sets, there's
Suzanne Wertheim: inclusive language, inclusive communication, and
Suzanne Wertheim: problematic language and problematic communication. Well, a lot
Suzanne Wertheim: of people don't have the terminology for what's
Suzanne Wertheim: going off the rails when communication is problematic, except for the
Suzanne Wertheim: language of social justice or language available to laypeople, which will be
Suzanne Wertheim: terms like sexism, racism,
Suzanne Wertheim: transphobia, homophobic, maybe
Suzanne Wertheim: they'll say it's a microaggression. I find in my
Suzanne Wertheim: many years of experience looking at what people are resistant
Suzanne Wertheim: to and what lands on people, everything I do is designed to
Suzanne Wertheim: bypass resistance and land on people, right, so they can
Suzanne Wertheim: internalise it, take accountability and say, oh, I should make that shift,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? And it's almost always a small shift. I have found that
Suzanne Wertheim: a very strong stress response trigger a resistance trigger is
Suzanne Wertheim: using words like sexism and homophobia,
Suzanne Wertheim: because a person may be coming in with very good
Suzanne Wertheim: intentions and just inadvertently say a thing. Sometimes people are being
Suzanne Wertheim: absolutely not inadvertently problematic, they are purposefully being
Suzanne Wertheim: problematic. And I have to say, I don't have time or energy for those people
Suzanne Wertheim: go pre problematic elsewhere. I think this is the kind of behaviour that can be
Suzanne Wertheim: a fireable offence. Like, I don't have time and energy for you. But if you
Suzanne Wertheim: really are a well intended person who's like, oh, I got to shift my
Suzanne Wertheim: attention to impact, then I have to say that you can't
Suzanne Wertheim: use words like sexism or homophobia to tell
Suzanne Wertheim: people when they've said something wrong, because they are going to shut down. They're going
Suzanne Wertheim: to feel very attacked. They're going to get very stuck in their own
Suzanne Wertheim: good intentions. They're going to get hot with shame. They're going to be filled
Suzanne Wertheim: with adrenaline and cortisol, and it might take 48 full hours
Suzanne Wertheim: for those stress chemicals to exit from their bodies. And so that's
Suzanne Wertheim: why another reason why I've devised these principles is if people are going
Suzanne Wertheim: metal linguistic and saying to somebody, hey, I don't think you
Suzanne Wertheim: realised there's this thing that you said or this thing that you wrote and it
Suzanne Wertheim: wasn't the right thing to say, let me explain it.
Suzanne Wertheim: And you can use this violates a principle of inclusive language.
Suzanne Wertheim: It doesn't reflect. Reality because you've acted as if there are no
Suzanne Wertheim: non binary people in the world when you said your husband or wife. And
Suzanne Wertheim: so you've got to switch over to spouse and partner because non binary people
Suzanne Wertheim: exist. And so we need to reflect reality that
Suzanne Wertheim: lands a lot better with people
Suzanne Wertheim: than using the language of social justice,
Suzanne Wertheim: which may be merited, but doesn't land
Suzanne Wertheim: well with almost anybody. It's the calling it out
Joanne Lockwood: versus calling it in. It's the educational element, as you say.
Joanne Lockwood: If you start using words like privilege and the other social justice
Joanne Lockwood: words, people who hold those privileges, the majority,
Joanne Lockwood: as you say, tend to shut down. And I'm a great believer that we need
Joanne Lockwood: to collaborate rather than attack each other because what happens when privilege
Joanne Lockwood: gets attacked, it pulls the drawbridge up, it starts throwing rocks at you from
Joanne Lockwood: the ramparts and you don't get anywhere. All you end up doing is having an
Joanne Lockwood: argument amongst yourselves, attacking the castle until we've really got
Joanne Lockwood: to try and lower the drawbridge, lower the heat, lower the temperature
Joanne Lockwood: and have these she say inclusion conversations where
Joanne Lockwood: you're educating whilst pointing out a better way, rather
Joanne Lockwood: than just you're wrong. As soon as you put the hand up or the stop
Joanne Lockwood: or the accusation, defences hit and you say the brain chemicals kick
Joanne Lockwood: in, education stops. And I would add to
Suzanne Wertheim: that, that in my experience the more granular you
Suzanne Wertheim: go and the more behavioural you are rather than saying you're
Suzanne Wertheim: an x or you're y something that's sort of a large
Suzanne Wertheim: scale label. If you move away from telling somebody that they
Suzanne Wertheim: are something and saying, oh, here's this habit you have, or
Suzanne Wertheim: here's this tick you have, or here's this word that you use if you go
Suzanne Wertheim: granular and you say when you do x, it has this
Suzanne Wertheim: effect. It makes people feel disrespected or it
Suzanne Wertheim: makes people feel erased or you're hitting a pain point. And I don't think you
Suzanne Wertheim: realise that this word is actually painful for people who've had different experiences
Suzanne Wertheim: from you. If that level of granularity where it's very
Suzanne Wertheim: specifically and I recommend in a workshop series, I have the
Suzanne Wertheim: SBI model for telling people when something has gone wrong
Suzanne Wertheim: and I think that's a good part of calling in. So not my model, I
Suzanne Wertheim: forget who came up with it, but I credit them on the handout that I
Suzanne Wertheim: give. But it's situation, behaviour, impact. So if you go
Suzanne Wertheim: very granular and you say, the situation is this you said this thing, or the
Suzanne Wertheim: situation is we were in a conversation and nonbinary people were there, or you sent
Suzanne Wertheim: out a press release and nonbinary people will be reading it, or A range of
Suzanne Wertheim: people will be reading it. The behaviour you used, the phrase husband or
Suzanne Wertheim: wife. And this leaves out non binary people, the impact. People
Suzanne Wertheim: who have nonbinary partners, people who are themselves nonbinary are
Suzanne Wertheim: going to feel like you don't see them, you don't care about them. They're not
Suzanne Wertheim: part of your policy. This thing that you said about you, including benefits
Suzanne Wertheim: or whatever, is something that sounds so mundane, right? We're including benefits. And for
Suzanne Wertheim: people who are married, your husband or wife can blah, blah, blah. Well, what if
Suzanne Wertheim: the husband and wife is not a husband or not a wife? Right, so it
Suzanne Wertheim: can seem so mundane, but people who work for you can still feel
Suzanne Wertheim: so othered or forgotten about. Well, do I count? I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: not a husband and I'm not a wife or my partner isn't a husband or
Suzanne Wertheim: a wife. So if you explain that impact, these people are going to feel othered,
Suzanne Wertheim: they're going to feel sad, they're going to feel disrespected, they're going to feel erased.
