The CIA’s Latest Mission: Improving Diversity

2015/04/22 Leave a comment

Not surprising that the CIA understands the need for greater diversity of perspectives:

Like workplaces across the country, the CIA is striving to improve the diversity of its staff. And just like other companies, the agency nicknamed The Company has found that progress comes in fits and starts.

In interviews with more than a dozen black officers, TIME found that while the CIA has made diversity a top priority, it still struggles to recruit African-Americans and promote them to higher positions.

Diversity is not just important for its own sake. As an intelligence agency, the CIA lives and dies on its ability to interpret complex data about foreign countries. Black agents noted multiple times when their unique perspective as a minority within the United States led them to a breakthrough in understanding a foreign conflict.

The agency’s top leaders agree.

“Diversity is critical to the success of CIA’s mission. We need a workforce as diverse as the world we cover,” CIA Director John Brennan said in a statement to TIME. “CIA has come a long way in broadening the demographic of its senior ranks, but we still have significant work to do.”

To that end, Brennan launched the Diversity in Leadership Study to examine the current demographics of the agency’s senior ranks. A similar study on women, who make up 46% of the CIA workforce, was released in 2013.

A key part of the study, which is being directed by famed lawyer and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan, will be recommendations on how to better foster an environment where people from all backgrounds can rise to the top.

The CIA’s Latest Mission: Improving Diversity | TIME.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Disregard for Diversity in Selection of Judges – New Canadian Media – NCM

2015/02/17 Leave a comment

Valid concerns:

Several legal groups are calling on Ottawa for a more accountable process for judicial appointments saying there is an appalling lack of diversity and visible minority judges in Canada.

The Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, the South Asian Bar Association, and the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers have joined forces arguing the appointments show a “disregard for diversity” and are calling for change in the selection process.

Last week, the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers sent a letter to Justice Minister Peter MacKay asking if the government plans to start collecting information about the makeup of judges.

The letter was sent in response to media reports that found the department of justice doesn’t have any “readily available” information about the diversity of federal judicial appointments from the past 20 years.

It means the government can’t say how many women, visible minorities, French-speakers or aboriginals have been named as federal judges since 1993.

In its letter, the FACL – which represents some 700 members in Ontario, and is affiliated with the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, which has approximately 40,000 members –  asks MacKay three questions:

  1. Does the government keep statistics on the number of judicial applicants who it says do not “self-identify”?
  2. How long will it take the government to gather this information?
  3. Does the government intend to gather and produce this information so that we may better understand where exactly we stand on judicial diversity in Canada?

The letter also says MacKay has twice declined a meeting with the federation’s president to discuss diversity. Another letter shows MacKay also turned down a meeting last summer with the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, Global News reported.

Lawyer Anna Wong writing in Law Times said a recent round of judicial appointments by Justice Minister Peter MacKay has put the issue of judicial diversity squarely back in the spotlight.

“The latest appointments follow a trend of predominantly white male appointments that reflect neither the diversity of the population served nor that of the legal profession.

Disregard for Diversity in Selection of Judges – New Canadian Media – NCM.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

ICYMI: Moving past diversity: RBC’s journey to rid its upper ranks of ‘unconscious bias’

2015/02/04 Leave a comment

Good interview with outgoing RBC CEO Gord Nixon and taking diversity and inclusion to the next level and making people aware of unconscious bias. Well worth reading:

Diversity is about mix. Inclusion is really putting that mix to work for you. This unconscious-bias work, when we started last year, we had (esteemed scholar and co-author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People) Dr. Mahzarin Binaji come and speak with our senior leadership team and other employees. We really felt it was the next frontier of this work — trying to get to the more subtle issues and the more politically incorrect or more difficult to speak about (because bias is not an easy thing to talk about). We are working to really get people to become self-aware. And I think along with that it’s also realizing that having a bias doesn’t make you a bad person. We all have them. What’s important is recognizing them and then looking for ways to actually mitigate those biases. We’re doing this in a number of different ways. One is just for individuals — influential individuals (people who make important decision in the company). We really had a lot of our senior people go through this awareness building. I hear leaders say, “I was putting together a team to be working with this important client and as I was looking at people I was going to select, I realized that I was actually looking for somebody like me.” That’s often what your natural bias is.

I think maybe to provide a very practical example. Sometimes you find people assuming that a woman with young children won’t accept a promotion that involves travel because you heard about some woman who did it. The answer there is, don’t assume that. Ask the woman if she is interested in being a candidate for a role that involves travel. Our assumptions and our biases get us there automatically. Or, you think, “This is a new immigrant and why is it relevant to understand how they do banking in a different country?”. Actually, it’s very relevant because we have new immigrants coming to this country and understanding how they do banking allows us to serve them better. So, those are the practical aspects, practical issues that we try to address when they actually happen by having good processes.

