23 minute read
Education Choices Podcast Interview with Dr. Sandie Okoro
Inclusion and Diversity/Parent Perspective
EDUCATION CHOICES PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH
Dr. Sandie Okoro
Dr. Sandie Okoro discusses the importance of using her ‘voice’ to support gender and racial equality and shares some insight into her childhood and education that enabled her to become a diversity and inclusion champion and take her current position as General Counsel at World Bank and Senior Vice President.
CAREER
What are some of the most exciting things that you feel that you have achieved so far in your dynamic and diverse career?
I am currently at the World Bank as General Counsel of the World Bank Group, and Senior Vice President. It was a big one, it was a really big step up in terms of GC role, and being in an area of development where it is all about ending poverty is huge and something I’ve hugely enjoyed.
I would also say that some of the things that I have done outside of work have been really important to me: the work I have done promoting gender equality, racial equality – all of that on the diversity and inclusion side, many different forms of things that I am very, very proud of. So, I would really say that the balance between this sort of day job, and getting this big job at the Bank, and doing the work that I have been doing on diversity and inclusion. At the Bank at the moment, I am Chair of the Anti-Racism Task Force, which is something that came into being about a year ago, and I am very proud of the work that we have been doing there. It is a lot of work to do. We’ve recently done an Anti-Racism charter internally, so it is really taking that concept of racial equality and equity forward. So, I think there are many different things, all of which I think tie up together.
I would really encourage anybody out there, no matter what age they are, no matter where they are in their careers, to do a little bit extra on the side. If you’re a pupil at school – get involved in extracurricular activities around diversity and inclusion. In your work, in the charities around you, everywhere because it is really important because your voice is very needed and we need everybody involved.
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Inclusion and Diversity/Parent Perspective
Obviously, you are not just a person of colour, but you are also a female world leader. How have you addressed this unique role?
I don’t really see myself as a female world leader, but I do see myself as someone who has a senior role on the global stage, who is female, and has a voice. I have gone round to see many amazing women, in many different countries, they’ve all said to me: “You have this voice. You have this title; you have this voice. Please use it to raise our issues.” And I think that’s one of the most important things is that, you know, I’ll get invited to talk, to say something or give a lecture, simply because of my title. So, I have to use that, I think in my way, give agency and voice to those women who are not able to express their agency and voice. It’s not that they don’t have it, it’s getting a platform to express that. And that’s why I talk about access to justice, gender equality, women’s rights, whenever I get a chance to do that and spread that message, because not everybody has the opportunity to talk about it in the way that I have. So that’s what I say is how I can use the unique position that I am in. It is to change lives, help change the lives of those women and give voice and agency to them. Gender equality, equal rights, equity: it gives more for everybody. It is not about less; it is about more. Women are half of the world’s population; we need to be in half the conversations, we need to be half of the people in the room. Why not? And I think that needs to change, and that’s one of the biggest changes that I hope that we will see this century. And I hope along with that, we will see some more racial equality as well.
To hear about further challenges that Dr. Sandie Okoro has faced and more about resilience please listen to the podcast
What was your experience in school like as a person of colour?
My primary school was completely different from my secondary school. My primary school did not encourage me to reach for the stars, so to speak. There was an incident at school where I remember the teacher went around and asked everyone in the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. And I remember putting up my hand and thinking: “I’ve got a great answer.” I said that I wanted to be a judge. And the teacher replied: “I’m sorry, Sandie, but little black girls from Balham don’t become judges.” That was a time when you could say that, it wasn’t thought to be a mean thing to say, you were managing a child’s expectations and people didn’t know any better. But, of course, I didn’t listen to that and thought: “Well if they don’t, then I’m going to be the first.” Now it’s a very different thing, obviously.
I still have people come up to me when I give talks who would have had a similar experience not that long ago. Somehow - an ambition was not backed. Somehow - a dream was not backed, or told it wasn’t for them. And I think: “No, no. That is somebody else’s limitations for themselves that they are putting on you. If you feel you want to do it, if it’s in your bones, if you really want to do it, you will do it. You just have to work out how much hard work you need to put into it, and just get on and do it.” For me, it didn’t stop there, there were many other things in my career where for a number of reasons people would say: “Oh that might not be for you!” or suggested to me that I change my surname so it sounds more Anglophone so I could get more job interviews. None of that, really, mattered. It wasn’t right advice; it was somebody else looking at things from a very narrow perspective and thinking that life would always be the same as it is now.
