Our society has managed to steadily progress despite the myriad issues around diversity embedded in it, and some might argue that slow progress coupled with the many benefits offered by AI is good enough. I obviously disagree. While there are more than enough moral and ethical reasons for diversity, the most salient fact is that at the end of the day, DEI doesn’t just mean Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, I believe it should also stand for Diversity Equals Income. Every time a company uses an algorithm that alienates a user, diminishes an outlier in order to fit a model, tamps down diversity when making a hiring decision, or works in a diversity-blind fashion as opposed to a pro-diversity manor, dollars are being left on the table — dollars that few businesses can afford to spare.

The first time the potentially negative interaction of technology and race dawned on me was back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s when I – and many of my black friends – found ourselves unable to be properly identified by the face recognition software used by Facebook. As we soon learned, who was in the room doing the programing mattered. The programmers, the majority of whom did not look like us, trained the machines on faces that looked like theirs and not ours, leaving those of us with darker complexions as mysteries unable to be identified by computerized eyes. One would think that as the years have progressed, things would have gotten better, but a 2018 study conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that some facial recognition algorithms had error rates that were up to 100 times higher for African Americans than for Caucasians.

Sadly, this bias isn’t just found in visual data. A 2019 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that algorithms used by credit scoring companies tended to underestimate the creditworthiness of African American and Hispanic borrowers. These algorithms routinely gave these borrowers lower credit scores and higher interest rates.

What does this have to do with diversity? AI has also ushered us into a new age for HR. All across the world companies are using AI to screen resumes for potential hires. The issue is that AI-powered hiring systems have been found to discriminate against women and minorities. A study by the University of Cambridge found that an AI-powered recruitment tool developed by Amazon consequently downgraded resumes that contained words such as “women,” “female,” and “gender,” and as a result, candidates with female-sounding names were less likely to be selected for interviews.

There were two problems — both of which are interconnected, difficult to solve, and which need to be addressed. First, in all these situations, the training set was flawed. If a system is trained on biased information, it will generate and propagate a biased output. In the case of the recruitment tool, it had been trained on resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period, most of which were from male applicants (who were chosen, in some part, due to the systemic bias of the human HR people). Second, those in charge of these systems didn’t value or consider diversity enough to actually encode it in the system.

Like a child learning what is right and wrong or how to behave, an AI needs to be taught. To properly teach it how to deal with the myriad different situations it may encounter, organizations must expose the AI to past examples of right and wrong (or success and failure). These past examples can be redolent with bias against women, immigrants, people with physical or neurodivergence, as well as race and ethnic groups. Currently, since the complexity of the AI’s computations is so high that it is virtually a black box, the best way to check if a system is biased is through testing both the input and the output. Testing for any sort of sampling bias in terms of a specific characteristic, or geography, or demographic marker in what was fed into the system as well as unwanted correlations from what comes out of the algorithm is critical. The issue is that this extra step, while relatively simple, is time consuming and time is money. That being said, a fair question to ask is — is this enough?

In our social discourse, it’s generally understood that simply being colorblind (for example) is insufficient in light of the various systemic structures at play in our society. In order to achieve some sort of equity, “color bravery” — in other words, a more proactive stance on addressing racial disparities — is necessary. So then, if in other circles, simply being color blind is insufficient, why then in this circle, would being un-biased be sufficient? As I’ve said time and again, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is important but it’s not just important because it is morally right or humanistically right but because in business (as I also said earlier) Diversity Equals Income.

To give a few examples:

• A 2009 study by the Center for American Progress found that companies with more racial and gender diversity were more likely to have higher profits.
• A 2016 study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that companies with more female executives were more profitable.
• A 2018 study by the Boston Consulting Group found that companies with more racially and gender diverse boards of directors were more profitable.

Studies have shown that diverse teams can bring a wider range of perspectives and experiences to the table, leading to more creative problem-solving and better decision-making. They can be more effective in understanding and serving a diverse customer base, and they can be more attractive to top talent, which can lead to higher productivity and innovation. AI provides businesses the opportunity not only to ensure that their hiring practices aren’t biased but that their staff has the diversity needed produce the best goods and services for their ever more diverse consumers.

The organizations that are relying solely on AI to screen resumes, sift through applications for schools, or make decisions about credit, etc. are making a grave mistake. They are mistaking the hammer for the carpenter and the car for the driver. This is actually very similar to a problem I occasionally run into while leading product ideation workshops. Clients will get so invested in the exact rules and procedures of an exercise I’ve devised to help unlock their creativity that they’ll literally get upset when I throw out the rules and start capturing the ideas that start pouring out. They often want to hold their tongue and risk losing their idea, rather than sacrifice the well laid out rules of the exercise — that is until I remind them that the exercise is just a tool, and what really matters is the idea.

