Here’s a very real and relevant question: Who is allowed to speak about and fight for diversity and inclusion?
Who is meant to have and express an opinion on the low representation of gender and ethnic diversity in the climate tech ecosystem? Who do you want to see talk about the institutional discrimination of women and people of colour in the workplace at events and elsewhere? The answer isn’t as straightforward as we might initially think.
If here, at Life Size, it was our white male colleagues who were leading the effort, what would you think? Would you think, ‘Wow brilliant, these white men are taking this important issue upon themselves’? Or would you think, ‘Oh this is weird, these white guys shouldn’t talk about/on behalf of their female and racially diverse colleagues’?
It would be weird for white men to lead on this topic. It seems that it has to be the women and BAME (an English acronym that stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic and is fairly widely used in the UK at the moment) colleagues because we are the ones who are allowed to have a voice and opinions. But it means that the burden is on us. What do I mean by that?
Statistics compiled in big studies confirm time and again that disadvantaged groups, such as women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities, carry the weight of responsibility of working on these issues. For example, a 2021 study by McKinsey, a management consulting company, revealed that women leaders are up to twice as likely to spend substantial time on diversity, equality and inclusion work that falls outside their formal job responsibilities than men at the same level.
Additional factors to consider are that this work is usually not remunerated and may lead to issues around these colleagues having to be spokespeople on behalf of all women, all Black people and so on.
It’s a conundrum.
We’re an employee-owned company, so everybody at Life Size works on company goals. Our development is a shared responsibility. We do respect and account for the time it takes to work on these goals. But the potential emotional burden and spokesperson dilemma are not as easy to deal with.
The emotional burden
Skip this part if you’re already clear on what I mean by the emotional burden.
At any given point, what are the things that you are concerned about? It could be a parent being unwell. It could be a difficult love relationship. The development of your children. Moving house. Keeping your current home clean and tidy. Getting the shopping done. Eating well, ideally with a low environmental footprint. Being fit and healthy, getting in that morning run, going to the gym, doing your sports. Pursuing what you’d like to do? It could be organising quality time with friends and family who live across town, all across the country, on the other side of the globe.
What if, in addition to all these relevant and important things, you had to concern yourself with combating institutional and historically ingrained racism and sexism?
If we agree that these are some of the key challenges of our time, we have to acknowledge what a monumental task we’re expecting to get done. Racism and sexism are topics that may bear heavy and painful family or collective history, topics that bring up potentially traumatic past experiences. It’s too much for this article to go into this deeply, but many people of colour (as well as many white people) will have traumatic family history events. Working on these topics may bring them to the forefront. My writing about this right now is questionable as I may be bringing up things for you that you weren’t prepared for when starting to read this article. But I don’t know how to resolve having to tackle it with sparing the pain. Similarly, many women will have experienced sexual harassment and now have to fight for the next generation to hopefully not have to face those same experiences.
That’s what I mean by emotional burden.
The spokesperson dilemma
There’s a lot to be said on this topic that I won’t go into now. A key thought I’d like to discuss in today’s blog is that those who do this work make themselves vulnerable to criticism.
How often have you seen a company address diversity and inclusion and then see the long list of comments underneath criticising, pointing out shortcomings and maybe even attacking and harassing the author?
We may think it’s not so bad as this was posted by a company. You may even think that respectfully expressed criticism is important – that the company needs to be called out for its shortcomings. I understand that thinking. But we need to remember that it’s not a company that worked on this and developed its thinking and communications strategy to create this particular post. It was a human being and they were likely a female or BAME employee.
It’s paralysing to feel that you need to get this right. The fear of saying the wrong thing or not capturing everything is so big. It stopped me from any engagement on the topic because I felt… What? Scared? No. Paralysed. Stopped in my tracks. Finding myself editing a thought before I can think it through and let it unfold. That can’t be it for any of us, especially not for women and people of colour.
Let’s face it. It’s impossible to get it completely right at all times. What would “right” even mean? We can’t expect humans to get this unbelievably complex goal right straight away. Right and wrong are way too narrow words for this kind of task.
So I pledge that the human beings at Life Size will try. We will think and we will act. And we will be here for each other. We will seek respectful, differentiated conversations and we will protect ourselves from unfair criticism. We endeavour to provide a safe space for our clients too and will support their efforts as sparring partners, colleagues and listening ears.
If you’re a climate tech startup that’s looking for new ways to be a business in addition to developing technology that will bring us closer to harmony with our planet, get in touch with us. We’d love to explore how we can maximise your efforts through communications.
