Women working in STEM fields face gender pay gaps worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, some of the highest across the economy, according to newly released data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. But there are some bright spots in the sector, with Gilmour Space Technologies and Facebook among the one third of…
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A myriad of government programs have failed to address the structural diversity barriers in Australia’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields over the last decade, according to an outside review calling for a new holistic approach. The review’s final recommendations, to be released by Industry and Science minister Ed Husic on Tuesday, call on the…
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Over summer, BroadAgenda is featuring a short series of profiles on amazing women and LGBTIQ + folks. You’re about to meet Professor Selen Ayirtman Ercan, Director of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She’s also the Research Lead of Centre’s Building Democratic Resilience cluster.
I guess it depends on who the person I am sitting next to is and where the dinner party is at. I would say that I am conducting research on democracy —what it is, where it takes place, and how it can be improved. When I say democracy to people the first thing that comes to their mind is elections of course and things like voting, and parliament house etc. (although this also depends on who is sitting next to me. I have been able to sit next to many fascinating people at dinner parties, especially here in Canberra). In a nutshell, my research goes beyond the conventional spaces and practices of democracy.
I am particularly intrigued by the concept of deliberative democracy. What is it? It is often defined as a ‘talk-centric’ as opposed to a ‘vote-centric’ approach to democracy.
In practice, this means creating spaces where people come together to discuss their disagreements, listen to each other and find common ground.
This may sound very simple and like common sense, right (unless you are an advocate of an authoritarian rule)? However, our democracies are far from realizing this supposedly straightforward idea. Sometimes, adversarial politics hinders us from finding common ground; at other times, power dynamics between different groups and individuals or an unwillingness to address historical injustices steer us away from practicing this simple democratic idea.
My work seeks to develop the conditions under which democracies can become more inclusive, more deliberative as well as more resilient.
Selen A. Ercan, speaking at “Democracy in crisis? Democratic innovations and future of politics’” panel hosted at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, 2019. Picture: Supplied
I am currently involved in several projects, one of which explores how democracies can become more resilient in the aftermath of extremist attacks that were aimed at instilling fear and fostering polarisation. This is a Discovery project funded by the Australian Research Council. It is inspired by Jacinda Ardern’s remarkable response to the Christchurch mass shootings.
Ardern was an extraordinary political leader. For me, what set her apart from other political leaders is that she was decisive yet compassionate at the same time—a rare combination.
Right after this attack, Ardern managed to formulate an authentic, victim-centric and compassionate response to this tragic attack. She refused to name the terrorist and took sides with the families of the victims. Our project compares this response to the responses to other similar attacks in different countries and draw lessons on democratic resilience. Australia is also one of our case studies, with a specific focus on its response to the 2002 Bali Bombings.
Another inspiring resource for my project on democratic resilience was Leigh Sales’ amazing book, Any Ordinary Day. From the moment I delved into this book, I found myself captivated and unable to put it down. I strongly recommend this book to everyone. Now, you might be wondering about the connection between Leigh Sales, an outstanding journalist, and my focus on extremist attacks and democratic resilience. There is a profound link between what Sales does in this book and what I focus on in my democratic resilience project.
In her book, Sales asks a fundamental question: When the worst happens, what comes next’? Each chapter unveils different stories of ordinary individuals navigating and overcoming life-altering events, discovering hope, and building strength and resilience after their darkest days. My project asks similar kind of questions but applies them to democracies rather than individuals. I am interested in understanding how democracies can recover from major shocks, how they become more resilient and what kind of institutions, practices and leadership is needed to nurture democratic resilience.
I am originally from Turkey. I grew up and lived in Turkey until I finished my undergraduate studies in Political Science. Since then, I have been living overseas, first in Germany for about 8 years, and then in Australia for the past 18 years. The experience of living in diverse countries, navigating various languages, and immersing myself in distinct cultural contexts has profoundly shaped both my personality and intellectual pursuits.
Being a migrant naturally sparks curiosity about the essence of a truly inclusive society and the conditions necessary for societies to embrace and accommodate differences. When you move from one country to another, you learn to question your taken-for-granted assumptions.
What feels normal or unquestionable in one country maybe approached differently in another country. When I first moved from Germany to Australia, for example, I was amazed by the motto of one Sydney council, which read ‘one community, many cultures’.
In Germany, community is something that is inherently homogenous. You could have many separate communities, but each community has one culture/ethnicity mainly. I was also amazed by the hybrid use of identities here, such as ‘Australian Muslims’. It is things like these we take for granted in Australia, but which are hard to imagine in other contexts. This does not mean that everything is perfect in Australia, but observations like these have strengthened my interest in the questions of inclusion and democracy.
I hope that my work has both scholarly and practical impact. I am trying to bring deliberative thinking in contexts that are deemed unsuitable for this approach, for example for resolving deep disagreements, or addressing the threat of violent extremism. I do hope that this is useful in the field and encourages fresh thinking. I also hope that my work has a practical impact.
One other project I am leading at the moment is developing a ‘Deliberative Democracy Toolkit for Public Servants’. Together with a brilliant group of researchers at the University of Canberra, I am working on translating our scholarly knowledge on deliberative practices into an actionable resource book for public servants in Australia. This is exciting. I hope that my work inspires people who are looking for innovative ways of doing things.
Selen A. Ercan, Fieldwork in Lismore, with the members of the Knitting Nannas against Gas, 2018. Picture: Supplied
Of course I view myself as a feminist researcher. ‘Feminism is for everybody’ as bell hooks famously put it. In terms of my work, feminism means being attuned to gender and gender asymmetries and exclusions, trying to advance the empowerment of women and other marginalized groups as much as I can. Research informed by feminism cannot just be a pure scholarly exercise. It should have a political purpose and seek to identify and address inequalities and marginalisation.
Apart from these, feminism is also key for me for the kind of research methods I use in my work. I mainly use qualitative research methods and work with text and talk as my data.Feminist researchers have played a crucial role in the development of qualitative research methods. They have criticised and reconfigured mainstream scientific and positivist methods, requiring researchers to be detached from what they study in the name of producing ‘objective’ knowledge.
Feminists have emphasised the need for qualitative methods to prioritise women’s voices and “lived experiences” in the process of knowledge production. I have written about this recently– about the contribution of feminism to the qualitative research in political science, together with Prof Ariadne Vromen.
There are many things that surprise and inspire me in my work. I enjoy conducting fieldwork and bridging abstract ideas with on-the-ground practices, constantly asking what we can learn from these experiences. The creativity and agency exhibited by ordinary citizens in unlikely places or under challenging conditions continue to fascinate me. Numerous examples come to mind, such as the 2014 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, where we witnessed some of the most intelligent and creative forms of political participation and resistance.
But let me give an example from Australia. A couple of years ago, I conducted research on the coal seam gas controversy in New South Wales. During this project, I encountered the social protest group known as the Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG) and had the privilege of interviewing various members in different towns across New South Wales, including Lismore, where the group originated. KNAG members regularly gather in public places, often in front of their representatives’ offices, where they sit and knit yellow scarves, beanies, toys, and puppets as a form of protest against mining in their communities. These meetings involve much more than sharing wool and knitting patterns.
By coming together to knit and persistently ‘being present,’ they aim to send a political message to their local politicians and broader public that they are vigilant against undesirable mining activities. It was fascinating to observe how these women subvert their traditional soft and sweet ‘nanna roles’ to not only make a political statement but also to mend broken relations in communities polarized by the coal seam gas controversy. KNAG is one of the case studies in my recent book, Mending Democracy: Democratic Repair in Disconnected Times (with Hendriks and Boswell). I have also published other work drawing on this inspiring case, exploring the role of knitting and non-verbal expression in democracy.
Politics does not have to be boring and adversarial. It can be fun, creative and engaging. Through my research, I’ve discovered that everyday individuals possess remarkable capabilities to envision and actualize transformative changes in our democratic systems. Let’s dispel the notion that politics is dull; instead, let’s embrace its potential for excitement, innovation, and meaningful engagement, so that we can redefine and invigorate the very essence of democracy.
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Western Australia’s Minister for Women’s Interests Sue Ellery has stressed the need for cultural change to support more women in STEM, startups, and venture capital, as she shared stories of cultural barriers within the state government. Ms Ellery, who is also Minister for Finance and Commerce, called for cultural change in the venture capital sector,…
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Western Australia’s Minister for Women’s Interests Sue Ellery has stressed the need for cultural change to support more women in STEM, startups, and venture capital, as she shared stories of cultural barriers within the state government. Ms Ellery, who is also Minister for Finance and Commerce, called for cultural change in the venture capital sector,…
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An Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence has achieved gender parity among its researchers and students in half a decade, without the need for quotas. Its leaders say its evidence-based program detailed in a new publication on Friday could be emulated by other organisations. ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions…
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By Vibhor Mathur
See original post here.
The lack of access to disposable income is not just the result, but also a cause of great poverty and inequality. Recent experiences like the COVID-19 pandemic have brutally highlighted that traditional policy tools are inadequate in protecting the weakest sections of India. In this context, there are calls for universal basic income (UBI) to strengthen welfare architecture and unlock the nation’s latent demographic potential. UBI is a regular cash payment made individually to each member of a political community, without any means-testing, work requirements or conditionalities.
India’s diversity has always thrown up unique governance challenges. A tribal woman in Assam, a young graduate in Delhi, a landless labourer in Maharashtra belonging to a marginalised caste and a homemaker in peri-urban Tamil Nadu all have such diverse and distinct needs that creation of uniform policies a near impossible task. The proposals put forward, thus, either fail to recognise the different needs and to provide efficient mechanisms of delivery, or worse, take a priori and ill-informed decisions on the needs of different groups. For instance, free buses are of no use to those who live in areas without public transport.
Similarly, distribution of sewing machines to empower women misses the key step of asking them if tailoring is the path they want to pursue, or if employment is even the biggest challenge they are facing at the time. Narrowly defined and targeted policies for different groups create inefficient governance and perverse populist political incentives.
Cash, as a universal medium of exchange, has the unique potential to provide to each person a basic economic floor and empower them to meet their needs as they deem fit. This is not to say that good quality and accessible government services are not essential. But the addition of a cash-based support allows for protecting those who can fall through the cracks and enhance people’s capacity to access better services. The basic income pilot in Hyderabad, WorkFREE, has seen increased health insurance coverage among participants. The Delhi pilot by Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) saw people gaining access to better quality food and thus improving nutritional outcomes. Additionally, universality and unconditionality of the scheme would mean that the government does not need to spend time and resources in assessing eligibility of the potential beneficiaries, and poor and vulnerable people are freed from the burden of such paperwork. In a country with inadequate documentation and awareness, such a scheme provides the state the best chance of robust coverage.
A basic income also provides the crucial security that can help people tide through crises like health shocks, loss of employment, seasonal or natural disasters, deaths or any extenuating circumstances. These thrust the already poor into extreme poverty, exploitation and endless debt traps. Cash transfer and basic income programmes from around the world show evidence of people being able to invest in better housing, healthcare, education and savings, reducing their reliance on credit and accessing further training or education, entrepreneurship, asset building or more decent work.
A basic income proposal usually draws two criticisms. First, that beneficiaries will no longer have incentive to participate in the labour market. Second, that giving cash in the hands of the poor will lead to misuse on alcohol and drugs. But basic income pilots around the world have shown that an unconditional cash transfer has no negative effects on people’s desire to work. Even in the SEWA and WorkFREE pilots, many women have been able to negotiate themselves out of exploitative daily wage work and invest in small businesses. As for substance abuse, a meta review of data from around the world by Nobel Prize laureate Abhijit Banerjee and colleagues found that it in fact reduced among cash transfer recipients. Clearly, poverty is a cause of, rather than an inhibitor for, substance abuse among the poor.
Automation, unemployment, climate crises, pandemics, declining female labour force participation and growing inequality are among the crises that make people, especially the underserved and marginalised, more vulnerable. UBI and better government services are perhaps the best way to provide control, benefits and freedom to the poorest and weakest sections.
This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
Fresh from casually dancing and singing with the Bee Gees offstage at the Whitehouse during Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s State visit to the US (true story!), Australian of the Year Taryn Brumfitt hit the stage at the National Press Club in Canberra to give us all a sobering message about body image.
“I have never met anyone who’s learned to embrace their body and regretted the decision to do so,” she told the packed room in a televised Women in Media address.
Moving onto a powerful lesson about the importance not judging the health of someone by looking at their body, Taryn told the audience about her late brother, Jason.
“I want to share a rather personal, painful example of how I know this not to be true. My brother was charismatic, charming and incredibly funny. He had the potential to do so much, and he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.
“When he lived in Queensland, he was randomly approached by one of the team from the movie The Thin Red Line and was asked to be Sean Penn’s movie double, which of course he jumped at the chance. I don’t want to make it about appearance, but the girls did think Jason was a good looker!
