Peter Brocklehurst

I am Professor of Women’s Health and Director of the Birmingham Clinical Trials Unit, in the Institute of Applied Health Research. Before joining the University of Birmingham in 2016, I was at UCL for 5 years and at the University of Oxford for 17 years. Throughout my entire career, I have always been open about being gay. I talk about my personal life and I don’t pretend that I am single or that my partner is female.

Personally, I have never experienced overt prejudice, but I am conscious that people have. Even today, I meet clinical academics who are terrified about coming out at work because they are worried about the impact that being LGBT may have on their career. Knowing that there is someone in their field who has been open about being LGBT and has succeeded in their career could have a huge impact on them.

We talk about women in Science and Technology or BAME people in positions of influence and power being visible, but LGBT staff are invisible in lots of ways. There is no easy way to identify us. So, unless it is openly talked about, people won’t know that their colleagues, their student, or the line manger may be LGBT. I may feel completely comfortable talking about my partner, but I don’t go around wearing rainbow badges, like I don’t wear any other badge of anything I am affiliated with. So, people wouldn’t necessarily know that I am a gay man. There need to be other ways to make myself visible. This is what an LGBT staff profile does.

What new members of staff and students joining the University need to know is that their sexuality should be completely irrelevant to their job or their studies. It should not be a good or a bad thing, like many other aspects of themselves. They should not feel that they have to hide anything, and they should not feel that they have to make exceptions for people who behave in a discriminatory way towards them. They should be able to just feel comfortable in who they are. And what we, as a University need to do, is to make sure they are.

Ensuring that the University is welcoming and accepting of LGBT people, we need to know who our staff and students are. So, the one thing I would make sure is happening at the University is that we always ask about sexuality when we are collecting data to monitor how we are doing in relation to diversity. Most of our checklists ask about gender and ethnicity but sometimes they don’t include sexuality. And when they do ask about sexuality these are poorly completed questions. And although some people may think that these questions are intrusive, as an organisation, we cannot monitor our performance if we don’t know whether we are attracting people of a diverse background. I do think we need to be able to monitor our staff diversity in the context of the broader University sector, and in relation to the population of Birmingham. Having said that, I feel that this University is an LGBT friendly institution that embraces diversity and encourages people to be themselves.