Through our new Careers in Ideas task force, we’ve been looking at ways to improve social mobility both at the gateway to, and within, the IP professions. We’ll be organising an event soon to explore best practices in outreach, recruitment and selection procedures that help to erode the stereotypes and biases that still seem to challenge our socio-economic diversity.
Julie Barrett, chartered UK patent attorney and European patent attorney and leader of the IP-focused business and career consultancy PurposiveStep, tells us why she’s so passionate about this project – and asks for your help in generating relevant stories and case studies.
Julie writes:
At the IP Inclusive annual meeting in January 2019, I suggested that a neglected area of awareness-raising amongst our profession has been that of an apparent bias towards/preponderance of people from relatively well-off backgrounds and high-ranked schools/universities, regardless of innate ability and potential to become a superlative IP professional.
In one of my earlier blogs, I mentioned my own starting point: ‘working class’; SW London/north Surrey accent; local primary school; fortunate scholarship to a GDST (Girls’ Day School Trust) school; subsequent unhealthy neglect at that school (I had no desire or ability to be either a medic or a tennis star); taught old/wrong syllabus for one of the A levels; couldn’t afford private tutor to do retakes, so ended up at my 5th choice (ex-poly) university; and so on. A miracle therefore (with thanks to the enlightened recruiters at the then-Wellcome Foundation Ltd) that I was ‘allowed in’ to the profession at all! I notice that, in these respects, not a lot seems to have changed in the last 40 years.
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