“Now, if I put Jason here, and then a man in a larger body next to him, and ask 100 people who they thought was healthier out of the two men, all 100 people would have said Jason. And yet, Jason was a heroin addict, who died from his addiction, on a park bench in Sydney across from Central Station.”
She reiterated: “You just don’t know what’s going on in someone’s life, and you most definitely can’t judge someone’s health by their appearance.”
Moving on, Taryn recalled the incident 10 years ago in which she “…shared a before-and-after image of my body that sent the internet into a spin and lit the spark behind what would become my career and sole focus for the next decade.”
In that time Taryn believes we’ve made progress on body image – but still have a long way to go. She says while some commentators believe the topic is passé, nothing could be further from the truth.
“Body image issues among young people are the worst they’ve ever been. Since the start of the pandemic, rates of body image distress and eating disorders in young people have doubled.
“A 2013 Deloitte Access Economics study, found that the total socioeconomic cost of eating disorders was $69.7 billion annually, not to mention the immeasurable personal costs,” she told the Press Club audience.
Australian of the Year, Taryn Brumfitt, addresses the National Press Club. Photo: Hilary Wardhaugh
Taryn has been working to get evidence-based resources on body image to thousands of young people across the country.
However, she says one of the most important places children receive messages is at home: “I’m absolutely convinced that if we do not do the work as individuals and professionals to change our own internalised beliefs and behaviours around bodies, it will be another decade before we see any meaningful, lasting change.
“If you’re a parent, role model or caregiver to a young person – the most powerful thing you can do is to stop saying anything negative about your body or appearance—or anyone else’s—in front of your kids,” she said.
In her typical authentic style, Taryn declared that just like the rest of us, she’s had moments when “the wheels have fallen off.” But in the end, these experiences have driven her forward.
“In my teens my family was rocked by the suicide of my uncle, I’m still devastated every day to have lost my brother Jason when he was just 27 years old, and I was left absolutely broken when my 19-year marriage ended several years ago.
“I’ve had the full human experience, some real highs and lows, but out of all of the life-changing moments, there’s been nothing more profound than when I decided to stop hating my body, and learned how to appreciate and embrace it instead,” she said.
(Editor’s note: Hear! Hear!)
At one stage, Taryn said she despaired at her supposedly “broken” post-children body. And even considered plastic surgery. But slowly it dawned on her that this would send the wrong message to her young daughter, Mikaela.
“I had this thought: ‘How am I going to teach my daughter to embrace her body if I change mine?’ So, I cancelled the scheduled surgery.”
Explaining this revelation further, Taryn said: “I realised that I didn’t want to move my body to punish it, I wanted to move it for the pleasure of being alive. I learnt that I wanted to nourish my body with foods that fuel me and give me energy.”
Circling back to the moment when she shared the non-traditional “after” photo of her larger body online – and how it sent the internet and media into an international frenzy – Taryn told the Press Club audience thousands of people then wrote to her about their own body image despair.
“It was at that moment that I fully understood the scale of this issue,” she said.
Turning to statistics, Taryn painted a sobering picture of the way Australians view their bodies: “Ninety one percent of women want a different body to the one they have. For our youth – we are experiencing a paediatric health emergency.
“Seventy seven percent of Australian adolescents experience body image distress, which is actually higher than the global average. Rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, eating disorders and steroid use related to body dissatisfaction are soaring.
“We know that young people with poor body image are 24 times more likely to develop depression and anxiety. One in ten adolescent boys and one in three girls meet the criteria for eating disorders. And the issues are presenting at younger and younger ages. We now have the data that shows that 37 percent of three-year-olds want a different body to the one they have.
“And there is elevated risk for body image concerns, among trans, non-binary, gender diverse, and sexual minority young people,” she said.
Taryn urged the audience not to comment on the bodies of others – for any reason: “If we normalise this type of judgement, our young ones will go on to think that their bodies should be subject to public scrutiny. It’s harmful, unhelpful and quite simply, none of our business!”
Her last tip was to stop blaming social media for body image issues, and harness it for good instead.
“Let’s encourage a more empowered approach to social media, for us and our kids. Just like in real life, let’s be discerning about who you let in the door, use your power to support the things that help us feel good, and unfollow the things that don’t.”
As a joking aside, Taryn urged us all to insist on more cat and dog videos in our social media feeds (as opposed to ogling at and comparing ourselves to people’s bodies).
When it comes to the media, Taryn suggested we “…show images of people that are as diverse in appearance as we see in the world…And let’s stop talking about weight and ‘obesity’ and start talking about health.”
“Life is fleeting. Don’t waste it being at war with your body, and please don’t set the young ones in your life up for a lifetime of the same,” she concluded.
Find out more about Taryn’s work with body image research and advocacy group The Embrace Collective here. Watch the Embrace films on Netflix.
Picture at top: Australian of the Year, Taryn Brumfitt, addresses the National Press Club. Photo: Hilary Wardhaugh
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This blog post was first published by The Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA), the leading organization representing researchers, academics, and students in the fields of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies in Australia. Read the original here.
Feminist research is increasingly intersectional, yet the way in which intersecting aspects of identity – like gender, race, and sexuality – are experienced in secret institutions is less understood. It’s also multiply problematic, with challenges layered and obscured by the lack of transparency.
Over the last three years, my colleague Professor Susan Harris Rimmer and I have spent time researching the impact and experiences of diverse groups in the intelligence sector. Spanning a broad spectrum of institutions, the intelligence community (IC) is at the forefront of everything from tactical and strategic intelligence to criminal intelligence, domestic and international intelligence, civilian and military intelligence, and strategic assessments on political, economic and social threats to security. Think: spies and analysts, counterterrorism, espionage, and foreign interference.
Secret institutions like in the IC both replicate challenges in other forms of government and the private sector while (re)producing unique constraining environments minoritized groups.
Yet, the intelligence sector is not the only one experiencing these same trends. Broader national security institutions or general government agencies can often be highly secretive and obscured by layers of classification, as can religious institutions, secret societies, and cults.
There are a few compounding factors when it comes to understanding women and minoritized groups’ representation and experiences, not to mention impact, in secret institutions. From our study of the IC, mechanisms such as security classifications can create an environment of obscurity and non-transparency, where even non-classified information may be withheld from the public gaze. This contributes to a classification halo-effect which limits what is and can be known about people’s experiences in intelligence – from recruitment to retention, leadership and representation, harassment, power, resourcing and more.
It can also take decades for data to declassify and even then, some parts can remain classified. Moreover, the gendered rules and experiences of intelligence were seldom written down – so declassification may not reveal much if data and experiences were not documented. Challenges in sourcing accurate and timely data therefore skews our understanding of how diverse people experience secret institutions, favouring historical analyses, one-off biographies, and the odd popular work of fiction that does little to help institutions know what is and is not working.
How this lack of transparency ultimately impacts organisations and individuals is threefold: it can amplify inequalities; obscure progress and regression; and impede accountability.
It can also ultimately impact on organisational operability, and in the case of the IC and national security institutions at least, result in critical vulnerabilities stemming from an inability to understand and create diverse, inclusive, and strong teams. These impacts include everything from narrow threat detection and threat analysis gaps to excessive groupthink, not to mention high ‘churn’ rates and loss of retention which ultimately costs organisations and fails to support individuals.
Australia’s new Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill provides one way to think about the impact transparency can have on reducing inequalities. Honing in on the issue of the gender pay gap, the Amendment is designed to allow the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to publish the gender pay gaps of organisations over 100 staff in size.
Transparency is seen to encourage better accountability to employers and stakeholders, as well as potentially promoting competition between employers to improve their workplace conditions relative to their peers. It also helps individuals know what they are signing up for when they join an organisation or industry.
Another way to think about (a lack of) transparency is its impact on research: what is – and can be – known about diversity in these sectors. Methodologies for researching the IC for instance are not well-established, mostly relying on decades-old datasets, biographical accounts (where available), and ‘insiders’ who can give insights to the true state of affairs. Insider accounts can be particularly beneficial for research.
Yet, they remain challenging to achieve in practice due to ethical approval processes (which may be additionally demanding, particularly in researching national security institutions), high levels of secrecy, a lack of transparency, the prevalence of backlash, and a lack of whistleblower protections. Depending on the secret institution in question, there may be additional barriers that impede understanding, and therefore action around problematic trends. This can be an aim of some secret institutions in itself – to cover up, obfuscate, and ultimately remain unchanged.
Ultimately, government in particular requires a social license to operate. In Australia, this relies on accountability and transparency to establish and maintain trust between institutions and constituents. As Professor Susan Harris Rimmer and I argue in our research, these institutions often have access to huge resources, hold significant and very special privileges, immunities, and duties under the law, and carry significant status in state societies.
Whilst I remain hopeful that institutions take it upon themselves to revisit just how much – or how little – is known about diversity in secret institutions, it is also critical that citizens and constituents advocate for their own right to know. Gone are the days of operating in a black box. Understanding, researching and building practices and policies for diversity is critical across all institutions – secret or not.
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This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
As a kid I was fortunate to travel widely, and I saw the devastation of the natural beauty of the world across many countries. Now, a little older, I am a student in environmental management, and I want my voice to make a difference. Questions I ask myself every day include: How do we make sure that we do not repeat harmful patterns of the past and become good ancestors for the future generations? How do we work with communities, and organisations, across sectors and with nature? How do we truly listen to what nature is trying to tell us and reconnect with it?
I believe that women’s voices must be heard if we are to keep our planet alive for myself and for future generations. That is why I joined the Women’s Climate Congress (WCC), a not-for-profit organisation run by passionate women, dedicated to making the changes needed to bring about climate security and ongoing care for life on Earth for current and future generations, which are expressed in the inspiring WCC Charter for Change. And that is why I wanted to share some insights from the WCC’s recent Women’s Climate Conversation online – ‘The old world and the new: Women’s leadership journeys in a changing climate’.
The conversation explored Action 1 of the Charter: ‘Embrace gender-balanced inclusive governance’, and was moderated by climate emergency strategist and WCC Steering Circle member Cheryl Durrant. The guest speakers brought diverse experiences of women’s leadership and climate action – Dr Gabrielle Kuiper, energy sustainability and climate change professional and former adviser to Julia Gillard, and Willow Berzin, Chief Assembler, the Coalition of Everyone.
As highlighted by the speakers, leadership, as we know it, has been associated with competitive, commanding and controlling ‘masculine’ behavior. Yet if we talk about ‘women’s ‘leadership, it is often described as more inclusive, collaborative, compassionate and intuitive. Therefore, most of what we think of as leadership is incomplete. As a society, we have to unlearn things that no longer serve us and relearn, remembering our true nature of curiosity, creativity and leaning into the unknown.
As Willow Berzin beautifully articulated, there is a need for balance between “the Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine…”.
It’s rare to hear discussion of Spirit, but I believe it is important to include love and compassion in any discussion of leadership.
Willow added “Women’s leadership is about being together and working together, and part of it is showing up to conversations [like WCC’s circle conversations], empowering and connecting with one another”.
In her discussion Dr Gabrielle Kuiper noted that “Empathy is important, but not without strategy” – in today’s challenging times, it is essential to develop a unique leadership style that combines the best of both worlds and serves for the greater good of all. This idea was reinforced by Willow Berzin, who reminded us that we have all the tools at hand to tackle the climate crisis and it is vital to combine hope and action to make the change we are seeking. Questions to ponder on include:
What are your unique talents and strengths? How can you amplify them and bring them to the world?
What are your values?
Who can be on your personal board of directors to support your success?
How can you maximize your time for greater impact?
How can you be of service to this time? How are you useful? How do you find your role in this?
Dr Kuiper said that in her view it is possible to observe a pattern of fear and greed in politics, with power and money becoming addictive to the people in power, regardless of their political persuasion. Those notions aren’t serving us anymore, and we have to have systems in place to make space for new emerging leaders, but we also need systems in place to promote inclusive governance and to protect them from power addiction. She suggested several steps:
By following this approach we can create a more inclusive governance structure that embraces diversity, fosters new leadership, and allows for fresh perspectives and ideas to thrive.
Listening to this, I agreed with the WCC proposal that to achieve inclusion and diversity, women’s leadership is urgently needed to redress the historical and systemic imbalance and lead change to promote these new approaches.
I am inspired that the WCC Charter for Change calls for immediate actions, including quotas, co-chairs and women’s caucuses to support gender-balance and support access to the policy agenda.
Building on ideas of unlearning, inclusion and what we are afraid of, Willow Berzin noted that “we need a better game” and she referred to the concept of ‘Game B’ as the new normal which we are bringing into being as we live through the dying remains of how things were (‘Game A’). The WCC Charter for Change feels like one expression of Game B.
