By partaking in this course, I have certainly gained a useful insight into the importance of managing diversity other than the need to comply with legislation. For example, it can be beneficial for organizations to link diversity to strategy in order to integrate personal, organizational and social values into their culture. I have learnt that managing diversity also contributes towards an organization’s corporate social responsibility and their ability to include all their stakeholders. However, it is important to note that throughout the course and the development of my team project, I have seen that there are various organizations who do not consider managing diversity as a top priority.
Similarly, I’ve gained an insight into the gender pay gap. For example, not only are women underrepresented in decision-making in the workplace, but they also have less money to save and invest, which ultimately further contributes to a greater average pension gap between men and women. I have also learnt about the depths of intersectionality and how, for example, women or men can experience both racism and sexism at the same time.
Furthermore, I can now distinguish between both direct and indirect discrimination and apply it to the practices of certain organizations such as Google. This course has also provided me with the opportunity to expand my knowledge on the process of how an individual’s perception of stereotypes can be influenced by social class, mass media, the internet, families and education. This further contributed towards my knowledge of socialization and the fact that despite it being particularly significant throughout one’s childhood, it can still continue and play a significant part throughout one’s life in general.
I have now adopted a new way of approaching the complexity culture, i.e. ways of doing things, ways of thinking and ways of making sense of the world. Cultures can differ in terms of cooking traditions and also their varying philosophical approaches and cosmogonies. I also understand the significance of migration processes on how society views and understands culture today. Through migration, there has been an abundance of different cultural practices, languages, religions, ethnicities and races. By understanding the consequences of migration processes, I have gained a good understanding about the formation of minority groups in society. I have also gained an insight into how the lack of knowledge and understanding about religions and languages contribute to why some individuals fear certain cultures or minority groups.
By participating in this course, I have also been exposed to the cases of some major corporations and their efforts in embracing all dimensions of diversity in order to create a more inclusive work environment. For example, Netflix has introduced more diversity in their content by hiring more female actors and individuals from different races such as Latino and black people in order to establish a workforce that resembles its global customers. Similarly, Danone identifies diversity as a source of both performance and innovation and have adopted more of an open-mind as a company. Thus, by evaluating cases from different organizations, I understand how transparency plays a key part in managing diversity and also how organizations can benefit from auditing their practices and publishing their results. Not only was it interesting to learn about what corporations are doing to manage diversity, but I also enjoyed learning about what certain countries are doing as a whole to be more inclusive. One example would be the replacement of pedestrian traffic lights to represent gay couples in Vienna.
The course has also taught me about what actions can be taken by organizations in order to manage diversity successfully. For example, through inclusive design, businesses can redefine their products and services in order to represent a greater proportion of the population. A good example would be Mango’s efforts of fighting stereotypes, giving visibility and accepting alternative behaviours by creating a new collection that is designed specifically for those celebrating Ramadan. Through effective marketing and communication practices, businesses can exhibit their efforts towards the creation of more inclusive products that are in line with their values. For example, I was extremely impressed with Samsung’s high-impact advertising campaign that involved addressing equality through their washing machines. Organizations may also adopt a stakeholder approach by working with foundations, associations or trade unions.
I was also extremely inspired by some of the guest speakers throughout the course, more specifically SURT’s approach to gender and empowerment and the tools they created to achieve this. For example, SURT’s creation of ‘forward questionnaires’ and ‘competence portfolios’ helps females transform their experiences into competencies and at the same time, provides them with the chance to recognize their capabilities and talents. I hope to adopt a similar mind-set to SURT in the future in terms of their belief that ‘difficulties are opportunities to develop competencies’. Similarly, the guest speaker from PEPSICO inspired me and taught me that having a vision is fundamental for establishing targets, such as a 50/50 gender balance in all management roles by adapting and modifying their recruitment process and policy in order to attain inclusive leadership. These strategic priorities also contribute towards PEPSICO’s attractiveness in the job market.
Finally, by creating my team project, I learnt how diversity can contribute towards the development of new ideas and concepts. All of my team members were from different races, ethnicities and also had different educational backgrounds. This meant that not only did I get to learn about how diversity is managed in their home countries, but we also had an interesting brainstorm of ideas that we got to combine into developing a solution for our chosen company. As a consequence, our group did not suffer from the case of ‘group-think’, as we all came from different backgrounds, which meant that none of us put aside our own beliefs in order to conform. In addition to this, I got to learn which discourses of diversity they had been exposed to and also what inclusion meant to them and their way of intertwining these principles into our team project.