You need somebody else to be there and stop you and say, “Hey, I think we might have a bias here” and by making this a more common language in our organization — by talking about it and by having the sessions — it gives you permission to have those conversations and it just makes it easier to go there where sometimes you’re not sure or you don’t want to offend people. This just makes it part of how we do business.

Moving past diversity: RBC’s journey to rid its upper ranks of ‘unconscious bias’ | Financial Post.

The report, by RBC and EY, also well worth reading:

Outsmarting our brains: Overcoming hidden biases to harness diversity’s true potential 

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Do Australian Movies Really Reflect Our Multiculturalism?

2015/01/28 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion and debate over diversity and Australian film (Canadian record not so great either):

But many others strongly believe that national cinema industries, especially publicly-funded ones, have some responsibility to open hearts and minds – and that great stories are missed if diversity is ignored.

“Filmmaking is about having something to say and letting people think about it,” says Caradee of his own cinema practise. His production company’s stated aims include challenging audiences and asking questions about identity and justice. The radicalisation of young Australian men, a hot political issue, is a dominant theme in the planned My Country.

“In TV we tell these stories because we have SBS and the ABC, but there’s no equivalent in film,” says Caradee. More diversity within the filmmaker ranks will result in more diverse films, he adds.

“When stories are written by people not from the culture in which they’re set, they come up fake and the rhythms of speech are wrong,” says scriptwriter and assessor Karin Altmann. She estimates that of the 130-160 scripts she reads annually, only about a dozen are not driven by Anglo Saxon creators.

Caradee is for affirmative action focussed on multicultural groups and involving mentoring and technical upskilling; she’s more into creating opportunities, more broadly. “Writers, emerging filmmakers, people from other cultures: all have less opportunity, and when you open up opportunities it is surprising what happens,” she says.

… Another aspect to multiculturalism is Australian cinema’s appalling record of colour-blind casting. In other words, lead roles are usually played by white people, and taxi drivers and criminals by brown or black people.

Do Australian Movies Really Reflect Our Multiculturalism? | Movie News | SBS Movies.

And from Queensland (where Brisbane is located), strong support for inclusive multiculturalism prior to the state elections:

But he [Premier Campbell Newman] also asked the new citizens to respect Australia’s “democracy, our rule of law, our court system”.

“Multiculturalism works,” he said.

“It makes us stronger, it makes us richer. There are all sorts of wonderful things that take Australia forward from being a successful multicultural community.”

Mr Newman said the world had given Australia much and it was up to its citizens to embrace the melting pot of cultures.

“We have ties to people all around the world that help us economically,” he said.

“We have fantastic things that we can see and do, food and dance and festivals and it works.

“Today I say to you it only works while we continue to work hard to embrace one another, to understand one another, to actually be enthusiastic and appreciate of that diversity.

“There have been some things that have happened in the last year or so and we must keep that well and truly behind us. We must say that we are going to continue to make this country work and be so successful.”

Multiculturalism works: Newman

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Diversity our strength (someone tell the bigots)

2015/01/27 Leave a comment

Elizabeth Renzetti puncturing the myth of Toronto being welcoming of diversity, following a political panel of visible minority candidates:

It’s not just Toronto, of course. This week’s controversial Maclean’s cover story claiming Winnipeg is the most racist city in Canada highlighted the virulence of anti-aboriginal sentiment in the last municipal elections. As mayoral candidate Robert-Falcon Ouellette told the CBC last summer, “If there’s one person saying it, there’s 1,000 people thinking it.” (It should be noted that the man who was elected mayor, Brian Bowman, is Métis.)

As Ms. Chow said, “We’ve become complacent.” Because Canada’s largest city mostly trots along in peace and prosperity, it’s easy not to notice the bitter undercurrents that the past four years stirred up. Or perhaps to think that they’ve disappeared, along with the brothers who did the stirring. But that would be wishful thinking.

Politics is, of course, a hurly-burly – a brutal, elbows-up game. I don’t think any of the women who were on that panel thought otherwise when they stepped into public life. “I have very thick skin,” Ms. Chow said. “Probably too thick.” What they didn’t expect was the idea that they had no right to be in the game in the first place.

But those are precisely the kinds of candidates who should be playing the game. If we’re presented with more of the same faces touting more of the same platforms, an already apathetic, disillusioned electorate will switch off – in which case everyone loses.

And diversity among municipal elected representatives is proportionately less compared to other levels of government.

