During one of our consultation meetings with the Member States, one of the attendees who joined the meeting a little later, and did not know who was in the room, asked me about the plans that “they (the Commission) came up with”. She assumed I was one of the junior staff present, perhaps because the image of  a decision-maker was not expected to be of my age and appearance. I was a little puzzled when this happened, but later realised that we often fall victim to our own biases and assumptions, and so inclusion and diversity often suffer. I have done it myself on numerous occasions. When I left the Commission and started working at Google, I found myself often instinctively looking for the ‘older man in a suit’ when important decisions were being taken. But at Google my experience is that the important decisions are just as often made by the person, man or woman, in a hoodie.