We are still talking about gender inequality. We’re still talking about racial inequality. We’re still talking about economic inequality. And how did we get to this point where we are still talking about inequality at this time given how many decades people have highlighted, worked on this, thought about this? Why do we need a special issue on inequality to begin with?

And I’m going to propose in this talk a couple of dynamics that are behind our inability to make progress on this, that maybe don’t get talked about as much as we talk about other issues. And those two dynamics are backlash and discomfort.

Before I get into that let me set the stage a little bit. I’ll start maybe with Silicon Valley which is a microcosm of a lot of the problems that we’ve identified around inequality. You can open up any newspaper, any magazine, almost any day of the week and see yet another story about ways in which discrimination and inequality are perpetuated in this setting; whether it’s Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, whether it’s Susan Fowler’s blog about her experience of sexual harassment at Uber — and not just her own experience with the harassment but the fact that the organization itself didn’t respond at all when she brought it to their attention — to Gamergate in which many female participations in the video gaming industry were suggested to threats of violence and death threats and things like that.

And, of course, we’ve always lamented how low the amount of venture capital is going to women-led businesses. And we always thought six percent was a really terrible number, until it fell to two percent which it did in this past year. So we’re talking about a setting in which we see a lot of discriminatory outcomes and a lot of inequality.

But, of course, it’s not just in Silicon Valley. As we know there are more CEO’s named John than there are woman CEO’s all together. And, you know how thick is this glass ceiling? If we were to add up not just John but let’s pick also James, Robert, and William, so very common names. If you look in the United States the ratio of those men with those names to women is about 1:2.

But when you start to look at situations of power in elite context we start to see for example professors of economics, we see that there’s more than one man of those four names per every female professor in economics. All told, we get into a political setting it goes up to one to two times. And of course when we get to CEO’s there are four times as many men with those four names than female CEO’s altogether.

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People have recognized that this is potentially a problem that this is representative of inequality. And many organizations have fought quite hard and invested quite a bit in diversity initiatives that might in some address some of the challenges associated with this inequality. And yet despite that what we’re seeing is backlash.

This comes from a New York Times article in which they talked about how some men are saying that the push for, in this case gender equality has gone too far. This is a picture of James Damore. He famously wrote…ex-employee of Google now…who famously wrote a memo that was meant to be an internal memo claiming that by focusing on gender equality they were reducing the quality of the output of Google, because female engineers simply weren’t as good; were lower quality than the male engineers. It might explain why he’s an ex-employee of Google.

But this question of quality I think is a really important one. People make this excuse that we don’t want to compromise quality, and yet academic research will show to you just how problematic that statement about quality is.

So I’ll just show you a little bit of what we know. There have been decades of research basically establishing the effect of inequality. And what this research suggests is that we all see the world through gender lens. It’s how we’re socialized. And what those gendered lenses do has caused us to devalue female contributions in a highly masculinized context, like business, like investing, like venture capital, like the startup world.

And so, I’m just going to just give you three examples from the many, many, many studies that are out there. The Green Bar is always the female; the Yellow Bar is the male. And I’ll start on the left which shows where we take equal quality presentations for investment in a startup. And by equal quality I mean identical. The only difference in the presentation of the pitch for the startup is that one is narrated by a male voice and one is narrated by a female voice. We find that those equal proposals are twice as likely to get funded if narrated by a male voice.

If we then look at equal resumes for an application to a job as a lab technician, the only difference is that one is named Jennifer and the other is named John. Everything else is the same. When hiring committees were asked to evaluate the hireability of that candidate, John is somehow more hirable that Jennifer.

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Similarly, if we look at computers, people use computers, they use them for tasks; the computers perform exactly the same. They are then told, the people in the experiments are told that their computer is either named Julie or their computer is named James. And they are then asked how much they think the computer is worth. And consistently people say that a computer named James is worth more than a computer named Julie.

Okay. So we basically can debunk this whole equality story, because even when there is exactly the same quality, we with our gender lenses perceive that quality differently. And that is potentially leading to this backlash that we’re seeing. And I think that the explanation for this is something to do with privilege. So there’s a quote that’s going around the internet now that says when you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression. And I think that that really represents maybe what’s going on with the backlash that we’re seeing.

For those of you who follow basketball you might be familiar with Gregg Popovich who is the coach of the San Antonio Spurs. And he’s been talking a lot about inequality lately, particularly around race but also other areas, and he tries to explain his understanding of white male privilege. And what he says is, it’s like we’re starting at the 50 yard mark in a 100 yard dash and everyone else is right at the beginning.

