Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Business is paramount, does it get that additional boost with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)? Most of us will agree to it, the Delta impact this can cause within organization is unparallel and humongous. Does this also impact Countries? The answer is big “YES” driven by financial inclusion.

Let us focus on one of the important topics of DEI, women being part of the work force. Today, corporate world needs leaders who have high EQ (emotional intelligence), empathy, humility, and an eye for detail in their approach. Women have been blessed with these traits. A 2018 McKinsey study brings home the point that businesses lacking gender and ethnic diversity underperformed compared to more diverse businesses. Furthermore, female-led businesses have shown to perform significantly better than male-led businesses. Unfortunately, despite all the studies/media hype around women leaders’ being better than men we have less than 10% women leader in Fortune 500 companies. Similarly, the number of unicorns with women founders is in single digit. However, things at ground are progressing, we see leadership and professional development programs designed explicitly for women. Corporates and Government leaders across the world are now focussing on bringing the change.

The other area where DEI get ignored is when companies go by skin color and education, more prevalent in western world primarily against the Black community. Religion/Caste system/State bias in our country. This happens because most corporates/employees have conscious bias and/or unconscious bias. The key attribute is society/family upbringing. Net impact, it harms the organizations in the long run.

This topic can be further extended to Corporate Products. Unintentionally at times corporate’s make mistake on Branding a product, ignoring Consumers’ emotions. To explain this, we will look at HUL’s campaign of Fair and Lovely where they discriminated against dark skinned people and showed them struggling to get job, marriage etc. https://youtu.be/crh-h5mf9YY.?

Result of that- Backlash from society against Colourism in India, campaign Dark Is Beautiful by Nandita Das with filmmaker Mahesh Mathai, music composer Ankur Tewari, and Sangita Jindal, Chairperson – JSW Foundation, and a slew of Indian actors to celebrate India’s Got Colour. https://youtu.be/F3kMD32ctTw. This led to HUL being?criticized?by the Advertising Standards Council of India of misleading advertising to promote its ‘Fair and Lovely’. Impact -HUL decided to withdraw the cream. HUL came with new name and new ad, Glow and Lovely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcNySYxZ6s. However, the damage was done.

Bharat Matrimony made a similar mistake on Holi festival this month- https://youtu.be/IlhLrrxZZqo . In the video, a woman - her face spread throughout with colour - is seen washing her face to remove the colour, but?cannot take the mark off her face, left behind after celebrating the festival. Twitter Handle of Bharat Matrimony said “This Women's Day & Holi, let's celebrate by creating safer and more inclusive spaces for women. It's important to acknowledge the challenges that women face in public spaces and create a society that truly respects their well-being - today & forever”. Huge backlash on social media hurting sentiments of people around festival like Holi.

The biggest DEI, game changer for countries “Financial Inclusion. Changing the world using Internet and Technology.

A key component of inclusive growth is financial inclusion, which connects people to secure ways for receiving, storing, and managing money. Across the world, millions of people don’t have access to formal Banking. The need of financial inclusion addresses:

a.??????Economic Objective

b.??????Mobilization of Savings

c.??????Large market for financial system

d.??????Social Objective

e.??????Sustainable livelihood

f.???????Political Objectives

Companies like AliBaba in China started with a platform for customers/sellers to buy and sell goods from China. Over the period they built on the concept adding different companies like Taobao, Alipay, Tmall, Yu’e Bao and Ant Financial. Using these platforms people in remote villages of China could sell their goods, get payment, meet their financing needs (Ant financial) and invest surplus money (Yu’e Bao). Today they have more than 900 million customers. Alibaba covers most of villages across China, massive financial inclusion using Technology platform. In country like China where the Banks focus only on loans for corporates or high-end retail ticket size, Alibaba has completely changed life of Millions of people.

Mpaisa in Africa, another great example of financial inclusion using Mobile network for receiving and transferring funds. Advancing further on it, a new FinTech company Be Mobile Africa (For profit with purpose) started in 2020 to support financial inclusion. It is helping over 35 countries and more than 100 million people across Africa to move out of Poverty.

Mastercard committed to bring 500 million excluded individuals into the financial system. Objective to remove 85% cash transactions happening in the world with huge inefficiencies. It achieved that goal through more than 350 innovative programs across 80 countries.

Indian Government initiative with support from RBI-Jan Dhan Yojana, UPI, Rupay Card and other financial initiatives like insurance for poor are all supporting millions of people in our country.

We are at cusp of sea change on subject of DEI across every aspect from corporates to countries. So, creating a happy workplace means embracing inclusivity and diversity for corporates. For countries, financial inclusion will help millions of people to come out of Poverty and have sustainable living which would also mean less political unrest.?