Diversity and Inclusion - not diverse or inclusive

[BewaretheIckabog]

I work as a consultant and am so fed up of D&I initiatives. Every single organisation has been Stonewall trained and brainwashed. 10 minutes on all other protected characteristics and 2 hours on LGBTQI+, bring your whole self to work.

There are other initiatives. I have recently advocated for wellness and mental health awareness.

I’m not disparaging anybody’s sexuality and don’t actually care who my colleagues sleep with or their sexual preferences are. As long as they are not being discriminated against or receiving derogatory treatment in the workplace it’s irrelevant.

I have not had to make a business decision in years where sexuality was a factor.

I do have to make decisions around religious beliefs e.g. not doing a working lunch during Ramadan, ensuring kosher, halal, or vegetarian food is at meetings.

We, quite rightly, have to adapt, make reasonable adjustments and be aware of disabilities.

The gender pay gap and inequality around women in the workplace is real. Today someone indicated they were considering the likelihood of a woman going off on maternity as part of a recruitment decision!

None of these things have been a focus event in any company I’ve been working with; it’s all been Pride LGBTQI .

Let’s get real diversity and inclusion back up on the agenda.

Couldn’t agree more. I started a new job recently, the D&I training was 90% trans stuff. I was left wondering whether they thought there was no issue with other protected characteristics or they just didn’t think they were as important. Yet while we have very many more women than men in the organisation, 9/10 of my meetings the most senior person in the room is a man.

It's the same at my work. I'm public sector so unfortunately I have no chance to speak out. I can't afford to lose my job.

They've got an internal ED&I presentation you can download from the internal internet. In it are a list of the protected characteristics. They've changed the word sex to gender and put sex in brackets at the bottom of the slide. However I suppose I should be grateful it even got its own slide; the disability, age and religion characteristics were grouped into one slide! Trans got 4 slides(!!!) including one about statistics saying that the growth in trans young people was due to better awareness and support (not social contagion then???? hmmmm). Gay, lesbian and bisexual got 1 slide which I suppose they should also be thankful for (sarcasm). Ethnicity got a slide too, so at least good that it wasn't just grouped in with other characteristics.

The thing that pisses me off is that there are a number of people in our organisation with disabilities (me included) and nothing is ever done to accommodate healthy working, helping with desks, additional support etc. Time and time again the results of the staff surveys come out and the low ratings are on facilities for disabled staff. It should be equal for everyone. Not just one characteristic. And in fact, trans identity isn't even a protected characteristic! It's gender reassignment. Ahhh it's so maddening.

Omg completely agree. Disability awareness should be right up there. And somehow it just never is. It's a disgrace

D&I is very faddy isn't it? They are like sheep, all doing the latest hot thing and at a superficial level too. I expect that the trans fad will move over for some thing else they are all excited about shortly and as noted here the perennial issues will remain low effort.

Tbh I don't think it's just the content that is a problem.

In a lot of organizations the time that is being spent on these kinds of training is unreal. These are often jobs which are struggling to provide important, real services.

I know military people who feel strongly that members aren't spending enough time on basic functions and skills, the ones that keep them, and the others around them, alive. But they still have time for this stuff which frankly in many cases should simply come down to, mind your own business and act like a professional.

It’s frustrating because I would actually really like to work in D&I (I’m in HR), I’ve done a lot of work in my career aimed at genuine inclusion, but D&I roles at the moment are just junk.

I think a huge issue with D&I is it's often the job of one person, how can one person possibly have enough knowledge of all the protected characteristics to truly create an inclusive programme of training?
In my experience, generic D&I is often done well at larger organisations with the capacity and scope to have volunteer groups who actively work with management throughout the year - not just on particular days/month of the year.
The size of organisations allows a range of experiences to come forward and lobby to apply practical improvements that can help improve the day to day working of the people there.

For companies much smaller - this can be hard as the experience of one person from the LGBTQ+ community may not be the same as others, and it genuinely can be tricky when you do not have lived experience to balance something that is genuinely inclusive against personal preference.

I do find though there is a great community between D&I professionals, I've never struggled to find someone to talk to about how we can improve a particular area, provided I'm willing to offer the same back in my particular area of expertise.
It all falls flat regardless of content of management aren't genuinely committed

DE&I is currently at the top of everyone's agenda, but people with disabilities are still at the bottom, where they have always been.

I've been noticing a lot of noise is made about diversity and inclusion in my place of work, yet every leader except one is a middle-aged, upper middle-class, white male.
To me it means exclusion for women again.

All we ever seem to do is have days to raise awareness or celebrate something - generally sexuality but also religion ( we celebrate Diwali etc) - but they never actually talk about issues - eg what is hindering someone with x charecteristic from thriving/progressing - how can we help?
And apparently social mobility isn't an issue

Any EDI training I've experienced has been fully intersectional and deals with all protected characteristics.
It's interesting that someone mentioned disability upthread as that is one that many are bad on but I recently attending some better recruitment training that had an excellent focus on how recruitment processes can be improved for disabled applicants. Done well this stuff matters deeply (and doesn't have to be expensive!) but like anything that starts as an improvement in can be commodified (by some) and then becomes performative. We see it in education all the time. The next 'big thing' will be oracy. And some of us are old enough to remember someone charging for sciencifying the advice to take a break now and then 'brain gym'.
It's particularly irritating in EDI as poorly done it leads to a backlash which can sometimes be worse than doing nothing!