Suzanne Wertheim: So if you just make this little switch, everyone's going to feel included.
Suzanne Wertheim: People on ramp onto that much, much better. So that's
Suzanne Wertheim: my I'm going to say something terrible.
Suzanne Wertheim: It's not terrible, but there is a research that
Suzanne Wertheim: shows that if you ask men, this is just going to be male
Suzanne Wertheim: specific. If you ask men, have you ever raped anybody?
Suzanne Wertheim: The vast majority will say no. But if you go
Suzanne Wertheim: granular this is just like anonymous survey work. I believe I have to
Suzanne Wertheim: revisit this study. If you go granular and say, have you ever done
Suzanne Wertheim: behaviour A? Have you ever done behaviour B? Have you ever done behaviour
Suzanne Wertheim: C? And those behaviours are components
Suzanne Wertheim: of non consensual interactions of
Suzanne Wertheim: rape. The number of men who admit to that shoots
Suzanne Wertheim: up by more than 100% of what it was. So people
Suzanne Wertheim: are not this is, to me, sort of an end case, right? But there
Suzanne Wertheim: are ways that how are we making people feel bad and not caring about
Suzanne Wertheim: them? Inclusion language is still on that spectrum. It's still on
Suzanne Wertheim: the spectrum of other kinds of physical attacks, right?
Suzanne Wertheim: It's a verbal attack. So that's really where I take my
Suzanne Wertheim: granularity. Like if it works for getting people to be, if not accountable, than
Suzanne Wertheim: the first step of acknowledging that they've done something. If it works even for
Suzanne Wertheim: something as horrific and stigmatised as sexual assault,
Suzanne Wertheim: then I promise you it's going to work well for getting people in your
Suzanne Wertheim: organisation to be more accountable for their
Suzanne Wertheim: verbal problems they've created. And by the way, I want to say
Suzanne Wertheim: that this is an oral medium, you and I,
Suzanne Wertheim: but anytime I say, speak and say, I am in my head, including
Suzanne Wertheim: sign languages. So I just want to say that everything I'm saying
Suzanne Wertheim: also applies to people who are speakers of sign languages and not just oral
Suzanne Wertheim: languages. That's important to make
Joanne Lockwood: sure we are enunciating looking at people respectful
Joanne Lockwood: of people who have hearing loss or hard of hearing, where
Joanne Lockwood: I see so many speakers on stage, they're turning their head away. They're not looking
Joanne Lockwood: at the audience. So not everybody who is hard of
Joanne Lockwood: hearing lip reads. But there are a number of people who have hearing, who still
Joanne Lockwood: rely on the visual and the audible to better hear the words
Joanne Lockwood: properly. So it's always important to
Joanne Lockwood: be consciously inclusive of your communication, not
Joanne Lockwood: just passively inclusive, because you're talking about
Joanne Lockwood: inclusive communication and problematic
Joanne Lockwood: communication there's. The bit in the middle, really, which is the
Joanne Lockwood: inconsiderate communication is where you're not being passive or
Joanne Lockwood: negative deliberately, you're just not considering. And I think
Joanne Lockwood: part of the for me, part of it is making sure that we're actively thinking
Joanne Lockwood: about your needs as a person. So if I am speaking in
Joanne Lockwood: front of an audience or a workshop, whatever, I'm making sure that
Joanne Lockwood: I cheque with everybody, ask if they have any needs in advance
Joanne Lockwood: and reinforce that whilst I'm wellbeing, is everyone able to hear me
Joanne Lockwood: okay? Is there anything I need to do differently? Can you see everything okay? Do
Joanne Lockwood: you need to come to the front really
Joanne Lockwood: overemphasising and being overly conscious about it
Joanne Lockwood: to make sure that you're not inadvertently
Joanne Lockwood: problematic using your language there?
Suzanne Wertheim: And for my
Suzanne Wertheim: book, I either hired people or quid pro
Suzanne Wertheim: quo people for doing subject matter
Suzanne Wertheim: expert readings of things or lived experience readings of things. So I
Suzanne Wertheim: collaborated with two autistic linguists, getting their PhDs and studying
Suzanne Wertheim: not just autistic, but studying autistic communication. Right. So real
Suzanne Wertheim: subject matter experts to bring in some autistic communications
Suzanne Wertheim: to my book, because
Suzanne Wertheim: historically, I'm so deeply horrified by how my field has
Suzanne Wertheim: marginalised autistic communications and presented things. I very
Suzanne Wertheim: confidently would stand on a stage and say, all people do X. And now I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: like, all holistic people do x all people who aren't there's so
Suzanne Wertheim: many ways all people are marking hierarchies all the time. Gender is incredibly
Suzanne Wertheim: salient and people really care about gender. I'm like, oh,
Suzanne Wertheim: that is really not true for so many autistic
Suzanne Wertheim: communicators. For them, power is not that interesting and
Suzanne Wertheim: gender is not that interesting. Right. So there's so many ways in which I was
Suzanne Wertheim: excluding people, but, oh, I got caught up in the
Suzanne Wertheim: autistic thing. Oh, I hired people to so, a
Suzanne Wertheim: person I hired, he actually very recently passed
Suzanne Wertheim: away, which I am very sad about. He was a leader in
Suzanne Wertheim: a new kind of linguistics called crip linguistics. So they're
Suzanne Wertheim: reclaiming the word crip, which was a very
Suzanne Wertheim: stigmatised word.
