Spot the difference: Inclusion, Diversity and Equity
Despite the renewed energy around ID&E, there remains a noticeable lack of clarity around each of these terms. In your company, you’re likely to hear these terms used interchangeably or serve as a catch-all. But, if we can’t get clear on how each of these differ from each other, we’re well far off from identifying improvements and launching targeted initiatives.
Diversity
Diversity is the demographic makeup of your workforce. But diversity is less about what makes people different — their race, socioeconomic status, and so on — and more about understanding, accepting and valuing those difference. This is why having “diversity quotas” often leads to token appointments, doing more harm than good because companies will often treat this as a box-ticking exercise. The workforce of large companies invariably includes a mix of genders, races and other types of diverse candidates, but it becomes increasingly homogeneous further up the corporate ladder.
Many European countries have imposed gender quotas requiring that at least 40% of a company’s board should be women. In the US, California requires any corporation with shares listed on a major stock exchange to have at least one woman on its board. New Zealand and Australia have imposed disclosure requirements for gender diversity on company boards.
What would work better for truly increasing diversity at the top levels is if companies work with executive search firms to look for individuals of diverse backgrounds who would benefit the company. For other levels of the workforce, inclusive promotion metrics and channels for solicited employee feedback and complaints would be helpful.
A key point to note is that diverse teams will yield higher ROI only if they’re managed by an inclusive culture.
Inclusion
An organization can be diverse without being inclusive because inclusion is not a natural consequence of a diverse team or organization. Inclusion is the extent to which various team members, employees, and other people feel a sense of belonging and value within the company. The important distinction here is that even among the most diverse teams, there’s not always a feeling of inclusion. For example, women might be well represented at the senior management level, but still not feel included due to longstanding gender norms, salary discrepancies, and other factors.
Some examples of non-inclusive behaviors in a workplace can lend themselves to creating a lower quality of the human experience. In short, a lack of inclusion means an erasure of experience and perspective; it’s subtle and dismissive. Diversity is a fact, but inclusion is a choice.
To be truly effective, inclusion must be engrained and integrated throughout the entire workforce. Providing trainings to people leaders, encouraging empathy in all interactions and designing a culture for inclusion purposefully is the choice companies must make for ID&E initiatives to take effect.
In a diverse and inclusive organization, the next step is a design which identifies inequities and helps to elevate the people on the margins to an equal playing field.
Equity
Equity asks us to acknowledge that everyone has different needs, experiences, and opportunities, and then to design a system which levels the uneven playing field. Cynthia Sylvia Parker said it best — “It’s not about everybody getting the same thing. It’s about everybody getting what they need in order to improve the quality of their situation.”
An employee from a minority group isn’t playing on the same level as someone from a historic majority group. Giving equal help to both groups continues to preserve the unequal dynamic. But giving a little more help to this employee from the minority group can put them up on the same level.
