Many companies that want to develop a diversity strategy first of all set themselves a goal. This usually means: we would like to see more women, for example in boardrooms, management positions and tech and IT areas. But that is too short-sighted. Intersectionality is needed. What that is and how it works on the job, you can read here.
Studies, such as that of the Swedish Allbright Foundation, reflect annually how many women sit on the boards of German corporations. (Spoiler: few). The creators of @wievielefrauen count how many women can be seen in event photos on Twitter (spoiler: also few). And many companies have already had women's networks for several years or decades.
And actually it should be clear: there are no uniform women. So who belongs to this category? Who feels addressed by it and who does not? It's time to take a look at little-noticed self-identities.
The concept of many companies: "First we focus our diversity strategy on women" is far too one-dimensional and only leads to further exclusions. I'll explain why here.
Diversity strategies break down structural barriers
But first a brief recap: Diversity & Inclusion aims to value the diversity of all people in the company. D&I should enable equal opportunities and belonging for all people in the company, while breaking down structural barriers. Because structurally existing, social walls continue to have an effect in companies. This was shown by the Twitter hashtag #metoo, which was used by women around the world to draw attention to sexism and sexualised violence, #metwo, which was used by people to tweet about racism in Germany, and #unten, which showed that social background also causes many exclusions in the workplace and beyond.
Why women are not equal to women
A study by the Bonn Institute for the Future of Work has shown that Muslim women wearing headscarves have to send four times as many applications for an invitation to a job interview with identical qualifications. For more highly qualified jobs, Muslim women applicants are even more disadvantaged compared to applicants without a migration background. However, the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) guarantees religious freedom.
One group in particular benefits from the focus on gender
This shows: A Muslim woman wearing a headscarf is of course a woman. But she is discriminated against specifically for her self-identity as a Muslim woman. The focus solely on gender demonstrably benefits only one group: namely, white cisgender women, (i.e., women who identify with their assigned gender at birth) without disabilities, heterosexual, and from academic* families. This is also shown in a 2018 study by Lean.In, for which researchers examined the categories "white women in senior management" and "women of color in senior management" in US companies.
The example can be played through at will: Women with disabilities, trans women, women who are overweight...: They are all discriminated against in the labour market. The diversity strategy should reflect this.
Diversity strategy: Intersectionality first
Discrimination categories are interwoven with each other. The technical term for this is intersectionality. The American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term intersectionality for these social inequalities: With an image of a crossroads (English: intersection) where forms of discrimination meet and intersect. Crenshaw is referring to the specific discrimination of Black women in the US labour market:
"Let's take as an example a road junction where traffic comes from all four directions. Like this traffic, discrimination can also be multi-directional. When an accident occurs at an intersection, it may have been caused by traffic from any direction - sometimes even traffic from all directions at the same time. Similarly, if a Black woman is injured at an "intersection"; the cause could be sexist as well as racial discrimination." (Crenshaw 2010).
However, the problem has been named much longer - by the women's rights activist Sojorner Truth as early as 1851. She wrote that while women collectively experience oppression because of their gender, the experience of Black women against the backdrop of racist exclusion is another oppression. The white women's movements of the time did not take this into account.
In Germany, too, important initiators introduced intersectionality into the discourse of women's movements from the 1980s onwards. In Germany, for example, migrant women, Black Germans, Jewish women or women with disabilities have drawn attention to their own identities, such as Grada Kilomba or Peggy Piesche.
Considering Multiple Discrimination in the Diversity Strategy
Another example of the interaction of forms of discrimination: A recently published study by Amnesty International shows that Black women on Twitter are 84 per cent more exposed to hate and experience more verbal violence than white women.
Furthermore, it has long been known from the US context and from Great Britain, for example, that the gender pay gap is considerably larger for black women and women of colour. In Germany, there are no figures on this. This is a data gap that absolutely must be investigated. The first attempts to collect discrimination data beyond the category of gender in Germany have already been made.
Naika Foroutan, deputy director of the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research, said in connection with a study by the Berlin organisation Diversity in Leadership: "The collection of gender equality data has already proven itself for the category of gender. In the post-migrant society, it is important to develop survey instruments that capture social diversity beyond the migration background. This has been successfully achieved for the first time with the study."
Why is intersectionality so important in the company?
In the English-speaking world, D&I specialists speak of the so-called "emotional tax". There is no literal German translation for it - which also shows that the discourse in this country is not yet so far advanced. But it means something like: the emotional price that some people have to pay in the company because they are part of a non-dominant and marginalised social group and therefore experience racism, for example. And always have to emotionally plan for experiencing racism. It is therefore also logical that people who are burdened by the "emotional tax" have to muster more strength at their workplace and beyond than people who are not affected by it. Therefore, the goal must be: to create a less discriminatory work environment for all diverse self-identities. So #inclusion and #intersectionality should be the building blocks of your diversity strategy.
What you can do for more intersectionality
Let's be honest with each other. What makes the whole thing so uncomfortable is dealing with complex forms of discrimination and privilege. Yes, it is not easy. But it is part of any honest diversity strategy. Brst start with yourself:
- Where does my own behaviour lead to other people being excluded? Keyword: Check biases.
- In which areas should I expand my knowledge about forms of discrimination?
- Who could I listen to more? Where in the past have I prejudged someone because of their self-identity?
And then also to investigate within the company with the help of a D&I consultancy, for example through a D&I audit. A D&I audit is often a starting point for a D&I strategy. It uses quantitative and qualitative data analysis to show which challenges exist and which programmes may already be working very well.
Women's quotas are only meaningful to a limited extent
Effective D&I strategies should therefore be intersectional. They would have to go further than pure number crunching, which with its "so-and-so-many-percent-women" will not help all women in the long run.
Women before, yes, absolutely, but only if diverse self-identities of all people who identify as women and all people who are non-binary are thought about by us diversity strategies. This is also what successful diversity strategies do: they enable even difficult conversations and address the unique challenges of people and structures in the company.
