An interesting and balanced article by Rana Foroohar in the FT today, which supports some of the broader messaging that DEI is not dead, but is evolving beyond representation, performative messaging and “diversity quotas”.
At it’s heart, I have always thought of Diversity and Inclusion as being about fairness. Very few organisations operate a true meritocracy because of the innate biases that mean we continuously make assumptions about our co-workers without realising we are doing it.
And these bleed into everyday decisions about who gets to do which piece of work, who gets to meet which client, who gets career development training, etc. A great example in this article is “male bosses assuming that women of child-bearing age or with families wouldn’t want to be considered for certain types of positions — client-facing jobs with lots of travel, say.” This is one of the 16 accidental sexisms from our book (The Accidental Sexist) which continue to impact women’s careers far more than men’s.
It is clear (to me at least) that striving for equality and equity is the right thing to do. But it also makes good business sense. When people feel that their workplace is not fair to them, it is highly unlikely that they are going to do their best work. Rather than get fixated about ROI for DEI, just think about how all that unfairness is contributing to your retention and performance data. How much is this costing your business?
If we want that business performance, DEI needs to be about everybody. We need to treat everyone as individuals, with their own unique experiences and abilities. That is what inclusion is all about and why it needs to engage everyone – including the straight white men that are still most likely to be in leadership and managerial positions. They need to develop their inclusive leadership abilities alongside everyone else in order to deliver the business performance people are looking for.