AI is merely a tool. Yes, it is a powerful tool, but it is still only a tool — one of many tools that we as businesspeople, members of society, and human beings have at our disposal. We need to remember that the goal needs to remain one of creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive business environment — so we can create better products, services, and experiences for our consumers. If we don’t, we are leaving money on the table, we are leaving our consumers unsatisfied, we are leaving our companies without the best talent, and we are leaving ourselves exposed to the first competitor who is smart enough to capitalize on our blind spot.

The smartest companies that I’ve worked with are the ones that define their goals first and find the tools to achieve those goals second — not the other way around. Marshall McLuhan once said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” This is one situation where we cannot, and must not, allow our tools to shape us if we hope to continue forward to a more diverse future, let alone a more profitable one for our businesses.

Cerrone Lundy is a Director at Vivaldi. He works with organizations to better understand their client needs and create products, services, experiences and more. 

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Vivaldi strongly believes in WIN’s mission to close the gender gap in innovation. Vivaldians are on the global leadership and chapter leadership teams and have even been ambassadors of WIN.

Vivaldi spoke with Shakeir about advocating for women’s careers, the expectations of Gen Z, and how we define innovation.

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How would you explain the mission of Women in Innovation?

Women in Innovation was founded to close the gender gap of the representation of women in the innovation space. If you look at innovation firms, only 25% of top firms are actually led by women. If you look at innovation best-sellers (books and written content), only 16% are written by women. In Fortune 100 companies, only 25% Chief Innovation Officers are women. Obviously, there’s a gender disparity that we need to not only monitor closely in terms of data and how we’re moving the needle, but also to think of outside-the-box ways by which to close these gaps.

What key focus areas do you think are vital for creating equity in the innovation space?

Looking back at my own career and the interviews I’ve done for my own research around this area, there’s a lack of executive leadership sponsorship. Only about 56% of junior level women report having a senior leader who actually advocates for them. Mentorship is one thing, but someone who is willing to put their neck out there when it comes to decision-making and say, “I want this person to lead,” that’s a different story. Around 49% believe it’s more challenging for them to reach senior management positions than it is for men. If you don’t have somebody who is advocating for you, with intentionality, it’s very difficult.

If people think there’s only one spot, there may be more of a perception around competition, rather than an idea that we can build larger networks to help each other in a different way.

Absolutely. One of the main challenges women feel impede their advancement is a lack of opportunity to broaden their skill sets. Creating those spaces where you’re tapped into networks or thought leadership that’s constantly giving you previews of trends.

Another piece is peer to peer support networks. This is often where women are more hesitant than men to ask a connection for a favor or advice out of a fear of being perceived as opportunistic or weak. I think there’s room for us to really strengthen each other by creating those spaces for networking, which is one of the mandates of WIN. The last piece is a lack of female dominated inner circles. Around 75% of high-ranking women have really strong ties to female circles, which led to job placement level, and it’s 2.5 times greater than women with small networks or male dominated inner circles.

To talk specifically about the innovation piece — do you have a preferred working definition for “innovation”?

Innovation has been one of those terms that could be anything and everything. I favor the definition that innovation is a process of making changes, large and small, radical and incremental, to products, processes, and services that result in the introduction of something new for the organization that adds value to customers and contributes to the knowledge store of the organization and is profitable.

Dr. Reima Shakeir, CEO, Women in Innovation

There are so many ways that people can work in innovation-related spaces. With your background as a professor, what are students looking for when it comes to career opportunities around innovation, business reinvention, and technology?

I get to talk about my favorite topic: Gen Z. Let’s start by saying that the one certainty today is uncertainty. Over these past few years, with the global pandemic, rocketing inflation, climate disasters, Russia’s war on Ukraine — Gen Z is really growing up and navigating a very complex and uncertain world, along with the rest of us. They are re-thinking foundational elements of day to day life, be it building decentralized networks of emotional support to advocating for greater responsibility from companies and brands, and questioning the world they want to live in. Gen Z is truly beyond the binary in every single sense of the word. And like many of their peers, perhaps similar to millennials, they want to put their efforts into and work in companies that they can feel good about. The three pillars that have historically been relevant to my students have been sustainability, equity and integrity. These are what they look for in companies when they are joining.

One of the other things we’ve heard about people entering the career world is that they are looking for companies that have practices that reflect their values with regard to DEI. Is that something you’re seeing people evaluate more?

