MORE THAN A BUSINESS CASE: Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity News You Can Use 001 (11/6/20)
Every other week I’ll bring you five articles and a resource that I found particularly interesting, insightful, or actionable in bridging gaps in access and opportunity in the DE+I space.
Within the post, you’ll get an interesting article, a quick synopsis, a relevant quote from the piece, and personal reflection — be sure to drop additional thoughts, comments, questions, and reactions in the comments!
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1. [Bloomberg Businesweek]: Economist Found $16 Trillion When She Tallied Cost of Racial Bias
What is the cost of racial inequities? Dana M. Peterson, a director, and Global Economist for Citigroup explores this question ina 104-page report that highlights research on the Black wealth gap. She explores not only the drivers such as education, housing, investment, labor segmentation, and others — but also the upside to closing these gaps — $5 trillion.
Peterson calculated that by closing the various gaps between Blacks and Whites, the U.S. could stand to gain an additional $5 trillion in economic activity over the next five years.
As we months have gone by since companies have posted their corporate statements on racial injustice and antiracism, posted black squares on social media, and made donations to HBCUs and organizations focused on racial justice. It’s now important to “walk the talk” moving past performative actions — organizations, and organizational leaders need to be introspective and the role they play in causing or enabiling racial injustice which very much be ancilliary or adjacent to the businesses core service offerings.
2. [Clarkston Consulting]: Managing Organizational Change to Advance Racial Justice
Once we are aware that we need to move past performative actions and statements as we proactively pivot towards advancing racial justice, it’s important to create a comprehensive organizational change program to assess your organization’s health and create a roadmap for radical transformation. In this post, Nicole Wilkinson, Consultant at Clarkston Consulting, highlights the critical elements of advancing racial justice — awareness, authenticity, and sustainability.
This moment has been an inflection point, causing organizations to take an internal look at the health of their organization from the perspectives of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism. Companies that take this moment to lead with awareness, authenticity, and sustainable action in how they’re managing organizational change will harness the power of transformation toward a more equitable workplace.
Sometimes the most challenging aspect of creating a niche organizational change effort such as one focused on antiracism and equity — is knowing where to start. Whether it be leveraging people analytics, focused groups, or consulting a third-party, ensure that you are first raising awareness and creating accountability before, during, and after activiating your initiatives.
3. [NPR]: Why Diversity Training Has Been Suspended At USAID
In September, the President of the United States issued an executive order, that in short, condemned workplace diversity and inclusion training and prevented federal agencies, contractors, or organizations receiving federal grants to participate in them. This is not only dangerous but has a number of trickle-down effects. Because of this, one of the largest foreign aid agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development, suspended all D&I programs.
“This kind of executive order [from the Trump administration] means that we’re refusing to acknowledge history and the current reality that so many people are impacted by.”
This post was interesting, because USAID is an organization that could only continue to benefit from D&I programing (well, we all can) due to their footprint internationally and work with over 4,000 organizations in over 100 countries. It’s also interesting because there are a number of organizations and companies that are doing the work in providing transparency and equity in fields like health care, housing, governance that, by and large, have well documented gaps in DE+I; with suspended training the organization doesn’t only suffer but so do the customers.
4. [Adweek]: The Richards Group Incident Is Advertising’s Diversity Déjà Vu
According to the 4As recent DE+I survey in advertising which leveraged 165 agencies representing more than 40,000 employees — found that Black employees make up just 5.8% of the industry, Hispanic or Latinx make up 8.68%, Asian/Asian American make up 4.23% — while White/Caucasian make up 70.51%. This can be problematic when we start having conversations about inclusive engagement and authentic marketing. Recently a number of clients are leaving the top marketing agency, The Richards Group, after the founder made comments that a Motel 6 ad concept was “too black.”
Newkirk found that most Chief Diversity Officers, despite their title and healthy salaries, consistently miss their goals because they are isolated from power and largely relegated to serving a public relations role for the company. Indeed, she cites how only 35% of Fortune 500 CDO’s even had access to their institution’s own diversity data and generally feel unsupported.
Inclusion and representation has long been a challenge for the advertising and marketing industry, but also marketing departments within companies. Often times it’s diversity blunders, lawsuits, or negative press that catapult organizations into making sustainable change, but it shouldn’t have to be this way. Organizations should take a proactive approach to truly understand what their bind spots are, where diversity is lacking, and understand the gap between their organization’s representation and their customers — this not only prevents some potential challenges but it enables a deeper, authentic understanding and connection with your customers and innovation within your organization.
5. [Washington Post]: India’s engineers have thrived in Silicon Valley. So has its caste system.
A focus of mine in the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging space over the past year is gaining perspective on topics that I don’t personally identify as. This read by Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post highlights how biases that are prevalent in India regarding the caste system, can consciously or unconsciously manifest in North America (or any other region for that matter). Learn more about the Caste bias to raise awareness of what to be mindful of in your organization.
Engineers and advocates of the lowest-ranked castes say that tech companies don’t understand caste bias and haven’t explicitly prohibited caste-based discrimination.
It’s interesting how common themes that are often discussed in this space — such as bias based on race/ethnicity — are prevalent in a “similar but different” fashion elsewhere. The article highlighted that this bias is caused by complexion of skin tone or names on a resume, similar to the countless studies on colorism and unconscious bias in resume reviews. This is why it’s especially important in the DE+I space to train our brains on how to identify and mitigate biases so we can applythose skills to all aspects in how we interact with the world.
[Resource] Textio’s Augmented Writing Platform for Employer Brand
Technology can easily be a catalyst or a barrier to your DE+I efforts. Since 2014 Textio has served as a platform to help organization harness machine learning and AI to mitigate bias in the hiring process, recently they launched a product targeted at assessing and improving your employer brand — focusing on multi-cultural language, team-centric vs. individual word choice, and growth mindset language.
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Best,
Brandon Miller
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Brandon is a manager and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Services Lead at Clarkston Consulting and chairs the firm’s Diversity Council. Brandon has also cofounded the too fly foundation (providing passports and travel grants to students) and cohost of the cap culture podcast (bridging culture, community, tech, and capitalism).
