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| less than a minute read

Can we please stop referring to candidates and colleagues as "diverse?"

"Diverse" has unwittingly become the "Other." By lumping everyone else into that category, we center the straight, white, able, cis man and effectively marginalize all others. 

One leader described diverse as “any non-male or male person of color, a veteran, gender non-conforming person, or person with a disclosed disability.” This definition separated the company into just two groups: white heterosexual, non-veteran, able men — and everybody else. When we pointed this out to him, he was confounded. The term diverse ended up reinforcing an us versus them paradigm, in which white men were treated as us (or the “in” group), and everyone else as the “out” group — the other, “diverse.” The usage resulted in othering the very people he sought to include.

Tags

diversity and inclusion, leadership, diversity leadership, diversity strategy