And so, when you actually push for equality you push for diversity, what you’re saying is that either everyone should get up to that 50 yard mark, or everyone should be back at the start. And so, it feels more competitive, it feels more threatening. And I think that’s in part why we are seeing as much backlash as we’re seeing.

Nevertheless, despite that backlash and the evidence that we have on discrimination, what we are coming to a consensus on in the business world is that there is a business case for diversity. Now as an academic researcher I can say that there’s some nuance to this story about the nature of the business case. There’s been a tremendous amount of research on this. But what I can say is that there is a consensus in the business world that it is the case.

And so, if we look at that consensus it explains why so many organizations have been thinking about investing in diversity. And yet the evidence suggests, and this is a report from the World Economic Forum, that gender equality is not only not advancing but sliding backwards around the world. In Canada, which is a country that you’d think would really be at the forefront of this, or the United States where there’ve been many diversity initiatives, we see Canada falling from 14^th to 25^th in the world, the U.S. falling from 23^rd to 45^th in the world. So we are not yet making progress despite all of the investment in these activities.

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And this comes to my second explanation of why I think this is the case. And I think it’s in part because diversity is uncomfortable. If we want to get all those benefits that everyone says that we get from diversity; more innovation, examination of more options that are risk management, all of those things that you can get, you’re going to have to deal with discomfort. You’re going to have to deal with the fact that the people in the group are not like you. You may not have the same cultural connection or cultural references that make you feel comfortable with each other. You are going to have more differences so you’re going to have to work on processes for resolving those differences. It is not going to be comfortable. And the research very clearly establishes that it is not.

In fact, that is why groupthink is so prevalent, because when you’re a group where everyone thinks the same thing as you think it’s very comfortable, right. And what we’re trying to do is say, no actually, if you’re going to get the benefits of diversity you’re going to have to be uncomfortable and being uncomfortable is not something that most people seek out.

Kathy Phillips who is a professor and researcher in this area made this argument about that discomfort and how we should deal with it in her article on How Diversity Makes Us Smarter in Scientific American. And what she says is we should think about that discomfort the way we think about pain when we exercise. She says the pain associated with diversity can be thought of the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old song goes, produces the gain. No pain, no gain, right. So we have to cope and deal with that discomfort.

I have a couple of ideas how we might do that. The first of those is to engage in conversation. And I want to go back to our friend Gregg Popovich because he has spoken about…you should look up this video, it’s so fantastic…but he spoke about it in this way. He said unless it gets talked about constantly it’s not going to change. There has to be an uncomfortable element in a discourse for something to change, whether it’s the LGBT community or women’s rights or race.

And so what he is basically saying is, we can’t just have this conversation one time of year like on gender equality on International Women’s Day, we have to be talking about it constantly. And if it’s not uncomfortable we are not going to be able to make progress. The discomfort is actually a crucial part of the process.

And so, I tried to role model this a little bit in another article with my colleague Jan Mahrt-Smith, and he put himself in the place of that privileged white male where he actually admits ‘I wasn’t even aware of my privilege; that’s how privileged I was.’ And so, you’ll see that we engage in this conversation about privilege, about achieving equality, about the issues of inequality, and it was uncomfortable at times. And it was frustrating at times, for both of us.

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But what we both concluded was that we are going to have to accompany each other on that journey. Following each other in this path, dealing with the discomfort, and be willing to re-engage as we work through these kind of...I think one solution is the solution of conversation. We have to talk about it and we have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

The second solution has to do with innovation. I have been an innovation scholar my entire career in one way or another. And my observation about innovation is that, one, organizations all want to focus on it and they work very hard at it. And they have tools, processes, techniques, and organizations dedicated to doing it.

Second, that innovation is always going to involve organizational transformation. They put their best and brightest on them. They know that it’s hard. They accept that they’re not always going to always be able to be successful but they invest and they put creative talent on it.

Why do we not treat inequality the same way? Why do we yawn and roll our eyes when people raise the issues of diversity and equality as opposed to saying, this is an innovation challenge. Right now we have a course designing for equality in which we’re actually taking innovation tools that we have, in this case design thinking, and applying it to gender-based challenges to see if we can change how we talk about these issues as it relates to changing the conversation on equality.

And I actually think that if we can treat inequality as an innovation challenge we’re going to be able to make much more progress and get over the stalemate.

[13.23 minutes]