Esther's blog: Why trust women?

I can’t believe how quickly it seems to have happened, but it is nearly time to open the next application window for the Citymothers Mentoring Scheme — Louisa will be sending an announcement tomorrow.  If you’re not involved already please do consider if you can offer yourself as a mentor or would like to be a mentee.  There are FAQs on the website and we have had some great feedback from individuals currently in the scheme.

One new aspect I’m very excited about is that we are privileged to have Simmy Grover, a researcher in the psychology department at University College London, helping us to evaluate the efficacy of the scheme, and to do this we need applicants to quickly answer quite a few questions in the application forms (it should add a maximum of 10 minutes to the process).   Our scheme is of great interest in the mentoring world because it is pretty large and this allows proper data collection which should yield statistically significant results – but only if each of you applicants will log on to your application form, put your feet up, think with a warm glow of how valuable each and every bit of information provided by you will be, sip a coffee, herbal tea or G&T, and whiz through those questions!

Separately, mentors and mentees from the first June 2014 cohort will get some questions from me, again to seek feedback.  Please DO take a moment to respond.  We are grateful for any comments.  Winter 2014 cohort – your time will come! 

So to move on quickly before my word limit is up, and to carry on the heart-warming theme, I wanted to share with you the back story to an event I was due to chair on the Citymothers calendar a few weeks back.  The journalist and author Allison Pearson was to give a talk at Thomson Reuters, with over 100 attendees registered.  I haven’t lost that automatic “check your email the moment you wake up” habit, so at 7.10 on the morning of the talk I see Louisa has emailed overnight:  “I received a message at midnight from Allison's husband - she's ill and can't come!”. 

No speaker has ever had to cancel at 12 hours notice before so we rapidly conferred.  I remembered I knew the legendary Monique Villa, CEO of the Thompson Reuters Foundation (check out her visionary TED talk from 2013 on the shocking topic of contemporary slavery, largely of women, where the crime scene is the internet).  Could she come and join an impromptu panel on balancing work and family life, the subject of Allison’s latest book, I ask her in an email?  Nine minutes later she replies, saying she’s at another event but her colleague Belinda Goldsmith, who is a Reuters award-winning journalist and Editor-In-Chief at the Foundation, could assist. In the meantime Louisa and I realise that Helen Goodier of the charity Working Families, which Allison supports, is coming to the seminar so she is roped in, and then Allison emails that she could sit on a panel, just hadn’t got the voice for a whole talk, and had too high a temperature to stand for a whole session.  So we are quorate by 8.20am! 

Next I request bios are emailed to me so I can introduce the speakers and we meet 20 minutes before the event and agree to talk about “is it possible to have it all as a working parent” from each of our perspectives:  Allison focusing more on the business world, Helen on the general population in England and Belinda adding a broad international view, with me, the lawyer, improvising connections between themes as chairperson.  The audience took the change of plan (too late to communicate in advance) in good spirits and the variety of focus was fascinating.  Allison reminded us of how our working environment has moved on in the last decade but how much further it has to go; Belinda reminded us of quite how phenomenally lucky we are in the wide scheme of things and Helen shocked us with the contrast between “rights” we almost take for granted in the City which are still outside the experience of many working parents elsewhere in England.

Because of the good grace of some really sporting contributors, a friendly audience, and a large dose of adrenaline, what could have been a non-event turned into a jolly interesting session.  As Monique’s sign-off to her email says, “Why trust women?”.  Well in this case it was because things just got done—and I hasten to add that I’m sure many men would do the same in such circumstances.  Perhaps there is still an assumption that men make the better impromptu and powerful public speakers, which this event challenged in spades. What I’m most interested to relate, however, is a wonderful example of how the support of like-minded people can spring out of thin air to create something rather special, and completely unexpected, at virtually no notice.  A big thank you to all involved.  It was a heart-warming occasion, even fun looking back on it! 

Esther is a member of the Citymothers Steering Committee and runs the Citymothers mentoring scheme. She trained and first made her living as a musician and then worked for over two decades in the City, becoming a partner in her law firm. She now combines legal consultancy, executive coaching, performing the piano, teaching and two non-executive Board positions in what seems to have turned into a third, portfolio career.