(ED)I Won’t Wait: A Cabaret on Inclusion
Updated: Nov 14, 2022
Inclusion is a hot topic. Organisations across the globe are actively recruiting equality, diversity and inclusion specialists to help diversify their workforce and to address toxic workplace cultures rooted in exclusion, bias, prejudice, and bullying and harassment.
But inclusion isn't something new and isn't an issue that has emerged in the last few years. Issues of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) are longstanding. The research, data, policy, and activism in this space has age.
In Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education (2009), Daryl G. Smith writes:
Successful diversity in people represents one of the critical indicators of institutional equity and true inclusion. The absence of diversity can send powerful messages. It doesn’t take long to look around an institution and see whether diversity is valued. If only White men are hired, it is reasonable to conclude that the institution does not seriously want anyone else to apply. One of the reasons that every hiring decision today is under such scrutiny for diversity is that diversity in leadership is so lacking that every new appointment is seen as one that matter.[1]
Yet, despite attention, despite scrutiny, I frequently hear from policymakers and from institutions that this will take time and that we need more, MORE, data.
Please sir, can I have some more…data on the challenges facing marginalised and minoritised groups?
With a focus on data rather than experience, inclusion fast becomes an activity, something to do, an added extra, an expense, a burden, and a cost. It is often annexed into institutionalised action plans that elegantly articulate wishes and hopes for the future.
These plans frequently involve the development of committees and groups as well as the collection and analysis of data. Interventions and change for the affected groups are frequently absent.
More evidence is needed, it seems. More time..................is needed.
But inclusion can’t wait. Inclusion is not an additional cost. It is an operational cost, like water, like electricity. Inclusion is an essential element of leadership, business strategy, and business planning. And if you don’t resource equality, diversity, and inclusion sufficiently AND SOON, the red letters will soon start to come in.
EDI can’t wait. I can’t wait.
Given the preoccupation we have with data, it seems quite sensible to begin with some numbers. And for this, I will put on my data affirming glasses.
Some numbers - but by no means all numbers.
According to AdvanceHE’s Equality in higher education: staff statistical report (2019):
At the head of institutions contract level, 73.5% of academic staff and 76.7% of professional and support staff were men.
Of the Professorial population: 66.3% of professors were White men and 23.6% White women.
Of the Professorial population: 7.7% of professors were Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) men, compared to just 2.3% BAME women
There were just 90 Black male and 35 Black female professors in UK universities.
3.2% of the professorial population declared a disability, compared with 6% of professional staff and 4.4% of non-professorial academic staff.
Data on religion and sexuality remains lacking and, thus, problematic as institutions are not required to submit this data to HESA. In the words of Toyah Wilcox: It’s a Mystery.[2]
And this is Higher Education - aren't we supposed to be role models for inclusive leadership? Advocates? Agents?
If we look more broadly, the picture is largely the same. There is a gender pay gap, and ethnicity pay gap, a disability pay gap, an LGBTQ+ pay gaps. And that's just pay gap data.[3]
Data. Data. Data. No change.
Data Data Data. Slow change.
Data Data Data. As change.
Say it with me.
Data. Data. Data. No change.
Data Data Data. Slow change.
Data Data Data. As change.
Data, Policies, Action Plans, Charters, Manifestos - hypnotic, soothing remedies, tinctures for progress, for change, for inclusion.
While data is important, data doesn’t give us answers. Data doesn’t tell us stories and so it doesn’t persuade, data doesn’t engage. We don’t feel data. We forget data.
Consider:
What do you know about those who you work with?
How do you engage with the EDI data you have? You do have data, don’t you?
How do you engage with team members from a diverse range of groups? Do you understand the challenges for those different from yourself?
Do you feel what’s behind those data points?
How can we understand the experiences of those who occupy a different space from ourselves?
How can we feel difference, so that we can then act on and for difference?
Data highlights the problem. Listening helps us to understand it. But listening requires attention, compassion, and time.
As poet and disability rights activist Laura Hershey makes clear beautifully in her poem Telling (p.134):
What you risk telling your story:
You will bore them.
Your voice will break, your ink
spill and stain your coat.
No one will understand, their eyes
become fences.
You will park yourself forever
on the outside, your differentness once
and for all revealed, dangerous.[4]
Stories depend on making the vulnerable visible, hyper visible. The labour is placed upon the outsider, the outsider asked to come inside, rather the insider step outside.
Is your door open?
Do you even need that door?
But if we rely too heavily on what is visible, on the doors and walls that we see, the artifices that WE perceive, then we will fail to understand experience as varied, changing, kaleidoscopic.
We must remember that here may be walls that we cannot see, that WE don’t need to navigate, walls that we don't want to see, walls WE may not think need dismantling.
To tell stories, to share experiences, is to undertake what Sara Ahmed describes as Diversity Work.[5]
Diversity work can be hard, emotionally intense and tiring. But it is work that we all must undertake – it’s should be part of the job. While stories are important in helping us understand inequality and exclusion, we must be cautious that our focus isn’t drawn to fixing people.
While training and development initiatives such as mentoring programmes are important, they do not address the problems with systems, structures and decision making.
It is important to remember, as my gym instructors says, that: the barriers to success are not of own making.
Repeat this, daily: the barriers to success are not of own making.
