A hope for 2022: Diversity in the workplace will become multi-dimensional

This is Working Together, a weekly series on equity in the workplace. Today, LinkedIn News unveiled our Big Ideas for 2022 package , and an extended version of mine is below. Share your own Big Idea using #BigIdeas2022. Also, join us at 2:30ET on Wednesday, December 8th for a live discussion with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield here .

Ruchika Tulshyan has devoted her career to studying diversity and inclusion. She specializes in intersectionality — a term used to describe how categories like race, class and gender can come together to create unique forms of discrimination.?

After spending a decade watching this issue, Tulshyan noticed a shift in corporate leaders’ approach in 2021. She heard them speak openly about how their privilege had shaped the course of their careers.?

That was a first.?

“This pandemic made a lot of leaders realize what they took for granted,” said Tulshyan, who also advises companies on their inclusion strategies through her company Candour.?

It’s signs like these that make Tulshyan and other experts bullish that in 2022 the business community will focus on diversity in a truly fresh way. After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, executives across corporate America came out en masse with pledges to rid their organizations of systemic racism. This marked a significant shift from diversity efforts within corporate America up until that point, which largely focused on the advancement of women.?

Moving into next year and beyond, companies will need to combine these inclusion efforts — and more — to ensure talent can bring their whole identity to work. Some 96% of U.S. companies report the gender representation of their employees at all levels, and 90% report gender representation at senior levels, according to LeanIn and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report . But only 54% of companies track gender and race/ethnicity — i.e. Black or Latina women in senior leadership. This dearth of data renders women of color “invisible,” says LeanIn CEO Rachel Schall Thomas .?

Long gone are the days that companies can treat whole groups like a monolith in recruiting. This presents new challenges for diversity leaders thinking about how to not only track talented prospective employees but also ensure there are opportunities in place for these workers to advance at an equal pace as their peers.?

“This is not to say that ensuring gender equality in the workplace is not important – far from it,” wrote Damion Jones , global head of inclusion and diversity at pharmaceutical firm Bayer “The challenge is expanding this important work to include all groups who have traditionally lacked a seat at the table.”

So, will companies rise to the challenge??

They will face obstacles along the way. Outdated discrimination policies and laws that don’t take into account the “microagressions” — common daily verbal or environmental slights — will certainly be one of them, Tulshyan notes. Also, many corporate leaders continue to act defensively when confronted with their company’s diversity challenges.?

Marianne Cooper has seen this defensive posture time and again. A sociologist at Stanford University who focuses on gender research, Cooper says leaders have a hard time believing that gender and racial organization is happening within their own organization.

“They think about it happening to other people in other places as opposed to thinking that it is happening in a systematic way, so that it is happening to their company too,” she said.?

Despite these barriers, the best talent will demand change. Some 50% of multicultural women are thinking about leaving their jobs in the next two years because they believe both their gender and their race make it harder to advance. And 34% of Black professionals in a recent LinkedIn survey said that they feel their company talks about increasing diversity and inclusion but doesn’t make any actual changes.?

“It is important to own where you are coming from, and that is a hard pill to swallow,” said Ella Bell Smith, the author of Our Separate Ways, Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity. “We need to become co-conspirators . If all women don’t advance, no one group is going to advance in the long term.”

What’s your Big Idea for 2022? Let us know in the comments below.?

What’s Working

Greater disclosure. Microsoft shareholders approved a proposal requesting that the tech giant disclose more information about their handing of sexual harassment complaints. (Microsoft is LinkedIn’s parent company.) [WSJ ]

A first for honesty. In an unflinching memoir, Ursula Burns — the first Black woman to run a Fortune 500 company — shares everything from her childhood living in poverty to the challenges she faced while running Xerox. More recently, she shares a call to action to white leaders to stop calling her for advice and learn more about systemic racism themselves. [Fortune ]

At all levels. A new study suggests that the gender gap in corporate America has little to do with hiring and retention and everything to do with promotion rates. One solution may be to implement a policy that ensures the gender makeup of any given level of an organization’s hierarchy matches the gender representation of the level right below it. [HBR ]

• Read more: LinkedIn data suggests female promotion rates are on the rise.?

What’s Not

Same work, different pay. A study published in the journal Health Affairs suggests that female doctors earn $2 million less than their male counterparts throughout their career. That figure is likely a low-ball estimate and comes from comparing the salaries of men and women physicians based on their specific medical specialty. [The 19th ]

Wrong way to fire. Digital mortgage startup Better.com invited 900 employees to a short Zoom call last week — to inform them they were all being laid off just before the holidays. CEO Vishal Garg announced the layoffs with, what CNN notes, seemingly no emotion in his voice. [LinkedIn News ]

Record rates. A record 4.4 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in September, largely to escape poor working conditions. And in a sign of just how tight the labor market has become, there are roughly 10 job openings for every seven job seekers. [WSJ ]

Who’s Pushing Us Forward?

What topics do you want to discuss next time? Let me know in the comments below using #WorkingTogether