Joanne Lockwood: Before. Yeah, definitely. With reclamation. So you take the word that's been
Suzanne Wertheim: used against you and you use it in group and you give it power. Much
Suzanne Wertheim: like queer the N word for some people, or
Suzanne Wertheim: African descent, not all. So that's the process of reclamation. And so
Suzanne Wertheim: in the book, I had asked him to read very carefully. I was so careful,
Suzanne Wertheim: it took so much effort for me to say, okay, you're reading as a black
Suzanne Wertheim: person and a disabled person. Here are the relevant pages. Right. I was so careful
Suzanne Wertheim: for the people doing me this favour. And then he just went and read the
Suzanne Wertheim: whole book, which was good, because he had a lot of comments on
Suzanne Wertheim: stuff, but at the beginning of the book I compare
Suzanne Wertheim: communication event planning to regular event planning. I'm saying,
Suzanne Wertheim: look, if you've ever planned an event, you've had to think about who's coming to
Suzanne Wertheim: the event and think about what their needs are and take them into consideration.
Suzanne Wertheim: A lot of people get so paralysed with fear when it comes to language, but
Suzanne Wertheim: I'm like, this is a transferable skill. Have you planned an event? You can plan
Suzanne Wertheim: a communication event. Do you have to send out a press release? Do you have
Suzanne Wertheim: to do an internal email to the whole company? Are you going to create a
Suzanne Wertheim: video? Like all of these things, especially for planned communications,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? Like, if you can plan a party, you can plan communication, you just need
Suzanne Wertheim: an inclusion checklist. Like you would have a party checklist, right? So in the
Suzanne Wertheim: book I had written, have you ever gone to an event where
Suzanne Wertheim: you felt like you were really taken into consideration, like people had really thought
Suzanne Wertheim: about you and really thought about your needs and you really
Suzanne Wertheim: felt included in the event? And this reviewer, a professor
Suzanne Wertheim: of linguistics, said, I've never been to a non deaf
Suzanne Wertheim: event where I felt this way ever in my life.
Suzanne Wertheim: Ever in my life. He was in his forty s and
Suzanne Wertheim: I honestly teared up. I'm tearing up right now thinking about it, because I
Suzanne Wertheim: had just asked him, out of respect for his fantastic linguistic
Suzanne Wertheim: skills and his knowledge base, right? And I just asked him to read specific
Suzanne Wertheim: pages and then he went and read additional pages because he was curious and
Suzanne Wertheim: then he just put that thing in there and it stopped me. I had to
Suzanne Wertheim: close down and take a walk around the block and just think about I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: very lucky that I was born into the body I was born in, in a
Suzanne Wertheim: lot of ways, right? And it hadn't occurred to me that
Suzanne Wertheim: being born into a body that was hearing and mobile mostly
Suzanne Wertheim: abled I'm not fully abled and I'm not fully neurotypical, which I
Suzanne Wertheim: learned later in life, but I was born into a body
Suzanne Wertheim: that made it so I could very often
Suzanne Wertheim: feel like I belonging in places. And here he had had experiences where
Suzanne Wertheim: unless he was in his specific group, if he was not in
Suzanne Wertheim: his specific, specific group of deaf and hard of hearing people, he
Suzanne Wertheim: never truly felt taking into account. And that was a really
Suzanne Wertheim: brutal place for me to sit and I still sit there sometimes.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, that reminds me. I'm a
Joanne Lockwood: member of the Professional Speaking Association in UK and
Joanne Lockwood: Ireland and we organised two sort
Joanne Lockwood: of national events per year and we were
Joanne Lockwood: approached, because I'm on the board, we were approached by
Joanne Lockwood: someone who is neurodiverse and
Joanne Lockwood: they came to us and said it would be better if so they came
Joanne Lockwood: with that. I want to help you improve the event. For
Joanne Lockwood: me, for others who are neurodiverse or
Joanne Lockwood: neurodivergent, some people prefer the term neurodivergent,
Joanne Lockwood: or people who just maybe have some anxiety about walking into spaces
Joanne Lockwood: they've never been to before. It would be better if you
Joanne Lockwood: put chairs at the back of the room so people don't have to walk into
Joanne Lockwood: the space. They can just sneak and sit at the back, become comfortable before they
Joanne Lockwood: find the chair, have walk through videos so that before they
Joanne Lockwood: turn up, they can see the entrance, they can see the walks we had to
Joanne Lockwood: get from A to B. You narrate things
Joanne Lockwood: that are happening now and next, those kind of things, putting good
Joanne Lockwood: signage, having a quiet room. And so we went through this whole
Joanne Lockwood: thing and the feedback we got
Joanne Lockwood: from the delegates who went and we've just run another one two weeks ago,
Joanne Lockwood: was that they found the communication was so powerful
Joanne Lockwood: because they turned up, they knew what they were going to expect. They just seen
Joanne Lockwood: the venue. They knew where the reception was, they knew where the venue was. And
Joanne Lockwood: this is people who cast themselves as neurotypical. So not
Joanne Lockwood: only a lot of the work I do, I'm sure what you do, it's
Joanne Lockwood: what helps the one, she helps the many. And that's what we're doing
Joanne Lockwood: here. We're not saying it's just for you. It's actually we're benefiting the
Joanne Lockwood: entire cohort or the communities that are involved, not
Joanne Lockwood: just providing access for someone who has a disability.
Joanne Lockwood: In my late 50s, I'm not saying I'm getting on, but sometimes I don't want
Joanne Lockwood: to walk up flight stairs. So for me it's important to have an escalator,
Joanne Lockwood: a lift or elevator or something.
Joanne Lockwood: I don't have a disability. There are people who maybe go skiing, break their
Joanne Lockwood: leg. They were okay last week, they're not good this week. So we're providing
Joanne Lockwood: accessible solutions, not just for people who have a lived
Joanne Lockwood: or a born disability. We're providing anyone who comes into that in
Joanne Lockwood: their life. So what you're saying there about your
Joanne Lockwood: examples is about creating solutions for the one that benefit the many.
Joanne Lockwood: And you don't know who that many is. They're just there and they appreciate you've.
Suzanne Wertheim: Cared about say
Suzanne Wertheim: so. A lot of companies don't want to invest in talent retention. I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: just going to put that right up front. I look at where the budgets go,
Suzanne Wertheim: and right now Dei budgets are being slashed. So people are willing to
Suzanne Wertheim: put money into talent acquisition, into client acquisition and
Suzanne Wertheim: client retention. And then there's that quadrant of talent retention where they're
Suzanne Wertheim: like, oh, we don't have the budget, or it's a nice to have. And I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: just like, I'm right now trying to lay out what are the consequences
Suzanne Wertheim: of when you don't put money into workplace culture, because it's very
Suzanne Wertheim: expensive. So I'm here in tech. There's a lot of engineers making
Suzanne Wertheim: 200 year dollars.