Do not worry about being the only person in the room. Do not worry about being the first. It won’t be like that for long, and someone has to be, so why not you? And everybody’s watching, and this is what I didn’t realise, Chloe, until later, was how many people looked at others to be role models and to represent. I had no idea, until relatively recently, how much that matters. If we don’t represent, and we don’t try and change things, how are things going to change? I can’t remember who said it, but we need to be the change we want to see.
Very well-put. You are an ex-Putney High School girl and still play an active role supporting the school- what did you learn in your time there?
Well Putney High was so opposite to my primary school. So, I went there – I’m not going to say when – but let’s just say it was a time before iPhones and satellite TV. It was a different era. But I went to this most marvellous secondary school called Putney High School. The day I walked in the door, it was about what I could achieve and why wasn’t I trying to achieve it? Not about anything else. Not about: is it possible? Was it not possible? They gave the ethos that if you wanted to achieve it, you could achieve it. And that’s where I got that resilience from.
I was the only black child in the school for a very long time, and you wouldn’t even have noticed it. It was never mentioned; it was never an issue. I made friends because I don’t think the school would ever have allowed me to make it an issue, right, that I didn’t feel any prejudice from any of the teachers or any of the pupils. I got invited to everything, I was Captain of the Dance Team. I was encouraged to do everything, and I was encouraged to do it well. And I was encouraged to really try and they did not allow me to be lazy in certain things where I have a tendency to be.
They also encouraged the little rebel in me, which is the protester in me. So, I did a lot of protesting with my friend, Fran, against racism and apartheid at the time. And they knew it was us, and we put stickers all over the place, and they would never really tell us off. They encouraged that: to challenge society, challenge what is out there. Do it in a respectful and peaceful way. And that is something that has never left me. I think a Putney High School girl always asks “Why?”, always challenges what is out there, never takes anything for granted and is a little bit quirky. They encouraged me to pursue what it is I wanted to pursue, and that education for education’s sake is worth it, and that I was worth it. And that I could learn whatever I wanted to learn if I made
Mrs Suzie Longstaff celebrating Putney High being awarded a Gold Medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2021 a bit of an effort, but that effort had to be a big effort just like everybody else. So, I wasn’t treated differently, I didn’t feel I was different. But in that sense, it meant they pushed me just as hard as everybody else.
They are obviously part of the GDST, the Girls Day School Trust, what do you think are the benefits of single-sex education? Or how did it serve you well?
Well, I am no expert on this, but I would say, you know, the whole debate around girls doing science at school etc. So for me going to a single sex school, this was never an issue because you saw the other girls around you doing all the subjects. I never ever thought: “This is a subject for boys. This is a subject for girls.” Another thing, I never thought: “This is an instrument a boy plays, or a girl plays”, because you had a band, you had an orchestra and all the other things you have in schools that people join. But everyone plays everything because you need the whole ‘shebang’. When you go to a single-sex school, everybody does everything. One of things that I remember - I was very much into drama but behind the scenes, and I used to do the lighting - is that the girls used to play the boys’ parts… because that’s what you did. It wasn’t thought of as anything unusual. You used everything that was in front of you, and you only had girls in front of you, so they played the boys’ parts. I never forgot that. Nobody ever raised an eyebrow; this wasn’t really a big issue. But guess what? It meant there were more parts for people
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Inclusion and Diversity/Parent Perspective
to play. Because traditionally, if you went to a co-ed school, the girls got the girls’ parts and the boys got the boys’ parts, and everybody knows that there are more boys’ parts than there are girls’ parts in nearly every play, at the time anyway.
It exposes more people to arts and their talents. I think you get more people taking a chance on things that they wouldn’t otherwise take a chance on, because the girls can do everything and all the boys can do everything. So, I think there are lots of pluses in single-sex education. But there are lots of minuses as well, because you haven’t had that co-educational aspiration. That was new for me when I went to university – but not for very long because you’re very much an adult by the time that happens. The opportunity it gives you to try everything, because you have to try everything, I think is really important. I did some work later when I was on the board of the RSC, and we were having a discussion there about gender neutral casting, and I said, you know, it might have seemed rather foolish at the time: “Why is it that you get gender neutral casting in schools and nobody gives it a second glance, and you have to take what’s there, and you get racial neutral casting. I remember a production of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ that we did, and we had Mr Bennet that was a girl from an Indian origin, Mrs Bennet, I think, was black, the girls were from all over the place, Mr Darcy I think was from China - because they were there! And that was who was cast and who was best for the role. But no one thought: “Where’s this family come from? Look at that ethnic mix.” No. But somehow when we move from a school environment where you always take what you have, and I put that in inverted commas, into the “real world”, it suddenly doesn’t reflect that anymore. I think we need to be more open, more open in that way. We get more closed the older we get. I think that singlesex education gives much more opportunity for everybody to do more, particularly in the artistic sphere, because you don’t go down the traditional ‘parts for boys. Parts for girls.’ ‘Instruments for boys. Instruments for girls.’ ‘Subjects for boys. Subjects for girls’ which we all try to stay away from, but guess what? It happens.
