This past week, was in a session on diversity and inclusion with some senior leaders.
Before we realized, the conversation swiftly converged to gender diversity, to the complete exclusion of all other forms of diversity.
To my utter surprise, some of the most vocal critiques of gender diversity turned out to be not the men in the room but women - all of them super successful and brilliant professionals who had weathered it out to be where they are today.
They felt that their hard earned achievements were often perceived by others as an outcome of their gender, not merit. They felt belittled by a lot of what is being done today to promote gender diversity.
Got me thinking.
Probably because gender is the most visible and most 'easy-to-measure' form of diversity, many organisations have put a disproportionate focus on this. With all the right intentions, many have put in place KPIs related to gender diversity to measure progress.
Problem is: as these KPIs cascade down from the board room to the work floor, somewhere along the way the intent gets lost in translation. What remains is a number that must be achieved. Managers - often grudgingly - do whatever it takes to meet those numbers. To an average person on the floor, it soon starts looking like a 'quota system' where women supposedly get more favours than men.
In this system, men are unhappy because they think women are being favored over them.
Women are more unhappy because they feel their accomplishments get unduly credited to their gender, not their merit.
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As a society, we have a long way to go to be truly diverse and inclusive.
What we are doing today in organizations by focusing on broad groups like gender, ethnicity, nationality and so on is a good starting point but not the end.
To be truly diverse, we need to embrace diversity at an individual level. This means valuing what EACH individual brings to the table because of their unique identity and life journey. This requires training ourselves to suspend our judgment and doing our best to make EVERYONE feel included at EVERY stage of their life and career.
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Coming back to gender, a woman when she joins the workforce is not necessarily the same woman when she becomes a mother - in terms of the support we can offer to make her feel included and effective at work.
Unfortunately, there is no cookie cutter approach to how we do this. We need a change of mindset.
On that note, Happy Mothers Day!
#diversity #inclusion #career #gender #work