Rick Rattray is the founding Managing Director of ILSC GlobalFoundations. ILSC partners with universities to develop specialized on-campus co-curricular language and academic foundation programs designed to better attract, support, and retain international students. Prior to GlobalFoundations. Rick held education industry senior executive roles at Barbri, Shorelight, ReliasLearning, Colloquy (which he co-founded), and Kaplan. Rick has a Master’s degree in Public and Private Management from Yale University, and a Bachelors of Arts in Political Science from Florida Atlantic University.

We can celebrate that organisations like Lead5050 exist. It has shone a much needed light on gender inequality in international education – an issue many people in our industry are in denial of.

It’s been a week since Lead5050’s Inaugural Women in Leadership Awards and Lead5050 panel at ICEF. It gave me much to think about and I wanted to share some of these thoughts with you. In a nutshell, the Saturday Awards gala was fun and festive and allowed us to acknowledge and celebrate our peers’ achievements.

I was brought up in an entrepreneurial family. My mother, Marguerite, planted the seed of what we now know as EC, the chain of schools that specialises in English language learning.

When you meet someone with confidence, you just know it. They speak directly. They make more statements. They ask fewer questions. They seem unbreakable. Whether it is with friends, a significant other, or within the workplace, having confidence is critical in so many areas of our lives.

As women there are lots of things around in the workplace that hinder us on our way to the top but one that isn’t often talked about is how we actually hinder ourselves.

This year, Insight Lingua Russia celebrates 25 years in business - a fantastic achievement and one they are quite rightly, very proud of. Started by Elena Solomonova who you’ll also have seen is one of our #First50, and now co-run with daughter Anastassia Romanenko - here is their story as told by Anastassia.

Growing up in a family and culture where women are strong willed and respected for this, it was not until my professional life that I saw things were not like that everywhere. Honestly, when I began my career, it was surprising to me that women did not see themselves as equal in the workplace. Over the years, I have grown to understand different cultures and situations but remain conscious of the gift I have gotten by having been raised in a very positive situation.

Much research suggests that a relatively small proportion of the meaning of any communication is conveyed through the words that we say. But just how critical is the choice of words to use? and is it different for men and women?

I recently saw the film Hidden Figures. If you haven’t seen it, the story follows the lives of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three African-American women working in the computing department at NASA in the Sixties...

Stephen has been opening the discussion on the things we say to and around our children and why the words we choose to use are so important.

One of the first pieces of advice I received from my university career advisor was to actively seek out mentors and build a toolkit of support to help propel me through college, into the workforce and beyond. No matter what stage of life I’ve been in, I’ve actively sought out mentors inside and outside of my sector of international higher education.

It is easy to dismiss “tech” as for young men who like to design computer games in their bedrooms, but this is to diminish, not only female talent in this area, but the vast range of opportunities to get involved...

Imagine for a second that the people you disagree fundamentally with, people whom you’ve probably removed from your online social sphere, have also been doing the same thing with those that disagree with their (unpalatable) world view. With that in mind It's not hard to see why it's so hard to make progress on a whole range of issues. People just don't talk anymore.

This man walks into a bar…and the barman says ‘why the long face’ and the man goes ‘because it’s 2017 and yet even an industry as, supposedly, open and enlightened as international education we are still surrounded by the same entrenched mental infrastructure that shackled the minds of our ancestors in terms of gender equality’. The barman moves to serve another customer…

A Woman Walks Into A Bar…She’s there to network, meet clients and make contacts. All being well, she’ll enjoy it and get some good business contacts, but what does she do if she comes across a client, or potential client, that she wants to do business with, but who makes inappropriate comments about her or other women, or even makes a pass?

Mentoring is different to coaching, but often the terms are used inter-changeably. The way I have been taught is that mentoring is more about giving advice, based on experience. If I am coached, I expect to come up with the options and answers myself.

Women are brought up thinking that they would never have the time to take care of the family if their job required them to be so responsible. I still remember stopping my business partner and sister, Bernice, and asking her to explain why there were so many men at these events. After her explanation, the penny dropped and I realised that even in such a diverse and fantastic industry, female leaders were still lacking.