Suzanne Wertheim: And if you lose them, if you lose a 200K engineer, it's at
Suzanne Wertheim: least 300K. That year to replace them, right? Because
Suzanne Wertheim: of all of the losses. For
Suzanne Wertheim: example, I talk about inclusive meetings.
Suzanne Wertheim: When you're trying to design a meeting that is inclusive for
Suzanne Wertheim: somebody who is autistic, somebody who
Suzanne Wertheim: is a speaker of English as their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th language,
Suzanne Wertheim: a lot of people are much more multilingual than where you're sitting or where I'm
Suzanne Wertheim: sitting, depending on where you grew up. If you
Suzanne Wertheim: are making inclusive language for people who
Suzanne Wertheim: are
Suzanne Wertheim: inclusive meetings, for people who come from a
Suzanne Wertheim: culture where you have to have everything in order
Suzanne Wertheim: before you say something. So, for example, a lot of Native American
Suzanne Wertheim: cultures here, especially on the West Coast, you're supposed to go off and practise on
Suzanne Wertheim: your own. And it's the height of rudeness to bring something
Suzanne Wertheim: half baked, right? Like, you have to come. So if
Suzanne Wertheim: you do these things for these kinds of cultural diversity and you make inclusive meetings,
Suzanne Wertheim: guess who also benefits? Your introvert white male
Suzanne Wertheim: engineer. Right? There are ways in which people think
Suzanne Wertheim: that the benefit is only for a certain kind of person. And
Suzanne Wertheim: I'm like, everybody wants to work in what I call the optimised
Suzanne Wertheim: workplace, so I just call it the optimised workplace. And I'm like, bias gets in
Suzanne Wertheim: the way. And the optimised workplace is where everyone feels seen, heard, and
Suzanne Wertheim: valued, where they feel like they belong, where they're able to make
Suzanne Wertheim: contributions and aren't blocked, and where they feel safe, right?
Suzanne Wertheim: Psychological safety, it's very basic. And I'm like, guess what? Guess who likes
Suzanne Wertheim: to work? There 100% of people. And my data on
Suzanne Wertheim: optimised workplaces comes from business studies. It doesn't come from dei
Suzanne Wertheim: studies. It's like, oh, here are the best run companies where people really like to
Suzanne Wertheim: work. They've got incredible retention rates, they're incredibly productive, and it aligns
Suzanne Wertheim: 100% with diversity, equity, inclusion
Suzanne Wertheim: initiatives. So to me,
Suzanne Wertheim: that's evidence. That's what we call data validation, right? And
Suzanne Wertheim: so people often don't think that way. But what you're talking about is exactly that
Suzanne Wertheim: example, and I'll add another to it. I present a
Suzanne Wertheim: lot right now, much more virtually, but often in
Suzanne Wertheim: person, it's coming back. And
Suzanne Wertheim: recommendations for keynote speaking, they're like, use ten
Suzanne Wertheim: slides maximum. And I'm like, no, because
Suzanne Wertheim: I know a lot of people aren't
Suzanne Wertheim: great with only if you're a speaker of an oral language,
Suzanne Wertheim: it doesn't mean that you're great with only auditory comprehension.
Suzanne Wertheim: And so when I have an important thing to say, those words are on the
Suzanne Wertheim: slide in big letters, high contrast font, black
Suzanne Wertheim: and dark blue on a white background. And
Suzanne Wertheim: people can read them as I'm saying them because those are my punctuation points.
Suzanne Wertheim: So back in early rap and 80s rap, it would be where everybody comes in
Suzanne Wertheim: and says the thing and then you go back to the one person, right? It's
Suzanne Wertheim: kind of doing like a little Beastie Boys moment here. But
Suzanne Wertheim: people are very grateful. People are like, I really understood you
Suzanne Wertheim: in a way that I don't understand a lot of other presenters because I'm thinking
Suzanne Wertheim: about and so many people use closed captions now,
Suzanne Wertheim: right. People have gotten very used to streaming with closed captions
Suzanne Wertheim: because that extra bit of information for language is
Suzanne Wertheim: helping their language processing. So, by the way, what you talked about sounds
Suzanne Wertheim: for me, I can be anxious coming into a new space and everything you
Suzanne Wertheim: said, I'm like, oh, that sounds amazing for coming into a meeting and already
Suzanne Wertheim: knowing where I'm going to sit and stand and I can come in and what's
Suzanne Wertheim: happening next. That's the best. Yeah. And the
Joanne Lockwood: feedback, the quiet room. There were people who just wanted
Joanne Lockwood: quiet. They didn't want to talk to anybody.
Joanne Lockwood: I'm a self confessed and
Joanne Lockwood: out and open introvert. I can do an hour or so. I
Joanne Lockwood: can go full max for an hour, then I need the
Joanne Lockwood: recharge. So I'll just go and lock myself away. It's nice. You haven't got to
Joanne Lockwood: justify yourself or say to people, I don't want to speak. Everyone
Joanne Lockwood: knows if you're in the room, you don't speak. You just have your own little
Joanne Lockwood: space. Play a bit of Candy Crush or something on your phone, do whatever you're
Joanne Lockwood: going to do, just cheque out. And it really is powerful.
Joanne Lockwood: I picking up on what you say about slides. There's a kind of
Joanne Lockwood: a thing around professional speakers, about
Joanne Lockwood: true professional speakers don't need slides, they just stand up on stage and
Joanne Lockwood: it's the power of their voice, the storytelling, and yeah, great,
Joanne Lockwood: brilliant. But I'm a great believer also in, as you
Joanne Lockwood: said, there are people in the audience who will
Joanne Lockwood: zone out. English is not their primary
Joanne Lockwood: language. They'll forget what you're saying or they miss something.
Joanne Lockwood: I'm the same, actually. I was listening to some
Joanne Lockwood: talks at this conference last week, and one person
Joanne Lockwood: was working through this exercise and they had this model called Soap. Soap.
Joanne Lockwood: And they give a little card. You're supposed to write this little
Joanne Lockwood: thing down on the card. Then you had to tick at the end of it.
