What does diversity mean to you?

On International Women’s Day, I am reminded of the need for diversity in the workforce, and want to pose the question of what does diversity mean to you? Diversity is not just the inclusion of other races, genders and backgrounds. More than just a blind quota of non-white, non cisgender, not university educated, non-middle-class, non-males. Diversity is not just a tickbox of compliance to achieve a demographic for marketing and public relations.

Diversity of thought

The purpose of diversity to helps business solve problems with a variety of viewpoints and experiences. People from the same background will tend to have the same viewpoint and approach to issues.

We are all subtly different in our thoughts and opinions, based on our upbringing, education, and cultural exposure. We are influenced by how our parents treated us, the focus of our schooling (religious? Team sport focus? Large class sizes), the media we watch, listen to, or read. Our peers and siblings change us, our school bully or best friends – all change our approaches.

So, having someone from a different culture, different gender or race, or even different upbringing – can lead to a new approach and mindset. A diversity of thought can help almost all parts of business – problem solving, dealing with customers, marketing, dealing with staff, innovation, and dealing with technical issues.

Lessons from ‘Suits’

In the TV series “Suits”, the law firm will only hire people from the same law school. This means they have all had the same classes and the same teachers/lectures and have learned from the same books and case studies. This will ensure that everyone is compliant, but also limited and constrained by what and how they were taught. A lecturer or tutor who is a misogynist bully or has strong personal views on immigrants or minorities, will influence students and poison their minds by requiring compliance. This then trickles down to a change in ethics for the students, even if it is subtle.

My own experience

I select team members for who is the most applicable to the role, blind to their background or physical attributes of gender or race. Having said that, some of my requirements for a person to be applicable to the role come from their attributes – females are generally better at Change Management and first line desktop support, and males are generally better at physically building a datacentre’s servers in racks. I avoid having all WASP team members, and lean towards having staff from the same culture as other employees and customers, particularly if it differs from white males.

People from government education may have different experiences to add to problem solving, someone from a single-parent upbringing may see problems differently with fresh eyes to an issue. An IT employee who is not into science fiction and gaming may be into architecture and engineering, and so have seen a documentary or read a book that solves the problem that traditional IT people cannot solve.

I had a team member once who was the usual IT person – our DBA was white, university educated, and overweight single male, who enjoyed scifi and CSI/NCIS. We were talking about how street lights turn on at dusk. He was convinced that each street light had a GPS receiver and a ‘simple’ table of dawn/dusk times that would allow each lamp to calculate when to turn on. His colleague (from India) pointed out that a person could be paid to switch on and off a section of street lights, and the one person with a hobby of electronics pointed out that a simple light sensor would switch on lights when needed, including in poor weather or during an eclipse.

Three solutions from diversity of thought.