Diversity our strength (someone tell the bigots) – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Study Says Creativity Can Flow From Political Correctness

2015/01/26 Leave a comment

Interesting study on political correctness and the diversity of teams:

Duguid and her co-authors set up an experiment to see if the notion that politically correctness impedes creativity held up to scientific scrutiny.

They sat down students in groups of three to brainstorm ideas on how to use a vacant space on campus. Some of the groups were all men, some all women, others mixed. Control groups got to start right away on the brainstorming, but the test groups were primed with a script.

The research team told those groups that they were interested in gathering examples from college undergraduates of politically correct behavior on campus. They were instructed to, as a group, list examples of political correctness that they had either heard of or directly experienced on this campus.

“They did that for 10 minutes,” Duguid says.

In the same-sex groups, the old notion held true. Groups of three men or three women who were instructed to think about political correctness were less creative than the control group. But in the mixed-gender groups that got the politically correct instructions, creativity went up.

“They generated more ideas, and those ideas were more novel,” Duguid says. “Whether it was two men and one woman or two women and one man, the results were consistent.”

Study Says Creativity Can Flow From Political Correctness : NPR.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others – NYTimes.com

2015/01/23 Leave a comment

More evidence that of the importance of diversity and emotional intelligence in improving the performance of teams:

We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others – NYTimes.com.

Filed under Other Tagged with ,

Diversity on boards means more than gender

2014/12/10 Leave a comment

More on corporate board director diversity (or lack thereof) by Anita Anand and Vijay Jog (see earlier post Women gain on corporate boards but visible minority representation dips):

In light of these arguments in favour of board diversity and given the ever changing mix of the Canadian population in general, one might think visible minority directors would be more present on Canadian corporate boards. But this is not the case. We have found they represent 5.5 per cent of directors of TSX-listed firms (and less if certain foreign-owned firms are excluded). Visible minorities represent only 4.2 per cent of those graduating from director-education programs, some of whom have previous board experience as an admission requirement.

The percentage of women is much higher in both cohorts; white women comprise 26 per cent of graduates of director programs but only 12 per cent of public company board members. Thus corporate boards have much fewer visible minority directors relative to both white women and white men.

But does diversity even matter? Prior academic research has been somewhat inconclusive. We find that firms with white male boards do not show significantly better performance than firms with boards comprised of females and visible minorities. We do not claim that these results show causality since it is possible that firms that demonstrate superior stock performance are forward-thinking or that investors respond positively to such proactive measures. At the very least, our results suggest that there is no performance deterioration by having a diverse board.

Visible minorities contribute significantly to GDP and represent a high growth segment of the population. Let’s open up the conversation about board diversity beyond gender parity and consider whether boards should bear some demographic similarity to the society in which the corporation operates. Corporate Canada will need to face this issue at some point: why not now?

Diversity on boards means more than gender | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

6 Depressing Facts About Diversity in Film | TIME

2014/08/07 Leave a comment

Not too surprising:

The Media Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism issues a report every three years analyzing diversity in film. In its most recent study, published Monday, the initiative analyzed the 600 top-grossing films over the last six years. Its report found there has been no meaningful change in the racial diversity of films since 2007, despite last year’s hits like 12 Years a Slave and Best Man Holiday.

Here are five other findings from the report:

  • Only a quarter of all 3,932 speaking characters were from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups in 2013’s films
  • Latinos were especially underrepresented: Only 4.9 percent of all speaking characters were Hispanic, even though that demographic represents 25 percent of the moviegoing population and Hispanic women are the most avid summer moviegoers
  • Animated films are the worst culprit: Less than 15 percent of animated characters in films from 2007, 2010 and 2013 the last three reports were from underrepresented groups, even though they are the films to which children are most frequently exposed
  • None of 2013’s top-grossing films featured a female director
  • Only 6 percent of directors across in 2013 films were black

6 Depressing Facts About Diversity in Film | TIME.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

eBay’s Surprising Diversity Figures | TIME

2014/08/07 Leave a comment

More on diversity within the tech industry, this time eBay:

The tech industry is notoriously dominated by white and Asian men. But eBay’s first diversity report shows that it employs more women, blacks and Hispanics than its peers.

Forty-two percent of eBay’s staff of 33,000 workers is female, beating out LinkedIn’s 39%, Yahoo’s 37%, Facebook’s 31%, Twitter’s 30% and Google’s 30%.

eBay also reported that 7% of its U.S. employees are black and 5% are Hispanic.

But even though eBay as a whole may be more diverse than many other tech companies — it also had a female CEO, Meg Whitman, from 1998 through 2008 — there is still a huge gender gap in terms of tech jobs and leadership roles: only 24% of eBay’s tech workers are women.

eBay’s Surprising Diversity Figures | TIME.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →