4 key steps to attaining diversity, equity, and inclusion goals

From a cultural, societal and general fairness perspective, most progressive people believe that attaining diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) is conceptually a desirable objective. After all, if you ask little kids if they feel it's fair just because they were born a girl or a boy, or have a certain skin color, and for that reason doesn't get a toy, they would instinctively cry "that's not fair!". Somehow, we all have a sense of fairness and we're hardwired to know deep within us that it doesn't feel right. Hence, the attainment of such goals feels natural and directionally correct to many people. With all the education and communication tools available to us at our finger tips, why does it remain such a difficult goal to attain? It's certainly not for lack of awareness.

There are four key steps to moving the needle on this front:

1. Courage - Courage to take risks
2. Action and effort - Willingness to take action and put in the hard work
3. Combined goals - Baking in DE&I initiatives with other goals
4. Published measurement - Measuring and publishing for accountability

While many people support the goals of achieving DE&I, it often remains a theoretical concept due to lack of willingness of taking risks. One of the first risks is the willingness to articulate and make a stand. It is not easy and can be uncomfortable and feel confrontational. If there are inequities presented whether at work or at home, instead of looking the other way, one needs the courage to take the risk and speak up, call it out, and encourage a change in behavior. One doesn't need to be combative or rude about it, but by silently letting an unfair situation go without speaking out only fosters an environment that breeds such a culture. By not speaking up, one is in fact complicit to continuing to incubate, support, and nurture such cultural behaviors into our society. Just like every action has an equal and opposite reaction in physics, we should recognize that every inaction has an equal and opposite reaction too. We need to own both our actions and inactions.

Speaking up takes energy and effort, and could be exhausting, especially if you plan to do this whenever the situation arises. I recall a time when I was working with some volunteers on speaker events and trying to attain a goal of a 50% speaker mix of men and women. The volunteers told me that it would be exceedingly time-consuming and difficult to discover female speakers in different industries to speak who would have the same caliber and renown of many white males. If women are never given the opportunity to speak, you would not easily discover them via a short Google search and quickly find them from the first 10 search results. Instead, one has expend the time and energy to speak to others in the industry to learn which women might be highly regarded, but may not have been provided speaking opportunities, and extend an invitation to them to speak. This is certainly not the easy path and is definitely way more time-consuming. There is a natural tendency to choose the easy path since it's less time-consuming. In 2021, out of the Fortune 500 companies, 41 are led by women CEOs. These 41 women are constantly asked to speak and serve on boards. The recycle rate (same person serving on multiple boards) is higher for women and minorities than for white men, which shows that while diversity on boards may be increasing, there is not an equivalent rate of increase in the number of new women and minorities on boards. If the desire is to genuinely move the needle on this front, without the willingness to take action and put in the hard work and effort to attain the goal, DE&I goals would be one of those desires doomed to remain a valleity.

I once encountered a CTO of a tech startup who, when asked why his team comprised of 99% men, responded that as an early stage startup, his sole purpose was to build a viable product and DE&I initiatives was a nice thing to pursue later but not something he could worry about at that time. The same volunteers I had mentioned earlier similarly asked me to help clarify if obtaining renowned speakers was the priority or if balanced speaker mix was the priority; I responded with "both are priorities -- they are not mutually exclusive". There is a false narrative that DE&I goals are to be pursued on their own. In the workplace and in our lives, it is not unusual for us to pursue multiple goals -- this is no different. Instead of having dedicated DE&I speaker events, we simply need to ensure every speaker event has a question or two that is focused on this matter so that this conversation is woven into all activities. DE&I initiatives need not, and in many cases should not, be separate or mutually exclusive activities but instead be baked into other goals. For businesses, using the power of the purse, buyers can ask for diversity statistics from their vendors and all things being equal, can award jobs to those who have diversity in their leadership and staff teams. 

In order to know if you are moving the needle on any activity, one has to benchmark, continually measure, and report on its progress. One of the board members I know of an organization was hesitant to publish any diversity numbers and wanted to keep it internal to board meetings only, as they didn't want to be embarrassed with the state of the numbers. It is arguable that precisely because they are aware that the numbers are embarrassing that they should be published so that there is motivation to make positive changes sooner. For reasons similar to why independent directors are needed on boards, enabling external people to view published numbers fosters greater transparency and accountability. Measuring takes time and effort, and publishing the number takes courage. These numbers should also be baked-in the set of numbers that boards review along with revenue, EBITDA, etc.

Despite statistics showing that women-led startups tend to do better financially, only 2.3% of women-led startup got VC funding in 2020, down from 2.8% in 2019. We are moving in the wrong direction despite all of the media coverage and awareness of these inequities and desires for change. The pandemic has caused some investors to become risk-averse and go back to the safe familiarity of backing who they know. When investors only want to invest in a startup with cofounders who were previously VC-backed, it is perfectly understandable as they want to mitigate risk and that's the shortcut and frankly lazy way of vetting, which actively contributes to a vicious cycle. It takes courage and the willingness to take on risks to get out of this vicious cycle. If VCs and investors genuinely intend to break this cycle, they must be willing to do some sobering examination of their own system of how they go about deciding what firms are worth funding, root out systemic bias, and figure out alternative ways to enable more women-led startups to be funded. This requires some risk-taking, hard work to re-tool the way they go about doing their business, and willingness to bake it into their business process and goals, and report on their progress as one of their business KPIs.

The path to attaining DE&I goals is one that is not easy but is certainly possible and can happen more quickly with sufficient resolve, effort, and courage.