The HR company advising here needs to pick up quite a large portion of blame but ultimately, I think this is group-think. When we talk about hiring for diversity thisis what we actually mean: diversity ofthoughtthat doesn't assume the whole world thinks in the way we think.
Absolu-fucking-letly.
Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has made this exact point about how we often miss the point because we become so focused on certain things to the exclusion of others so we ultimately miss the point about diversity.
He did a documentary for the BBC on diversity and said that one of the flaws in focusing on race has been to miss socioeconomic status. Keep in mind, he himself is black.
His point was that the BBC had done very well at recruiting ethnic minorities but this had been very much at the expense of white, working class males with middle class minorities being more likely to get jobs. What they hadn't managed to tackle was how many staff were privately educated. In practice instead of broadening diversity, it was arguable that actually this approach had been narrowing diversity because staff had a similar upbringing and this meant that the BBC was blind to more working class viewpoints and wasn't representing poorer communities well on numerous levels. His point was it was actively harming social mobility and aspirations of certain communities.
There's clearly an issue within the charity sector about a lack of diversity of political identities, particularly in certain sections. We are seeing a whole bunch of people who have exactly the same political views running certain charities which has massive implications. There was a big thing about the National Trust along these lines not long ago, with there being a massive push on social media to get members to keep out certain people because they 'had the wrong political views'.
It's fundamentally damaging if it's a charity that's supposed to serve a broad spectrum of society. We absolutely should be having a broad width of political views, socio-economic background, age and professional experience with those who run a charity.
What strikes me about the list of trustees here is the apparent lack of management experience - which will include people management and understanding of HR skills combined with a couple of very dominant older characters within the charity supposedly being balanced by a lot of very inexperienced young people. There's a massive lack of understanding of GDPR and understanding HR (we made an admin error over gross misconduct and misconduct FFS. How in god's name do a) you manage this b) think this a suitable defence/ justification in an employment tribunal!!!)
That's not balance, thats a massive imbalance. I note particularly that it's much harder for a group of young people lacking in experience to stand up and robustly challenge older dominant characters. You really have to have some guts and conviction to do that. It's HARD. Managing people older than you generally isn't an easy task.
Not only that, but due to the way that trustees are appointed you are much more likely to see groupthink being deliberately established in order to reinforce an agenda. The whole grapevine thing and how there are activist cliques makes this a real weak point. Indeed if you have a dominant character within the charity, it effectively is possible to encourage the appointment of trustees who pretty much sit, nod and smile at what you are doing and it's only when the shit hits the fan that the lack of accountability this creates becomes very apparent. A charity which is TWAW is absolutely going to appoint trustees who are TWAW and avoid anyone who is known to be gender critical because they don't want the boat rocked, which is what trustees SHOULD be doing.
Instead because of diversity training which focuses on things like race, gender identity, sexuality and sex they can instead go - look we ticked all the boxes whilst simultaneously appointing a bunch of middle class people who all share the same opinions and have similar life experiences.
The key point is what previous posters have said - balance. But diversity training is arguably not doing this and is blind to this because it's not looking at the whole picture.
We are seeing this pattern in media, in politics and the charity sector it's everywhere.
I'd argue that all this diversity training misses the key point of ALL equality and human rights principles which is to balance the needs and wants of ALL parties. Instead it creates this hierarchy of repression which is dumb as fuck and doesn't actually reflect jack shit. It overwhelmingly harms the lowest socio-economic groups.
Women's charities will happily recruit males to increase their diversity score but fail to recruit women from groups most likely to use / need a service like this and will happily throw the most vulnerable under the bus because they are unable to express their views when these are the women who are most need of advocates.
The truth in journalism and in human rights is to look not for what is said but for the gaps in what is said. Those glaring silences and lack of voices are where the biggest stories are found, the biggest issues lie and where the most vulnerable are stuck. They are never the noisy groups on social media...