Gen Z is one of the most diverse generations of its time. Gen Z is a generation of inclusivity and belonging. So, the question becomes, how are you actually creating a culture of belonging in your organizations? Only 76% of companies admit that they do not have diversity and inclusion roles to begin with, so to lead into the future, leadership is going to be tasked with understanding and taking action to reflect the cultural landscape of this workforce and building an organization that reflects those values from the ground up. It’s not a choice anymore, it’s an expectation. That’s why Gen Z-ers have no problem job-hopping if they don’t find that the company is hitting those targets. Their world view is organically one of inclusivity and fairness, and they really have the expectation of organizations that they work for to reflect those values.

Are there any organizations or companies that are doing a good job of fostering belonging and inclusion in a better way?

When we see someone like Larry Fink, from Black Rock, writing an open letter that says we’re not going to do business with folks who don’t care about ESG, who don’t care about diversity, that’s a huge statement. It gets people thinking. I would say the trend is now moving more toward how we can be more intentional in our diversity efforts; let’s stop making a business case out of diversity, and try to be a bit more authentic in how we are engaging because it’s the right thing to do. Wharton just launched an MBA focused on DEI. If you’ve got a leading business school in the world dedicating a whole MBA to it because more and more leadership from corporate spaces are asking for it, I think that’s very telling.

You’ve worked in the nonprofit and philanthropy worlds – what is the approach there to innovation?

This is extremely complicated. When you think of innovation, inherently there’s risk involved. In the nonprofit and philanthropy space, there’s an accountability to donors, and so they tend to be risk averse. I think innovation has many nuances and interpretations in the business community and the same is true of philanthropy. What’s important is that foundations understand what they mean by the word and apply creativity in looking at how we’re solving for problems.

What’s happening next for WIN?

We have an exciting year unfolding for our community. Keep an eye on some of the initiatives we have coming up, the programming that we have, and how we’re aligning on our mission and sharing out our progress to our communities. Stay tuned and check us out at womenininnovation.co.

Dr. Reima Shakeir is an international scholar, author, and CEO of Women in Innovation. She previously served as COO at the Edmond de Rothschild foundations, and teaches at the MBA level at the NYU Stern School of Business and The Wharton School of Business.

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An organizational psychologist, PhD, founder and CEO of Ellavate Solutions, and professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Ella F. Washington is an expert in this space. She recently published “The Necessary Journey: Making Real Progress on Equity and Inclusion,” which details the DEI journeys of companies including Slack, PwC, Best Buy, Infosys, and others.

Vivaldi spoke with Washington about how business leaders can frame and take action on their goals, where companies may encounter roadblocks, and how DEI might be a form of disruption.

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Over the past few years, have you seen changes in company leaders’ understanding of the business case for incorporating more DEI practices?

The business case vs. the moral case is an age-old argument and many scholars and leaders feel strongly about one side or the other. I am of the camp that you need both; one without the other doesn’t work in the long term. History has shown us that without the business case, it’s hard for these efforts to be sustained, especially when there’s economic downturn or changes in leadership or, quite frankly, when everyone isn’t bought in to the moral case. The strongest companies have worked to actually make a tight connection to their business and what’s important to them, and I think that’s something that’s still missing from most organizations.

In the book you explain that companies can get stuck in approaching DEI because they’re afraid of getting diversity management wrong – when a company is in that state, what can they do to push forward?

I specifically outline three areas of focus that organizations and leaders themselves can be looking toward: purpose, pitfalls, and progress. One thing I ask organizations to do is really zone in on what their purpose is as an organization and how that connects with DEI. That often helps leaders to understand that yes, DEI is the right thing to do, not only from the humanity side, but also from the business side.

The pitfalls are really important, and the best next step is to think okay, we have these goals, we’ve figured out what our purpose is, but now we have to be honest about what’s held us back. Maybe it’s policies that are leaning toward inequities that we haven’t been honest about, maybe our leadership team hasn’t been committed throughout the organization. There can be a myriad of reasons, but holding that mirror up is critically important.

The third step is progress. What does progress look like for us? When organizations define what progress looks like, both short term and long term, set goals and define the steps to get to those goals, they are much more likely to be successful.

From the employee side, over the past couple of years people have reevaluated how work fits into the rest of our lives. They may be looking for workplaces that better reflect their values or have greater missions. How have you seen an impact caused by that reevaluation?

What I think is interesting is, the research on millennials, that came out mid-2010s, shows that millennials as a working generation were much more concerned about mission and purpose than generations before. That shift started to happen well before the pandemic. What happened during the pandemic is that people started to think about not only what they wanted out of their workplace, but what they wanted out of their lives.