Gabrielle told us a quote from Martin Luther King Jnr, which eloquently describes my main takeaways from this thought-provoking conversation:
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anaemic.
“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love”.
You can watch or listen to the recording of the whole online conversation here.
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By Shailendra Bahadur Singh in Suva
Conflict and insufficient social cohesion are the biggest challenges in Fiji, and all and any efforts to mitigate and address this situation are laudable.
The research literature posits that while news media can exacerbate social and political conflicts through their reporting styles and focus, they also have the potential to alleviate tense situations by adopting conducive, conflict resolution methodologies.
The Conflict-Sensitive Reporting Manual for Fijian Journalists includes guidelines to approach and report conflicts in a responsible manner by, among other things, conducting the requisite research, and avoiding unnecessarily inflammatory tones.
Dialogue Fiji is the most active civil society in the “social cohesion” space and besides this manual, it published the proceedings of its first symposium on social cohesion in 2017 entitled Ethnic Relations in Fiji: Threats and Opportunities.
The book, which I co-edited with Dialogue Fiji executive director Nilesh Lal, not only highlighted the challenges of social cohesion in Fiji, but also the reservoir of goodwill in our communities, despite everything that we have been through together.
More than 50 years after independence we are still struggling with social cohesion, not the least because it is a complex problem given our context, with no overnight solutions.
The problem requires commitment from every sector of our nation, the news media being no exception.
National media’s contribution
In this regard, conflict-sensitive reporting can be seen as the national media’s contribution to social cohesion and nation-building.
To understand how conflict-sensitive reporting can contribute positively, we first need to look at the media-conflict dynamic, that is, how media conventionally report conflicts.
According to critics, most violent conflicts are “rooted in resource or land disputes, but fought with strong references to ethnic, cultural, and religious identities”.
The news media tend to focus on the manifestations of conflict, such as the tensions, violence, and damage, rather than the root causes, or possible solutions to any disputes. This lopsided approach risks feeding prejudices and fueling misconceptions.
Conflict-sensitive reporting, on the other hand, takes a nuanced approach to the coverage of conflicts, in that it does not regard conflict as run-of-the mill, daily news reporting round, but something that needs extra care and attention.
Conflict-sensitive reporting is an informed and considered approach, based on a commitment to understanding the roots of a conflict and reporting in an in-depth and circumspect manner.
The idea is to not only “do no harm” but report stories with the aim of facilitating solutions to conflict.
Fair and balanced?
It should be pointed that conflict-sensitive reporting is an idea that is not fully accepted in the news media fraternity, which has traditionally espoused reporting the “facts” in a fair and balanced manner. But what is “fair”, “balanced” and “objective” is in itself heavily debated in the news media sector.
As a university journalism programme, we at the University of the South Pacific are open to researching and experimenting with new and innovative concepts like conflict-sensitive reporting.
The framework has been designed for developing countries with multiethnic communities at greater risk of conflict, than societies with greater ethnic homogeneity.
Such countries are highly susceptible to movement towards civil conflict and/or repressive rule. If this sounds familiar, it is because “civil conflict and repressive rule” have been very much part of our existence in Fiji.
Fiji, mired in ethnic tensions and political differences culminating in four coups fits the description of “fragile” or “vulnerable” societies”.
Media have described Fiji’s coups as “short-lived”, “clean-up-campaign” or “coup-to-end all coups.”
This terminology is regrettable because it grossly underestimates the lingering, sustained, pervasive and long-term damage of our coup culture.
Infrastructure deficit
For example, research published by professors Biman Prasad and Paresh Narayan in 2008 indicates a 20-year infrastructure deficit of $3.4 billion partly due to instability.
Likewise, Professor Wadan Narsey in his 2013 article estimates that by 2011, Fiji had lost $1700 million because of the 2006 coup alone.
This included $400 million in government revenue, which could have been used in education, health, infrastructure and public debt repayments.
Because of just a few deaths due to the four coups in Fiji, media often describe these upheavals as “bloodless coups”.
However, in social and economic terms, the coups caused a bloodbath.
The expression “death by a thousand cuts” comes to mind. We do not feel the pain immediately because after the initial shock, there are smaller aftershocks that we feel and absorb over the course of years and decades.
In time, these repeated blows add up to inflict deeper wounds that are more difficult to heal, but we adjust to the pain, normalise it, and learn to live with our situation, especially the poor and disadvantaged, who face the brunt of it.
Low life expectancy
In Fiji these wounds are manifest in the lack of services, dilapidated infrastructure, low life expectancy, lack of opportunities, low employment and high crime, brain drain, and so forth.
Fiji gives meaning to renowned author Paul Collier’s words: “Wars and coups are not tea parties: they are development in reverse”.
Some of the key underlying causes of our lack of progress are the lack of social cohesion and national unity, which equal unrealised potential.
Since the 1980s there has been idle talk of turning Fiji into a Singapore, and more recently, political chatter about Fiji surpassing Australia and New Zealand
In my opinion, this is a pipe dream unless and until we get social cohesion right, learn to resolve our differences without guns, and move together as a united force.
This requires leadership and vision from the government, support and selflessness from citizens and professionalism and responsibility from the news media, with regards to taking it on themselves to understand the national context, and tailor their coverage accordingly
This is an edited version of Associate Professor Shailendra Bahadur Singh’s launch address for Dialogue Fiji’s Conflict Sensitive Reporting Manual for Fijian Journalists on 8 August 2023 at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. It was also published in The Fiji Times.
“The sense of otherness is there ALL the time – everyday. I sometimes feel it very acutely. And I don’t think that shifts with time or experience…. The sense of otherness is always there.”
This is what one senior woman leader told Intersection and Chief Executive Women during our research into the experiences of culturally and racially diverse women in leadership in corporate Australia.
Her reflections were common.
Almost everyone we interviewed relayed their experience of discrimination, barriers, and racism resulting from the way leaders and peers reacted to their colour, accent, name, cultural practices, their dress or hair reflective of their culture or race or their different career trajectories.
They told us they felt the constant need to adapt and fit in with western models of leadership. All this in addition to the barriers they face as women in the workplace.
Yet our research points squarely to the fact that, while the discussion of gender in the workplace is advancing, race is rarely mentioned, and racism remains a taboo word.
“They almost don’t care what the women look like – but I do, as we’re just replacing old white men with slightly younger White women.”
Australian workplaces are well behind international counterparts and need to get serious about cultural and racial diversity.
If we do not explicitly address structural inequality, we will inevitably make these worse. We need to understand the intersectional differences that all of us experience and how they have been used to create inequalities between us. We all have a cultural and racial identity. If we fail to recognise how these shape our lives, and how they disadvantage some of us, the benefits of gender equality initiatives will flow largely to White women. Certainly, that is what the data shows. It is the same with class, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, and (dis)ability.
If we are to make progress, we need to have honest and open conversations about who we are.
Yet, for many of the women leaders we spoke to, this was the first time in their career that they had been asked to reflect on how their gender and race may have impacted their career trajectories. Our conversations revealed that race was hardly ever discussed in the workplace.
Most of the women we spoke to considered that now is the time to change up the conversation and talk about gender AND race in corporate Australia.
To have an effective conversation, we need to be able to name the issues. But the language we use in Australia, most often, “cultural and linguistical diversity”, is neither accurate nor sufficient.
The language of ‘diversity’ is problematic, bringing with it a comparison to an invisible norm that remains unscrutinised or uncritiqued. Just as most cis men are able to walk through life rarely thinking about their sex or gender, Whiteness is generally an invisible characteristic, and White people are rarely asked to consider how their race has privileged their careers. In our report we wanted to name this privilege. The language of Whiteness sometimes makes White people uncomfortable or defensive, but that is exactly why it is important to name it.
It is good to see the Australian Government is working on the weaknesses in our terminology and data collection. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency is working to assist workplaces to capture consistent diversity demographic information and the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Giles, has committed the Government to improving data collection on race, culture, and ethnicity more broadly.
Our research revealed some pathways forward for Australian workplaces. Put simply they come down to good leadership and active allyship.
Our interviewees spoke of the critical importance of sponsors, mentors and the need for leaders to provide access to networks. High potential women are often over-mentored and under-sponsored, compared to men, but it is sponsorship – the act of advocating for people who may not otherwise have access to leadership – that is the most effective.
Many of the leaders we spoke to in our research were conscious they were carrying the ‘cultural load’ of raising awareness of race and addressing issues of racism in their workplaces. Sometimes this was seen as rewarding, but it was often also exhausting and difficult. Many of the women we spoke to told us how important it is when White colleagues step in as allies.
Leaders can help staff build the courage and space to be effective allies by demonstrating this behaviour, while recognising and rewarding others who do the same. Leaders should communicate their expectation that staff should support their colleagues and that it is safe for them to do so.
Leaders cast a long shadow on workplace cultures, and often it is difficult for them to receive genuine feedback on their impact. We call on leaders to engage in deliberate self-reflection about cultural assumptions and biases, acknowledge mistakes, and commit to self-improvement.
They must make sure there is always space for people to talk about their different experiences, and to create safe working environments for everyone. These conversations will not help, however, if people do not feel safe to raise these issues. As one senior woman leader told us:
“Fortunately, I’m at leadership level where I’m like: here I am! But it’s taken me probably until the role before this one where I could – I still remember almost feeling like I could just exhale and let my shoulders down and I was just like… I’m going to be me. But it took a lot. I had to be quite senior before I felt that way. And even to this day, there’s still stuff I need to be a little mindful of, depending on my audience.”
The need to feel safe applies to culturally and racially diverse women as well as to White colleagues. Leaders need to assess their organisation’s culture, set goals and measure progress. And they need to take action in response.
The next step is to take a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to dealing with difference in our workplaces. We must recognise how gender and race intersect, along with all the multiple other facets of our identities, to create different lived experiences in the workplace for each of us.
“Having more diversity will attract more diversity. There is something in numbers.”
Few policies will be able to encompass the differences between us all. This is why it is a matter of leadership and of allyship, of engaging with all our colleagues, making sure our workplaces are welcoming for us all and holding ourselves and each other to account.
Please note: photo at top is a stock image
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The nation’s largest coffee brand joined the ranks of companies pledging to increase diversity in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Starbucks set a goal of 30% people of color at all corporate jobs and 40% in every retail and manufacturing role by 2025.
Two years later, the company’s own workforce demographic reports show there is still much progress to be made: Less than half of all roles reported by the company had reached the goal by 2022.
Black representation was particularly low. From 2020 to 2022, Starbucks’ own numbers show no change among baristas and shift supervisors and less than 1 percentage point improvement among store managers. Starbucks reported only a 1-point gain for regional vice presidents, the top retail position.
Coffee has been entangled with issues of racism since the 18th century, when colonizers established coffee plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere that depended on slave labor. And today, a majority of coffee is still grown and harvested internationally by low-income people of color.
The U.S. coffee business is disproportionately White. From the trade business to boardrooms and baristas behind the counter, people of color can be hard to find, said Phyllis Johnson, founder of the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity.
“When you look at a consuming country, oftentimes, what you see is such a small representation of what coffee is,” Johnson said. “A lot of the opportunities are gatekept.”
Starbucks and Caribou Coffee worker demographics were about on par with the rest of the country in recent years, according to diversity statistics all federal contractors must file and that became public for the first time in the spring following a yearslong legal battle by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
For every one Black Starbucks worker in 2021, there were six White employees, and the Minnesota-based chain Caribou Coffee reported the same 1-to-6 ratio in 2020. Despite being headquartered in the multicultural San Francisco Bay area, Peet’s Coffee was less diverse: employing eight White workers for every one Black employee in 2019, the latest numbers available for that company from the federal data.
About half of Peet’s Coffee’s workers identified as a racial minority as of June, said Mary O’Connell, head of communications at the company, higher than their 36% share among all U.S. jobs but far lower than the 71% non-White population of the East Bay’s Alameda County, where both the original Peet’s and its current corporate offices are located.
Starbucks is on track to reach its goal by 2025 and will continue to publish annual updates, said Danielle Winslow, social impact communications manager for the company. She said that its employees – Starbucks calls them “partners” – are at the center of the company and that it prioritizes creating opportunities for minority partners.
“At Starbucks, our goals around inclusion and diversity are not simply metrics – it’s a mindset,” she said.
Caribou Coffee did not respond to requests for comment.
Keith Hawkins, who is Black, founded the Color of Coffee Collective in 2021 to combat issues of diversity and equity in specialty coffee. Before that, the U.S. Army veteran spent years working at a local coffee shop and later almost two years at Starbucks, where he said he repeatedly watched as White co-workers with less experience were promoted ahead of him.
