Diversity's definition keeps growing
Sacramento Business Journal - by Robert Celaschi Correspondent
The standard for diversity in the workplace has itself gotten more diverse over time. More than just counting how many women or ethnic minorities are in the room, diversity has acquired deeper layers.
As the term is used today, diversity can include differences in religion, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, political outlook and more.
"The way people look at work itself is a diversity," said attorney John Adkisson, a partner in the Sacramento office of law firm Hanson Bridgett. Some people see their jobs as a calling, while others see their jobs as merely a way to get a paycheck.
"And that needs to be respected," Adkisson said.
In fact, attitude has become part of the definition as well.
Vision Service Plan Inc. takes its own diversity pulse once a quarter when it surveys its 1,600 or so employees.
"One of the questions that is asked is, 'Do you feel like you are treated with dignity and respect?' " said Saori Choulos, chair of the company's Diversity Committee. "At VSP, diversity is about being open to everyone's perspective to achieve the best outcome for business."
Inclusion
"Diversity is much broader than what most people think," said Adkisson, who also is president of diversity training firm Team Trainers. He noted that outside the workplace, most organizations have a unifying theme that draws people. For example, a common religious faith can bring together people of otherwise diverse backgrounds.
Not so in the workplace, where people might perform vastly different jobs, get a wide range of pay, or have varying degrees of job security.
"People don't come there because they have something in common, they come because they want to do their profession and get paid," said Adkisson. Thus in some aspects diversity isn't even an option. The only option is in how a company chooses to deal with it.
"Diversity is a recognition that we all have differences. It could be whether you are management versus union, a single parent or don't have children, single or married, or educational background," said Betty Masuoka, assistant general manager for administrative services at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. "Quite frankly we've been trying to take the discussion to a further step: We really want to focus on inclusion. I realize that's another buzzword, but for us it means we need to understand as an organization how we can include different approaches to decision making and points of view."
Aside from being morally right, it's good business, she said: "If you don't deal with the diversity issues, you won't get the work force you need. It leads to higher business costs if you are constantly recruiting and not retaining employees."
Internal diversity is also important if a company has diversity among its customers, said Kate Renwick-Espinosa, VSP's vice president for marketing.
"As we think about getting into markets that we haven't been in before, it's important to understand the perceptions of those markets: geographically, or targeting more Hispanic markets, or targeting more seniors," she said.
Distraction
This broad definition of diversity isn't welcome in all quarters. It masks some fundamental problems that still haven't been resolved, said Martha West, a law professor at the University of California Davis.
"That's so they don't have to talk about the hard data," she said. "The hard data still show women are lagging. If you look at African Americans, you won't find any economic gap being closed. In Sacramento, it's the Latino community: We can find plenty to mow our lawns and clean our houses, but we can't find them in other sections of the economy."
West was among several faculty members who took their own employer to task last year in a report titled "Unprecedented Urgency: Gender Discrimination in Faculty Hiring at the University of California." All of the authors had been members of diversity committees.
"What we found were committees virtually powerless in the face of both deeply ingrained and often unconscious prejudices, and seemingly immovable bureaucracies and institutional structures," the report said.
As a member of UCD's Affirmative Action and Diversity Committee, professor Kyaw Tha Paw U said, "The word discrimination itself was almost forbidden; white, male faculty and administrators were invariably seriously offended by any mention of discrimination."
The report noted a decline in hiring women faculty after the UC Regents abolished affirmative action in 1995 and California passed Proposition 209 in 1996. The report said that UC Davis hired only 15.5 percent women for "ladder rank" faculty in 1997, while women were earning 48 percent of doctoral degrees nationwide that year. The hiring rate was 25 percent women throughout the UC system, down from a high of 37 percent earlier in the decade.
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