Equality, diversity and inclusion — widening the reach
Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) remains a challenging area to work on, especially within academia. A tension that has been playing through my head recently is how do we ‘widen the reach’?
Widening the reach— what do I mean? There are two areas to consider here, and there are tensions that play between them.
(1) How do we encourage more people to engage as ‘active allies’ speaking up, raising the voices of underrepresented people and sharing the plight of individuals?
(2) How do we widen our support of people with the nuance of their individual identities, i.e. beyond what may be a narrow view of their individual (or collective) EDI characteristics, and their intersections?
A good approach to EDI should aim to promote equity for everyone, recognising the needs of individuals and supporting them towards fair and equitable access, and ultimately social justice.
In this vein, I hope that we can promote understanding of what needs there may be and where individuals have been marginalised.
To support a drive towards social justice, we may choose to categorise people, e.g. based upon gender with the simple break down of the number of male or female speakers. We may use that as a launch point to highlight the lack of equity in our culture, as highlighted through this ‘diversity metric’.
This is a great launch point and promotes conversations, but must be used with care. We risk disenfranchising the individuals who are in the minority, and rendering any actions in terms of a quota based system or affirmative action, thus treating the symptom of the issue and not the underlying cause.
We can clearly identify issues with a narrative of categorisation, often highlighting how male dominated a seminar programme is, e.g. through the observation that there are no faces who we perceive to be female in the line up (and this can be extended towards visible disability, skin colour and more).
Even when we use these categorisations, to provide us with data beyond anecdote, this approach can be problematic as it may support the propping up of the ‘status quo’. Similar to the quota based argument, we can cause erasure of individual experience, as we resort to counting the number of people with one of these particular characteristics and make the individual a statistic.
Furthermore, we can fall short if we are not careful, as we may risk erasure of even more marginalised groups, such as those who are gender fluid, non-binary, or if we are conducting a historical record, those who who may have changed their gender. How do we manage the erasure, e.g. of those who fall outside of the popular (but outdated) idea of a ‘gender binary’, or perhaps for those individuals who we ‘casually’ misgender as we make assumptions in our busy lives?
There are other tools and approaches that can launch this conversation, and draw in allies to engage with an understanding of the lopsided nature of our current communities. As an example, we can also present a balanced approach that combines quantitative data with examples of lived experience. Together, this may help us open up a conversation to bridge gaps and equip more people with the nuance of language in this space an empower them to act.
Each of these methods, flawed as they might be, can provide deep and insightful information about the plight of individuals and enable us to infer correlations based upon experience. For a ‘lay-person’ in the EDI space, they are also relatively accessible and often reduce a feeling of isolation or guilt based upon the allies membership of the dominant group.
We might consider that the aim of EDI is to better enable people to thrive, not quite regardless of their circumstance, noting that a strict equality of access approach may forget historical or systems based built in disadvantage.
If we take this view, then we should consider the impact of our EDI approaches, tools, and rhetoric on people as individuals. Here the the bluntness of categorisation may cause erasure of identity and experience for the most marginalised.
This complexity is difficult, as if we require all our would-be (and current) allies to understand the breadth of these identities and nuance of experience, are we alienating our allies and limiting their ability to engage?
The counter point remains, and this is one I firmly agree with. Members of minority groups should not be left to do all the heavy lifting. We need people who are in the majority to raise up others around them and enable the whole of our community to move forward. It is also important to recognise that we enter some conversations as a member of a majority group, and others in a minority.
This post may leave you unsatisfied, as I doubt I’ve answered the question. In reality, I’m still struggling with how to square this circle (n.b. other shapes are available). In discussing around the content of this post, a friend has suggested that we start with care around the intent with our engagement. We might balance this against the impact, and hope that individuals can be humble and recognise when intent does not land according to plan. For those who have different experiences within the nuance of EDI, we might try to be supportive in widening discussions.
I can only suggest that people who are standing up and talking about these issues encourage others to get involved, listen to critics (if you have the energy), reflect, and help build our communities to be stronger in their engagement. We will also have to consider that as we dive ‘down the rabbit hole’ we may be faced with a myriad of complexity, but that not everyone will have the time, energy or experience with their EDI adventure.
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I’d like to acknowledge the wise and robust discussions that have helped me come up with this post, including those most recently with Sam Giles, Chris Jackson and Jess Wade.