“Regardless of what I knew, regardless of how much I poured into the industry,” Hawkins said, “I came to the real realization that most of these companies only wanted certain people, specifically blond hair and blue-eyed White men, to represent them when it came to spaces of negotiating deals.”
A current Starbucks employee, who asked to be identified only by her first name, said she has not seen any improvement in recent years. Sunny has been a barista at multiple Starbucks locations in Texas for a decade. In that time, she said she abandoned her ambitions of being promoted to shift supervisor or store manager after repeatedly being passed over.
“At the beginning of me signing on, they told me … that we’re a company that is really big in promoting from within,” she said. “I am living proof that that’s not true.”
What diversity exists in the coffee industry tends to congregate in lower-level, lower-wage positions. Typically, the disparities grow wider up the corporate ladder.
“The problem exists in decision-making roles and opportunities,” Johnson said.
This is a chronic problem across corporate America, where White men hold a disproportionate number of executive positions.
The Starbucks C-Suite breaks some from this trend: There were 12 Starbucks executives of color out of 45 in 2021, six of them Black. Although women outnumber men almost 3 to 1 among service workers, like baristas, their representation is half that amid executives, and 21 of the 27 women in the C-Suite are White.
At Peet’s Coffee’s in 2019, 82 executives were White; just 13 were people of color, including three Black executives. Caribou Coffee reported one Black executive in 2020 and no women of color, out of 15 total.
And at Starbucks, a close-up look shows the improvements at corporate offices were mixed for Black employees: More were hired into employee roles and the number of vice presidents almost doubled to match the American workforce, but figures for managers, directors and senior VPs remained virtually unchanged between 2020 and 2022.
A Dig Insights survey of about 300 coffee workers across the country shows the fallout from a lack of promotion opportunities: Less than half of respondents who were Black, Indigenous or people of color said they would recommend working in the industry.
“It’s incredibly hard to make the leap from barista to a salaried position with a livable wage,” said one of the respondents. “These positions are sometimes gatekept by certification and training that is unaffordable by the common barista. I just hope for a better future with more opportunities.”
Smaller coffee shops don’t show up in the statistics, but Porttia Portis, who has worked in coffee for just over a decade in almost exclusively management roles at local cafes, said she has faced discrimination there from not just bosses, but customers.
“More often than not, people did not want to believe that I was the manager,” said Portis, who is Black. “Everyone in the room could tell a customer that I was the most knowledgeable person, that I was the manager, and they would look me dead in my face and be like, ‘I want to talk to someone else,’ ” Portis said.
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Many baristas will migrate from retailers such as Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee to local cafes in hopes of finding a better environment, Portis said. What they often find instead, she said, are small operations whose ambitions to scale up leave them mirroring the mindsets of their larger competitors.
“A lot of the mentality stays the same throughout the industry, regardless of the shop size,” Portis said. “And I think on a smaller level, you find that there’s a lot more disparity because there’s a lot less checks and balances. Whereas on the larger levels, you’re going to have more DEI programs or diversity initiatives. Whether it’s to meet a quota or not, there’s at least something that exists there.”
Charles Umeano said he has even tried changing cities, moving from coffee shops in Atlanta to New York and Boston. Yet he said he kept running into the same issues as Portis and others.
“I’ve watched a lot of very talented baristas of color decide that they don’t want to deal with this anymore,” said Umeano, who is currently looking for a job in coffee outside of retail. “In fact, a lot of them are questioning why I’m still here.”
Amid the unrest three years ago, many companies made similar promises in 2020 to increase diversity. But Hawkins said many of those vows to change proved to be more performative than productive.
When a shop near him posted an advertisement on social media calling for volunteers for an online conversation about minority representation in coffee, Hawkins, who has extensive industry experience, responded.
“And then they sent me a message back saying, ‘We’ll let you know,’ ” he said. “I waited for about six months. … I DM’d and said, ‘Hey, are you still having this conversation?’ And it was crickets.”
After calls for change peaked in 2020, Portis said she believed minorities working in coffee were left worse off.
“ ‘Performative’ isn’t even a strong enough word to some degree,” she said.
“As soon as the hype died down, then (there) was a lot of resistance,” Portis added. “Once people started getting hired again, it was just a lot of resentment of, ‘You got hired because you’re the diversity hire, and I really don’t believe that you’re qualified for this job.’
“Whereas before, you could at least expect if you did get hired, you knew you were getting hired because you were qualified.”
Johnson is more optimistic about the industry’s potential for improvement.
“I think the thing that will ensure that it continues and gets better is that their customers must demand it; their customers must hold them accountable,” Johnson said. “And sometimes, better can mean becoming more aware.”
Because the coffee industry is an intimate and relationship-driven space, Umeano said hiring tends to be based on who you know or other areas rife with implicit biases. But for their own success, he said, coffee shops stand to benefit from more diverse hiring practices.
Companies with more diversity in race and gender tend to outperform those that are more homogenous, which includes reporting additional revenue, according to recent studies.
“I think a lot of times, people look at diversity as you’re doing a solid to people of color, and I don’t really think that’s the mentality,” Umeano said. “In any situation, you want different heads in the room for creative solutions.”
This article was published in collaboration with USA TODAY.
‘The Opportunities Are Gatekept’: Coffee Shops Continue to Fall Short on Diversity is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
In her new novel, Untethered, debut author Ayesha Inoon, who is now based in Canberra, shares with readers an incredibly intimate portrait of a young Sri Lankan woman who immigrates with her husband to Australia. Here, Ayesha speaks with BroadAgenda writer, Jesse Blakers, about the book.
Untethered is a story about the complex experience of immigration but it’s also about a young woman who faces and overcomes great obstacles to find a stronger, freer version of herself. The protagonist Zia has a very sheltered and comfortable life in Sri Lanka, however she is restricted from pursuing her dreams of travel and higher education. She agrees to an arranged marriage as she knows that is what is expected of her.
In Australia she faces homesickness, isolation and poverty, however she also discovers there’s a certain freedom in being in a new country away from the cultural boundaries she’s always known.
The novel follows Zia’s journey of self-discovery, the grief of her losses and the joy of her newfound hopes and dreams.
It wasn’t so much a blending, as of drawing on my emotional experiences of immigration and navigating life in a new country to create the fictional stories of Zia and Rashid. In some ways it was easy, because I had my knowledge and experience of living in Sri Lanka, of Sri Lankan Muslim culture and life as a new immigrant in Australia.
This sometimes meant it was difficult to have distance from my characters. The initial draft was written in first person. Rewriting in third person helped give me some distance and perspective.
The pitching process was long, and sometimes disheartening. I tried to be objective about it and not take it personally when I received a rejection. There are so many factors that influence whether a book gets picked up or not, and I realised I could do little to control that beyond making sure my novel was in its best possible shape, and my submissions were well presented.
Needless to say I was thrilled to win the ASA/HQ prize and the journey from there to publication has been a dream. The team at HQ/HarperCollins have been amazingly supportive and I’ve loved working with them to launch my book into the world.
I didn’t expect the enormous amount of work that goes into producing a book – from the editing and proofreading to the cover design and marketing, there is so much that goes on behind the scenes to get books onto shelves!
I wanted to explore how gendered expectations can limit individual freedom of choice and the ability to be true to yourself.
Zia is expected to be submissive, to accept the choices of her parents in terms of what would be best for her life and to then be a ‘good wife’ to Rashid by supporting his choices. Rashid is expected to be the breadwinner and to know what is best for both himself and Zia.
We see both of them rebel against these expectations at various stages of the novel – Zia in wanting to study or work and Rashid in struggling with the fact that all the responsibility for their lives lie on him. And yet they are so confined by societal rules that they are unable to voice their true desires to each other or see how things could be different. I wanted to portray how difficult it can be to step away from such expectations and the strength it would take for someone like Zia to break free of them to follow her own path.
Cover of “Untethered.”
We all need the love and support of good friends to make it through difficult times, and I wanted Zia to have these relationships as she navigated life as a new wife and mother in Sri Lanka and then as an immigrant in Australia. In Sri Lanka, these friends are girls she grew up with and they find comfort in their shared experiences.
Her friendship with Jenny in Australia is especially poignant because although they have hardly anything in common, they enjoy each other’s company and build a strong friendship which becomes one of Zia’s foundations in Australia. Zia’s faith also evolves as she goes through her journey yet remains a constant source of comfort and strength.
It was challenging, because Zia, like many women, wanted very much to be a mother. I think there’s generations of women who were taught that this was their primary role in life and that all other ambitions were secondary, if at all. For Zia, this conditioning meant that she felt she couldn’t have more than one purpose.
Still, as you say, she never sees motherhood as a substitute because although it fulfils that desire, there are other deep needs which remain unmet, and she is left brimming with all this potential that she’s not able to express or pursue.
I would love for readers to see that Zia’s sense of purpose and her freedom, eventually came from within herself. At the beginning of the novel, she complies with all that is expected of her, believing the love and approval of her family and Rashid to be her reward, despite her secret yearnings for more out of life.
As the story progresses, Zia finds the courage to break free of her constraints and reach for independence. Although that comes at the cost of irrevocable losses, that is part of her journey, building her resilience and giving her a greater capacity to hold both the sorrows and joys of her new life.
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A new central office and an council representing historically underrepresented groups should be set up by the federal government to oversee diversity in STEM initiatives, according to the draft recommendations from the Pathway to Diversity in STEM Review. The proposed office within an existing department would work to coordinate government diversity in STEM policies in…
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In a single academic year, political and judicial leaders have escalated their anti-democratic, anti-educational movement aimed at dismantling higher education’s focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), initiating a furiously paced rejection of racial, sexual and ethnic diversity — as well as basic humanity. Multiple states have instituted curricular gag orders through “divisive concept”…
Industry minister Ed Husic says the independent review of federally funded programs designed to encourage women into science and technology professions will make for “uncomfortable” reading when it is released later this year. As new research reveals the representation of women in the STEM workforce remains stubbornly low at 15 per cent, Mr Husic said…
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There has been a sharp increase in public resistance and backlash to the advancement of LGBTIQ+ inclusion and equality recently. The UK charity Stonewall reports that LGBTIQ+ recorded hate crimes in the UK have increased in recent years, and in Australia, there has been a large uptick in anti-LGBTIQ+ related events.
Sports have become a flashpoint for these issues, too. Globally, international sports federations have introduced bans to exclude trans and gender diverse athletes from sporting competitions.
FIFA even banned teams and players from wearing the “one love” armband. The armbands were to be worn by players in the men’s World Cup in 2022 to protest against the treatment of LGBTIQ+ people in Qatar, where it is illegal to be gay.
Sports have a long history of exclusion and discrimination towards LGBTIQ+ people. In Australia, around 75% of LGBTIQ+ people have experienced or witnessed homophobia in sport.
Professional athletes such as Megan Schutt and Moana Hope have spoken out against discrimination of LGBTIQ+ athletes.
However, efforts have been made to address problems within the sporting world
around homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Organisations like Proud2Play, of which the author of this piece is a co-founder, and Pride Cup aim to increase the visibility of LGBTIQ+ athletes. Celebrations such as pride rounds and games across sporting codes show targeted diversity work.
LGBTIQ+ representation and diversity across sports is important because research shows that young people, in particular, need role models and to see themselves both represented and celebrated.
There is still a lot of work to do across the Australian sporting world, though, and this work must be prioritised through appropriate funding and targeted action.
With increased activity and visibility of LGBTIQ+ inclusion efforts, however, comes increased resistance from people and organisations who believe that LGBTIQ+ people are a threat to modern society. This resistance and activism against the advancement of LGBTIQ+ equality has been termed “heteroactivism”.
Heteroactivism was coined by queer scholars Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash. It is defined as “a term to conceptualise oppositions to LGBTIQ+ equalities, in ways that seek to assert a particular form of heteronormative sexual and gender order”.
It is a framework which positions heterosexuality and gender normativity (being cisgender) as superior, and the foundation of functioning western civilisation. Christianity is central to heteroactivism, with roots in the US Christian right.
In Australian sport, heteroactivism has been bubbling away for many years.
Sports have become a key platform to mobilise and advance resistance to LGBTIQ+ equality. Some Australian sports organisations have banned transgender women from participating in elite competitions.
Bills have also been drafted in parliament to “save women’s sport”, seeking to limit and exclude trans and gender diverse people from participating in both elite and community competitions.
Heteroactivism has a history in Australian sports. Both NRL player Israel Folau and tennis star Margaret Court are high-profile heteroactivists, using their platforms in sports to vilify LGBTIQ+ people.
More recently, players from a variety of sporting codes have refused to participate in pride rounds and wear pride jerseys.
Often, arguments against supporting LGBTIQ+ inclusion efforts centre around LGBTIQ+ identities being at odds or going against a player’s religion. Court even once stated that transgender children were the work of the devil.
