It’s time to ditch the word ‘minority’

Rethinking diversity in a global workplace

I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the term 'minority.' That can pose a bit of a challenge in the D&I space, because isn’t ‘getting more minorities in’ part of the ultimate purpose of D&I efforts at work?

We know the evidence. More diverse teams, more inclusive workplaces, more representative businesses perform better. The argument for ‘hiring minorities’ has been had and won. Part of the future of D&I work is to expand that winning argument out to more ‘minorities.’ Gender pay gap reporting has been standard for some time, and now we see the most progressive companies starting to consider their ethnicity pay gap, even the sexual orientation pay gap. The point of this data? Let’s make sure ‘minorities’ aren’t being underpaid or underpromoted.

Significant work in decades past has rightly focused on women. Reports were written that businesses should have women on boards, more women in senior leadership teams. These companies performed better, they posted better results, it’s even required now of the world’s largest listed companies. But no one would suggest the push to increase gender diversity is about promoting ‘minorities.’ Women are not a minority. Women are half or more of the population. This is about equal rights, not minority rights. While there is always work to be done, particularly on the gender pay gap and women on boards, businesses have the know-how to make a difference in this area of D&I.?

Let’s consider another artificially low ceiling - race and ethnicity. In the UK the term often used is ethnic minorities. In the US, racial minorities. In essence the same thing. People who don’t look like the proverbial ‘us’, as business leaders (still majority white) would say. But they still want their business to be diverse because diversity brings strength and resilience.?

So the business might conduct a survey. It might start gathering diversity information of its employees. It will spot homogenous clumps in particular sites or in certain levels like upper management, then it will launch various programmes to recruit or promote more people from racial or ethnic minority backgrounds. That is a very good thing, and a very important thing. But it has one problem - it maintains the artificial division between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ‘Us’ is the business, and ‘them’ are the minorities who are going to make ‘us’ more diverse.

Situationally, this is true on a country by country or city by city level. We know the population breakdown and we know that a business in London which is 95% white is not representative, or a board of a US firm that has no Black people on it has a serious problem with recruiting diverse talent. Figuring out what that issue is, and how to fix it, is the challenge.

But for a multinational business, this challenge falls into even sharper focus. And these days, there are few businesses, large, medium or small, that do not have at least a global outlook, let alone international staff. The challenge is definitional. Who is a ‘minority’ in an international context?

Once we were working with a company that has offices in the US, South Africa and Malaysia. They were using one of our build-your-own Omnitrack forms to monitor diversity in their global offices. They sent out a form one day and all of a sudden, our support team began to receive a lot of increasingly irate complaints. The complaints were coming from the South African offices who, unsurprisingly, did not fit into any of the US racial categories.?

The company decided they would fix this with a write-in box. But that didn’t help much either. Because a large chunk of the South African employees identified with the ethnicity called ‘coloured.’ Our support team then began to receive similarly irate complaints from the US office who were objecting to that term which, in South Africa, is a recognised racial identity. The point being, our concepts of race and ethnicity change with borders, demonstrating just how socially constructed our idea of race and ethnicity really is. It's not innate, it's learned. That doesn't mean it's false or should be ignored, but more that we need to understand the concept of race and ethnicity as something relevant to the time and place and society we grew up in, not as some kind of universal truth.?

In this company, a Black employee in the United States may be a ‘minority,’ but they are not in South Africa. A category that says 'African American' doesn't work for staff outside the US either. A white employee in the United States is not a minority, but they would be in Malaysia. And in Malaysia, there are three main categories of ethnicity: Malay, Chinese and Indian, along with dozens more groups and sub-divisions. When ethnicities are often defined by what they are not, then which American racial category is a Malaysian person of Indian descent supposed to identify with? When our client suggested to their South African offices that the coloured employees simply mark Black (or African American) on the monitoring form, there was an uproar.

For global companies, this is an issue that necessitates a lot of care and attention, along with delicacy and a deep understanding of local cultures and a willingness to listen. D&I is not an add on, it’s a fundamental part of modern global business. It requires us to think beyond the concepts of minority and majority, because this context can so easily fluctuate depending on country, city, or even office.?

Minority itself as an identity is purely situational. I’m a Jewish, gay, slightly darker-skinned person who grew up in Scotland, and I felt, and was often made to feel, like a minority in a minority in a minority. But being a Jewish person now living and working in Israel at VinciWorks, two of my three ‘minority’ statuses melted away. When I am in Jerusalem, my ‘minority’ status as a gay man can feel quite evident. But if I travel an hour up the road to Tel Aviv for instance, that minority aspect also dissipates in a city so openly gay, it's often described as 'straight-friendly.'?

VinciWorks now has offices across the UK and Ireland, so if I visited some colleagues in the UK again, does my minority status reappear? I’m in the same company, just in a different location. Yet I'm doing the same work and speaking to the same people. VinciWorks is still a compact business where everyone knows each other, but how would that work in a large multinational in dozens of countries with hundreds of offices and thousands of staff? An old-fashioned, borders-based understanding of diversity just doesn’t fit for a business with a global outlook.?

Yes there needs to be data. Yes there needs to be programmes to support and improve diversity. Yes we need to monitor multiple levels of pay gaps and hiring information. But this needs to encompass everyone, all of our staff, with all of our complexities and intersecting identities. If there are a lack of Black women at senior leadership levels, then those barriers to advancement and hiring need to be understood and addressed, not with a ‘minority hiring programme,’ but a root-and-branch review of underlying attitudes, biases, and quite possibly racism and sexism.

It’s not about ignoring differences, but embracing them. That’s the fundamental strength, and business benefit, of diversity. Multiple perspectives coming together as one team, one office, one business. To get there, we need to ditch the idea of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ It’s time to move beyond the label of minority, and embrace the true meaning of diversity and inclusion.?