The Soup is Getting Cold with Sheree Atcheson - Issue 4
Sheree Atcheson is a Sri Lankan-born Irish computer scientist and world expert on diversity and inclusion. She works with organisations, big and small, on their D&I policies and is the author of Demanding More, a Financial Times business summer books of 2021 choice.
Atcheson has also been recognised by Computer Weekly as one of the Most Influential Women in UK Tech. She is the Global Ambassador for Women Who Code and also took part in the recent BBC 3 series Do Black Lives Still Matter?
Why Read: Everyone agrees that we need to do more to improve diversity, inclusion and acceptance in the workplace – and many recent high profile scandals in the advertising industry show there’s a lot of work to do - but how do you actually go about doing it? Sheree tells you how to go about it in a no-nonsense, bullsh*t free way. As the Financial Times recommendation of Demanding More reads:
“Sheree Atcheson offers a bracing guide to dealing with privilege, intersectionality, unconscious bias, allyship, colourism, and the language and, more importantly, the practice of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
If there’s one newsletter you share, make it this one - it’s an important topic.
Tell us about your book, Demanding More?
Demanding More is exactly what it says on the tin; it's about demanding more of ourselves, of societies and our businesses when it comes to creating organisations and places as a whole that embrace diversity and foster inclusion. It's really about elevating the conversation from awareness, but actually moving us into education, and action.
I think all too often people immediately start with trying to go into either action, without educating themselves, or gaining awareness where they then stay in awareness entirely, and nothing changes.
The book is about providing an accessible, easy to understand framework of complex topics in a way that I hope everybody, regardless of your background, can really understand. I hope it’s how we can all really make meaningful change.
There was an interesting statistic in the book around the benefits for businesses to embracing diversity?
We know personally that it's the right thing to do and we shouldn't be okay with living and existing in a society that really advantages some while simultaneously disadvantages, others.
But we also know that there are business benefits, because ultimately, we're bringing in people from different backgrounds with different perspectives on to the same problem - onto the same solution - that you're trying to develop, which means you're creating an insight that you will not get in an echo chamber environment.
For example, we know that businesses in the top quartile for gender diversity are outperforming competitors by 15% and those in the top quartile for ethnic diversity are outperforming by 35%. There's a whole host of other statistics - but I think what's really key here is that while many businesses are successful could they be more successful? Yes. And this is one of the ways to do that.
Are there any companies that you think do that well?
I think transparency is the main thing. Adidas, for example, received criticism when it came to the difference between the diversity that exists in their marketing messages, which wasn’t reflected in their leadership teams.
Adidas have made very succinct and target-based changes to make sure they're holding themselves to account on the issue, but they have also shared that transparently externally regularly, too.
That means we have an ability to see what they're doing, and to hold them to account, but just as importantly we can see businesses in the same realm copying what they're doing. So, what we now have is a bigger piece and a bigger societal impact because of their actions.
Technology companies like to see themselves as very progressive, but are they doing enough?
A lot of tech companies for a number of years say they have focussed on this work, but with actually not a lot of change or headway. That's really because diversity and inclusion has focused heavily on representation, but also on gender representation as opposed to, what in the real world we're talking about is people of different backgrounds. Not just women as a monolith, which doesn't work.
The Facebooks, the Googles, and the Twitters, have only increased around 7%, or to 7% of, for example, black employees so actually there's not been a conversation or much worked on.
You shared something on Twitter recently about Basecamp and an internal memo to staff ‘banning political talk’. On the surface it looked fairly innocuous, but you found it very revealing about their culture. Why?
Yeah, so Basecamp, which is a software provider in the US, had posted a memo about banning politics in work, because they say it distracts from work, distracts from the needed conversations, and that it leads to conversations that can be polarising and, really, in their view, are fruitless conversations to have because no one's going to change their mind.