Manly pride jersey saga has NRL walking a fine line to prove it really ‘is for everyone’ https://t.co/i917IhaBAp
— ABC SPORT (@abcsport) July 26, 2022
The impact of ongoing heteroactivism in sport is profound, and has been very successful in halting progress for LGBTIQ+ people in that world.
Ongoing efforts to resist advances in LGBTIQ+ equality in sports have included:
For example, one group, Binary Australia, sent over 2,700 emails to Football Australia, protesting the inclusion of transgender football players in NSW.
The targeted and coordinated activism directed at sports organisations stops administrators from enacting LGBTIQ+ inclusive policies and practices. It silences them in speaking out in support of LGBTIQ+ people. It makes LGBTIQ+ inclusion too difficult to engage with in comparison with other areas. It becomes too political or “not worth the pushback”.
The mental health implications for LGBTIQ+ people are significant, too. Research shows
that ongoing discrimination can lead to poor mental health, increased anxiety and depression and dropping out of sports.
Administrators in sports have an opportunity to stand up to and address growing resistance to LGBTIQ+ equality. This can happen through policy development, anti-vilification efforts and, more importantly, demonstrating support for LGBTIQ+ achievements and contributions in sport.
By allowing heteroactivism to be mobilised through the medium of sports, administrators continue to alienate LGBTIQ+ players, fans and employees.
There are both opportunities and challenges for the Australian sporting world and how it responds to heteroactivism. Australia can be a world leader in efforts to improve outcomes for LGBTIQ+ people and make meaningful steps forward in the fight against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, ensuring LGBTIQ+ people are represented and included across all levels of sports.
Picture at top: Proud2Play
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The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to wipe out affirmative action in higher education any day now. If the erasure of a decades-old precedent occurs, the crucial question will be: How to bolster diversity on college campuses without the help of race-conscious policies? Universities will have to be creative, experts say, and consider approaches that will have an outsized impact on marginalized…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“This isn’t just about exporting existing structures and systems into outer space, but new possibilities and new futures for all”. When asked why diversity in the space sector matters, this answer summed up the key message at Australia’s Diversity at the Frontier: Gender Equality in Space Conference held in April this year.
There is a misperception that the space sector is a niche field concerned primarily with rocket launches and astronauts and not deeply grounded in what we do here on Earth. In reality, space and space technologies are everywhere.
From the use of satellites for communications, GPS technology, the internet, business transactions and even climate monitoring, to space innovations converted for earthly purposes such as artificial limbs, memory foam and PCs, we all interact with space and use space technologies on a daily basis.
The data is clear. Women represent only one in five space sector workers, and almost 90% of all astronauts have been men.
Even though women have demonstrated biological and psychological advantages when it comes to space travel, they remain side-lined. What’s more, the false narrative that working in the space sector requires a background in STEM discourages employees from more female-dominated humanities and non-STEM industries from even considering a career in space.
The challenges faced by other historically excluded groups are duplicated, with those from First Nations, culturally and linguistically diverse, lower socio-economic status and gender and sexual minority backgrounds even more underrepresented in the sector.
Yet, diversity matters because space missions and space technologies are expensive and entail risks that we cannot fully comprehend. Quality decision-making is critical to the longevity of both the sector and humankind, but this is not possible without a ‘gendered’ lens or inclusion of diverse perspectives.
In 2019, NASA had to cancel its all-female spacewalk due to a shortage of spacesuits on board to fit women. If a leading space organisation like NASA – which has a range of diverse programs aimed at improving representation of historically underrepresented groups – struggled with something as simple as uniforms and equipment for their female astronauts, what else is being overlooked?
A future with more historically excluded groups in the picture looks infinitely brighter. After all, it seems unlikely that, had more women been involved in planning the failed spacewalk, the same critical gaffe would have occurred. We know from research in space and adjacent industries that diversity results in more innovative and inclusive teams, increases productivity, and reduces groupthink.
Sending more women and historically excluded people to space or part of the sector expands our understandings of how space affects diverse bodies and allows for the development of space technologies and their potential applications across myriad contexts on Earth.
At the heart of the Conference lay a recognition that, to change humanity’s trajectory in space, rectify past imbalances, and maximise the benefits of space and space technologies, a more diverse workforce and approach to space is crucial.
The Diversity at the Frontier: Gender Equality in Space Conference was held in April 2023, convened by Dr Elise Stephenson, Dr Cassandra Steer and Prof Meredith Nash, and hosted by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) and ANU InSpace. This breakthrough conference brought together experts and practitioners, policymakers, and the next generation of the space workforce to ask the hard-hitting questions and to reinforce the critical gaps for marginalised groups and individuals in the space sector.
Covering everything from the problematic language surrounding the space sector (space is often talked about being for all “mankind” rather than “humankind” and “colonising” is common language when talking about “settling” new planets), to historically excluded groups’ experiences in the sector, the conference looked to industry and government to pave the way forward.
While some initiatives have begun to address pockets of inequality, like women in space initiatives, mentoring and leadership programs, an intersectional approach is crucial to recognize the cross-cutting ways in which gender, sexuality, culture, ethnicity and other human demographic factors impact on those in the space sector.
Pluralising the workforce will lead to significant gains and mitigate major risks to the future viability of the space industry such as stifled innovation, poor staff attraction and retention, and reputational damage.
Elise Stephenson of GIWL peaking at the conference. Picture: Supplied
Research undertaken at the Conference highlighted that employees in Australia’s space sector see leadership as the number one priority for diversity, belonging, inclusion, and equity in the sector, whilst the ‘lack of political will to enact change’ is seen as the biggest barrier to overcoming diversity issues. This presents tangible opportunities for the sector to make a difference and there is no time like the present for individual organisations to lead by example. Those who are quickest to embody diversity and inclusion (D&I) will likely have the best access to talent and obtain tremendous advantages.
That said, there are still many inevitable challenges left unsolved in this field – including pockets of resistance and backlash. Further research, plus policy development, is needed, particularly to support the large contingent of small and medium sized enterprises in the space sector which lack the resources to do this themselves. Key recommendations from the Conference included the need for:
1. More research on representation and experiences of diversity in the space sector.
2. Leadership commitments, policy development and practical changes in the space industry to support historically excluded groups’ participation and experiences.
3. Formal and informal strategies, ranging from equitable parental policies, leave policies, promotions/hiring policies, to the support of informal networks.
4. Funding, procurement and sponsorship assessment criteria across the sector that prioritises action on D&I and recognises demonstrable improvements on a regular basis.
Australia’s emerging space security institutions and rapidly growing industry provide an unprecedented opportunity to influence the future direction of the sector. ‘Now’ matters, as we have the best chance to embed diversity and equality from the ground up.
Read the full Diversity at the Frontier: Gender Equality in Space Conference insights here.
The post Diversity and Inclusion in Space: What can we do? appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
A new edition of the Okinawan Journal of Island Studies features social justice island activism, including a case study of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre, in what the editors say brings a sense of “urgency” in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion in scholarship.
In the editorial, the co-editors — Tiara R. Na’puti, Marina Karides, Ayano Ginoza, Evangelia Papoutsaki — describe this special issue of the journal as being guided by feminist methods of collaboration.
They say their call for research on social justice island activism has brought forth an issue that centres on the perspectives of Indigenous islanders and women.
“Our collection contains disciplinary and interdisciplinary research papers, a range of contributions in our forum section (essays, curated conversations, reflection pieces, and photo essays), and book reviews centred on island activist events and activities organised locally, nationally, or globally,” the editorial says.
“We are particularly pleased with our forum section; its development offers alternative forms of scholarship that combine elements of research, activism, and reflection.
“Our editorial objective has been to make visible diverse approaches for conceptualising island activisms as a category of analysis.
‘Complexity and nuance’
“The selections of writing here offer complexity and nuance as to how activism shapes and is shaped by island eco-cultures and islanders’ lives.”
The co-editors argue that “activisms encompass multiple ways that people engage in social change, including art, poetry, photographs, spoken word, language revitalisation, education, farming, building, cultural events, protests, and other activities locally and through larger networks or movements”.
Thus this edition of OJIS brings together island activisms that “inform, negotiate, and resist geopolitical designations” often applied to them.
Geographically, the islands featured in papers include Papua New Guinea, Prince Edward Island, and the island groups of Kanaky, Okinawa, and Fiji.
Among the articles, Meghan Forsyth’s ‘La langue vient de la musique’: Acadian song, language transmission, and cultural sustainability on Prince Edward Island engagingly examines the “sonic activism” of the Francophone community in Canada’s Prince Edward Island.
“Also focused on visibility and access, David Robie’s article ‘Voice of the Voiceless’: The Pacific Media Centre as a case study of academic and research advocacy and activism substantiates the need for bringing forward journalistic attention to the Pacific,” says the editorial.
Dr Robie emphasises the need for critical and social justice perspectives in addressing the socio-political struggles in Fiji and environmental justice in the Pacific broadly, say the co-editors.
In the article My words have power: The role of Yuri women in addressing sorcery violence in Simbu province of Papua New Guinea, Dick Witne Bomai shares the progress of the Yuri Alaiku Kuikane Association (YAKA) in advocacy and peacebuilding.
In ‘La Pause Décoloniale’: Women decolonising Kanaky one episode at a time, Anaïs Duong-Pedica, “provides a discussion of French settler colonialism and the challenges around formal decolonisation processes in Kanaky”.
Inclusive feminist thinking
The article engages with “women’s political activism and collaborative practice” of the podcast and radio show La Pause Décoloniale.
The co-editors say the edition’s forum section is a result of “inclusive feminist thinking to make space for a range of approaches combining scholarship and activism”.
They comment that the “abundance of submissions to this section demonstrates the desire for academic outlets that stray from traditional models of scholarship”.
“Feminist and Indigenous scholar-activists seem especially inclined towards alternative avenues for expressing and sharing their research,” the coeditors add.
Eight books are reviewed, including New Zealand’s Peace Action: Struggles for a Decolonised and Demilitarised Oceania and East Asia, edited by Valerie Morse.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
ANALYSIS: By Richard Shaw, Massey University
When New Zealand’s opposition National Party’s transport spokesperson, Simeon Brown, questioned the logic of bilingual traffic signs, he seemed to echo his leader Christopher Luxon’s earlier misgivings about the now prevalent use of te reo Māori in government departments.
Genuine concern or political signalling in an election year? After all, Luxon himself has expressed interest in learning te reo, and also encouraged its use when he was CEO of Air New Zealand.
He even sought to trademark “Kia Ora” as the title of the airline’s in-flight magazine.
And for his part, Brown has no problem with Māori place names on road signs. His concern is that important messaging about safety or directions should be readily understood. “Signs need to be clear,” he said.
“We all speak English, and they should be in English.” Adding more words, he believes, is simply confusing.
It’s important to take Brown at his word, then, with a new selection of proposed bilingual signs now out for public consultation. Given the National Party’s enthusiastic embrace of AI to generate pre-election advertising imagery, one obvious place to start is with ChatGPT, which tells us:
Bilingual traffic signs, which display information in two or more languages, are generally not considered a driver hazard. In fact, bilingual signage is often implemented to improve safety and ensure that drivers of different language backgrounds can understand and follow the traffic regulations.
ChatGPT also suggests that by providing information about speed limits, directions and warnings, bilingual traffic signs “accommodate diverse communities and promote road safety for all drivers”.
‘They should be in English’: National to ditch te reo Māori traffic signs https://t.co/7FGYyQDrPu
— RNZ News (@rnz_news) May 26, 2023
Safety and culture
With mounting concern over AI’s potential existential threat to human survival, however, it’s probably best we don’t take the bot’s word for it.
Fortunately, government transport agency Waka Kotahi has already examined the use of bilingual traffic signs in 19 countries across the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Its 2021 report states:
The use of bilingual traffic signage is common around the world and considered “standard” in the European Union. Culture, safety and commerce appear to be the primary impetuses behind bilingual signage.
Given Brown’s explicit preference for the use of English, it’s instructive that in the UK itself, the Welsh, Ulster Scots and Scots Gaelic languages appear alongside English on road signs in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
More to the point, on the basis of the evidence it reviewed, Waka Kotahi concluded that — providing other important design considerations are attended to — bilingual traffic signs can both improve safety and respond to cultural aspirations:
In regions of Aotearoa New Zealand where people of Māori descent are over-represented in vehicle crash statistics, or where they represent a large proportion of the local population, bilingual traffic signage may impart benefits in terms of reducing harm on our road network.
‘One people’
Politically, however, the problem with a debate over bilingual road signs is that it quickly becomes another skirmish in the culture wars — echoing the common catchcry of those opposed to greater biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand: “We are one people”.
