No short cut to inclusion
The annual INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY theme pretty much always makes me ranty. Not least because I don’t understand why we need a theme at all - for me the theme should simply be ‘Please can we have equality for women’ every year until we get it.
Anyway… this year’s ‘Inspire Inclusion’ theme was always going to bring extra frustration, because it inevitably leads to lots of male dominant companies and leadership teams asking how they can make the few women they have feel included. They want a short cut to inclusion, but unfortunately there just isn’t one. In any dominant group, those who aren’t part of that dominant group will never feel true belonging or inclusion. The dominant group members are the goldfish in the bowl, they are very comfortable in the water and simply won’t notice or remember that the water isn’t so nice for everyone in it. No matter how hard they try to say or do things to ‘include’, it will always be an effort rather than natural, it will inevitably slip sometimes and the non-dominant group will feel it as exactly what it is: well intended but forced.
The reality is that there is no short cut to inclusion and the only way to get there is to deliver diversity first (and even then it’s not a given, but that’s another topic). If you look around you and you see a dominant group, you can guarantee that not everybody is feeling inclusion, so your first job has to be to dissolve that dominant group. This is hard, because the group will feel very comfortable and nice to be part of to the majority. And it’s hard because there are lots of invisible, unconscious forces at play which have convinced you to choose all the people in the dominant group for their roles. You will need to put in the hard work to understand that and to put in place all the organizational interventions needed to overcome the invisible forces so that you can put together a more diverse team. Only once you have that do you have a chance of inspiring inclusion - as I always say, only in a team where nobody belongs can everybody belong.
Driving equality, diversity & inclusion isn’t easy work - if it was, we would have made much more progress on it than we have. But it is possible for those who are smart enough to know there are no short cuts and willing to truly put in the time & effort to understand the issue, what drives it and what we need to do about it.