They experienced a big staff backlash as a result, people left. What the founders got wrong is that if you view yourself as apolitical - if you view yourself as in the middle - that is a privilege because many people are not afforded that privilege to be apolitical.
Read More: Basecamp implodes as employees flee company, including senior staff [TheVerge.com]
It is a privilege to be able to say to people, “No, we don't want you to bring politics into work” because it is a privilege to feel above politics; politics is about the support of people of colour, about police brutality, about trans-rights, about gender rights and all those different things together.
So where do you draw the line when it comes to being ethical? The answer is, you can't, because this is people's daily lives.
I talk about this a lot in Demanding More that some people view diversity and inclusion as something that is sort of your nine to five, ‘what you do in work’. But it's not that, it's absolutely everything. It’s how we spend our money, how we decide that we are going to live in a certain area and if we're able to; and it's how we're able to get mortgages. It's how we're able to get health care if you're not somewhere like the UK, where you can get the NHS. It’s all of these things that make up our daily lives.
What should companies that find themselves in similar situations do?
I think what you should really do is sit down and listen to employees and listen as to why this was something that really really resonated as something that wasn't a positive move.
Really listen and think about what actually we need to do to make our company a better place for all of those people, not just the people that align with our beliefs and therefore view those people as apolitical. Because if you're saying everyone in the company is apolitical, you're actually saying they all have the same political alignment, and that's not simply going to happen.
What companies in this situation should have done is really spent time understanding and being more empathetic. A better outcome would have been to hold hands up and say, “actually we made a mistake here, and we're sorry about that. It's because we come from incredibly privileged backgrounds that we have thought that this was something we could do.”
The word privilege can be challenging for many people when it comes to the debate on diversity and inclusion. Nobody likes to think of themselves as privileged, do they, particularly if they feel they have built a career and life story on what they attribute to their own skills and hard work?
A clear perspective on personal privilege is really difficult for people to move straight into – and this is what we need to change - because if people don't actually recognise how they have either been disadvantaged or benefitted from how the world is built at the moment, then it’s difficult to change anything.
It’s very easy to say; “oh actually, yes, I've benefitted,” but how have you benefitted?
Then move into what can we do about it. The key thing that we need people with privilege to do is to actively intervene.
Too often allyship is viewed as something that's very passive that you just do it in the background, but if you have the power of privilege - it's actually about when we see something that isn't acceptable, challenging that decision in actively speaking out and actively putting your voice on the line. That is a privilege that you have to change processes because people are listening to you.
It’s about being actionable - it isn't just about a black square or a one-time donation, whilst those things can be slightly impactful, it needs to be more. It's about those continuous ongoing things of regularly educating yourself, intervening, changing processes and policies, and then continuing to hold your peer group to account.
“It's not just about yourself in a box singularly, it's about the peer group around you and the people that sit listening to you”
That's one of the things I think people forget is that it's not just about yourself in a box singularly, it's about the peer group around you and the people that sit listening to you, how do you hold them people to account as well because they are just as crucial in this as you are.
Whenever we talk about allyship and that awareness it’s important for that continuous temperature check to take place on your own privilege, which I think is actually very important.
Some people will find it really exhausting - because it is exhausting - but for me, I actually think it's, it's a really important conversation.
You talk about intersectionality in the book, which is something I’ll admit I hadn’t read too much about before. Can you explain a little more?
So, intersectionality was a methodology, founded by a black woman scholar in the 1980s called Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality really works to showcase how society, organisations, businesses; everything to the treatment you receive, the access to healthcare and wider life opportunities is dependent on the connection of race, gender, and class.
An example of that could be how, for example, white women are treated versus black women, or how a rich man is treated differently to a poor man; or how, for example, me as a person from a poor background and as a woman of colour, I'm treated differently, even compared to a poor white woman.
What intersectionality shows us is that our understanding is very nuanced, and the nuance is key here because when we try and take a guess, a one stop solution to this, we typically take the view of the majority groups. If we're taking the majority groups of women, for example, we're talking about those groups of women – white, middle-class women, typically - and then that means we leave many people behind.