Joanne Lockwood: Whether it was an S, whether it's no, whether it's a whether it was a
Joanne Lockwood: P. And I kind of zoned out in this talk because I was so
Joanne Lockwood: engrossed in what this person was saying and my mind
Joanne Lockwood: was exploding in different directions. I got to the end, he says, Right, now, I
Joanne Lockwood: want you to do this. I thought okay. And there's nothing on
Joanne Lockwood: the card that says what Soap means. His slide had gone and I'm
Joanne Lockwood: going, so I don't know what I can't remember what it stands for.
Joanne Lockwood: So I went out to ask and said, look, if you're going to commit these
Joanne Lockwood: cards, put it on the back, put it on your slide, do something. Because people
Joanne Lockwood: like me who zone out then realise at the end they need to learn what
Joanne Lockwood: they should missed, can't go back. And another speaker did the same.
Joanne Lockwood: She had an ABCDE model and she put
Joanne Lockwood: a and she put a list of things under the A, then she put a
Joanne Lockwood: list of things under the B. But when she clicked on the B, the A
Joanne Lockwood: ones disappeared. I assisted at the end, I said Brilliant. But I
Joanne Lockwood: zoned out. It wasn't until I got to the end of the E that I
Joanne Lockwood: suddenly thought, I wonder what I said. I wanted to go back, it's
Joanne Lockwood: too late. So I couldn't go back to the A's. I said, what would
Joanne Lockwood: be better if kind of thing is instead of blanket out, just
Joanne Lockwood: grey it out until you have a bright and a dark. So
Joanne Lockwood: you've taken the focus off of it. But for me, I can just go back
Joanne Lockwood: and go, oh yeah, I remember, because my attention span just doesn't
Joanne Lockwood: hold that long. And I learned that about myself last weekend,
Joanne Lockwood: that I was zoning out. It wasn't because I wasn't paying attention, it's because
Joanne Lockwood: what they said sparked me. All these things were firing off
Joanne Lockwood: and I didn't know how to come back. I mean, I
Suzanne Wertheim: wouldn't even call it zoning out, which feels a little too self deprecating to
Suzanne Wertheim: me. I think it's more that they didn't signal to you
Suzanne Wertheim: that this was a thing you were going to have to retain, right? They didn't
Suzanne Wertheim: signal to you, here's a thing, I need you to take
Suzanne Wertheim: this away. And it's too much for people who are so
Suzanne Wertheim: I'll tell you. I'm a
Suzanne Wertheim: professional linguist. I learned two languages from my dissertation, like
Suzanne Wertheim: learned in my twenty s two languages, and then went to Russia for a
Suzanne Wertheim: year and studied how one language was affecting the other in all these different ways,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? And I cannot learn things without
Suzanne Wertheim: visual cues. I would have to write down if there was a new word, I
Suzanne Wertheim: would have to write it down. I remember one time I was with my parents
Suzanne Wertheim: on what's called Navajo reservation, but they prefer
Suzanne Wertheim: the term Dine. And so we were talking and we were
Suzanne Wertheim: supposed to visit a hogan with an elder and I wanted to speak respectfully
Suzanne Wertheim: and I said, can you teach me a few things to say to be respectful?
Suzanne Wertheim: And they said them and I'm like, uh oh. And I found a scrap of
Suzanne Wertheim: paper and a pen and I said, Please tell me again. And then I wrote
Suzanne Wertheim: it down using a phonetic alphabet, and then I was able to say it.
Suzanne Wertheim: But as a professional linguist, a professional language, learner in
Suzanne Wertheim: some respect without a visual cue, I couldn't even do it. And I would say
Suzanne Wertheim: the same about song lyrics. I couldn't tell you what any song is about if
Suzanne Wertheim: it's just going in order. If I don't see it all in one place on
Suzanne Wertheim: a piece of paper, then I'm like, oh, that's what the song is about. But
Suzanne Wertheim: I'm a native speaker of English and some people enunciate well, and
Suzanne Wertheim: I couldn't tell you what almost any song is actually talking about. So I think
Suzanne Wertheim: that for many of us who are processing, if you're processing
Suzanne Wertheim: things through time, if there's temporal distance,
Suzanne Wertheim: that there isn't the same kind of retention, if something is gathered
Suzanne Wertheim: for you with a different kind of input written and you can see it synthesised
Suzanne Wertheim: all in one place. So I
Suzanne Wertheim: reject your zoning out and say that I
Suzanne Wertheim: would say that you were doing what's natural for an engaged audience
Suzanne Wertheim: member, and there needed to be supplemental things if somebody really
Suzanne Wertheim: wanted you to take something and turn it into active knowledge
Suzanne Wertheim: on your behalf. Yeah, I
Joanne Lockwood: take your charitable definition and I agree with you. So absolutely,
Joanne Lockwood: I was using zoning out as my kind of shortcut to how
Joanne Lockwood: I would describe, but you're right, I was probably acting very
Joanne Lockwood: typical in that until I need to remember something
Joanne Lockwood: or until I know I need to remember something, I probably don't. You have to
Joanne Lockwood: punctuate and say this next word is worth
Joanne Lockwood: remembering. It's the other thing, isn't it? If someone
Joanne Lockwood: says, Would you like a cup of coffee,
Joanne Lockwood: Steven? You don't hear, Would you like a cup of coffee? Until the
Joanne Lockwood: word Steven is used. So if you say, Steven,
Joanne Lockwood: would you like a cup of coffee? You know that
Joanne Lockwood: whatever's going to come next is an instruction or a question or something for
Joanne Lockwood: you. So it's about making sure you cite I think you said it
Joanne Lockwood: earlier say something as a warm up before you want to say the
Joanne Lockwood: main point. Otherwise you got to get people back on the page. Right?
Joanne Lockwood: I'm going to say something really interesting now, and this is it,
Joanne Lockwood: okay, I'm back in the room. And I think that's what you're trying to say
Joanne Lockwood: there is you got to give the people that audible or visual cue, the next
Joanne Lockwood: thing that follows is for you. Yeah. And
Suzanne Wertheim: so what I think is also interesting, let me bring it back to inclusive
Suzanne Wertheim: communication in a less hey, if you're a speaker, do these things.