And, I suppose, more opportunities for girls which is something you believe so strongly in. You also went on to study at the University of Birmingham, I’m not sure if I’ve got this right, but I believe you’ve since been awarded a doctorate?
I have! I’ve been made the most wonderful thing, which was a couple of years ago, which is called a ‘Doctor of the University’ which is wonderful. And it is one of the things I’m most proud of: to be a doctor of my own university. So, it’s not a doctor of laws, it is a Doctorate of the University. And there are very few that are Doctors of the University, so I am very proud to be a Doctor of my own alma mater, which is wonderful and has a fantastic law faculty there, by the way. They are doing many interesting things, especially in the sciences, there.
When I got there, I never felt that there was any cap, or any limitation as to what I could do as a female, as a person of colour, anything really. I didn’t feel that my professors were saying: “Think about this. Maybe go into Family Law. Maybe go
into this.” Not at all! It was all open-season – go for it! For people that are choosing their schools and universities, they’ve got to feel that it’s giving them that sense of encouragement.
CURRENT ISSUES
After the BLM movement, particularly the death of George Floyd, the education sector has been accused of perhaps not including enough content on the history of people of colour. Or perhaps, in some cases, misinformation. What are your thoughts on this?
So, when you look at the curriculum, it’s as they say ‘History is written by the victors’, so when you look at a curriculum and, well, the sciences are the sciences, but when you look at the arts, and history and geography, they are all taught from a particular perspective. Mathematics may be one of the few things that isn’t. Maybe the sciences as a whole. They are what they are: 2+2 is 4. It’s 4 all over the world! When you look at pioneers in art, and what we call art, how things are described has really changed.
So, I remember in school, when we would go and visit the museums in London – British Museum, Natural History Museum etc. – they don’t do it now, but they used to have a section called ‘Primitive Art’. And Primitive Art was everything from Africa and that part of the world. They didn’t call it ‘Ancient Art’. It didn’t have the same titles; it had primitive. I think we have to remember that language and positioning matters, and how we have been taught things in history, and how we saw images, and are those correct? Or are they just the way these people wanted us to see these things? And we should question that.
And there are many stories we now know that we haven’t heard and are now cropping up. Somebody gave me a very interesting book – haven’t yet read it – called ‘The Black Tudors’, about the Tudors and the people that were black at the time. And I thought: “I didn’t know there were any black Tudors!” We weren’t taught there were any! What were those stories? And, you know, all of those things were lost in history, because the story was not told. Different now, we have our mobile phones, we have Instagram, all those things recording every single movement. But prior to that, you had to rely on the historians to record what they thought was relevant. And there was no doubt that there were some things that had been missed.
That’s why I think that things like Black History Month are really important to recognise what has been missed, what hasn’t been recorded. We all need to know, and there’s a really good thing and I suggest all people go and look at this, all these things that have been created by people of colour that have never been recognised will surprise you. So, there are all these things that haven’t been recorded, that should be recorded, are now being unearthed and recognised. And they just weren’t. And I think you can’t change the fact that they weren’t but you can change the fact that they will be. And they are part of history. Otherwise, it seems like there was no history before then. For example, terminology that we use about Columbus discovering America, well, it was always there he didn’t discover it. He just stumbled across it, really. It was there; it has a history. But the way we are taught things, and some of the terminology we use, needs to recognise that actually it’s coming from a particular point of view rather than a wider
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Inclusion and Diversity/Parent Perspective
landscape. And we could all do with the wider landscape to understand things. And I give that example of calling certain art ‘primitive’ when in fact it isn’t, there’s nothing primitive about it all. We’ve just put it in that category, called it that, and that’s what museums used to label it until they understood better. Yet, other things were called ‘ancient’. You look at ‘Ancient Egypt’ or ‘Ancient Rome’. It’s not called ‘Primitive Egypt’ or ‘Primitive Rome’.
Do you think more could be done to educate children on the history of people with colour and women, and the journey towards equality?
Yes. It surprises me what history is now. Modern history is learning about Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid, which was in my lifetime so it doesn’t feel like history. So, we have to recognise that there is a lot there that has changed from the traditional form of history.