It’s a loaded phrase, originally attributed to the Crown’s representative Lieutenant Governor William Hobson, who supposedly said “he iwi tahi tātou” (we are one people) at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.
Whether or not he said any such thing is up for debate. William Colenso, who was at Waitangi on the day and who reported Hobson’s words, thought he had.
But Colenso’s account was published 50 years after the events in question (and just nine years before he died aged 89).
Either way, the assertion has since come to be favoured by those to whom the notion of cultural homogeneity appeals. It’s a common response to the increasing public visibility of te ao Māori (the Māori world).
But being “one people” means other things become singular too: one law, one science, one language, one system. In other words, a non-Māori system, the one many of us take for granted as simply the way things are.
Any suggestion that system might incorporate or coexist with aspects of other systems — indeed might benefit from them — tends to come up against the kind of resistance we see to such things as bilingual road signs.
Fretful sleepers
The discomfort many New Zealanders still feel with the use of te reo Māori in public settings brings to mind Bill Pearson’s famous 1952 essay, Fretful Sleepers.
In it, Pearson reflects on the anxiety that can seep unbidden into the lives of those who would like to live in a “wishfully untroubled world”, but who nonetheless sense things are not quite right out here on the margins of the globe.
Pearson lived in a very different New Zealand. But he had his finger on the same fear and defensiveness that can cause people to fret about the little things (like bilingual signs) when there are so many more consequential things to disrupt our sleep.
Anyway, Simeon Brown and his fellow fretful sleepers appear to be on the wrong side of history. Evidence suggests most New Zealanders would like to see more te reo Māori in their lives, not less.
Two-thirds would like te reo taught as a core subject in primary schools, and 56 percent think “signage should be in both te reo Māori and English”.
If the experience in other parts of the world is anything to go by, bilingual signage will be just another milestone on the road a majority seem happy to be on.
Dr Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Stan Grant, host of ABC’s Q+A, announced last Friday that he would be stepping away from his role for an unspecified period. Grant cited a need to take ‘a break from the media’ after receiving threats and racial abuse following his participation in the ABC’s coverage of the coronation of King Charles.
The abuse directed at Grant has been described by ABC news Chief Justin Stevens as a ‘relentless campaign’ prosecuted via social media trolls, but ultimately one directed by News Corp commentators’ intent on skewering Grant—and the ABC—for foregrounding the role of the monarchy and colonialism in violence committed against Indigenous Australians.
However, in announcing his decision, Grant indicated his primary reason for leaving was not the threats and abuse. Rather, he highlighted the lack of support he had received from others at the ABC—calling it an ‘institutional failure’—as well as a failure of the media overall to foster respectful discussion of important issues.
In recent years interest in news has fallen and more Australians are saying they avoid it. According to the Digital News Report: Australia 2022 – which both authors of this article worked on – those saying they often, sometimes, or occasionally avoid news increased from 57% in 2017 to 68% in 2022.
When asked why they avoided it, the top reasons given were that there was too much coverage of subjects like politics or coronavirus (49%) and that it had a negative effect on their mood (44%).
Notably, women are turning away from the news, citing exhaustion from its relentless negativity as a major cause.
So, what is the media’s role in this? Is Grant correct, that Australia’s news media are fostering a toxic space for public debate?
“I am down but I will get back up. And you can come at me again and I will meet you with the love of my people.” Stan Grant delivers a powerful message on Q+A before taking a break from the media. #StanGrant #QandA #WeStandWithStan pic.twitter.com/avNBJtzSMK
— QandA (@QandA) May 22, 2023
Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers have found that journalist’s news values, combined with underlying racism and a colonial mindset, contribute to the negative portrayal of Indigenous people and issues. Most insidious is the framing and reinforcement of First Nations peoples as the cause of the conflict and division on which journalists report. This negativity feeds into the newsroom.
Our research suggests that Grant is not the only journalist of the view that there are institutional problems with gender and race in the news industry. As outlined in the Valuing Diversity in News and Newsrooms report published by the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, 87% of journalists we surveyed said the industry needed to improve diversity ‘somewhat’ or ‘a great deal’.
Less than a third (30%) said their news organisation had enough ethnic or cultural diversity, and less than half (49%) said everyone at their news organisation was treated equally regardless of their ethnic and cultural background.
Among those journalists who identified as non-Anglo, non-European or Indigenous Australian, 39% said they had experienced discrimination in their newsroom because of their ethnic or cultural background. A further 58% and 69% respectively said there were barriers to employment and advancement because of their ethnic or cultural background.
But importantly, journalists also say that discrimination is still a problem widely faced by women. Among women journalists, 47% said they had experienced discrimination, 27% said there were barriers when applying for a job, and 58% said there were barriers to progressing in their career because of their gender.
Women were also more acutely aware of the intersectional nature of discrimination. Most women journalists acknowledged there were barriers to employment (68%) and advancement (65%) because of someone’s ethnic or cultural background, compared to less than half of men (32% employment; 41% advancement).
In both surveys and interviews, journalists pointed out that they felt more likely to experience discrimination if their senior leadership was not particularly diverse. As one interviewee noted, the feeling of not being listened to in majority white newsrooms was common for reporters from multicultural backgrounds.
Women journalists also told us they felt pressure to let things slide. News organisations often foster a competitive and fast-paced workplace culture that pays little heed to gender or cultural sensitivities. The pressure to beat deadlines while performing the model ideal of ‘disinterested observer’ is often at odds with a culture that respects difference. Journalists are expected to ‘put up and shut up’ rather than speak out.
Stan Grant has made the bold decision to speak out at a pivotal time in the national conversation.
In doing so, he is bringing broader attention to the lack of inclusivity that women and people of colour face while working in journalism—a fact that many in the public may not be particularly aware of.
As we move towards The Voice referendum the Australian media industry has reasons to reflect on its own role in undermining the very cause it champions, through employment strategies and taken-for granted news values and routines.
The post Stan Grant shows up a lack of media diversity appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
ANALYSIS: By Bronwyn Carlson, Macquarie University; Faith Valencia-Forrester, Griffith University; Madi Day, Macquarie University, and Susan Forde, Griffith University
Stan Grant, a well-known Aboriginal journalist and soon-to-be former host of Q+A, has made a stand against racist abuse, saying he is “stepping away” from the media industry. Grant said he has paid a heavy price for being a journalist and has been a media target for racism.
As authors of a recent Media Diversity Australia report investigating online abuse and safety of diverse journalists, we’re not surprised.
Grant was one the few diverse journalists employed in the Australian media industry. Yet his story of relentless racial abuse is one shared by other journalists who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, culturally and racially marginalised, LGBTQIA+ and/or living with disability.
Grant said:
I want no part of it. I want to find a place of grace far from the stench of the media. I want to go where I am not reminded of the social media sewer.
ABC management has finally condemned the racist abuse directed at Stan Grant and apologised to him, but it has come far too late.
ABC staff have taken matters into their own hands, walking out in support of Grant.
“Leadership is coming from the bottom.”https://t.co/9hJuZc3ikT
— The Conversation (@ConversationEDU) May 22, 2023
Racism across the media
The latest round of racially motivated abuse came after Grant hosted the ABC’s coverage of the coronation of King Charles.
Grant said:
Since the King’s coronation, I have seen people in the media lie and distort my words. They have tried to depict me as hate filled. They have accused me of maligning Australia.
When Elizabeth II died, many Indigenous journalists and newsreaders were targeted for not sharing the same grief many non-Indigenous people expressed. Narelda Jacobs was one of many Aboriginal journalists who received abuse across social media and was also targeted by mainstream media.
Grant called the ABC’s lack of support an “institutional failure”, saying:
I am writing this because no-one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support.
In response to Grant’s column, a statement was issued from the ABC’s Director News, Justin Stevens, conceding Grant has, over many months, been subject to grotesque racist abuse, including threats to his safety.
The ABC’s Bonner Committee has recommended a full review into the ABC’s responses to racism affecting staff and how they can better support their staff.
— NITV (@NITV) May 21, 2023
What our research found
Our report, Online Safety of Diverse Journalists, commissioned by Media Diversity Australia and released this month, focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, culturally and racially marginalised, LGBTQIA+ and/or people living with disability.
This new research followed a 2022 Media Diversity Australia report, Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories 2.0, which detailed significant under-representation of diverse journalists in the industry, particularly Indigenous people and those from culturally and racially marginalised groups.
Our new report focused more on online safety and the high cost for diverse journalists who are often not supported or protected in the workplace. It found 85 percent of participants had experienced either personal or professional abuse online.
As one participant said:
It’s so ingrained within all parts of society, all the pillars within society, all professions, which includes the media, and I think women, particularly women of colour and from Indigenous backgrounds, they receive the most horrific and vile abuse.
The report has not yet gained interest from the Australian media other than Fourth Estate which expressed alarm at the findings.
This week an important and timely discussion of the abuse diverse journalists are experiencing for just doing their job. @BronwynCarlson @faithvalencia takes us through the latest report from @MediaDiverseAU https://t.co/uSCX8D1khO
— Fourth Estate (@fourthestateau) May 19, 2023
One of the key findings from this research was that diverse journalists often accepted that online harassment and abuse from the public was “just part of the job”. Many reported they were working in what they considered “hostile work environments”.
One participant expressed:
As soon as you say you are a journalist, the response is: you are asking for it.
It was concerning to find the normalisation of online harassment and abuse, and many diverse journalists were reluctant to report their experiences for fear of being considered a problem. Many felt if they raised the issue it would impact any chance of career progression.
A participant commented:
I am cautious revealing my struggles because I don’t want people to think I can’t handle my job.
In his recent experience, Grant said:
Aboriginal people learn to tough it out. That’s the price of survival.
Organisations have a duty of care to their employees. Online harassment and abuse of diverse journalists is a work health and safety issue and needs to be urgently treated as such.
The impact and cost to diverse journalists is high, and many make the same choice as Grant — to leave the industry to protect themselves and their health. Many spoke about how harassment and abuse was not only online; 39 percent reported the abuse moved offline.
The racist attacks on Stan Grant are sickening and sad. All of us in the media must play our part in helping quell the stench of the sewer. I am so sorry Stan. @walkleys https://t.co/TfUANxk3Ny
— Shona Martyn (@ShonaMartyn) May 19, 2023
When it comes to thinking about who gets to tell Australian stories or who gets to have a career as a journalist free of harassment and abuse, the Media Diversity Australia report evidences the hostility of the media industry for those who are not white, able bodied, and/or cis-gender and/or heterosexual.
The report also shows, as Grant points out, that online harassment and abuse actively and incessantly targets Indigenous journalists. Although many of the participants stated they were unofficially warned by their workplace to expect online violence, they said they received little support to protect and defend them from racial harassment and abuse.
I started to see exactly what I’d been warned about (…) But there was no mechanism to flag that to say that you had received a racist email to send it somewhere where that person could be put on a watch list or whatever it is, you know, where they’re going to become a serial offender.
Grant echoes the experiences of many participants when he says:
Barely a week goes by when I am not racially targeted.
The research report also reveals that workplace and online harassment in media industry involves fairly predictable culprits. As one participant highlighted, they come from a similar demographic — white men.
Grant’s resignation is a huge loss to Australian journalism. He and other diverse journalists nationally are crying out for action on the part of media bodies and organisations.
There are many other diverse journalists who have left the profession prior to Grant’s departure. One of our interviewees contacted us to say:
If a serious and well respected journalist feels the best thing to do is leave and has had no support from work — what does that mean for the rest of us?
Let’s hope the media industry is finally paying attention.
Bronwyn Carlson, professor, Indigenous Studies and director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, Macquarie University; Faith Valencia-Forrester, lecturer and lawyer, Griffith University; Madi Day, lecturer, Department of Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, and Susan Forde, director, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
As the only woman on a 10-person sales team at Dell Inc., Marsha Cipollone said she was pushed down and pushed out while less-experienced men were handed the plum accounts.
Cipollone said she was denied the training and support her male colleagues received and was set up to fail. She was fired in 2017 and sued, alleging discrimination, according to court records. She said she settled with the company in 2018.
That same year, the U.S. Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office also documented systemic inequality at the company, finding that women and Black employees earned less than men and White workers in similar positions.
“Dell has very much typically been a White guy company,” Cipollone said.
But exactly how diverse Dell is – how many women and people of color it employs at all levels of the organization and how that stacks up against other companies – remains obscured.
When the federal government released a historic data set last month detailing employee diversity at more than 19,000 of its contractors, Dell was one of more than 4,000 companies missing because they objected to the release. And the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office – the same one that found inequality at Dell – has so far allowed the objectors to keep their diversity data secret.
USA TODAY and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting compared the new diversity data with federal contractors receiving at least a billion dollars in contracts in 2020, according to federal spending records. A majority of those companies were left out of the data release, indicating they objected, despite accounting for more than $180 billion in federal spending in 2020. That includes at least a dozen companies – collectively reaping more than $100 billion – that paid to settle Labor Department findings of job discrimination over the last decade.
