Lets stop talking about diversity and start working towards equity | Paloma Medina | TEDxPortland

[Applause] so I'm here to try to convince you to stop talking about diversity just stop just stop so I want to I want to convince you to stop talking about diversity because one the word is misguiding us and two we don't actually care about it our brains don't care about it so let me explain those of you who are like hold up let me explain so we know that about ninety nine point nine ish percentage of us have some level of ethnocentrism or some other kind of unconscious prejudice towards people who are different than us so that's like all of us here in this room before you start getting defensive on me and you're just like I does not even hold up it is you it's you but hold up no judgment because these unconscious biases they make sense in that their inner old limbic brain in this part of the brain evolved back in cave-people days and back in those days back in those days if if you were out and about and you ran into someone who looked different than you so he say that would have been cause for concern like who's this I don't know you or did you come from don't take my food right it would have been very very concerning but now we have a very modern world we interact with people all the time who act different than us look different than us that's normal but her limbic brain is still catching up it's still wired to equate outsiders with a threat to our own survival so it means that even if our mouths are saying we want diversity in our workplace we we want a diverse workplace that's all well and good our limbic system is say please not too diverse please not too diverse please not too diverse right okay so now on the other hand there's equity equity or way our brain is wired to care about so by equity I mean being treated fairly equality and there are important differences between equity and equality however we have reached neither in most different industries in our communities so for this talk I'm gonna use equity but the question I got really excited about was what does her brain think about equity well when my favorite studies involved two monkeys that were placed in cages side by side and these monkeys could see each other they were taught a trick and when they did the trick they would get a cucumber a piece as a reward and the monkeys were very happy with this super-great in Phase two of the study they switched things up and when one of the monkeys did the trick as before this time she got a grape and monkeys love fruit so this was definitely a way better reward than the cucumber super good for this monkey the other monkey when she did the trick in phase 2 she still got a cucumber so this was repeated again and again so that the monkey the cucumber monkey she could see that she was doing the same trick but getting the crappier reward let's pause there if you were doing the same task as someone else and you were getting a crappy reward how would you be feeling right now tell me all of your voices drop Vaughn yeah I'd be so pissed here's what the monkey dead [Applause] that's validating right that's valid [Laughter] yeah so just like monkeys just like monkeys we all innately understand how to spot even a glimmer of injustice so it starts explaining why researchers are finding that on flights you know when they make you walk through first class before getting to coach on those flights there are four times the number of incidences of air rage it's a thing it's measurable and there's four times a number of those incidences when they make you walk through first class before you get to your coach seat so now experts theorize that we seem to be wired to scan for equity even glimmers of inequity in particular because it was linked also with survival back in cave people days let's say that Mac and Kay people days there you are foraging hunting but two days in a row you can't less food than the rest of your tribe you do the same work this would have been an important early signal that your chances for survival were slimming and you better do something about it yeah if you want to last your winter so at the time when I was really researching this I thought well what does it matter that our brains scan for and want to protect a sense of equity well it matters because it means that our brains categorize equity as a core need and when any core need is threatened our brains and our bodies are wired to go into a stress State and if this continues now we've got chronic stress and chronic stress leads to inflammation we are finding that people who experience recurring racism indeed show chronic inflammation in their bodies in chronic inflammation as we're learning it's no joke it is directly linked to things like cancer heart disease general lower life expectancy ie it's linked with early death so equity isn't just politics here equity it's critical to our health thank you [Applause] [Music] so about a year ago there I was being an equity inclusion and diversity trainer and it dawned on me why are we talking about diversity at all diversity isn't what our brains need it's really just a metric to understand if equity is happening so let me explain let's say that your company 4% of the employees at your company are people of color but 30% of the u.s. population is people of color so if this happens again and again year after year at your company this that racial diversity number it's an early indicator that it's likely that there's inequity happening somewhere in your hiring pipeline but let's say that you change how you hire and you hire a bunch of people of color and you get it to 30% of your employees or people of color what we're done right can we settle or can we celebrate I love that you're not being like yeah we're done you know something's weird here because this new racial diversity number still doesn't paint the full equity picture it doesn't tell us if those employees are being compensated equitably to their white counterparts it doesn't tell us about how they're being treated by their white peers and everyday work lives and yet we're still knowing this diversity isn't the core need equity is the core need why do we talk so much more about diversity I think we talk more about diversity because it's safer when we say we are committed to diversity at our company it doesn't imply anything but a wish to invite more people into our company more minorities and inviting people it's not that hard I mean it isn't right because I can do it right now I want to invite all of you all of you I see you up there middle all of you here are invited to my house let's say tomorrow how's that sound five o'clock sound okay cool house party diversity checked off done we know right we're like right who we invite into her company's onto our teams into our neighborhoods it is a step but it says nothing about how we'll treat them once they arrive how we treat them and changing how we treat them once they arrive that would take changing our old brain and it also takes changing our systems and I know that changing our old brain and changing our systems that's intense that's daunting I know this so I thought okay well what does the research say about how humans have like achieve daunting goals the research says three things it says we need to verbalize the goal we need to make it measurable we need to make a time-bound verbalize it make it measurable make a time-bound here's the really cool thing fifty years ago this year our nation achieved a huge daunting goal using this very formula so 1962 President Kennedy addresses the nation with a very bold and seemingly at the time impossible goal he says we choose to go to the moon in this decade notice he didn't say we care about going to the moon in this decade now he also definitely didn't say we're gonna form a space committee in this decade yeah doing that no he made it he verbalized the goal he made it measurable he made it hella time bound we reached that goal in seven years in 1969 moon landing BAM done okay so rereading a speech I realized one we need to verbalize the right goal the goal is in diversity the goal is equity [Applause] we need to do like a find and replace and no vocabulary right we need to do a find and replace it or vocabulary in our HR manuals some of us in our job titles in our everyday work lives we need to swap out diversity for equity one but two Kennedy's speech made me realize also it's time it's time that we made this goal measurable and time-bound so what this looks like on the ground is that instead of saying that you are you care about hiring for diversity instead say that you will achieve racial and gender equity in your hiring procedures in three years [Applause] if you're a smaller company right so you're a small company you can do it in less time you can it also means that instead of saying things like we value diversity in our employees instead you influence your leaders to commit to there we go increasing racial and gender representation on your executive team by 50 percent in three years you can say that yeah [Music] and I know some of you are like give me give me the big stuff I want to run with the big dogs instead of saying that you're gonna form a Diversity Committee hire outside experts to help you audit for and then achieve equity and salary and promotions you can do it in two years you can [Music] I want you to walk out of here today I want you to be the one to first replace conversations about diversity with conversations about equity and I want you I want you to be the one to asks your leadership ask your peers let's make it measurable let's make a time-bound because diversity isn't what we're looking for what we really want right what we really want all of us is equity thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 255,024

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Development, Gender, Racism

Id: deYUUfak08Y

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019