But everybody wants to feel represented. I really think it’s important, particularly for those that go on to study History, for those that become professors of History, or doctorates of History, to look at those things more broadly and to bring more stories to the fold. Not negating stories that exist, but finding the untold stories that are there, and the untold angles.
So, a really interesting one, is the angle from which many which were told, would have been a male angle. So, Crick and Watson who did the DNA, there was a very famous lady, who’s name escapes me, alongside, but we always hear about Crick and Watson. She’s now been recognised much, much more. But that is an example: the fact that her name doesn’t roll off the tongue as quickly as ‘Crick and Watson and DNA’ is that there are many forgotten stories of women who have been working alongside. Or, who have been relegated to a “helper” role when they were doing just the same as everybody else. And America – which I’m living in at the moment – has been quite good at trying to recognise that and try to go back and resurface these stories from history and re-tell them. I think that’s really important. Look at who else was alongside, you know, when you look at stories of exploration. Who else has been missed who has not been told at all?
PERSONAL LIFE AND MOTHERHOOD
We also understand that your daughter has autism. I know her very well myself. Could you tell me a little about some of the challenges that you have faced raising a child with additional learning needs, but also being a full-time working mum of two children and later teenagers?
The first thing is learning to prioritise, because you have to in that situation. Learning that not everything can be perfect; it is okay for everything to be just okay. Those were two things that I came to terms with, I think, very early on.
Autism is a huge challenge, because it is the way a person sees the world and the way they interact with the world, and so it affects the whole world the family is in, as well. Your view of things is just not the same; your child’s view of the things is just not the same. They are very mixed and very vulnerable, so you are constantly looking out for them and seeing the world in a different way. There are positives there because you get to see the world in a way that other people don’t get to see the world. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be scary, but you are very aware of how difficult the world can be for those who are vulnerable and have learning difficulties.
Holding down a full-time job and doing that can be very difficult. There has been much more put in in terms of legislation than in my day, that gives you flexibility but it wasn’t there when I was really starting. I had to create it for myself, and understand very much how I needed my day to work, what support I needed and not be afraid to ask for that support. To understand what support my daughter needed, and not to be afraid to find that support for her. And not to be afraid…to say first off - and not to hide her from the world - but say: “This is Sophie. She is autistic. This is the way she might behave. That is the way Sophie is.” To make it very much Sophie, and not a child
with autism. So, I think what has happened is that people have recognised that she is a person and her characteristics are that is what she will do, and this is how she will react etc etc. And we have had many amusing moments around that, rather than making it about something to be afraid of and put to the side, and not integrate into your own world. So, I, as you know, have really integrated her into my world, and made her part of my world, and not put that to one side so she can make as much of it as she can and not be outside of it. But it hasn’t been easy at all. And she’s much older now, and more independent, and it was very, very difficult at certain points as well, extremely difficult, sometimes even thinking: “Are you going to get through the day in one piece?”
To hear about dealing with autism and people who have inspired Dr. Sandie Okoro please listen to the podcast
Am I allowed to ask, what are your aspirations for the future?
So, I don’t know what the future holds. I’ve got, you know, obviously my current job has lots of legs in it, don’t get me wrong there, but you know, I think I still hold that ambition, Chloe, one day, to be a judge. I still hold that.
It’s the wig, Sandie! Obviously, we’re interviewing you as Education Choices Magazine, and we like to say that we believe that we are a ‘key to success’. As a very successful lady of colour, and a single mother of two now adult children, we know how hard you’ve worked to build your way up in the world. What do you feel is the key to success?
It’s almost what I said before, which is don’t get in your own way. Don’t talk yourself out of anything. Talk yourself into something, not out of something. Take some risks in doing things. The worst that can happen is that what you want doesn’t materialise. But remember that you didn’t have it in the first place. But what if what you want does materialise. And I have realised that there are so many things that I have thought that I couldn’t do, wouldn’t be successful at, but once I tried it - guess what – suddenly, the people you need come your way, the tools you need come your way, the resources you need come your way, the ‘know-how’ comes your way. Life is not what you think it is going to be, and don’t live in the now, live in the future. And the way I tend to do that is to not say: “Where do I want to be in 10 years time, 20 years time?”, but “What would I regret in 10 or 20 years’ time that I didn’t do?” That is how you live in the future, and you give yourself a lot more choices and a lot more impetus to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. You think: “What is it that I’m going to regret that I didn’t do?”
We would like to give special thanks to Dr. Sandie Okoro for sharing her wisdom and insightful words with us.
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