EQUITY, DIVERSITY & INCLUSION:
A compilation of resources and articles for those ready to deep dive.
PSYCHOLOGY OF INCLUSION
To know #1: The need for inclusion is a primary neurological need: Newer research suggests that Maslow's hierarchy of needs updating. A sense of belonging (or lack thereof) has long been shown to be a primary reward/ threat for the human brain. For the full list of research-backed CORE NEEDS: check out BICEPS.
To know #2: Our brains are the problem: Have your whole team read this excerpt from the Perception Institute’s The Science of Equality. It clarifies what’s going on in our brains that gets in the way of inclusion, so teams can feel the importance of changing team habits and systems. It’s also worth noting that “progressives” experience “intergroup anxiety” when interacting with minoritized people out of a fear of “doing the wrong thing” and this negatively impacts the ability to have positive intergroup experiences.
To know #3: Exclusion starts with interruptions: To increase inclusion, break the cycle of men interrupting women, which breaks the cycle of conversations unintentionally reinforcing male status. Note that leadership or power does not matter: Even when in positions of power, gender was 30x more powerful than status or title in determining who interrupts who.
To know #3: Don’t wait until the minoritized group speaks up or self-advocates. White men are not punished for supporting inclusion initiatives, but minoritized employees are. Be pro-active about advocating for equitable inclusion, because it may not be safe for others to do so.
To know #4: A team skilled in inclusive conversation practices (ie sharing and listening to each other equally) will perform better long term, and this factor alone is more important than the talent or intelligence of individual team members.
To know #5: Being inclusive is not our default, but we can begin to understand it. This is an interesting framework for understanding our own limits around inclusion: intercultural adaptation.
Tactic #1: Create opportunities for people to know each other fully, across groups. Inclusion includes getting to know what core needs matter most to every team member, not just the ones you're besties with. One way to get to know people better (which builds mutual rapport) is to be proactive about spending time with them to ask open questions. You should also start an ongoing speaker and internal panels series that brings in experts on race, gender, ethnicity, LGTBQ and other minoritized groups in your industry. Some case studies here (page 12 and 13)
Tactic #2: Update your meeting structures: The right meeting structure can increase equity and inclusion in a group without any additional training. One of my favorites for so many reasons is the Challenge Clinic structure. I sometimes merge the sharing structure of the Challenge Clinic with the questions/ agenda of an After Action Review.
Tactic #3: Start or double down on affinity groups or ERGs, here’s why and how.
Tactic #4: If you’re over 50 employees, regularly collect inclusion data. A great way to begin equity and inclusion work at your workplace is to get basic survey data to know what matters most to fix first. I recommend Culture Amp or other experts, rather than creating your own. If you are ready to create your own, here’s a DIY guide, and Project Include is a great place to ensure you’ve thought through multiple angles, especially if your company is 100+ people. Also, check out how other companies have done it at the Open Diversity Data project. And here’s a concise but clear argument for assessing how you're treating your current people.
If you’re one of the minoritized group member: One of the first things I recommend to strengthen our self-advocacy muscle is learning about the psychology of posture and poses (self-advocacy requires confidence from the inside).
TACTICS TO INCREASE EQUITY ON YOUR TEAM
Measure equity on your team or company along at least two areas of the following three areas: Belonging, Promotion, and/or Compensation equity -- Quick, rad examples and a longer indepth overview. Here’s one industry’s example of how to call for the tracking, commitment, and reporting of equity promotion numbers.
Improving equity at work is a moral imperative but it doesn’t hurt that it also leads to great team diversity, which has been proven to improve performance and innovation:
Research finds that every 1% increase in workplace racial diversity correlates with a 9% increase in sales revenue
A McKinsey’s analysis shows that companies with the most diverse executive boards have earnings that are 14% higher on average
Other research shows that increased diversity leads to a harder working and more creative workforce.
Companies with discriminatory practices are more likely to go out of business (correlation analysis pending).
Women are qualified leaders: "Strong female leadership" on boards equals an ROE of 10.1% (vs 7.4% of boards without significant female representation).
Discuss as a team how your biases may be impacting your team decisions (not whether they are) because we all have bias:
White names receive 50% more callbacks for interviews, all other variables controlled for.
Changing a resume name to a female name drops the salary offered, and/or decreases job offers
We are more empathetic to those in our ingroup, ie our own race. Second study here.
Women are critiqued more than double what men are, for the same behavior. This includes showing anger or being assertive.
Women receive crappier, less useful and more skewed feedback, which is correlated with lower promotion rates.
Confirmation bias in feedback giving: how we perceive and then judge others depends absolutely on their race and gender.
Women and POC are “mentored-to-death” but under-sponsored: why not all employee support is equal.
Unconscious Bias Interventions:
A variety of mindfulness techniques are showing promise in decrease biases: Lovingkindness training is one.
Research supports that specific cognitive and communication techniques decrease bias in ourselves and others. Second study here.
Project Include has great info on solutions and resources along the employee life cycle, which is my preference for understanding where to focus your efforts first.
Stay hopeful: The World Values Survey is one of the many tools which shows that attitudes and values can change in a population within one generation. Interesting for understanding a global perspective as well as for reminding us that tactics work, even at a large scale.
