Lets stop talking about diversity and start working towards equity | Paloma Medina | TEDxPortland

so I'm here to try to convince you to

stop

talking

about

diversity

just

stop

just stop so I want to I want to convince you to stop

talking

about

diversity

because first of all the word is confusing us and second of all , we do not care. Our brains don't care, so let me explain to those of you who are like, wait, let me explain so that we know that about ninety-nine percent of us have some level of ethnocentrism or some other type of unconscious bias toward people. people. who are different than us so it's like all of us here in this room before you

start

getting defensive with me and you're like I can't even hold on it's you it's you but you don't judge because these unconscious biases that they do have sense in which your old internal limbic brain in this part of the brain evolved in the days of the cave people and in those days, in those days, if you were out and about and you ran into someone who looked different than you, that He says That would have been a cause for concern, like who he is.

I don't know you or where you come from. Don't take my food well. It would have been very, very worrying, but now we have a very modern world, we interact with people all the time. Those who act differently than us look different than us, that's normal, but your limbic brain is still catching up, it's still programmed to equate outsiders with a threat to our own survival, so it means that even If our mouths say we want diversity in our workplace, we want a diverse workplace that is just fine, our limbic system says please not too diverse, please not too diverse, please not too diverse , okay, now, on the other hand, there's fairness or the way our brain is programmed to care about fairness.

It means being treated fairly and there are important differences between

equity

and equality, however, we have not achieved either in most of the different industries in our communities, so for this talk I will use

equity

, but the question that excited me A lot of it was what your brain thinks. Well, about fairness, when my favorite studies involved two monkeys that were placed in cages next to each other and these monkeys could see each other, they were taught a trick and when they did it they received a cucumber a piece as a reward and the monkeys were very happy with this cool super, in Phase Two of the study they changed things up and when one of the monkeys did the trick like before, he got a grape and monkeys love fruit, so this was definitely a much better reward than the super cucumber. good for this monkey, the other monkey when he did the trick in phase 2 still received a cucumber, so this was repeated over and over so that the monkey, the cucumber monkey, could see that he was doing the same trick but getting the worse reward. pause if you were doing the same task as someone else and received a bad reward, how would you feel right now?

Tell me all your voices to come down, Vaughn, yeah, I'd be so mad, this is what the dead monkey is validating, right? valid, yes, just like monkeys, just like monkeys, we all innately understand how to spot even a hint of injustice, so that begins to explain why researchers are discovering that on flights you know when they pass you by for first class before getting to the coach on those flights there. That's four times the number of air rage incidents, it's something that can be measured and there are four times the number of those incidents when they make you walk in first class before you get to your seat in coach, so now experts theorize that it seems that we are wired to seek equity even glimpses of inequality in particular because it was also related to survival in the days of the cave people, let's say the days of the Mac and Kay people there you are looking for food, hunting, but two days in a row you can't have less food than the rest of your tribe, you do the same work, this would have been an important early sign that your chances of survival were decreasing and you better do something about it, yes, if you want to last the winter, so at the time I was actually looking into this I thought well, what does it matter that our brains seek and want to protect a sense of fairness?

Well, it matters because it means that our brains categorize fairness as a fundamental need and when any fundamental need is threatened, our brains and our bodies are programmed to go into a state of stress and if this continues now that we have chronic stress and the stress Chronic leads to inflammation, we are finding that people who experience recurring racism actually show chronic inflammation in their bodies in chronic inflammation, as we are learning that is not a joke, it is directly related. to things like cancer, heart disease, lower life expectancy in general, I mean, it's related to premature death, so equity is not just political here, equity is fundamental to our health.

Thank you, about a year ago I was being an equity inclusion and diversity trainer and it hit me. In me, why are we talking about diversity? Diversity is not what our brain needs, it's really just a metric to understand if there is equity, so let me explain, let's say at your company 4% of your company's employees are people of color. but 30% of the US population is people of color, so if this happens over and over again year after year at your company, this racial diversity number is an early indicator that inequality is likely somewhere in your hiring process, but let's say you change the way you hire and hire a group of people of color and you give it to 30% of your employees or people of color.

What have we done well? Can we come to an agreement or can we celebrate? I love that you're not saying yeah, we're done, you know? Something is strange here because this new racial diversity number still doesn't show the full equity picture. It doesn't tell us whether those employees are being compensated equitably with their white counterparts. It doesn't tell us how their employees treat them. white peers and everyday work life and yet we still know that this diversity is not the main need equity is the main need why do we talk so much more about diversity? I think we talk more about diversity because it is safer when we say that we are committed to diversity in our company it does not imply anything more than the desire to invite more people to our company more minorities and inviting people is not that difficult I mean it is not okay because I can do it right now I want to invite all of you all I see you up there in the middle all of you here are invited to my house let's say tomorrow how that five o'clock sound sounds good cool house party diversity marked fact we know well we're like right who we invite into your company, into our teams, into our neighborhoods, it's a step, but it doesn't say anything about how we're going to treat them once they arrive, how we're going to treat them, and how to change the way we treat them once they arrive. for them to come, that would require changing our old brain and also changing our systems and I know that changing our old brain and changing our systems is intense, it's daunting.

I know, so I thought, well, what does the research say about how humans achieve daunting goals? The research says three things it says we need. to verbalize the goal we need to make it measurable we need to set a time limit verbalize it make it measurable set a time limit this is what's really cool fifty years ago this year our nation achieved a huge and daunting goal using this same formula so 1962 President Kennedy He leads the nation with a very audacious and seemingly impossible goal at the time: He says that we choose to go to the moon in this decade.

Note that he didn't say we cared about going to the moon in this decade. He now definitely didn't either. I'm not saying we're going to form a space committee in this decade, yes, by doing that, no, he achieved it, he verbalized the goal, he made it measurable, he made it time-bound, we reached that goal in seven years, in 1969, the moon landing, BAM, okay. When re-reading a speech I realized that we need to verbalize the right goal, the goal is in diversity, the goal is equity, we need to do something like find and replace and there is no right vocabulary, we need to find and replace or vocabulary in our human resources manuals. some of us in our jobs in our everyday work lives need to trade diversity for equity one but two Kennedy's speech also made me realize that it's time we make this goal measurable and time-bound So what does this look like in the future?

The argument is that instead of saying you care about hiring for diversity, say that you will achieve racial and gender equity in your hiring procedures in three years if you are a smaller company, so if you are a small company, can do it. in less time also means that instead of saying things like we value diversity in our employees, instead you influence your leaders to commit, we are going to increase racial and gender representation on your executive team by 50 percent in three years, you can say That's right, and I know some of you are saying, "Give me, give me the big things that I want to handle with the big dogs instead of saying you're going to form a Diversity Committee, hire outside experts to help them audit and then achieve equity and pay and promotions you can do it in two years you can I want you out of here today I want you to be the first to replace conversations about diversity with conversations about equity and I want you to be the one to ask your leadership, ask them to your colleagues, let's make it measurable, let's set a time limit because diversity is not what we are looking for, what we really want, what all of us really want is equity, thank you.