Opinion The gender gap challenge: What corporates and PR get wrong about ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’

Modern workplaces must contend with the challenges of intersectionality, long-standing social and economic justice demands, and the simple fact that they are not keeping up with the times

The gate is DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. And the talkative gatekeeper that stops women, among many other groups, from accessing it is the endless specious chatter around it that is comforting for its supporters and alarming for its detractors. (Representational/ Pixabay)

Paromita Ghosh

March 8, 2024 10:55 PM IST First published on: Mar 8, 2024 at 08:45 PM IST

In the famous Franz Kafka parable, Before the Law, a man tries to enter a space, simply named the “law”, but is denied entry by the gatekeeper. He tells the man he cannot be granted entry “now”. The man waits for years conversing with the gatekeeper and eventually dies of old age without even once stepping inside the “law”. As the man dies, the gatekeeper tells him: “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I am going now to close it.”

A contemporary reading of the parable may be in order around International Women’s Day. The “law” remains the same old workplace. The gate is DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. And the talkative gatekeeper that stops women, among many other groups, from accessing it is the endless specious chatter around it that is comforting for its supporters and alarming for its detractors.

DEI is the most prominent in the series of corporate initiatives that are essentially about organisations making themselves more reflective of the societies they are located in. Public proclamations about embracing DEI values allow organisations to project themselves as supportive of diversity. Why are they doing it now more than ever?

One, because until now, large sections of the society have been kept out of the modern workplaces. Reasons vary from active discrimination to slow responses to social and political change. And two, a corpus of industry research claims that gender diversity, among others, boosts performance and profitability. In DEI, the traditional and unchanging structures of the corporate workspace meet the gentle winds of change.

DEI was welcomed as a disruption but runs the risk of becoming a cliche like “work-life balance”. There are plenty of conversations around it with no real effort or resources dedicated to realising the values of diversity, equity, and inclusivity in concrete terms. There are, of course, some organisations who take it more seriously than others, but the overall bar is low.

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The annual Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum benchmarks the status and progress being made towards gender parity across four key dimensions — Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the global gender gap stood at 100 years. This means it would have taken almost a century to achieve global gender parity at the then rate of progress.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic that added another three decades to the 100-year gap that we were already unlikely to see bridged in our lifetimes. The pandemic was particularly rough for women. It added to their burden of care and made it even more challenging to negotiate the domestic and the outside work. The peak of Covid-19 did not merely slow down gender participation and parity. It reversed the gains the feminist movements demanded and democratic reforms afforded over the last five decades.

The 130-year challenge cannot be expected to be fixed by just good intentions. More so, they cannot be fixed by the kind of intentions that drive captains of industry and business thought leaders to often say the quiet part out loud — “zyaada gender ho gaya” (“too much craze around gender nowadays”). But they are willing to tolerate diversity and inclusion if it promises quick returns.

When DEI initiatives are made out to be about boosting bottom lines, it sounds like people do not matter because they are people. They matter because they can provide grist for the productivity and profitability machine. This narrow approach signals that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not important for their own sake but because unfashionable values have been freshly discovered to have miracle powers.

DEI initiatives cannot turbo-charge business performance pronto. Neither can the fruits of diversity and inclusion be harvested by running cloistered gender clubs or doing gender training workshops and seminars that only women attend. Such surface-level initiatives are, for the lack of a better analogy, this decade’s equivalent of rangoli-making competitions that HR departments have finally given up on, to everyone’s relief.

Two things are possibly invoked when one utters the word, “diversity”. First is the complex, messy, yet vibrant and uplifting lived experience. For instance, when one lives in a mixed neighbourhood, one learns about unfamiliar cultures, appreciates differences, and organically makes new connections. In the process, one becomes more cosmopolitan and democratic-minded. Second, there is diversity as a policy prescription that speaks the language of accommodation and tolerance and attempts to manage the mixedness along predetermined objectives. Both the powerful and marginalised groups come to resent this approach sooner or later as it tends to reduce them to their most basic identities and, worse, seems imposed from the top. One is thinking of a roster of etiquette-laden mandatory celebrations in organisations and housing societies that some people half-heartedly participate in to promote unity in diversity.

Similarly, today, DEI initiatives are better imagined as messy and vibrant lived experiences for any deep and meaningful progress than as staid programmatic prescriptions. Carrying out DEI initiatives in a substantive manner requires reimagining and redesigning structures and processes that centre representation, equality, transparency, safety, and accountability. This involves creating a conducive environment where these values can be exercised even though there might not be any immediate or tangible gains. Diversity does not lead to higher productivity or profitability immediately through magic. Improvements occur as people develop and exercise skills among a diversity of colleagues that they would not have ordinarily by working in a homogeneous and dull workplace.

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However, to drive the key point home, DEI is not a tool to solve business problems in contemporary times, it is to make businesses more aligned and more responsive to contemporary times. If businesses do not understand this, they will forever be trying to fix brand problems by having to spend on expensive PR.

Unlike the man who got deterred in Kafka’s parable and instead waited for the gatekeeper to change his mind about letting him inside the “law”, all of us will do well to disregard the chatter of the gatekeeper — the magical thinking around DEI. The man got scared and decided to wait outside the “law” when the gatekeeper told him, “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.”

Beyond the gatekeeper’s chatter — the contemporary discourses around DEI — there are indeed more powerful and difficult, resource-intensive, and time-consuming challenges that one will encounter once inside the modern workplace but there is no easy way around them. Modern workplaces must contend with the challenges of intersectionality, long-standing social and economic justice demands, and the simple fact that they are not keeping up with the times. A DEI bandaid can not fix a 130-year gender gap challenge.

The writer is a Mumbai-based media practitioner