I think that intersectionality piece highlights that everybody has a unique experience of any given situation that is dependent on a whole lot of things – class, race, gender - and you can go somewhere and have a totally different experience to someone else who is doing exactly the same thing. I know from experience that some heterosexual, middle-class white men in senior roles can struggle with that.
Yes, absolutely. We've seen it recently when Boris Johnson was speaking about private tutoring. He made the comment about how children of wealthy parents have access to private tutoring, ‘because of their parents hard work’.
That is completely disconnected from reality because hard work does not equate to wealth, and certainly, as someone who comes from a very poor working-class background, and who has no real financial worries whatsoever these days; to directly equate hard work to wealth has led to a lot of the systemic bias we see against those from poorer backgrounds.
And that's a big problem because the lack of empathy really disregards the privilege of those wealthy parents, who really benefited through privileges that means they may already be 20 steps ahead of someone else. And if you don't acknowledge that, then this is the problem that we're seeing continually happening; leadership, aren't getting it, governments aren't getting it – and we continue to embed the same exclusionary policies and processes that we're still trying to fix.
There’s another key phrase from the book, which resonated: ‘Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is rare.’
I think it's key because people very often have an assumption that success is where you expect to find it. And it's incredibly biased because it's rooted in all those biases of the assumption of what success looks and sounds like. Until we really challenge that we're continuing to lose out on phenomenal talent that just needs some different support.
That's why I'm a huge supporter of the Social Mobility Foundation because the work they do is really changing the playing field for people of all backgrounds, who are from poorer economic and socio-economic backgrounds because the intersection of class with race and gender is exponential. And we've seen that from the effects of the pandemic, too. We have the data – so we know that's a problem. It's just what we're going to do about it now.
What advice would you give to small businesses that want to do more.
The first thing is, listen; it doesn't matter whether you have 200,000 employees, or 10, listen to what they want and listen to what they need and listen to how they're experiencing your workplace, right now, and do that regularly so you have, as I call it, a ‘temperature check’ on how things are going.
When I consult with smaller companies, I always say, pick one or two things you want to do really well for six months, and then we'll reassess after six months. You don't have to try and do everything in one quarter because you're not set up for it, and you will fail when you spread yourself too thin.
Be very clear on what you can and can't do. Small businesses do not have the same budgets as the big, big companies. So be very clear about what you're prioritising and why you're prioritising it, and also what to expect coming out of it.
What small businesses do have is an ability to really influence culture and see the impact almost right away because you are much smaller; that's a big positive because as you get bigger, what you define your culture as at the start will grow with it, so it's really key that you get it right at that starting point.
Buy Demanding More: Why Diversity and Inclusion Don't Happen and What You Can Do About It, published by Kogan Page, from www.shereeatcheson.com/demanding-more or via Amazon Now.
Receive a 20% discount on the book at www.koganpage.com/demandingmore
Use this code TSIGC20 on check out.
Follow Sheree On Twitter @nirushika
Read More on This Topic:
We Need to Talk About Race: Dale Lovell shares his personal experiences of race and calls for more open conversations in adland.
When Cheering Turns To Violence - Black England Players Face Online Racist Abuse - Sheree Atcheson on English football.
Thanks for reading.
Next Month: Justin Calderón, journalist and content marketer.
Past Issues:
Issue 1:The Soup is Getting Cold with Martin Lindstrom, best-selling author, brand expert and TIME magazine’s one of the “world’s 100 most influential people.”
Issue 2: The Soup is Getting Cold with Nick Entwistle, the founder and Creative Director of The Bank of Creativity and One Minute Briefs, a social media phenomenon.
Issue 3: The Soup is Getting Cold with Alon Shtruzman, Hollywood TV producer and CEO of Keshet International, Keshet Media Group's global distribution and production arm.