Companies that receive taxpayer-funded contracts are supposed to be held to a higher standard, and they’re subject to audits by the Labor Department office charged with making sure contractors provide equal employment opportunities.
Dell agreed to pay nearly $10 million in back wages after repeated government findings of discrimination. The company called itself a “leader in pay equity and inclusion” and retained its status as a major federal contractor, with at least $2 billion in federal contracts to Dell or its subsidiaries in 2020 alone.
Dell didn’t respond directly to questions about why it objected to releasing its diversity numbers. The company pointed instead to its own curated diversity report, which says its “people leaders” are 72% male and 71% White and doesn’t include the standardized data that would allow it to be compared to similar companies, such as Apple, HP, IBM or Intel, which didn’t object. “We believe in fair treatment in the workplace, regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation or religion,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Unlike subjective reports that can be manipulated to present a rosier picture of diversity, the data that federal contractors are required to submit to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows the actual numbers of employees broken down by race and gender, for broad job categories like executives, professionals and service workers. The numbers allow for standardized comparison. They also show, for example, how many women of color are employed at different levels of a company, which many companies leave out of their customized reports.
Until recently, most companies didn’t share standardized numbers with the public. Some companies say the job categories on the reports are too broad or misleading, and their annual diversity reports better reflect their workforce. Others are reluctant to be cast in a negative light or invite litigation.
In 2019, when Reveal sued the government for diversity data submitted by a group of tech companies, some argued they’d be vulnerable to rivals learning sensitive information or luring away their diverse talent. A federal judge disagreed, ruling that the diversity reports known as EEO-1s are not confidential business information. The Labor Department released those tech company records but has chosen not to apply that ruling to requests for more data. Several of those companies, including fitness company Fitbit and software company DocuSign, no longer object to the data’s release. Others, such as PayPal, initially fought the data release but now share the annual reports publicly.
Last month, in response to more requests and a lawsuit from Reveal, the department released five years of diversity data from companies that didn’t object. An analysis of the data by USA TODAY found that federal contractors are failing to live up to the promise of equal opportunity, with White men dominating their executive ranks. Companies that did not fight public disclosure include defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing, which ranked among the highest recipients of federal contract dollars in 2020, as well as familiar names like Moderna, Pfizer, A&E Television Network and Sherwin-Williams.
Equal Employment Opportunity: Who Rises to the Top?
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Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Labor Department spokesperson Edwin Nieves said the agency hasn’t allowed any companies to opt out of providing their EEO-1 numbers. Instead, Nieves said the department is required to give all contractors a chance to object and is withholding their data while evaluating those objections. Reveal is still pushing in court for the release of all contractors’ data.
While the government gave contractors repeated opportunities to object over several months, lawyers warned companies to object or face the potentially brand-damaging consequences of transparency.
Lawyers advising contractors on meeting government anti-discrimination requirements are often focused on minimum compliance, not transforming company culture, said Mary-Frances Winters, CEO of The Winters Group, which provides diversity consulting to companies.
And company lawyers often don’t want to reveal anything that could put the company at risk. That can pit the diversity team against the legal team, Winters said.
“We fight with lawyers all the time,” Winters said. “The DEI office is saying, ‘Let’s be transparent,’ because for them, it’s about, where are the opportunities to be better? The legal people, while they’re not necessarily against that, they’re saying, ‘Let’s not share our weaknesses.’ ”
As they gobble government money, big federal contractors are at different points on their diversity and transparency journey. Some, such as engineering and construction company Bechtel and health care company McKesson, didn’t respond to any questions. Government services contractor Amentum said it would disclose EEO-1 data at some point: “Target date is unknown,” a spokesperson said. And the pharmaceutical company Merck objected because the company considers those numbers confidential and not representative of the firm’s diversity efforts, said spokesperson Bob Josephson. But when asked about its objection, the company provided Reveal all five years of data anyway.
Lockheed Martin’s data would have shown how many people of color the company employed at different levels back in 2017 and 2018, when the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office found the defense contractor had discriminated against Asian, Black and Latino or Hispanic job seekers. But Lockheed objected to the Labor Department’s release.
In 2020, Lockheed denied wrongdoing and expressed its commitment to diversity, but agreed to pay $700,000 and hire 34 of the rejected applicants.
In an emailed statement, the company noted that it posted its 2021 EEO-1 report online and that “our commitment to diversity and inclusion is a business imperative, helping to drive our innovation and global leadership.” Lockheed was awarded more than $51 billion in federal contracts in 2020, the biggest dollar figure to any single company.
A Lockheed spokesperson didn’t explain why the company objected.
Washington D.C.- based consulting firm called Chemonics International blocked releasing its own diversity data because it considers that confidential commercial information, said Chemonics spokesperson Martha James.
“Furthermore, we don’t frame our diversity, equity and inclusion strategy or measure our progress through the lens of EEO-1 data, which lacks the additional variables and context that allow us to fully analyze our workforce data,” James said in an email.
The company launched a diversity effort in 2017 after a Labor Department audit flagged a time when the firm rejected every single one of 124 Black applicants for entry-level professional jobs. Chemonics agreed to pay $482,000 to the rejected job seekers and to hire eight of them. James said the company has been in compliance with anti-discrimination regulations ever since.
Chemonics claims some progress: Its first diversity report says its ranks of people of color increased from 36% in 2017 to 40% in 2021, without a detailed breakdown. How many Black people does Chemonics employ and at what level in the company? The proof would be in EEO-1 numbers Chemonics wouldn’t disclose.
Cipollone, the former Dell employee who sued for discrimination, said she didn’t see a lot of diversity there, so she’s not surprised Dell objected to releasing its numbers. But she thinks all companies should come clean and face the consequences.
“It’s not 2000 anymore. It’s 2023,” she said. “You’re just going to have to take the hit for it and you’re going to have to get on board with everybody else.”
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY. Jessica Guynn contributed reporting.
This story was edited by Kate Howard and Doug Caruso and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Will Evans can be reached at wevans@revealnews.org, Jayme Fraser can be reached at jfraser@gannett.com, and Jessica Guynn at jguynn@usatoday.com. Follow Evans and Fraser on Twitter: @willCIR and @JaymeKFraser.
After History of Discrimination, These Federal Contractors Fought to Hide Diversity Data is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Each year, thousands of companies land lucrative federal contracts, producing COVID-19 vaccines, manufacturing missile defense systems or serving hot meals.
But taking a slice of the hundreds of billions the U.S. government spends each year on goods and services comes with strings.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order holding federal contractors to a higher standard than other employers in ensuring that Black Americans and people of color have equal opportunities in hiring, training and promotions.
Nearly six decades later, an analysis by USA TODAY of new data on federal contractors obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows those firms are not living up to that commitment. Records were available for 19,000 companies, including 10,000 with data as recent as 2020.
Deep racial divides cut through the workforces of federal contractors, which employ 1 in 5 American workers.
While the employee ranks in these companies have diversified, the top jobs that command the best pay and benefits have not, mirroring the private sector at large.
White men dominate the executive ranks, holding 59% of those positions in 2020. They are the only demographic group that holds a higher proportion of top positions than of all other jobs, where 34% are White men.
People of color are largely missing from the top assignments. A small fraction of executives are Black or Hispanic, and an even smaller number are women of color. Instead, they are concentrated at the lower levels of organizations in roles such as administrative assistants, technicians and laborers.
Even at companies where women and people of color hold management jobs at rates near their workforce participation, it does not translate into advancement into the C-Suite.
Equal Employment Opportunity: Who Rises to the Top?
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Source: U.S. Department of Labor
While White male executives could almost fill Houston’s football stadium twice, Black female executives would fit into a few sideline sections. They hold roughly 1.7% of the top jobs at these companies.
The second-widest representation gap is among Latinas or Hispanic women, with about 1.5% of executive positions. Asian women hold around 2% of executive roles.
The fallout can be measured in stagnating income levels and widening wealth gaps as women of color face powerful headwinds when they try to rise above middle management.
The USA TODAY and Reveal findings suggest federal contractors are not meeting their contractual obligation to combat historic patterns of discrimination and the federal government is doing too little to ensure they abide by the letter and spirit of the law, said J. Edward Kellough, professor of public administration and policy at the University of Georgia.
“Federal contractors are doing work for our government and it’s being funded by our government,” he said. “The government is supported by all the people, so their workforce ought to reflect all the people.”
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., whose office has conducted a corporate diversity survey of America’s largest companies since 2010, says the findings reveal “an abysmal record among federal contractors who have largely failed to improve and promote diversity at the highest levels of their organizations.”
“This clearly demonstrates why Congress must do more to ensure all federal contractors that receive federal dollars can show data-backed progress in training, hiring, and promoting diverse candidates at all levels, especially executive leadership positions,” he said in an emailed statement.
Corporations tout their commitment to a diverse workforce in glossy reports filled with photographs of smiling employees of all races. But for years they resisted disclosing their actual numbers of people of color and women they employ.
That began to change after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Under pressure from investors and employees, more companies opened themselves up to public scrutiny by voluntarily sharing the forms they are required to submit each year with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Federal contractors are not only charged with opening up opportunities, but they also must submit proof through the EEO-1 forms that include the race, ethnicity and gender of employees broken down by job category.
Until now, the government shielded that information from public view. It took a yearslong legal battle by Reveal to pry the information loose.
Last week, the Labor Department released data on more than 19,000 federal contractors employing as many as 19 million people. Thousands more have objected and their information remains in limbo pending further litigation.
About 4,000 companies had contracts in both 2016 and 2020. Two-thirds did not show improved diversity at the top in those five years; overall, the percentage of White executives dropped only about 2 percentage points.
There was some progress: The ranks of women of color as executives at those companies grew 30%, from about 4,800 to about 6,200.
At that rate, however, it will take more than 50 years for women of color to occupy as many spots in the C-Suite as they do behind cash registers and in cubicles.
Take ABM Industries, a facility services company employing more than 100,000 people, which scored $15 million in federal contracts in 2020. Of 460 executives, 78% were White, while White people held just over a fifth – 21% – of other jobs.
Ninety-one percent of executives at debt collector GC Services were White in 2020, but White people accounted for about a third of its 7,000 workers. The company was awarded more than $478 million in federal contracts.
Like any other employer, federal contractors can’t discriminate based on race or gender. But as recipients of federal money, they have to go further than that under the standard set by Johnson: They are required to actively open doors for women, people of color, people with disabilities and veterans.
They must develop affirmative action plans to show how they will accomplish that. Federal contractors also can be audited by the Labor Department. Sometimes the department uses the type of demographic data released last week to support its investigations.
The NAACP and Communication Workers of America recently used EEO-1 data to highlight racial disparities at Maximus, a call center provider whose annual federal contracts exploded from $371 million in 2016 to $1.9 billion last year, in part because of the pandemic. The company had posted its 2021 EEO-1 report in response to shareholder pressure, according to the groups’ report.
The groups found that Black women and Latinas make up almost half of the lowest-ranking workers at the company, but only 5% of executives.
Daija Arrington, a 27-year-old mother of two, works for Maximus from her home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, answering emails that people write to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking about COVID-19 and vaccines. After nine years in customer service, three of them at Maximus, she’s trying to climb the ladder to management.
“I have the experience and I have the heart and I have the knowledge,” she said, “and loving the place I was working, I wanted to move up in the company.”
When she applied for Maximus supervisor positions several times, Arrington said she either heard nothing or was rejected without an explanation. She’s working on an online degree in business administration, hoping that will improve her chances.
Statistically, she faces an uphill battle: Most of her own supervisors have been White.
Arrington, who is Black, said she can’t help but think, “Nothing’s changed.” Calling out the company on disparities between leadership and other employees is important, she said: “It’s important to me because I deserve a seat at the table.”
Maximus’ vice president of public relations, Eileen Cassidy Rivera, said the company is routinely audited by the government for its hiring practices and has passed every time.
“Maximus is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we continue to make significant progress with our long-term commitment to build a strong and diverse workforce,” Rivera said in an emailed statement. “Maximus has an established career path for all contact center employees that we regularly promote with our program and teams.”
Maximus does not appear in the data released by the federal government, and Rivera did not directly respond to questions about why the company objected to disclosure.
Diversity researchers say racial inequality can derail careers.
In 2017, Althea Woodson, a 27-year veteran Black engineer, sued Boeing because she said younger White male co-workers were given more opportunities to advance within the organization.
The case settled out of court in 2019 for undisclosed terms.
The company receives more than $20 billion a year in federal contracts. In 2020, 79% of its executives were White, a dramatic improvement from 89% five years earlier.
