Act 1: What is Diversity?
In order to answer the larger question, "Why Diversity?", I will start by focusing on an equally complex question, "What is Diversity"? Take a moment and try to answer that question for yourself. Note that your approach to this question, how you read it and how you respond to it is heavily context-laden. If you are the ED of an educational non-profit you will likely approach this question differently from an HR Manager at a large corporation, or a college student. I raise the question of context because, much like you, I have a particular context from which I am approaching this topic. While I will try to address multiple contexts and perspectives throughout these series of conversations, my particular context/ paradigm informs my interpretation, approach, and ultimately shapes my intention for raising this question in the first place.
So, here is some sense of my context: I am a 37 year old Black woman (born and raised in the US). I am from Detroit, MI. and have lived all over the country. I have multiple degrees in Philosophy, including a PhD. I am an alum of Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. I am the eldest child in a large extended family. I am heterosexual and able-bodied. I am not a religious person. I am married and have no children presently. I take the question of diversity personally, ie my engagement with this topic is not a purely theoretical or political exercise. I am an educator, committed to educational equity. I grew up poor and as an adult have largely been working/ middle class... While none of these facts determine my perspective, and there are certainly other relevant pieces that that I did not mention, this list will at least provide you with some sense of where I am "coming from".
I chose to open the conversation in this way because conversations about things like race, class, sexuality, etc... are mired in the personal. In this way, it is helpful to have some understanding of who the other person is and where s/he is "coming from" when we attempt to engage in these conversations. My intention in raising this question is that I think that diversity is critical, but that as much as the word is used, we often fail to do justice to the complexity of this issue or its critical importance.
So, "What is Diversity"? This question will take several articles to address because there are many different approaches and perspectives that should be considered.
Scene 1: Counting Bodies
At it's most basic, diversity is enacted at the level of raw data: how many ___ are in the classroom, boardroom, office, etc... While this approach ultimately proves to be ineffectual, it does have an important role to play in diversity and equity work. Before I get into where I think that this approach falls short, let me start out by explaining why this approach is so prevalent and important. The primary driving force for work in the area of diversity and equity has been the reality of deficiency, or the absence of certain kinds of bodies in the classroom, boardroom, office, etc..., due to structural inequalities within our social, political, and economic systems. In order to really name and understand the depth of these deficiencies, we began to survey and quantify the problem. It is not enough to simply say that there is an inequitable proportion of ___ in these kinds of positions; we have to have the hard data and statistics that provide a concrete way to identify and track the effects of these systemic inequalities. The data also gives us a way to hold universities, corporations, and other institutions accountable.
Beyond all of this, numbers do matter for a plethora of reasons. There is a great deal of research out there (some of which I will share with you in greater detail) on the importance of role models and the impact of phenomena like, "stereotype" threat, that are heavily influenced by numbers. I have personally seen the positive impact that cohort recruitment and programming can have on outcomes for under-represented people in higher education and in other organizations. So, because numbers do matter, many organizations and institutions began to focus on recruitment or "access", which makes a certain amount of sense. If the problem is assumed to be numbers, then the goal is to increase the numbers. In this way, the "problem" of diversity has been largely relegated to a recruitment issue.
Here's the problem, diversity is not just a question of numbers. The numbers are a manifestation or symptom of an underlying set of issues. Most recruiters have come to understand the importance of retention and success in addition to access. In other words, the ability to recruit people into an organization does not mean that they will stay. We have certainly seen this in higher education where graduation rates for under-represented students did not increase in proportion to increased access. The simple accumulation of different kinds of bodies does not and cannot alone account for, or correct, the systemic inequities that led to this deficiency in the numbers in the first place. The lack of Black men and women in the sciences is not a recruitment issue. The lack of white women in engineering is not a recruitment issue. The lack of Indigenous men and women in higher education is not a recruitment issue. While the numbers provide us with a necessary and important point of departure, they cannot serve as the sole focus of diversification efforts.
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