Promotion & Salary Equity: Let’s do it already
Promotion inequity can be the worst for women at the lowest hierarchical levels, and for POC men at mid-management levels. I.e do not expect promotion inequity to impact all minoritized employees the same way.
The compounding meta-data proving that pay inequity based on bias is real, no matter how you slice the data.
Tactic #1: Address salary inequity by first increasing transparency where you can. Or even better, create and share clear compensation formulas. Companies are seeing a doubling in employee applications after creating public compensation formulas, and an increase in employee satisfaction. More resources here and here.
Tactic #2: Make promotion and compensation decisions as a group to decrease bias. It works.
Tactic #3: Get rid of salary negotiations: They negatively impact women (and more on this) and racial minorities. And/or replace “by request” raises with pre-set salary discussion timings (ex: “We only offer raises on each employee’s anniversary”). One company’s story of their equity-focused comp strategy that incorporates all three tactics.
Tactic #4: If you haven’t yet, ban the use of an employee’s salary history when making salary offers. It’s illegal in tons of states, and it punishes candidates for the biases of their past employers.
Tactic #5: Train all managers on the science behind salary countermeasures, as well as the ways to interrupt bias in evaluation and promotions, such as awarding promotions and salary increases based on pre-established criteria; transparent salary bands; and the tactics mentioned above.
Tactic #6: Provide professional and leadership development programs within “affinity-based cohorts”.
Tactic #7: Offer compensation that is about more than just money, but supports flexibility as well, and supports outside-of-work family and community commitments, both of which matters to all employees (vs offering perks and benefits that just appeal to young or male employees).
Do not over-rely on your company’s “promotions and salary bias countermeasure” alone, it can make you more likely to let bias creep back into your promotions and salary decisions.
Resources for those affected by salary inequity.
SELF-CARE FOR BIPOC AND MINORITIZED GROUPS
The Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture has created a Racial Trauma Toolkit: available as a guide and infographic to support and validate the need for multiple methods to heal and respond to our racial trauma.
Meditation techniques are evidence-based ways to support your mental and emotional health, including due to racial or gender trauma. This link is a guided meditation by Dr. Candice Nicole, a Black psychologist working to support healing from racial trauma.
Impact and clinical therapy options to support healing from racial trauma
Empirical research and a list of evidence-based methods to support our mental health when we’ve experienced recurring racial, ethnic or bias trauma (scan to end for list of mental and physical health activities)
A quick read for four methods to cope with racial trauma
HIRING and D+I
Before you focus on changing your hiring: Assess your current equity and inclusion practices before you move to hire for diversity. You wouldn’t look for new roommates if your house was falling apart with faulty plumbing, decrepit walls and broken windows — you would fix your house to be a proper home first right? Do the same with your current systems. My summer 2020 workshops focus precisely on this, because I know you’re ready!
Why change our hiring systems: because our “intuition” and human judgement is flawed:
Why unstructured interviewing (ie "hiring via intuition") may be the worst hiring methodology (and why organizations may be slow to change this practice).
Age-ciphering in resume screening: Name and activities that provide clues about age impact job scoring
Lessons from the colleges: What if "size of pool" didn't limit our recruitment rates?
"But our talent pool is pretty limited..." and "scarcity" concerns:
Studies show that gender and race, not quality of applicants, impacts who gets hired (small, but interesting study and other duplicated studies).
Even with the degree, minorities get hired at a fraction of what white applicants do, and that Black employees are more likely to be promoted if they were a referral hire (this does not hold true for White employees).
Equitable Hiring Tactics
Understand what candidates are looking for and change your company to authentically offer that to them: Stack Overflow's 2018 Dev Survey shows that 38% to 42% of women, nonbinary folks, and transgendered folks rank diversity, company culture or professional development opportunities as the top priority when assessing a potential job.
Limit images from your screening process — a new badass Chrome extension helps you block out human images so you can focus on the content of someone’s Linkedin/ online profile (instead of letting your limbic brain judge them based on their photo).
Use written feedback about candidates to increase interviewer accountability (to judge by criteria, decreases bias) -- heady academic but fascinating article)
Use other's behavioral questions
Case study: From 3% to 14% in one year - Etsy and Hacker School improve gender representation in tech.
Case studies: How partnering (vs just “mildly connecting”) with colleges and high schools that support minoritized groups can open up new strong pipelines for you.
Check your job postings for gendered language - Textio can also help.
Two-in-the-pool: Why you need 2+ minority candidates on your shortlist (they otherwise stand a zero chance of getting hired).
Case study: One company's methods for bias-decreasing hiring and interview debriefing
Don’t go it alone: Companies such as GapJumpers are helping companies remove bias out of their hiring processes.
Eight strategies to consider to increase equity/ attract all the talented people.
Remote Workers
More and more workplaces offer the option to work from home, and some companies are moving towards 100% distributed teams (ie all-remote-workers). This shift towards remote work can have positive impacts on equity and representation in the workplace, because remote work offers value to all demographics, can work better for folks across the neurodiversity spectrum, and expands your hiring pool. Warning: to take advantage of the benefits of remote work, team and company policies must change to support remote workers. Below are a few resources for understanding the psychology of remote work, and how to make remote work human-friendly for yourself and your team.