Representatives from Boeing declined to comment on the company’s employment records.
Homogeneity at the top also puts corporations at a disadvantage. As the nation grows more diverse, studies show greater diversity on leadership teams improves financial performance and increases innovation.
Ron Williams, the former Aetna CEO whose first job was washing cars on Chicago’s south side in the dead of winter, says corporations must cast a wider net and apply a broader lens to the executive skill set.
“People have lots of capabilities to learn and to do great things if given the opportunity,” said Williams, who is among a small number of Black leaders to have run a Fortune 500 company. “To judge people by where they came from and to judge people by what they are currently doing is a disservice to them and a disservice to the organization.”
Inequities can persist even after promotions. In 2017, a young female consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton sued her former employer, accusing it of gender discrimination.
After moving up to a management role, Raena Dhuy says she discovered all of her female subordinates were paid substantially less than their male counterparts. And she herself was vastly underpaid, she said.
Booz Allen Hamilton denied the accusation and settled the case out of court.
Booz Allen Hamilton and its related consulting companies were paid more than $5 billion by federal agencies in 2020. That year, more than a quarter of executives were women, all of them White.
“Our business requires a diverse workforce that respects and champions inclusive thought, experiences, and backgrounds,” spokesperson Jessica Klenk wrote, noting the company has set specific goals for increasing diversity among senior leaders. “We remain committed to building and empowering diverse talent within our workforce and in our communities.”
Dhuy said she cannot discuss details of her case because she signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of the settlement. But she said Americans should expect top federal contractors like the firm to pay their employees equitably.
“People give up their lives because they work so many hours and dedicate so much of their time to these companies,” Dhuy said. “I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be treated equally both in pay and in general respect.”
Savannah Kuchar contributed reporting.
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY.
People of Color Were Promised Equal Opportunity. Federal Contractors Are Failing. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Executives at companies that receive billions of dollars in federal contracts were less likely to reflect America’s diversity than their employees, according to a first-ever analysis by USA TODAY and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Some have been sued for workplace discrimination.
In 2020, 21 companies each were paid more than $3 billion by the federal government, including defense contracting giants like Lockheed Martin and pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, one of the pioneers of the COVID-19 vaccine.
People of color were underrepresented among executives at these corporations compared with the rest of their workforce, the analysis showed. And women were less likely than men to break into top ranks, particularly those of color. Such disparities have long been documented by researchers and in the historically limited public information about demographics at American companies, including a USA TODAY database of S&P 100 corporations.
The disparities highlight how tax dollars can reinforce gaps in wealth and opportunity for women and people of color.
Joseph Bryant Jr., who leads the Rainbow PUSH Silicon Valley diversity project founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said public money should advance equity in the country.
“Either the government should be giving more money to minority businesses or the government should be giving money to businesses that make diversity and inclusion a priority,” he said.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, who runs the Center for Employment Equity, said making the data public allows people to compare companies and hold them accountable for their hiring practices. He said diversity, equity and inclusion officers also could use the data to benchmark their companies’ performance against competitors.
“I hope that in the long run this empowers the DEI staff in these firms to push their firms to do better,” said the sociology professor from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The data is the largest trove of corporate diversity information ever made public after a yearslong legal battle by Reveal seeking the reports filed by government contractors each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It includes more than 19,000 federal contractors. More than 4,000 others have objected, and their information remains in limbo pending further litigation.
The Department of Labor has argued it can’t release contractor diversity reports without notifying each company. It has so far sided with companies that argue the reports should be considered confidential business information – even though a federal judge has ruled those records should be made public.
Researchers say Monday’s release could be a crucial step toward the public being able to see all summary diversity data collected on this federal form, not just the demographics of government contractors.
“This could be what breaks the logjam,” Tomaskovic-Devey said. “If the vast majority of firms were willing to release these data, what does that say about the defense that this is a trade secret? ”
Many of the companies receiving the most money from federal contracts do work for the Department of Defense.
Topping that list in 2020 at more than $51 billion in public money is Lockheed Martin, the Washington, D.C.-based aerospace and security giant. That figure does not include its subsidiaries. For instance, Sikorsky Aircraft received $4.6 billion in federal contracts that year, ranking 11th.
Neither company appeared in the five years of data released Monday by federal officials. But Lockheed Martin has published a copy of its demographic report online since its 2020 filing. That document shows White, non-Hispanic or Latinx men held 68% of executive jobs despite being 34% of the U.S. workforce. They had no executives who were Pacific Islander or American Indian. And Hispanic or Latinx women held just two of the 356 executive jobs despite accounting for 7% of the U.S. workforce.
“At Lockheed Martin, we believe that our commitment to diversity and inclusion is a business imperative, helping to drive our innovation and global leadership,” wrote company spokesman Richard Sant.
Our analysis found similar trends – White men holding a disproportionate number of top jobs and women of color having the least representation – at other companies receiving billions of dollars, such as Boeing, Raytheon, Humana, General Electric and Honeywell.
A Texas father-daughter attorney team of Elizabeth “BB” and Brian Sanford represent employees suing major defense contractors.
Brian Sanford says the Pentagon should do more to audit employment relations from its largest contracts.
“Just hold them to the basic standard. It’s our tax dollars – they should be following the law,” Sanford said. “There is a lot of power in saying ‘You don’t get this $1 billion contract if you do this.’ They’ll listen to that.”
Few of the 21 companies that received the most federal contract money in 2020 returned a request for comment about their diversity track record.
Companies often argue that the reports must be kept secret because they could give competitors valuable information about their workforce, even allowing other firms to lure away diverse talent.
For example, Oracle has objected to the release of its data in the past by saying it could lead to a “raiding of minority or female employees,” though the company posted a more recent copy of its federal report online.
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY.
This story was updated to include a comment from a Lockheed Martin spokesperson.
Jessica Guynn contributed to this report.
Have a tip? Reach Will Evans at wevans@revealnews.org or on Signal at (510) 255-0865; Jayme Fraser at jfraser@gannett.com or on Twitter at @jaymekfraser; Nick Penzenstadler at npenz@usatoday.com, on Twitter at @npenzenstadler or on Signal at (720) 507-5273; and Jessica Guynn at jguynn@usatoday.com.
No Longer a Trade Secret: Diversity Data From the Country’s Mega Contractors is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Corporate diversity and inclusion have become more about profits than about recognising the rights of women and minorities, argues ousted Te Whatu Ora chair Rob Campbell.
COMMENTARY: By Rob Campbell
Just as we are making some progress on diversity and inclusion policies in business governance and management my perverse mind is starting to have doubts.
Initially around gender diversity I was an enthusiastic camp follower. It seemed a relevant part of progressive social change.
As Te Whatu Ora chair, I was an advocate and supporter of a much stronger role for Māori in health governance and management. I was a strong promoter of inclusion in all my roles such as at Summerset, Tourism Holdings and Sky City.
I was recognised for this when awarded Chair of the Year a few years back, and the Beacon Award from the Shareholders’ Association at about the same time.
I think that we have made progress at business board and senior management level — by no means complete but barriers have been reduced and seats filled more appropriately.
I confess that even while I and many others were advocating and implementing this, my doubts crept in as the narrative morphed from one primarily about rights into one more based on demonstrated benefits, for example, to profitability.
Then the prize-giving started, the “champions” preened, and one could not help but wonder what interests were really being served. It really was not all that difficult or radical in its impact as after all — the replacements were from the same class and education and non-cis gender characteristics as the old.
Long overdue
It is a good thing rather than bad of course, long overdue and still far from complete.
But the old hierarchies and principles of business control, practice and ownership have not been that much affected. We have more women in influential roles but the roles and expectations of those in the roles have not changed very much. Higher gender representation is a step on the way to gender equity in the workplace but not a final goal.
My perception is that ethnic diversity is facing an even harder road. There has been some progress but it seems that neither the will nor the availability of “suitable” candidates is as strong as it is on gender.
Of course this tells us something — our perception about what is “suitable” is limited and excludes all but a few from non-Pākehā communities. It is not that such communities do not have highly capable leaders but that the capability does not readily match the ways business expects its governance and management to be.
You could be kind and call this a cultural difference. Similar issues may hold back business governance diversity in terms of non-cis gender differences and neuro differences. Maybe what business wants is not real and far reaching diversity but “acceptable or non-disruptive” diversity.
Welcome to the boardroom and the executive floor on the terms that have always prevailed.
So this makes me think about “inclusion” too. There is an increasing range of inclusion programmes, training and schemes. My inclination is to welcome and support these and, as with gender, I have seen and celebrated individuals step up within such processes and succeed.
Cue more prizes, awards and media releases.
Common theme
But I see a common theme as we progress. Business is making pathways some for people from other cultures to become acceptable or suitable — on the terms of business. Colonialism has always done this politically and we can see this commercially as well.
These are adaptable social systems well capable of changing appearance without changing substance.
Companies co-opting or paying mere lip service to diversity and inclusion? It’s almost universal.
I admire the people who take these opportunities. They often have to change a lot, to take on more than their peers at work, to model and represent. But business inclusion is inclusion into the world of business not business changing to match another culture, other than quite superficially.
I wonder if these processes are not more akin to “assimilation” than genuine diversity and inclusion. That is, always on the terms of the boss. Welcome to our club, on our terms. This assumes superiority of culture.
Just like assimilation sought to obscure and diminish the outside, the minority, the different in order to seem to include. Ultimately assimilation was seen for the destructive force in social policy that it was — a steamroller to flatten diversity not to encourage it.
Like assimilation, I don’t think, now that my thoughts have run to this point, that our “D&I” policies, appointments and programmes, will really be much of a force for change.
That does not make them bad, but lets not pretend they are more than they are. The same people still mainly fill the same roles according to the same rules, doing the same things, as they did before.
I welcome anyone who can convince me otherwise. I don’t like being the grumpy, cynical old man.
Rob Campbell is chancellor of AUT University and chairs NZ Rural Land Co and renewable energy centre Ara Ake. He is a former chair of health agency Te Whatu Ora, the Environmental Protection Authority, SkyCity Casino, Tourism Holdings, WEL Networks and Summerset. He trained as an economist and originally worked as a unionist before eventually becoming a professional director. This article was first published by Newsroom and is republished with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
On Wednesday last week, I was sitting on a stage as part of a panel conversation, which is not unusual for me. What is (lamentably) unusual is the fact that I was in the minority as a white woman.
The other panellists were all brilliant women of colour – speaker and author Winitha Bonney , Niveditha Balachandran, who leads the Inclusion and Diversity work at the Transport Accident Commission, and Viv Nguyen, who I work closely with in her role as Chair of the Victorian Multicultural Commission.
The Public Sector Women of Colour Leadership and Allyship Summit focused on putting diversity on the stage and showcasing the talented women in the public sector – those who are too often overlooked.
In 2022, Women on Boards Australia found that women comprised 46% of board members, but only 5.7%were culturally diverse women.
The Diversity Council of Australia just put out some research that surveyed Culturally and Racially Marginalised Women – a term it is using to replace Culturally and Linguistically Diverse – and found that 85% of these women felt they had to work twice as hard to get the same treatment or evaluation as white women. In evidence of the racial bias that many people hold, 75% of women surveyed reported that other people had assumed they work in a lower status job than they did.
So it’s harder to get into a leadership position as a woman of colour – but even when you do, others might not see you as a leader.
We cannot achieve gender equality while any group is marginalised. But for many years, a so called ‘colour blind’ approach to gender equality and increasing women in leadership meant it became a space for white women – excluding women of colour, of different faiths and of different races.
When gender intersects with other identities such as these, it compounds experiences of disadvantage, and renders ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to gender equality ineffective.
As Victorian Multicultural Commission Chair Viv Nguyen explained, assuming women are a homogenous group risks leaving some women behind.
“Some women have the dual challenges of overcoming cultures and traditions and modern structural barriers,’ Viv said.
“We must collect data that is more than just gender; setting targets for gender must include other lenses.”
That’s why the Gender Equality Act asks public sector organisations in Victoria to apply an intersectional gender lens to its workforce and the work it delivers . It’s the first legislation of its kind to formally incorporate intersectionality.
This is a new space for many organisations and we are currently grappling with a lack of data. My team is currently working on a research report to help understand intersectionality in the Victorian public sector (including local government and universities) – and address the data gap, but there’s a long way to go.
In ‘The Pronoun Lowdown’ – which I currently have open on my desk – Nevo Zisin writes: “Calling yourself an ally is like buying a toy trophy and telling people you’ve won an Oscar. I’m always wary of people who say it.”
So too, I feel uncomfortable talking about being an ally. But reflecting on the panel conversation, I also know that, despite having experienced other forms of disadvantage in my life, I have immense privilege in not needing to always think about race.
So how, as a white woman, can I be a better ally? How can you?
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