Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies. Dr. Shirley Davis
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alt="Remember"/> Belief in these many isms and phobias influence our biases in our everyday life, including the workplace. Recognizing and understanding these beliefs is an important step in our DEI journey so that we become aware of what not to do and what to do more effectively.
LGBTQIA+
(Adapted from Human Rights Campaign’s and Catalyst’s Glossary of Terms)
An initialism for the community of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and any other sexual or gender minority. People often refer to the I as “intersex” and the A as asexual. Some of my colleagues also use the IA to refer to inclusion allies.
Originally, the first four letters of the LGBTQIA+ initialism were commonly used to group various sexual and gender minorities. Although it was first considered an evolution toward inclusion, these four letters proved to be limiting to individuals who didn’t identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.
Other LGBTQ terms include the following:
Sex: Biological classification of male or female based on reproductive organs and functions.
Lesbian: Women and nonbinary people who are attracted to women may use this term to describe themselves.
Gay: Men, women, and nonbinary who are attracted to people of the same gender may use this term to describe themselves.
Bisexual: A person who is attracted to more than one sex, gender, or gender identity may use this term to describe themselves. These attractions don’t necessarily occur simultaneously, in the same way, or to the same degree.
Transgender: People who feel that the gender assigned to them based on their biological sex is a false or incomplete definition of themselves. Being transgender doesn’t imply any specific sexual orientation. Therefore, transgender people may identify as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on.
Queer: This term is often used as a catch-all adjective to describe many people, including those who don’t identify as exclusively straight and/or folks who have nonbinary or gender-expansive identities. This term was previously used as a slur but has been reclaimed by many parts of the LGBTQ movement.
Microaggressions
Microaggressions are subtle verbal and nonverbal slights, insults, indignities, and denigrating messages directed toward a person due to their group membership, often automatically and unconsciously. Microaggressions can be seen as innocent, harmless comments, but they actually reinforce stereotypes and are a form of discrimination.
For example, if you ask the Asian member of your team to complete a task that requires extensive math because you know they’ll be great at it, you probably just made the statement without thinking. You don’t know the Asian member of your team; you just assumed they’d be great at math based on a stereotype. That’s the challenge with microaggressions — they often operate outside of the level of consciousness.
Throughout my career as a woman and a person of color, I’ve experienced many microaggressions at the hands of supervisors, senior leaders, and other authority figures who were from the dominant group of power and privilege in the organization. I’ve been complimented for “sounding white and speaking proper,” been told how articulate I am, and been used as a photo op for the company’s annual report or marketing brochure and as a token for meeting diversity goals. I’ve been present at the table but had my voice be invisible, been designated as the one to go get lunch for all male colleagues — the list goes on. These microaggressions left me feeling used, undervalued, emotionally exhausted, resentful, and hurt.
Similar to implicit bias, microaggressions are an unfortunate outcome of the human experience. Check out the discussion of microaggressions in Chapter 7 to help to raise your consciousness about these matters and how to mitigate them.
Neurodiversity
The concept of neurodiversity is newer in the DEI space but not the medical and social science fields. Neurodiversity is a term that was introduced in 1998 by an autistic sociologist named Judy Singer. It comes from a number of brain studies that reveal that people who think, learn, and process information differently than others have brains that are wired that way. Advocates seek to set the record straight that people who are neurodiverse are not suffering from a disease or dysfunction. Rather, the idea is that people should expand their understanding of what’s “normal” in terms of brain function — that many things that have been considered problems are actually just differences.
Neurodiversity is important for the workplace because often those who are considered neurodiverse fall under the disability umbrella; however, John Elder Robison, a neuroscience scholar in residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia stated that “neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences like autism and ADHD are the result of normal, natural variation within the human genome.” Neurodiverse people’s brains function outside the average brain and have the ability to hyper-focus, which is beneficial in certain job categories and industries.
Prejudice and stereotypes
A stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person, thing, or group. Prejudice is an attitude or feeling of unfair dislike based mostly on opinions and stereotypes rather than facts and evidence because of some characteristic such as race, age, religion, and so on.
Stereotypes are any commonly known public belief about a certain social group or a type of individual. They can be positive (for example, most people assume that all millennials are tech-savvy). Prejudices, on the other hand, are almost always negative and aren’t based on reason or experience. They often are supported by a belief that certain people or groups have less worth or fewer abilities. Prejudiced behavior is often influenced by bias.
Stereotypes are often believed and perpetuated out of humans’ need to believe a generalized assumption about a group they don’t normally interact with. Stereotyping and prejudiced behavior (that is, discrimination) often go hand in hand because prejudices are often based on believing stereotypes. Discrimination, then, is negative, destructive, and exclusionary behavior toward an individual or groups of people based on identity groups (such as race, gender, sex, ethnicity, or social class). Prejudice and stereotypes are perpetuated through discrimination at the individual, institutional, and structural level, and discrimination is put into practice through personal behaviors, practices, cultures, laws, and policies.
Think for a moment about your own experiences with stereotypes. What stereotypes were you taught growing up? What messages did you receive about your group? What messages did you receive about people who are different from you?
Privilege and power
Privilege is advantages, rewards, or benefits given to those in the dominant group solely because of their membership in that group. It operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives these advantages at the expense of members of target groups. In the United States, privilege is granted to people who have membership