Alumni Spotlight: Dianne Greyson

Dianne is wearing a black jacket and a pink striped collard shirt and a black jumper. She has black rectangular glasses and shoulder length dark brown hair. She has brown eyes and a big smile.

Our alumni community is filled with dedicated, inspiring people that go above and beyond to improve their fields. One great example is Dianne Greyson, who is campaigning for greater equality when it comes to pay for minority employees.

10 October 2022

Four women working together from different ethnic backgrounds.

After having had a successful career at various IT consultancies, Dianne Greyson knew she wanted to work in Human Resources. To make this dream come true, she returned to education as a mature student, studying a postgraduate degree in HR Management in 2008.

I was nervous, because I was a mature student and a lot of the people around me were quite young. I didn’t think I was going to make it. I didn’t think I was capable. But I was proved wrong!”

At the time, Dianne was attempting to balance parenthood, work and university, so UWL’s location made it easy for her to pursue a course she truly cared about.

Sianne is wearing a top that says #ethnicitypaygap with a silver necklace. She is in a large room and there are chairs and tables set up behind her. She has shoulder length black hair and rectangle glasses.

Looking back, I recognise it was quite tough at the time, but I wanted it that much that it just didn’t deter me, and I got there in the end.”

The balancing act didn’t end with graduation though. Dianne leapt straight into contract work in various organisations across the public and private sectors, including the foreign office. She began by focusing on resource management and collaborating at director level to help inform strategic HR.

I like HR because of the people aspects. You’re able to help people. There are lots of facets to HR, and it allowed me to bring together everything I was interested in doing.”

One of Dianne’s biggest postings was with travel agent Thomas Cook, helping them to transition into an online business. But even large projects like this couldn’t distract Dianne from addressing the inequality she was starting to notice in the workplace.

Since 2018, Dianne has been running the #EthnicityPayGap campaign. There is often a disparity between salaries for employees from ethnic minority backgrounds and their white counterparts. This campaign pushes for reporting on this gap to become mandatory, as it is for the gender pay gap.

From that point on the campaign has continued to grow, and Dianne has since appeared on national media to promote it. She even launched the Ethnicity Pay Gap Day, which is on the 8th January every year, encouraging companies to publicly have conversations and begin the mandatory reporting journey.

During a debate at the House of Lords, Dianne was personally thanked for her work by The Rt. Hon. Lord Boateng and has appeared on Sky News. While there is still some resistance, she is finding many organisations willing to engage with her, keen to learn and understand the concerns of their workforce.

Rather than a large team of volunteers, Dianne is running the campaign by herself, all while raising a family, handling her dyslexia, and continuing in her day job.

You need to have a passion for it, a desire to make a change. That’s what pushes me forward. I feel that my cause is great, and there are actions that need to be done.”

“The pay gap exists everywhere, no matter what type of organisation, and I saw some posts on LinkedIn questioning why no one talks about it. After about a month of thinking through what I could do, I had an epiphany. The #metoo movement created t-shirts, so I created a t-shirt to show solidarity and share it on LinkedIn. Because I shared my image on LinkedIn, quite a few of my connections wanted to purchase one”. “This wasn’t something I envisaged would happen but, this lit the touchpaper for me starting the campaign.”

Five different peoples' hands on the table from different ethnic backgrounds.

Thankfully, Dianne’s day job adequately prepares her to navigate the organisations with whom she consults. Always an overachiever, Dianne runs not one but two HR consultancies. Synergised Solutions provides bespoke, curated programmes for addressing equality and diversity, while Equilibrium Mediation Consulting offers mediation for workplace disputes, generalist and Strategic HR support.

Everything I do sort of connects. I didn’t set out to do things that way, but it just works, and it allows me to continue doing all the things I want to achieve.”

In aligning with Dianne’s campaign, the University of West London can confirm that 31.5% of staff hail from a Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic background, an increase from 30.9% in the last reporting period.

The mean pay gap, as of March 2021, is at 10.32% with hourly rates of £29.08 (White) and £26.08 (BAME). As part of our application to the Athena Swan accreditation (an HE specific equality scheme), the University has developed an action plan to tackle this disparity. The plan includes increasing Unconscious bias training for staff, broadening staff recruitment advertising, ensuring roles at all levels are advertised on Diversity Job Boards and tracking applications through the selection process to appointment and completion of probation. The University also has a range of staff networks including one for Black Women and the THRIVE network for staff who identify themselves as being for a Minoritised background.

Find out more about the ethnicity pay gap campaign.