Lack of Diversity in your organisation is evidence of discrimination
Posted on September 13, 2016

Lack of Diversity equals discrimination – and discrimination is illegal.
How would it be if I went to the HR manager of your company and said “How do you treat your slaves here? Do you let them sleep under cover or are they left outside?” I know I would be looked at strangely. “Of course we don’t keep slaves,” they would say indignantly. “What sort of question is that?” And, of course, it would be a stupid question as there is no evidence of slaves being used in our corporations.
What if I said, “What sort of methods do you use to discriminate against women, non-white people and people of different sexual orientation?” Again, they would say, “Of course, we don’t discriminate against people in our organisation.” However, this time, their response would not be true. There is evidence of discrimination in most organisations. The evidence is in the extremely poor representation of women, non-whites and those of different sexual orientation in leadership positions across Corporate Australia. In the water sector, there are 24 water businesses in Victoria and not one of them is led by a woman. Clear evidence that the Victorian Water Industry is run as a boys club.
So why does inequity and discrimination hurt organisations?
Obviously, it is really annoying – actually, extraordinarily painful – if you are female, non-white or have a different sexual orientation and you can see that you are being excluded and are now unemployed. Social exclusion is extraordinarily painful for the individual. We are biologically wired to ‘fit-in’ to the tribe. In tribal times if you don’t ‘fit-in’ you die – literally.
But what about the organisation? The reason that discrimination is so damaging to organisations is that discrimination undermines trust and fairness.
The currency of any organisation is trust and fairness. A perceived lack of trust and fairness will:
• Lead people to not tell the truth and not share valuable and important information
• Encourage people to ‘Manage upwards’ or pass on good news and not bad
• Undermine people’s willingness to bring their best to work
• Lead people to ‘play games’ to get promotion rather than work diligently knowing that they will be rewarded on the basis of performance – rather than social connections
• Leave employees feeling vulnerable and afraid of being discriminated against themselves
It also denies organisation access to major talent. If you discriminate against women and don’t select your leaders from this talent pool then your executive team will be 50% weaker than it could be. Half of your executive team should not be there and are only holding these roles because you have excluded women. Clearly, lack of talent at the top will significantly undermine an organisation’s performance.
So let’s get rid of the idea that we need to fix diversity for cosmetic purposes. Let’s stop playing lip-service to this topic to ‘keep people happy’ and lets rid of our organisations of discrimination to enable better performance. Playing lip-service to this topic will only increase lack of trust and cynicism if people believe that the new ‘diversity manager’ is just window dressing.
So where does your organisation lie? At the lower levels on this ladder we have organisations who are either ignorant of their discrimination or consciously of discriminate. We then have organisations that are compliance-focused. These organisations try to keep themselves safe from the law by ensuring all of their staff have undertaken EEO training. This is usually ‘on-line’ and not treated seriously by the organisation. This is the sign of an organisation that is happy to keep discriminating – they just don’t want to be caught out. Next, we have organisations who are making an effort. Usually they have hired someone at a low level in the organisation to diligently try to effect some change – which is usually doomed to failure as it is not truly supported by the leadership (who have been the beneficiaries of discrimination in the past). Employees tend to become cynical about their leadership. Then we have organisations who are actually taking meaningful action. After all, it should not be that hard. There are well-educated and experienced women, non-whites and people from different sexual orientations everywhere who are quite capable of being hired into senior roles. Your just need to look a bit harder as they are usually off doing something else in response to having been excluded from their organisations in the past. Recruitment agents need ‘get their act together’. At the higher levels we have authentic organisations that see the problem and are making true progress. Finally we have those who are unconsciously equitable. In these organisations there is no discrimination and no evidence of discrimination. In these organisations asking to see your diversity strategy would be akin to asking to see your anti-slavery policy and would make no sense.
Where is your organisation? The higher up the ladder you are, the more trust you have in the organisation and the better performance you will experience.

Lack of diversity in the organisation is evidence of discrimination

So diversity is not just the latest corporate fad. It is a fundamental philosophy on the importance of a value system of fostering trust and fairness within our corporations.
Furthermore, if you are a diversity professional – you should be working to work yourself out of a job – but there is no need to rush. There is plenty of evidence that discrimination within organisations will be here for a long time.

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