Suzanne Wertheim: Although I completely agree. A lot of people don't get good training in how to
Suzanne Wertheim: speak to people, and then it shows. But bringing it back to inclusive
Suzanne Wertheim: language, there are people who are worried that they're going to sound
Suzanne Wertheim: very woke or not on brand if
Suzanne Wertheim: they use more inclusive substitutes. Right?
Suzanne Wertheim: So I'm on retainer for a financial services company,
Suzanne Wertheim: and they send me things, and so they're like, well, what would you
Suzanne Wertheim: do? And I'm like, but my brand is inclusion, so what's correct
Suzanne Wertheim: for me isn't like, I see you as three years, five years behind
Suzanne Wertheim: me, right? Like, there's stuff that I'm using now that five years from now is
Suzanne Wertheim: okay for you to use, but I think it's too soon for you to use
Suzanne Wertheim: now, given who your audience is. They got 23 million customers or something, right?
Suzanne Wertheim: So I'm like, let's be more cautious. For example,
Suzanne Wertheim: I say to people, like, well, I don't want to sound woke.
Suzanne Wertheim: And I'm like, but you don't have to sound woke to be inclusive. So one
Suzanne Wertheim: thing is here's an important term. Terminological precision is
Suzanne Wertheim: a thing that I said during my book launch a few weeks ago, and a
Suzanne Wertheim: few people came up. So when I'm talking about inclusion language,
Suzanne Wertheim: I'm saying I want you to be precise. And there are times that you're saying
Suzanne Wertheim: things that are actually imprecise. So let's move it to the more precise thing. If
Suzanne Wertheim: you're saying husband and wife, that's imprecise, because there are people who don't
Suzanne Wertheim: fit in those categories. You think you've included everybody who's legally bound
Suzanne Wertheim: to another person in a romantic relationship. And I'm here to say
Suzanne Wertheim: you have been imprecise and you've forgotten people, right? So
Suzanne Wertheim: terminological precision. So people, for example, think
Suzanne Wertheim: that guys includes everybody. And I'm here to tell you that there are
Suzanne Wertheim: semantic tests that show yes for the listener.
Suzanne Wertheim: Joanne is shaking her head saying, Guys, it
Suzanne Wertheim: does not include so. But there are people who are very resistant.
Suzanne Wertheim: And they say to me, guys includes everybody. And I'll say, okay. So
Suzanne Wertheim: I'm going to a bathroom, the loo, as it were,
Suzanne Wertheim: in a restaurant, and I am female, assigned female at
Suzanne Wertheim: birth, female to this day. And the first bathroom door that I
Suzanne Wertheim: see, because I'm here in the US. Says, guys, do I walk into that
Suzanne Wertheim: bathroom and think it's gender inclusive, or do I walk down the hall and look
Suzanne Wertheim: for a bathroom door that says gals or dolls or
Suzanne Wertheim: girls? I'm not walking into the guy's bathroom because I know it's a bathroom
Suzanne Wertheim: designated for people who are understood to be male,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? So I say you don't have to
Suzanne Wertheim: sound super hippie dippy or California woke or
Suzanne Wertheim: whatever. If you say so every time you're going to
Suzanne Wertheim: say guys. Like, let's say you're a manager running a meeting, and every time you're
Suzanne Wertheim: going to say, hey, guys. All right, you guys, all right, guys, let's move to
Suzanne Wertheim: this. I said, you can just switch it up. You don't have to use the
Suzanne Wertheim: same thing. So you can start by saying, hey, everyone, let's start. And
Suzanne Wertheim: okay, team, you did a great job. Okay, folks, let's move on. And he said,
Suzanne Wertheim: you know who's noticed? Nobody's noticed. Nobody's
Suzanne Wertheim: paying attention to the fact nobody's going to. But you know who's
Suzanne Wertheim: eventually going to notice? Like, your non binary or
Suzanne Wertheim: female team members who suddenly realise that
Suzanne Wertheim: they like when they're in a meeting with somebody else who's saying guys all the
Suzanne Wertheim: time, they're like, oh. They're like, oh, mike never says guys,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? So it's going to be some sort of retroactive credit you're going to get,
Suzanne Wertheim: but they're going to just feel better. And to my mind,
Suzanne Wertheim: that's the majority of inclusive language. It's not designed to
Suzanne Wertheim: signal how good a person you are. It's
Suzanne Wertheim: designed to have set things up for comfort,
Suzanne Wertheim: just like all of those careful things to talk
Suzanne Wertheim: you. Through to talk an attendee through what the meeting was going to be.
Suzanne Wertheim: It's the same thing for all of the interactions, whether they're one on one, a
Suzanne Wertheim: meeting, all hands,
Suzanne Wertheim: meeting speech, an
Suzanne Wertheim: email to the entire company, et cetera, a slack communication
Suzanne Wertheim: to everybody. That's why I say communication and language and a set of
Suzanne Wertheim: practises rather than focusing on words.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, for sure. What
Joanne Lockwood: I've found is you can just put the full stop earlier in
Joanne Lockwood: the sentence. So instead of good morning, sir. Good evening, sir, you
Joanne Lockwood: just put the full stop after good evening or Good morning. It's easy, just don't
Joanne Lockwood: say anymore. Because our natural politeness, maybe as an
Joanne Lockwood: English speaker, our natural politeness is we want to sort of use this
Joanne Lockwood: familiarity terms, but if you just say good morning, good afternoon, or how are we
Joanne Lockwood: doing? Everything okay with you today? Good morning, everybody. Hi,
Joanne Lockwood: everybody, great to see you here, team. Those kind of
Joanne Lockwood: things are really great ways you say a number of
Joanne Lockwood: times I'm standing on the platform at train station and they say, ladies and
Joanne Lockwood: gentlemen, the train now arriving at platform two is for Cardiff. You go,
Joanne Lockwood: what about my friend? Where are they going to go?
