Last Thursday a group of HR colleagues attended the annual regional awards dinner for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). We were finalists in the ‘employability and equality’ category and our submission highlighted our great progress in this area.

But of course, our work on equality is not about winning awards, or ticking boxes or reaching quotas. It’s about making sure we have the best people possible to teach and inspire our students, carry out world-leading research and work with communities, policy makers and businesses.

I’d like to illustrate this with a quick example that is close to my heart. On Saturday I attended a conference in London at a charity called Retinitis Pigmentosa Fighting Blindness. They support people who have my particular eye condition, but also they help fund research into potential treatments and hopefully one day a cure. There I heard a talk from Professor Linda Lako. She runs a research group at Newcastle University’s Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Centre for Life. Her team has developed cutting-edge techniques for growing retinal tissue from stem cells and that work is giving hope to millions of families that one day they will be able to save the sight of their loved ones.

There are many more examples in all sorts of fields, but not enough, particularly in science and engineering, and that’s not good for us – our economy and our prosperity depend on it. So our gender equality work is about ensuring that as an employer we do everything we can to attract, retain, develop and reward more brilliant women like Professor Lako. We are making progress but there is a lot still to do.

Richard Boggie