Why I’m Over Diversity and What I’m Going to Do About It
LinkedIn // Karima Green, Global Director of Inclusion & Impact at SThree
Throughout my life, all roads have led back to people; they are both my passion and my profession. In my first Talent Voices piece I would like to share where that drive comes from, my view on the potential we have in staffing to make a real difference, and why I believe it’s time to move past our shared focus on diversity and inclusion and push for deeper, more meaningful conversations around intersectionality and belonging…
Why people?
Cultural acceptance is something that I've always had to think about. In the early nineties, my family moved over from Kuwait to a very rural, very white Wales, and we had to change my Arabic surname before I was accepted into a school. Growing up, we often spoke about holding yourself to standards of excellence, and working to influence the parts of the world that are within your sphere of control, with the end goal to always be making things better for others. My first memory is actually attending a women's equality march with my mum. I always knew I had a strong sense of social justice, I just didn’t know that I would end up turning that into a career.
When I started out in IT, I had no particular interest in the industry. I was one of five women in a department of 100; I didn’t recognise myself in any of the leaders and managers across the business. So, I did what was in my sphere of control and found myself a mentor. Before I knew it, I was building my own network of women - a skill that would continue to serve me throughout my professional life. I also had a great manager and ally, who made opportunities happen and the rest, as they say, is history.
Changing your own corner of the world
My current role is Global Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and People Engagement. Although I’ve been working in the discipline for a long time, this has been my first experience in the staffing industry, and I'm proud of the impact we have made as an organisation in this space in three years.
As a STEM staffing specialist with people in 14 countries, getting DE&I right is a necessity. People are our business; we bring skilled people together to build the future. We have to stay agile and adapt at the same rate as the industries we serve.
It’s fantastic to be recognised for our efforts, not just in staffing , but across industries. We were recently awarded Company of the Year at the European Diversity Awards – and are now in a place where we are outperforming many of our competitors. And yet, I feel very strongly that this is just the start of our journey. I like to think of SThree as trailblazers in terms of what the staffing industry can achieve when it comes to DE&I – and I think a lot of that comes down to our focus on moving the discussion along.
Taking the next step
“Karima!”, I can hear you say, “We already focus on gender, race, sexuality and disability. We have networks, we do awareness days, we have policies and audits and bias checks.” But what if I were to tell you that in focusing on these things individually or in vacuums, we run the danger of assumption that all the experiences of diverse groups are the same? And that sometimes, that assumption can be as dangerous as bias.
Say you have had a big focus on advancing the experiences of women in your business. You have done all the right things, but you aren’t seeing the results you expected. It could be for a remarkably simple reason: women are not all the same.
We need to stop talking about JUST diversity and inclusion, and start talking about intersectionality and belonging. For me, this is the next big step.
Diversity and inclusion have been a foundation course – I want to see practitioners!
Every single one of us wants to belong to something, to feel connected – it’s human nature. But you can’t have belonging without understanding what intersectionality is. From gender to race, religion, disability, socioeconomic status and sexual orientation, among many other things, the layers of our identity affect the barriers and discrimination we face as individuals – both in the workplace and in life.
Take Women’s History Month, for example. We had to be clear about the intersectionality of women. Sharing a commonality does not make our lives and experiences universal. The reality is that a woman who is black is highly likely to be paid less and overlooked for promotion, while shouldering more expectation than her white female or black male counterpart. Whilst I am a Middle Eastern, I am light skinned with Western features, ethnically ambiguous enough to be mistaken as white – which happens constantly. As such, I am likely to have experienced much less bias, conscious or unconscious, than others who share my ethnicity. The term for this is ‘passing’. Because I can ‘pass’, I know that I have faced fewer inequalities than even members of my own family. If that makes you as my reader uncomfortable, that is a good thing. Making real change means we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, we need to use the discomfort to do better.
A sense of safety
Whilst I feel this term is overused, we also need to promote a sense of psychological safety. You might have 50% female representation in leadership roles. You might have representation of historically excluded groups across your organisation. But if you don’t have a culture that feels psychologically safe, then you haven’t got belonging and you struggle to retain the talent you have worked so hard to engage in the first place.
People shouldn’t have to dim any aspects of themselves to feel successful or valued. If you’re, for example, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, and you feel you have to check your identity at the door to be accepted at work - that isn’t belonging, no matter what activity your organisation does around Pride month. If you have someone who leans into their ability to ‘pass’ to advance more easily, this isn’t belonging, no matter what proportion of ‘diverse’ hires you are making.
Diversity and inclusion has been a like a foundation course. Now, we need to get people up to practitioner: acknowledging, understanding, and driving intersectionality requirements, while fostering that true sense of belonging. This is what's on my agenda for the next 12 to 18 months.
Data is the backbone of diversity
Understanding data is important because that’s how we start to see things change. If, for example, you were to overlay gender pay gap data in the UK with ethnicity pay gap data, I’m convinced the results would horrify - but not surprise - most of us. This matters. The pay gap issue has a direct impact on the equity individuals hold in society. How can we ensure a better, fairer society in the future when we can’t even make a change within our own businesses?
Achieving widespread access to that data is not as straightforward as it might seem. I was personally devastated when the government made the decision to not make ethnicity pay gap reports mandatory in the UK; it felt like the mountain we are climbing got a little steeper – but we must keep moving.
Like I was taught as a child, I go back to impacting what I can within my own sphere of influence, and I encourage you all to do the same. In staffing, we have a responsibility to the communities we serve to do more to move things forward. Myself and my team will be doing our very best to make sure we lead by example, working to collect that data, publishing and acting on its results wherever necessary: from an equity perspective, finance, promotions, hiring, retention, turnover, and so on.
Structuring your DE&I team for success is now a commercial imperative and cannot be an extension of your already overloaded HR function. You must invest in your DEI team. We are a strategic, business critical function, with a specific skillset and deep knowledge of operational change in this area. For example, you could have someone from your Tech team be your lawyer in court, but would you be confident in your chances of winning the case? Apply that same thinking to your diversity ambitions.
Most important of all, we as leaders must collaborate - coming together as an industry to share best practice, understand data, develop standards and commit to removing barriers in our sphere of control. You can go fast alone, but we can go further together. I’m up for the challenge; are you?
I’d love to hear what you think about this important topic. Share your thoughts with the #TalentVoices hashtag.