Joanne Lockwood: You're not talking to them. Every time a
Joanne Lockwood: speaker or people are here uses the phrase ladies and gentlemen, I always
Joanne Lockwood: think all the people is excluding or. If you have a slide where you're putting
Joanne Lockwood: stats and demographics and you've just got male and female on it, you think,
Joanne Lockwood: well, even if people who are non binary or gender
Joanne Lockwood: nonconforming are so
Joanne Lockwood: insignificantly represented on the statistic, have you
Joanne Lockwood: stopped you having a column showing zero to at least
Joanne Lockwood: you've thought about it. And what I always say to people is if
Joanne Lockwood: you try Googling, do a Google Image search for guys. If you think
Joanne Lockwood: guys are gender neutral, do a Google Image search and tell me how many people
Joanne Lockwood: don't appear to be men in swimsuits on the
Joanne Lockwood: first five pages. Most of them are men in swimsuits on the first
Joanne Lockwood: five pages. An intriguing result. What I also say is
Suzanne Wertheim: another example I like to give it. We call it a semantic test or
Suzanne Wertheim: heuristic right. So what can you go through and test and see what's the gender
Suzanne Wertheim: reference involved is?
Suzanne Wertheim: Two coworkers, one's moved there recently, and they're both
Suzanne Wertheim: male and they're both
Suzanne Wertheim: straight. And one says to the other, so how many guys have
Suzanne Wertheim: you dated since you moved to town? Right, I know it can be hard to
Suzanne Wertheim: meet people here. It's a small town. Is that like
Suzanne Wertheim: a regular thing to say? Does this person of course it doesn't
Suzanne Wertheim: invoke dating everybody. So a nice
Suzanne Wertheim: example I like to give them. Let's just get historical
Suzanne Wertheim: here. How does it feel when a word has
Suzanne Wertheim: genuinely changed the gender of the kind of person it refers to?
Suzanne Wertheim: Let's use the word girl. So it's
Suzanne Wertheim: 1350, and I say girl, and then I say things in English
Suzanne Wertheim: that whatever, I'm not going to try. But so I'm speaking in 1350
Suzanne Wertheim: English and I use girl, and if I write girl, I spell it with a
Suzanne Wertheim: Y and I point to two people.
Suzanne Wertheim: One of them appears to be a young male person and one appears to be
Suzanne Wertheim: a young female person. I can be referring to either because girl in
Suzanne Wertheim: 1350 refers to boys and girls. It is gender
Suzanne Wertheim: agnostic. It is what people claim guys is.
Suzanne Wertheim: Girl is absolutely referring to anyone who is a
Suzanne Wertheim: young person. So sometimes you can say girl and mean somebody who is a young
Suzanne Wertheim: male person. But cut to there was a gender shift and so
Suzanne Wertheim: now it refers only to young female people. So we know what it
Suzanne Wertheim: feels like when a word has genuinely changed the reference of
Suzanne Wertheim: its gender, because nobody's going to say girl and think
Suzanne Wertheim: of young male people. Although we're being more careful with gender now.
Suzanne Wertheim: Right, but anyway, but oh, look at that group of girls over there. And
Suzanne Wertheim: it's a group of boys playing football or whatever. Right. And I
Suzanne Wertheim: meant soccer. So anyway,
Suzanne Wertheim: I like that counterpoint. Does guys feel like
Suzanne Wertheim: it's shifted all the way? No. Absolutely. Will it shift in the
Suzanne Wertheim: future? Possibly.
Suzanne Wertheim: Semantic shift is a thing you can look back on, but you can't look. Forward
Joanne Lockwood: at it's most prevalent here in restaurants,
Joanne Lockwood: the meet and greeter tends to say, hi, guys, can I get you a table?
Joanne Lockwood: And it's kind of I don't want to make any stereotypical
Joanne Lockwood: accusation here, but it seems to be imported from
Joanne Lockwood: North America as a kind of a cultural thing. And
Joanne Lockwood: in the UK, we kind of picked up on it and it's as bad
Joanne Lockwood: as I mean, I'm not a big fan of folk or folk and high
Joanne Lockwood: folks and things like that. That's kind of again, it's like forced English.
Joanne Lockwood: You have to try and make the language sound natural and inclusive without it being,
Joanne Lockwood: as you say, woke or deliberately inclusive, just naturally
Joanne Lockwood: inclusive. I think that's I don't see folks,
Suzanne Wertheim: you know, people write to me and they're do I or they ask a question,
Suzanne Wertheim: what do I do about sir and ma'am? Especially people in the American
Suzanne Wertheim: South or people, black Americans are often raised
Suzanne Wertheim: that they have to say sir or ma'am. And I'm like, OOH, we don't have
Suzanne Wertheim: one yet. I'm like, I'm waiting for the young people to come up with a
Suzanne Wertheim: gender neutral alternative. But we don't have one, I said. So you got
Suzanne Wertheim: to maybe do politeness and tone. So if you're going to walk up to somebody
Suzanne Wertheim: on the street, so if there's somebody you know is male and wants to be
Suzanne Wertheim: called sir, then fine, there's someone you know is female and wants to be called
Suzanne Wertheim: ma'am, then fine, or madam, right? But if
Suzanne Wertheim: there's somebody you don't know on the street or the next client or the next
Suzanne Wertheim: customer, you can't do it. So you have to use it. Well, you were saying
Suzanne Wertheim: good morning, right? Instead of sir, just drop it off,
Suzanne Wertheim: right? And you can just say, oh, excuse me. Like, you can try to do
Suzanne Wertheim: it in tone or you can say, oh, I think the person in the green
Suzanne Wertheim: shirt was next. Or instead of saying, Hi, guys, you can say hello,
Suzanne Wertheim: everyone, folks doesn't feel natural for me at all. For some people
Suzanne Wertheim: it's a very natural word. For me it feels very artificial. So I recommend that
Suzanne Wertheim: people use it if it feels good in their mouth, but if it doesn't feel
Suzanne Wertheim: good, dump it like that's. Okay. There's plenty of other things to say.
