Diversity and Inclusion in an Organization. Real or Fake?

Disclaimer: This post is my personal opinion. I don’t have any intention to offend or insult any individual, group of people or organizations

Today I heard a great sharing in my workplace regarding the impact of diversity and inclusion in an organization. There are many articles discussing this topic, I’m not gonna delve too deep on the topic.

In general, I agree that diversity and inclusion can give a good impact on an organization. As employees, they usually feel more happy and motivated which eventually leads to better performance to the individual and organization as a whole.

This topic brought back my memories to a conference that I attend years ago. There were two speakers who shared about their organizations. They shared about diversity and inclusion in their organizations, how they hire people from all around the world regardless of their background. At some point, there were very interesting conversations that I heard.

I couldn’t remember the exact wording, but one of the speakers said that they intend to be more diverse by hiring more people from different backgrounds. At that year, they aim to reach 50% on diversity (I’m purposely not mentioning what kind of diversity was aimed).

Then the other speaker said: it means yours are not diverse? Because you tried to hire people from specific backgrounds to reach that number of diversity.

Boomm! I was really surprised by that thought. Up until now, I do agree with that thought. It‘s very cliche. An organization aims to reach diversity and inclusion through “un-diverse” and “un-inclusive” ways by purposely hiring specific backgrounds.

Let’s use an example. Let’s say there is only 1 vacant position in a company. Then there are 2 candidates that are equally good based on competency. One is a woman, and the other one is disabled. The company already has a lot of women employees and doesn’t have many disabled. The company aims to be more diverse by hiring more disabled people. So the 1 quota is given to the disabled candidate. How is that fair? How is that diverse for the woman?

In my opinion, it’s true that achieving diversity is not easy. By nature, minority obviously lower in number. Of course, it is hard for an organization to be more diverse by having more minorities organically. An organization that supports diversity and inclusion surely has more applicants from minorities. So the organization can be more diverse. But still, achieving a specific diversity number organically doesn’t make sense for me. Unless the organization cheatingly accepts people from specific backgrounds.

The goal is great — to support more minorities. I really support that. I also support if an organization admittedly tried to achieve a specific diversity number through “un-diverse” and “un-inclusive” ways. Because I know, it is not easy but the impact of having more diverse people is great.

Right now, the only organic way that I can think of to reach a specific diversity number is by creating a specific product that is targeted to minorities only. Then make those minorities love their product and want to work with them. But.. which company can have such privilege to do that.

Just my 2 cents :)