In order to better understand the current state of D&I coaching, it is first needed to provide a brief overview of how diversity-focused initiatives developed, and how it managed to get to the stage where D&I-related activities are now.
The year 1964 was a time when diversity started to be crucial. It was that year when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was published in the United States. This act made any discrimination on the basis of colour, race, national origin, sex, and/or religion illegal for employers who had more than 15 employees. It was applicable in many areas, including hiring, job training, promotion, and/or compensation. Additionally, there were some supplements to the law, which also forbade discrimination based on pregnancy, age, and disability (Dishman, 2018).
Then, diversity education started becoming popular. The very beginning of diversity education was portrayed in encounter groups. Such events had as the main purpose to bring white and black Americans together for discussions about racial relations. At that time, the discussion was considered as a successful one, if after its ending at least one of the white Americans admitted racial discrimination and white supremacy. Such events were, for example, held in the military.
In addition, having a black-white pair of facilitators was perceived as beneficial as to represent collaboration between different races. Facilitators were usually men, and the sessions were perceived as most value-adding when the white facilitator was able to demonstrate his emotions and openly talk about his journey, together with realising he had racial prejudices. The effect of the encounter groups was to increase sensibility of Americans against racial inequality.
(Vaughn, 2007)
However, one important question is when companies themselves started taking action. In the second half of 1960s and in the 1970s, there were many discrimination lawsuits filed. As businesses wanted to avoid these expensive lawsuits, which could besides the high price also harm the reputation and image of the company, they started with training for people in leadership roles as well as employees. However, these events were mostly a once-only occurrence and were primarily focused on perfect knowledge of the company policies, the dos and don’ts, and case studies for the participants (Anand & Winters, 2008).
In the 1980s, there was a stagnation in the diversity-focused initiatives. Part of the reason for it was the deregulation policies, which were implemented by the U.S. president at that time,
41 Ronald Raegan (Dobbin, Scharge, & Kalev, 2015). As a result, the focus shifted from diversity training to initiatives focused on cost-cutting due to the increasing competition in the industry.
Nevertheless, in the late 1980s a book called Workforce 2000 was published, which predicted that the workforce will in the future include more women and under-represented groups. This book was then further used by many professionals for promoting D&I initiatives.
In the early 90s, an article was published in HBR (Roosevelt, 1990), which suggested 10 steps to move “from affirmative action to affirmative diversity”, to make a company more inclusive.
The author of this article argues that company policies and culture that were still in place in 1990, were based on some assumptions of society and its structure that had been true before, however, now they need to be updated and revised, as realities differ. For instance, one of the original premises was that adult, white men make up the U.S. business mainstream. But, in the 90s, half of the workforce was already formed by women and minorities. Roosevelt points out that a lot of managers were afraid that diversity means lowering standards, however, especially in a diverse workforce, competence was very important. As Roosevelt (2006, p. 1997) explains,
“managing diversity is enabling every member of your workforce to perform to his or her potential”.
It was also highlighted that the reason the move from affirmative action is needed, is because it does not capture the true origin of prejudices and inequalities and does not serve to develop the full potential of all employees. Importantly, Roosevelt (1990) also claims that his plan was only to manage diversity, by which the results obtained would be the same as from a homogeneous team. But when we speak about leveraging and appreciating diversity, that is the case in which we can achieve much better results than from homogeneous teams. Roosevelt’s paradigm was a breakthrough moment for diversity-focused initiatives, as after its publication, companies started incorporating training on topics such as appreciating differences or unconscious bias in the 90s.
3.2.1 D&I Initiatives today
Since 2000, organisations have started focusing on having training not only for some groups in the company, but rather for all employees (Dishman, 2018). As Vaughn (2007) points out, diversity professionals must keep in mind that each organisation has different needs when it comes to educating them about diversity. In some organisations, racial discrimination is a burning issue, while elsewhere, education on the LGBTQ+ community needs to be addressed.
J. Tikalová (personal communication, May 4, 2020) also adds that the industry the firm operates in needs to be considered. Overall, what is commonly heard from D&I professionals, is that the diversity in the workforce should represent the diversity of the customer base. One example of
42 this opinion is Brousillon Matschinga (2020), who says it is impossible to create relevant products for the customer base if its diversity is not reflected in the workforce.
The increased globalisation in the world contributed to the fact that there are many forms of diversity present in multinational companies. It is the job of the D&I coach to be aware of all the possible identity groups that exist, and to work towards removing the obstacles to productivity there are for each member of the organisation, with a special focus on the groups that have been excluded historically. (Vaughn, 2007)
It seems that companies are starting to realise the importance of D&I practitioners to their businesses. In recent years, there has been a visible trend in the increasing number of job postings for D&I-related positions in businesses. On the graph below, it is demonstrated how much the job postings for DEI practitioners rose between recent years.
Figure 7 - Postings for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Related Jobs Source: ZipRecruiter Inc. internal data, 2019
ZipRecruiter conducted an internal survey to discover the development of the number of job postings related to diversity, equity, and inclusion between years 2015 and 2019. They carried out the survey by identifying those mentioned words in the results as well as manually checking the results for their relevance afterwards. The outcome shows that between the years 2018 and 2019, there was an increase of such job postings of three thousand, as the overall number of job postings including DEI rose from almost 7 thousand to 10 thousand.
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