“Diversity of perspective and thought is essential to understanding
and interpreting the law.”
--Law School Admissions Council
“Diversity and inclusion, which are the real grounds for creativity, must remain at the center of what we do.”
--Marco Bizzarri – President, Gucci
The initiative DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is
intended to address the fairness ethic so central to US life, in raising
awareness of disproportionate ratios across the board, in companies,
associations, schools, and board membership.
DEI goes beyond the diversity trainings, micro-aggression and inherent
bias now active in HR departments. One
reason is the Harvard 2019 study concluding that these initiatives have been
unproductive to counter-productive (Chang, Milkman, Gromet, et al.). DEI is a wider mandate—not a formal program
but a general theme—to extend beyond the training platform as a universal
design principle. This is a business
function, operating alongside recruitment and retention, member / worker
satisfaction, and policies and procedures.
It is long-term, comprehensive, and company-wide, and driven by a wider
mandate to acquire Cultural Competence.
Diversity as a social fairness principle began with the
integration of the army by President Truman in 1948, then continued with the
Civil Rights Act in 64, gay marriage in all 50 states (unimaginable before) was
decided by the Supreme Court in 2015.
Gender identity has taken center stage in the 21st century,
as well as mental health states, neurodiversity (autism and ADHD), and coming
up, long-term Covid health conditions.
Although gender and racial discrimination were the initial concerns,
these have exploded in a broad variety of other issues such as age
discrimination. California, as the
leading diversity center of attention, is part of the 22% rate of marriages
between ethnic groups in the Western US.
This raises other fairness issues – Alan Bakke v. University
of California (1978), which disallowed racial quotas in college
admissions. In our culture’s orientation
to fairness, the playing field tilted back away in a reverse from elitism, to
the extent that it is now a disadvantage to be a white male, as you will hear
often in work circles. This makes for a
difficult situation for employers. The Art Institute of Chicago just fired its
entire White, mostly female, 100 docents because they violated the diversity
mandate just by being People Without Color.
Clearly this is a fairness issue.
The concept of “Intersectionality,” however, offers the
opportunity to search out and find other diversity categories, such as age and
disability, or mental health states, that would work as diversity
qualifiers. When any individual can have
multiple qualifiers, the number of possible identities works out in the tens of
thousands. Women of color who are
lesbians and lower-class; white males who are disabled or veterans and Jewish;
the list builds so that point systems for weighting one applicant against
another must at some point need to become the standard for making decisions in
hiring and promotion, or membership candidacy.
How else to decide between the Black male and the White female applicant
for a senior position?
Why has diversity been so long in taking hold? Tribalism, which has ruled human groups of
hundreds of thousands of years, is our natural social preference for dealing
with people we are related to, either closely or loosely. If others look,
speak, and act like us, it fits our affinity for being able to read face and
voice, the start of ability to predict what people are thinking and what they
will do in any situation. Dealing with
other ethnicities and cultures makes this more difficult. Added to the difference is a leading one:
gender, as the only biological difference between people.
Language different from your own is a major non-starter for
communication. Within your own language,
however, language styling and accent are leading class markers, even above
ethnic difference. Hierarchy is a
natural outcome of status distinctions like wealth, education, opportunity,
competence, and social acumen. Voice and
literacy are markers for all the status signals we look for in deciding
someone’s class.
At the opposite end of the “familiarity scale” from
tribalism is cosmopolitanism – the assumption of being comfortable and
culturally consonant with a range of otherness – ethnic, class, education,
positional on the hierarchy. It is a
sophistication always present in any culture as it reaches out to the world and
welcomes what is different, including imported people and ideas. In evolutionary terms, we were
hunter-gatherers for most of human history, while only recently
agriculturalists and town-dwellers. Now
over half the world live in cities, and this share is predicted to be far
higher into this century. Ancient Rome
hit one million in 133 BCE; London was the first modern city to reach that
number not until 1810, New York in 1975.
Technology and communications have made possible megacities of over 10
million, of which China has the most.
Diversity is the future with the expansion of global
industries, migration, communication, and identity. The first companies to become diverse in
their makeup were the multinationals like IBM, the subject of a famous study of
power distance by Geert Hofstede (1980).
Gradually but with increasing speed, companies at all levels are picking
up the slack in who they hire, nurture, and promote into leadership as a growth
strategy.
