Talking Pride, Allyship and the Limits of Inclusive Language With Meg Richardson, Devex Chief of Staff

Finding the right way to celebrate Pride in the workplace can be difficult, as any company pilloried on social media for tone deafness is well aware. It may seem easier to say nothing at all—because if you don’t speak, you can’t misspeak, right??

But there’s a big difference between hawking special edition rainbow wares to make a buck and making the space to have meaningful, sometimes difficult discussions about how to create a workplace where everyone feels supported. Yesterday, Devex’s Chief of Staff Margaret R. , a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community, moderated a company-wide discussion on allyship; we later sat down to discuss the limits of words like “inclusivity,” corporate allyship, and what it means to be a queer development professional.?

This discussion has been lightly edited for clarity.?

RK: Happy Pride month!?

MR: Happy Pride!?

RK: How does it feel this year? What’s new when you think about Pride month in 2023?

MR: Pride Month is always a big month of celebration. I think it's a really good time to be in community with people who are excited about just celebrating the superpower that is being queer. But you know, this year is tough in the U.S. It's tough globally.

RK: You’re thinking about Uganda, right?

MR: Yeah, exactly. You know, a lot of our reporting has covered the issues globally, but especially in the U.S., it feels like we're right up with there with people who have tough policies against LGBTQ people. The numbers are really crazy in terms of the number of pieces of legislation. I think it says a lot about a country when it's targeting the children of marginalized communities.?

So I think Pride this year feels more important than ever, especially that celebratory feeling, but in a lot of ways really fraught. And there's sort of a need to keep Pride going in a lot of ways throughout the year, not just this June.?

RK: You led an internal conversation this week with Devexers from around the world. How did that go? What were some of your takeaways, as you talk with people and answer their questions?

MR: I love the session that we have during Pride month at Devex because we talk about allyship, which I think is something that can apply to a lot of different groups. We are part of a global company, and so the ways that people feel like they can support LGBTQ people vary depending on where they are.?

And so I think having an open conversation about allyship in the workplace helps folks to understand what allyship means, how it applies to a number of different communities. We're really lucky to have a number of LGBTQ people at Devex and strong allies on our executive team willing to talk about their own experiences in a vulnerable way. So I think it was a great conversation and I'm really grateful to the people who showed up and to the people who shared their experiences.?

I think allyship is a big conversation this year for Pride, given the number of corporations that in the U.S. have been under fire for their allyship, or lack of allyship.

RK: We even had a colleague in the Philippines saying they had a similar situation there with a big corporation—you think we're heading in one direction where people are kind of coalescing around the idea of Pride and, and then you end up with a backlash.

MR: Totally. And I have a lot of empathy for companies that are trying to navigate this. On the one hand, you want to support communities. And I think there is authenticity behind some of the corporations that support Pride. And then on the other hand, the biggest fear of the LGBTQ community is having that support being really performative and not actually authentic.

RK: And kind of putting you out there on a limb and taking away that support.?

MR: Exactly. A lot of Pride, and a lot of the LGBTQ community and the support that they get, relies on these corporate dollars. It's a tough conversation to have, sort of at a global media level. But it's an awesome conversation to have with our colleagues, because I think people are really genuinely interested in learning how to make people feel comfortable in the workplace, especially managers now, and it was a great conversation that we had.?

RK: For me at least, one of the challenges is a word like “inclusion.” It gets thrown around so much that I worry it can stop having real meaning. Or even “allyship” or “support.” It's kind of like, “Oh, yeah, of course we all believe in this, and of course, we all agree.” And then if you kind of lose that feeling of it being something new and important, and if you don't dig a little deeper and ask a little more, you may be missing something.?

MR: Spoken like a true ally, Raj! I totally agree. And to be clear, if I had it my way, I'd get rid of the whole idea of inclusion. I don't want to be included. I want liberation from this idea – I'm like, offended in the first place to realize that I was excluded.?

So I hear you. I think allyship, diversity, equity and inclusion issues—these are all things that are nuanced and complicated. And businesses struggle to find words and the right ways to communicate that idea of, “we want to be accepting, and we're going to make mistakes, but we're going to really try to include all of you.”

You can't build a movement on nuance. And so you have to kind of hold on to some words like “allyship,” or some words like “ inclusion.” And I love the effort. But I think you're right, we need to continue to consistently look at how we're doing it. And the strongest way to be an ally, I think, is to be in a room full of people where there are no queer people and to be talking about queer issues in December and March and all of the other months where Pride’s not a focus.?

As somebody who leads communications for a global company, I know these are difficult things to communicate about. So I think it's both—let's talk about inclusion, and I don't ever want to talk about inclusion, again.

RK: I think about one of our core values, which is that we champion development professionals. And how infrequently we talk about what it means to be a queer development professional. We talk a lot about what's happening in a lot of the countries in the Global South where we work. Obviously there's the Uganda case, and you had the World Bank, USAID and others I think, rightly, calling into question our support when those laws are in place.?

But what does it mean for the people actually doing the work? And I think there's probably a lot more we can do at Devex to just raise that topic and that issue and make sure we're really living up to our value of championing development professionals, whether they're expats working overseas, or they’re nationals working inside their own rights or civil society groups, and the challenges they may face in this really fraught landscape that we find ourselves in.

MR: Yeah, and I think that goes for all the marginalized communities, right? Being a Black American during George Floyd who's deployed somewhere in Africa, I can't imagine what that would be like. And I think talking more about how we can show up for the people that we work with during really complicated and difficult times, and times that are traumatic where you feel like you really want to do something but you don't know how.?

When you work in an industry like ours that requires so much vulnerability in the first place, thinking about people who are starving, or people who are facing the worst circumstances in the world, figuring out ways to show up better for each other is definitely worth talking about and providing resources for.

RK: Well, thank you for talking about that, and for leading that discussion here at Devex, and thanks for this conversation.

MR: Thank you, Raj.?