Joanne Lockwood: It's funny you said that. Describe someone as the person over there in the green
Joanne Lockwood: shirt. I tend to wear a hat. I've got a couple of
Joanne Lockwood: hats, different coloured hats. I tend to wear those when I'm at events and
Joanne Lockwood: speaking and things like that. Because I want to give somebody an easy way to
Joanne Lockwood: describe me rather than get confused by my gender identity
Joanne Lockwood: or use my obvious characteristic as a
Joanne Lockwood: description. The trans woman over there or something,
Joanne Lockwood: I give them the lady in the hat or the person in the hat, or
Joanne Lockwood: the person with the yellow tights, or something like that. So I try and give
Joanne Lockwood: people a very easy way of recognising me and spotting me when I walk in
Joanne Lockwood: the door as part of my personal brand. So it does
Joanne Lockwood: help sometimes to signpost yourself in a way you
Joanne Lockwood: like to be signposted. But I think it's an excellent example
Suzanne Wertheim: of the extra labour that people have to do
Suzanne Wertheim: in order to make sure they're treated well. I think about all the black women
Suzanne Wertheim: I know straightening their hair, for example, or all
Suzanne Wertheim: the work that people do in order to make sure that's
Suzanne Wertheim: your labour to prevent
Suzanne Wertheim: negative things being said, like you're helping people out, but it's
Suzanne Wertheim: also protection for yourself because you've made it easier through your
Suzanne Wertheim: labour. But I long for a world
Suzanne Wertheim: where people already have very fluent ways of
Suzanne Wertheim: referring to a person that they don't have to go right
Suzanne Wertheim: to gender identity and already are
Suzanne Wertheim: thinking maybe gender identity isn't relevant to
Suzanne Wertheim: how I describe a person. Right.
Joanne Lockwood: On that note, it's been an amazing hour having a chat with you
Joanne Lockwood: and obviously the 20 or 30 minutes beforehand in the green room where we just
Joanne Lockwood: got to know each other. Suzanne Wertheim, tell me
Joanne Lockwood: about your book. Tell me about how people can get in contact with you because
Joanne Lockwood: I know the listeners of this show would love to make contact. So
Joanne Lockwood: what's the best way of getting in touch? Sure. So
Suzanne Wertheim: you can find the book. The book is called The Inclusive
Suzanne Wertheim: Language Field Guide. It is available
Suzanne Wertheim: all the places books are sold, including if you're
Suzanne Wertheim: in the UK, there are a few bookshops there that are stocking it in
Suzanne Wertheim: person. Paperback. It is a paperback it is an ebook. And if
Suzanne Wertheim: you thought I have a nice voice, you can listen to it for 7 hours
Suzanne Wertheim: and 56 minutes, narrating the audiobook.
Suzanne Wertheim: Although I do have to warn you, there is a table at the end that
Suzanne Wertheim: I read for 30 minutes. So the audiobook might not be the
Suzanne Wertheim: best might not be the best option. So if
Suzanne Wertheim: you want to find me, the best way to find me is Suzannewortheim.com.
Suzanne Wertheim: If you want to connect with me, you can contact me there. You
Suzanne Wertheim: can sign up for my free newsletter, which I send out twice a
Suzanne Wertheim: month. Once a month, I send out an inclusive language article about
Suzanne Wertheim: something often topical. And once a month I send out an advice
Suzanne Wertheim: column so you can write to me and get free advice. It's fully
Suzanne Wertheim: anonymized. And people I recently covered sir and Ma'am,
Suzanne Wertheim: for example, and people like, I don't know what to do. And
Suzanne Wertheim: people also like to follow me on LinkedIn
Suzanne Wertheim: because I do write articles on
Suzanne Wertheim: topical things. They're often topical in the US, but
Suzanne Wertheim: sometimes they're topical on a more global level. So I
Suzanne Wertheim: will give the analysis and show the patterns that people aren't seeing or give
Suzanne Wertheim: the names for things. Oh, this is an example of inflating language. When the white
Suzanne Wertheim: basketball player did it, nobody complained. And when the black basketball player did
Suzanne Wertheim: it, there was an outrage on Twitter. And so that's a double standard using
Suzanne Wertheim: what I call inflating language, et cetera.
Suzanne Wertheim: So, website LinkedIn and all
Suzanne Wertheim: bookstores. Absolutely. Also, as
Joanne Lockwood: you were talking there, I nipped onto Amazon, into Audible, and I
Joanne Lockwood: just purchased your book using one of my Audible credits.
Joanne Lockwood: So that'll be something I can listen to on the train. So I'm looking forward
Joanne Lockwood: to that. Having chatted for an hour, I'm really
Joanne Lockwood: intrigued to get into the nitty gritty in the weeds of this to
Joanne Lockwood: find out more about it. So, no, absolutely fantastic. Lovely. And I read it
Suzanne Wertheim: slow because there's a good number of linguistic
Suzanne Wertheim: concepts and sometimes people take time. So if you need to speed it
Suzanne Wertheim: up, it's read slow enough that it works okay. For
Suzanne Wertheim: 1.25 speed, I believe. Okay. I was very
Suzanne Wertheim: deliberate in the speed because I know that when people have new concepts,
Suzanne Wertheim: sometimes it just takes a while. You just need
Suzanne Wertheim: a little more time to hear that new word. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: we've picked up on my terminology about zoning out. Sometimes when I'm on
Joanne Lockwood: audiobooks, I find myself zoning out or hyper
Joanne Lockwood: focusing on the previous thing, and then I have to stop it, rewind and go
Joanne Lockwood: back again because I realise I haven't listened to about five minutes worth. So, yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: I do regularly rewind and play them at different speeds
Joanne Lockwood: or pick my moments. So I'll enjoy that. So thank you very much. I love
Suzanne Wertheim: it. Well, thank you again. This has just been such a pleasure and such
Suzanne Wertheim: a nice conversation. I really, genuinely enjoyed it.
Joanne Lockwood: Thank you. And obviously. Thank you to you, the listener.
Joanne Lockwood: Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for getting to the
Joanne Lockwood: end. I really appreciate that. Of course, if you're not already subscribed, please
Joanne Lockwood: do subscribe to keep updates on future episodes of the Inclusion
Joanne Lockwood: Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues,
Joanne Lockwood: share the love, share the episode. I've got a number of
Joanne Lockwood: other exciting guests lined up over the next few weeks and months. And, of course,
Joanne Lockwood: if you'd like to be a guest, please let me know. I'd welcome any
Joanne Lockwood: feedback or suggestions to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk.
Joanne Lockwood: let me know how we can improve the show, if that's possible. Finally.
Joanne Lockwood: My name is Joanne Lockwood. It's been an absolute pleasure to host
Joanne Lockwood: this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.