Don’t let women get too angry. They pay with their likability (their most important but silencing/self-policing leverage), which sets them up to be accused of being at fault for their exploitation. Do an honest appraisal of how much free or cheap labour you are getting from them but turning a convenient blind eye to. In fact, these are direct dollars in the form of savings she is bringing to the university, and her real pay check may well be sitting in some senior manager’s bank account.

Make meeting times during school hours. Provide digital means for women to attend if they cannot in person. Do not even implicitly vilify them if they cannot.

Look closely at your leadership profile. It may escape your attention that it is invariably white, but it doesn’t your staffs’.

Big numbers are like shiny objects these days. See past the glare. Metrics like the h-index are more a measure of how many people the research topic is relevant to (e.g. cancer research vs the well-being of refugees). Pervasiveness is not a measure of importance.

Do not underestimate or even deny the time- and emotion-intensive labour of teaching. Either bring back administrative staff responsible for the administrative components of teaching, or adjust teaching allocation models to more closely reflect the truth of what staff do.

Course and teaching satisfaction scores are informative but should be used in balance with how well staff promote critical reflexivity. Pedagogical outcomes are more important than how liked staff are; easy when a subject is naturally interesting (e.g. psychology), not personally threatening (e.g. sociology), has a small class size, and delivered by the white male prototype of intelligentsia (long historically grown). Also ask students how transformational their learning was.

A 40 : 40 : 20 profile means two days a week are dedicated to research and two to teaching. In the neoliberalist market of higher education, those two days of research have become the weekend and the two days of teaching are more like four. We are not all in this together, contrary to what management may like to think. Their unpaid overtime hours may be the same in number but the work they do has power, status, privilege, task diversity, a pay check, and self esteem that help take the sting off. Do not exploit staff who, with their academically trained and personal values for integrity and transparency, can take a long time to develop distrust and credulously believe in a system of merit-based fairness. The longer staff hold onto these false beliefs, the longer universities benefit. Streamline teaching expectations, and ensure workload fits into a 37.5 hour week.

Let everyone – women and men – talk about their families. Bygone but entrenched patriarchal norms of perceived unprofessionalism create silence, which fuel an illusion that space can be filled with more work. Do not underestimate how much men miss their children, but do not inflate or glorify their contribution to domestic affairs either.

Time with families matters. Good sleep matters. Slowing down matters. Joy in one’s work matters. EQ matters. Intellect and creativity are not replaceable.

Do not underestimate the power of the word ‘sorry’. Women can get on with doing and loving their job if they hear an authentic one.

She also likes the sound of the word ‘thank you’. Make sure she has a mentor with an expansive not concrete mindset who says things like ‘I really like your idea’, ‘I trust you’, ‘What do you need to make that happen’, ‘Your idea didn’t work but I still like that you tried’. Words like ‘How come you haven’t done this yet’, ‘Why did you do it this way’, ‘Why haven’t you done more’, ‘Learn to work smarter not harder’ crush and alienate her even more. ‘If she’s not happy, she should just leave’ is also an absolution of organisational responsibility.

Assume all employees have more going on in their lives than you can know. They may not want to tell, and you may not want to hear. Since academia is “not-for-profit” so does not reward performance with (non-confidential) bonuses, nor government so does not acknowledge overtime with accommodating rostered days off, simply sticking to workloads does right by them. ‘Flexible’ (i.e. always available) working arrangements, within unfair and difficult systems of career progression, are not a favour or carrot against exploitation.

The value of a thought cannot always be monetised. Financial restructuring that supports this fact will help higher education bridge its crisis and dissonance in identity about whether it is or is not a business. Clear messaging about purpose and values, and aligned resource allocation, will clear confusion for staff who do not understand where they fit.

Expectations for performance cannot be the same across all staff when financial support for professional development (including sabbatical) has been zero for some and highly uneven across all.

Women want to be promoted at the right time, for the work they have done and knowledge they bring, not when they have become long in the tooth. The reward otherwise becomes tainted.