If You Ask Nicely

Three years into one of London’s first equity and inclusion midwife roles, equality, diversity and inclusion (or diversity, equity and inclusion) is too often treated as an add-on, something I request rather than something the service owns. At the same time funding and resourcing in maternity units still tend to exclusively follow obstetric priorities. In this article, I reflect and ask whether my post sometimes functions as what Audre Lorde called ‘the master’s tools’1: useful for softening behaviour, not for shifting structures, and what it means to do this work as equality, diversity and inclusion comes under sustained attack globally.