As such, we must resist narratives of diversity work that perceive marginalised and minoritised groups as being less fortunate, as needing additional support and accommodations, as helping poor and unfortunate souls.
Diversity Work is difficult, always at risk of turning into something monstrous.
It is complicated, messy, and full of wrong turns. You can be misunderstood and misrepresented. You regularly make mistakes, a result of the difficulty of trying to achieve change from within, of challenging systems of which you are a part. We can start to fear doing diversity work.
In addition, diversity work takes time. And this is time given, more often than not, by those who are directly affected by discrimination and exclusion.
And this can leave you frustrated, wanting, and wishing that it wasn’t always you, down to you, up to you.
Diversity work is practical and intellectual. A lack of diversity impacts on not only who is within the academy, but what knowledge the academy produces.
As Patricia Hill Collins writes in Black Feminist Thought:
While Black women historians, writers, and social scientists have long existed, until recently these women have not held leadership positions…Black women’s exclusion from positions of power within mainstream institutions has led to the elevation of elite White male ideas and interests and the corresponding suppression of Black women’s ideas and interests in scholarship.[6]
Diversity work demarcates insiders and outsiders. But outsider knowledge, is crucial to every organisation, crucial to knowledge, crucial to the knowledge economy.
In his 1956 study of the outsider, Wilson argues that outsiders are dislocated from the world around them. He argues that events such as war cause the outsider to see the world as unreal, as false, a pretence. As Wilson states:
Their problem is the unreality of their lives. They become acutely conscious of it when it beings to pain them, but they are not sure of the source of the pain. The ordinary world loses its values, as it does for a man who has been ill for a very long time. Life takes on the quality of a nightmare, or a cinema sheet when the screen goes blank. These men who had been projecting their hopes and desires into what was passing on the screen suddenly realize they are in a cinema. They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? With the delusion of the screen identity gone, the causality of its events suddenly broken, they are confronted with a terrifying freedom.[7]
Despite Wilson’s radically different position and approach, his thesis resonates with the words of Collins who argues that: Prevented from becoming full insiders in any of these areas of inquiry, Black women remained in outsiders-within locations, individuals whose marginality provided a distinctive angle of vision on these intellectual and political entities.[8]
By being situated as outside, you obtain a different worldview, and your experience of the academy becomes unreal – the academy performing, rather than realising, inclusion.
To quote black feminist Alice Walker:
I believe it was from this period – from my solitary, lonely position, the positions of an outcast – that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships.[9]
For Jonathan P. Eburne: the term outsider is less a category or type than a provocation: it induces contemporary spectators to judge works individually rather than blindly heeding the prevailing wind emitted by the Establishment.[10]
But with provocations, criticism, and complaints comes defensiveness and dismissal. As Sarah Ahmed says in Living a Feminist Life: Even to describe something as sexist and racist here and now can get you into trouble. You point to structures; they say it is in your head. What you describe as material is dismissed as mental.[11]
For Ahmed, to change the academy we must occupy the position of the killjoy, someone who is willing not to shy away from problems. In effect, to be an “outsider-within” is to be a killjoy. It requires us to defy all that is said to be tradition, to be familiar, to be meritocratic. It requires us to defy the academy itself.
But with this, we must look after ourselves and do this on our own terms. As Dean Atta says on coming out:[12]
To have walls is to create an inside and an outside. Queer Theory asks us to constantly think against what is accepted, what constitutes the norm, to – as Nikki Sullivan puts it – ‘resist closure and remain in the process of ambiguous (un)becoming’.[13]
Queer Theory doesn’t ask us to open the doors to outsiders, it asks us to tear down the walls completely. For the academy to become inclusive, the academy must be open to continual change, underpinned by an evolving sense of responsibility, and driven by difference.
EDI can’t wait until tomorrow. Ask yourself: what can you do today?
Acknowledgements
My approach has been inspired, in particular, by the work of Geof Hill and Liz Aggiss who have pioneered new ways to communicate and engage audiences through both cabaret and digital media.
References [1] Smith, Daryl G. 2009. Diversity's promise for higher education: making it work. Johns Hopkins University Press. 77. [2] AdvanceHE. 2019. Equality in higher education: staff statistical report 2019. AdvanceHE. [3] For more information, see: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/ethnicitypaygapsingreatbritain/2019 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/disability/articles/disabilitypaygapsintheuk/2021 https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220603-the-big-lgbtq-wage-gap-problem [4] Laura Hershey. 2011. ‘Telling’. Spark Before Dark. Finishing Line Press. A full permitted version of the poem can be found at: https://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/telling [5] Sara Ahmed. 2012. On Being Included. Duke University Press. [6] Patricia Hill Collins. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge. 5. [7] Colin Wilson. 1956. The Outsider, with forward by Gary Lachman. Tarcher Perigee. 77. [8] Patricia Hill Collins. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge. 12. [9] Alice Walker. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers Gardens. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 244. [10]Jonathan P. Eburne. Outside Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas. University of Minnesota Press. 5. [11] Sara Ahmed. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press. 6. [12] Dean Atta. 2019. ‘How to Come Out as Gay’. The Black Flamingo. Hodder and Stoughton. 358. [13] Nikki Sullivan. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York University Press. v.