What I don’t understand is do the DEI teams not keep up with current thinking and concerns when they, say, change sex to gender when they talk about protected characteristics, or insist on asking for your gender. They must surely know that many women have woken up to the almighty nonsense (I count myself as one of them, 5 years ago it wouldn’t even have registered). I really would love to know. Like do they even discuss it amongst themselves.

My organisation is doing better on the other protected characteristics to be fair. We've had some disability awareness training from Leonard Cheshire that was good and we've had some race awareness training from an organisation I forget the name of. We still dont have networks for anything but 'pride network' or 'womens network' (which is basically an extension of the pride network) but there are now discussions on creating a disability network so some progress.

"And apparently social mobility isn't an issue"

This needs repeating.

"We still dont have networks for anything but 'pride network' or 'womens network' (which is basically an extension of the pride network)"

In my organisation, its middle class, mostly women and the networks all have the same people in them. The disability lead is a thembie and in the Pride network. The EDI lead is also the pride network lead. It's a whole lot of self-serving, navel gazing and the prioritising of a post modern, Queer Theoried world view. Very few people engage with them. I think staff networks built around 'them vs us" identity markers are pretty toxic.

Tell me about it. I had to do loads of online training for my current job.

One of them was 'd&I' and it was ALL about trans women (ok so there was one non bino woman for about two seconds). I kid you not. Waffles on about the moon waxing and waning l, and this being like gender...

The language used was offensive and misogynistic ('assigned' 'c*sgender' etc).

There was a few scenarios acted out - with women fawning and 'protecting' poor men. And they had the equality act wrong and stated that saying men can't use the ladies loos was illegal (no mention of 'legal fictions' of 'changing' sex) as long as they wore 'woman's attire'.

I refused to complete it and told HR what was wrong with it. They just agreed. Who is calling these shots then?

"intersectionality" pisses me off too.

Yes you can be black, gay, female, disabled but dont preach intersectionality if you are going to focus on just one of them.

Plus you can't compare the trans 'struggle' with the disability struggle. That's fucking offensive.

I wish companies would identify where there are problems and then look at what actions can be taken to address rather that D&I being an objective in itself.

@Forester1 I'd love to design one entirely with case studies that I've encountered over the years:

• Hiring a young woman in her 20s who has recently got married
• Employee recently returned from mat leave and has been left out of long-term projects
• Hiring someone who didn't go to a prestigious university
• Organising team socials which are always in the evening and parents/carers can't make it and feel excluded
• Organising team activities centred around alcohol
• Organising a work ski trip costing £££
• Work colleague with different hours/time off due to disability
• Requiring team members to chip in money eg. whip rounds etc where people feel pressured
• Work colleague doesn't feel confident using a new online system that's recently been introduced

I haven't read this report yet but it's on my desk to review! https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-report-seeks-to-end-ineffective-business-edi-practices

The alcohol one really annoys me! My children's school PTA have all their meetings in a pub in the evening. I don't go because meeting some strangers in a pub is my idea of hell, but it's also exclusionary in a whole host of ways!

I'm public sector and recently had to go compulsory online EDI training. They did at least manage to define the Equalities Act protected characteristics ( big fail in last year's training) and started by listing them out. They then continued with page upon page of LGBTQI+ content (mainly showcasing the T), a decently fair amount in race, religion & disability (which was all fair enough), in each case giving lots of links to events, support groups within the organisation etc. The only mention sex got was to mention they had left an organisation aimed at promoting women's participation in science ( there are no events in the calendar or support groups aimed at women), and age got no mention at all!

Pretty much sums up my experience while working there.

I work in a D&I role and have made huge efforts in recent years to ensure our work is i) based on the actual protected characteristics and ii) is proportionate and evidence-based, not driven by fashion or who makes the most noise. The majority of our D&I focus is on race equality, disability equality and women (of the female sex) in leadership, as these are areas where we can clearly evidence - via our staff data - the disparities between different staff groups' recruitment, progression, retention and satisfaction levels.

I wish more practitioners took an evidence-based approach. The focus on trans issues is typically completely disproportionate to the proportion of trans employees/customers and, as has been pointed out already, takes time and resources away from groups and issues where the need is greater.

Anyway, just wanted to flag up that some of us are doing the good work and not all D&I practitioners are trend-chasing sheep!

@littleburn I've just dipped into the report above and it seems like data recording and evidencing is key to interventions that actually work. And that poorly evidenced interventions can actually be counter productive - for instance, talking too much about one PC that isn't actually an issue in that workplace, but ignoring another PC where there are active DEI issues that need to be addressed.

In my line of work we have a significant issue with homogenous socio-economic background, and that isn't even a protected characteristic so sometimes I get a bit impatient when DEI trainers focus only on the EA's PCs.

@Xiaoxiong Labour have it in their manifesto to introduce socio-economic as a protected characteristic. It was their intention before being voted out in 2010.