What can I do today?

DE&I is everybody’s business

Contributor Holiday Phillips explores how to make DE&I everybody's business, in particular how men can step into the conversation.

As International Men’s Day approaches, I am hearing more conversations among my male colleagues about the role they have in conversations about gender equity. Most often they conclude they are supposed to be sideline supporters, there to listen and quietly advocate while women take centre stage. In theory this sounds good, but in reality, what this often looks like is men dropping out of the conversation altogether. Underneath the guise of ‘stepping back’ is often a hushed belief that gender equity conversations are not for men.
Why, I ask them, do they feel that talking about gender equity is not for them?

Most often I get the response that they are scared. They fear the repercussions of persecution and marginalisation that will come from saying the wrong thing. I empathise with this. We live in a culture that has little tolerance for making mistakes. And yet it is also true that persecution and marginalisation are the daily experiences of marginalised people—it’s why we do this work. And so opening yourself up to the possibility of experiencing just some of this as a price for being in the conversation, is in itself an act of allyship.

The other response I receive is that they don’t feel allowed to enter the conversation. It's not about them, so it’s not their business. This originates from a great misinterpretation of the purpose of DE&I work. The distorted belief that because the work focuses on certain groups of people, that it is about making things better for these people. DE&I work focuses on these groups because they have been side-lined. But the purpose of this is to make things better for all of us.

Diversity, literally translated, means difference. Think about how diversity occurs in the natural world—biodiversity is not the presence of certain plants or certain animals, but the presence of a variety to benefit the whole ecosystem. Organisations are ecosystems, and at the heart of diversity work is the truth that if certain groups are not allowed to thrive, the whole organisation (and all the people within it) suffers.

I remember working at a heavily male-dominated technology firm many years ago. Over several years we initiated a big drive to increase our proportion of female employees, with great success, ultimately resulting in a 50:50 gender split. The few women who preceded this drive were unsurprisingly relieved by the new state of affairs, but what surprised me were the number of men who approached me to say how relieved they were to be working in a gender balanced team. They spoke of how much more creative the team was, how much more confident to put forward ideas and how much happier they felt coming to work.

Of course, we can’t ignore the fact that certain people do benefit from inequitable systems, and in this case stepping out of the conversation might be an illicit act of resistance, a ploy to hold on to the benefits that inequitable systems give you. But I truly believe on a deeper level that even those who benefit most from inequitable systems cannot be truly happy while others are held down in order to prop them up. We are too interconnected for that.

So, whether you find yourself stepping back for one of these reasons or something entirely different, I understand the fear and I understand the confusion. But despite this, I want to tell you that you are needed. Your voice. Your heart. Your mind. In order to turn the tide on the depths of the inequity we still see in the world, we need all of us, and we need us now.

So, what can you do today? First, notice where you back away from conversations. Next, inform yourself on the areas you identify, listen, read, ask questions. It is as much our responsibility to step in as it is to be informed enough that we have something to add. Finally step in. Speak up, put forward your opinion, advocate.

When we realise that DE&I is all of our business, stepping into the conversation becomes neither a cynical ploy for self-advancement, nor self-sacrificing altruism. Instead, it goes to the heart of what it means to be human, interconnected, interdependent and in service to something greater than ourselves.