I do think that people are looking at their jobs with more scrutiny, but I don’t think it’s just about what their company stands for, it’s also “how do I feel working in this company?” It goes beyond mission and purpose, it’s, “is this aligned with who I am as a person and the life that I want to live?” That’s the dynamic shift that we saw before and after the pandemic, but the trend was already in motion.

Are there one or two questions that it’s important for companies to regularly ask their employees to assess how they are feeling, with regard to where they belong in the organization?

A question that I often have my graduate students reflect on is: what does a well-lived life look like for me? When you’re 85 years old and you’re looking back over your life, what are the things that will signal that you lived a well-lived life. Oftentimes the answer to that question and the answer to “what does success mean to me?” are different. People value their family, and the impact they had on people. That’s not often the same as valuing career success, yet career success is important to many people just not as important when they think about their overall lives.

When organizations ask their employees, “what does a well-lived life look like for you,” and then follow it up with “how does the work you do every day connect with that” or “how can we better connect the work that you do every day with that definition of what a well-lived life means,” that’s how you get employees to stay for the long term.

In the book you lay out five stages of the DEI journey — how can companies who may be in earlier stages in their journeys start thinking about building structures or pipelines around DEI? Or is that something that has to come at a later stage?

A little bit of both. You can’t skip the first stage of awareness and really understand the purpose, because then you start to do things that don’t actually have an impact and are not sustainable. Once you have the foundation, it’s important to understand if you have strong direction from the top of the organization and that everyone in the organization, regardless of level, knows how they fit into the strategy. What often happens is that leadership teams get together with their chief of human resources or a DEI officer, and they make big plans with three-pronged approaches and great goals, but they don’t bring the managers along to help them understand how they fit into the larger plan. They don’t bring those grassroots parts of the organization of frontline employees, employee resource groups, and other entities along, and so there’s often a mismatch. And the reverse can also happen. A key is both top-down and bottom-up approaches; people need to really understand how they each play a role in the larger picture.

Ella F. Washington

You work with companies to do DEI audits – can you give an overview of how it works? How do you get buy-in from stakeholders that a DEI audit is an important thing to do?

Getting buy-in from stakeholders is a critical part of the success. When we think about an audit, we really think about understanding the baseline — where are we as a company, what are our current state metrics and what is our culture? Yet an audit by itself will not lead to meaningful change unless the leadership team is involved. I often pair the audit process with getting stakeholder alignment through stakeholder interviews and leadership visioning sessions. Once you have the audit, you have to know what you’re going to do with the information. Then you can say, we want to be here and our report shows we’re there, how do we close that gap? If you want to see change you have to have both metrics and stakeholder alignment to how we are going to change.

Right. A way to make things actionable and put it into practice.

Data is interesting and great and helpful, but only if you’re going to do something with it.

Many companies say they want to be “disruptors,” but maybe their hiring and promotion practices are just perpetuating a cycle of bringing in mostly white men. Is there a way to think about DEI as its own form of disruption?

Absolutely, I think you can have DEI be its own form of disruption, but you still have to have the goal in mind. Back in 2017, when P&G put out the commercial “The Talk,” which really addressed racial issues in a unique way for the first time, especially from a consumer brand company, they were disruptors because people didn’t expect P&G to be putting out a commercial like that. It’s not a commercial where there’s strong product placement throughout. They said we want to be innovative in terms of forwarding the conversation that we know a lot of our consumers are having, and so they were really specific about how they wanted to be disruptive. You can’t just have a lofty goal and not be clear on what change or impact that you’re trying to make.

Making that connection with what’s impactful from your end consumer’s perspective.

Do you want to be disruptive in terms of how your consumers see you? Do you want to be disruptive in terms of how people who want to work for your organization see you? Not that those things aren’t connected, but especially if you’re just starting off, you can’t do everything at the same time overnight. Resources, money, time are not unlimited, so you have to be pretty specific around where you’re trying to focus with this first particular initiative.

One of the questions you ask people is what a “workplace utopia” would look like. Has anything surprised you when you’ve asked that question?

What is fascinating to me about when I ask that question is that the answer is different for every single person. And I love that. To me that shows that we’re each really unique and what our utopias are look a little bit different for everyone. The beauty of that is that there isn’t just one workplace utopia that will work for everyone, of course, but the more that we understand what is ideal to each of us as individuals, the more organizations can work toward making a better place for everyone. The work of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is really tough work, and having that north star to work toward really helps not only to motivate me, but other people in the effort to make changes in these spaces.

Dr. Ella F. Washington is an organizational psychologist, DEI expert, and Founder & CEO of Ellavate Solutions. She is a Professor of Practice at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Her book “The Necessary Journey: Making Real Progress on Equity and Inclusion” was published by Harvard Business Review Press.

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