May 31, 2024

|

by: kiran

Reassessing Meritocracy: DEI has a language problem

This is one of a series of reports from Padda’s DEI round-table discussion with a panel of renowned insurance-sector DEI experts in January 2024. You can read biographies of our experts and find the other reports here.

DEI has many jobs and practitioners wear many hats. It’s hard to find a single definition, but a good start might be something like “levelling the playing field so that every talent has the chance to shine”.

That can mean painful change. It also means a constant discussion about the differences between equality of opportunity, equality of process and equality of outcome.

At Padda, when we have run engagement surveys with a culture review component, we have regularly received quite open comments like: “I’m a middle-aged white man. What about me?”

This suggests several things.

First, every change has perceived winners and losers; otherwise it wouldn’t be a meaningful change. Unless we bring along the communities who feel that they have lost out into tolerance and acceptance of a new reality, then the results will be slower and weaker.

Second, the same is true for the perceived winners. Without a narrative which recognises achievements and qualities, people who have benefited from policies will feel that they “only got the job” because they were women, of a certain skin colour, LGBTQ+ etc.

Maybe the very idea of winners and losers must change.

Unless we recognise that merit and DEI are not opposites, not incompatible and not a zero-sum game, then all participants in a changed world will experience less benefit. And it’s an insidious perception – we sometimes talk about balancing the needs of DEI against merit-based hiring; and yet that reinforces the opposites; when they are in fact in no way incompatible.

Mark Lomas, FCIPD, Head of Culture, Lloyd’s of London stated. “I dislike the meritocracy debate”, he says. “If you start from a position of believing that we live in a meritocracy, then of course you’ll believe this diversity stuff is helping various groups unfairly to the disadvantage of others. There is no data I’m aware of that suggests we live in a meritocracy. So, I have very little empathy for the meritocracy argument because it didn’t exist in the first place. Just because we all have to compete a little more, demonstrating our ability against objective criteria, with a little less reliance on network as a determining factor doesn’t mean that something is being taken away, it just means we are trying to move towards the fair competition most people would view as important to strive for. And the D&I profession has got some culpability here because we consistently talk about disadvantage. If there are groups of people that are disadvantaged, then there are, by definition, those with additional advantage.”

Erik Johnson, Founding Board Member, Inclusion@Lloyd’s agrees that the DEI profession has made missteps and must create the environment for change with a positive narrative rather than slavishly creating divisive mandates. “Diversity challenges will be undone in good time by social change. But only if we message it in a different way.

“Here’s an example. Canada’s Research Chair programme gives very high-profile grants to academic researchers. Recognising the shortage of female Chairs, the original target for awards was based on the proportion of eligible female academics in a given area. The new target mandates awards should be based on females as a percent of the total population meaning in areas where men dominate the PhD pool females now have a much greater chance of being awarded. It caused backlash among academics and has become a poster child issue around reverse and unfair discrimination for people who are against EDI. I believe that instead the Canadian Government should have focused additional investment to increase the number of diverse PhDs so that the pipeline of STEM graduates is more representative of society.”

David Flint, Founder & CEO, Blue Mountain Capacity agrees that the pipeline must be the focus: “You don’t give someone a job if they’re not qualified to do it. For major hires, you must hire the right person with the right skillset and the ability to perform that function. And we find that in insurance, for example, when women get to interview, they get the job a comparatively higher proportion of the time. So, DEI can support a meritocracy by making sure people from a more diverse background get the opportunity to interview. And again, we must concentrate on DEI strategies in HR teams, because that’s normally the way people get hired.”

Returning to the issue of language, Sandra Lewin, Founder, 100 Women in Insurance, says, “When I launched my podcast, it was always about celebrating and showcasing female talent. And since launching it, so many people have approached me and said, ‘I’ve listened to your podcast and you never talk about how awful it can be to be a woman in the insurance industry’. And that really got me thinking that whenever we talk about diversity, we inflect it too much with negative language. There are women in the insurance industry who are just doing great things.”

Key takeaway: The “what about me” argument is seductive. DEI practitioners must fight divisiveness at every opportunity and learn a language of benefit, not disadvantage.