- Hi, my name is Joana Probert. I'm the Jane Jie Sun Career Development Fellow at Oxford Said Business School. We're here today to talk about intersectionality. In a nutshell, intersectionality is a term used to indicate that people fit into multiple categories at the same time. For example, someone is a member of a gender, a race, a class, sexual, orientation, age, religion, and in number of social categories. So intersectionality underscores the fact that there's overlap between these categories and this overlap influences the way people are viewed and how they experience their lives. Today we're gonna talk about the significance of intersectionality for leaders. We are fortunate to have two people here who live and breathe intersectionality in their careers and lives. I present you Jackie Chimhanzie, the CEO of the African Leadership Institute. And Bijna Kotak Dasani, who was named the 2021 Digital Leader of the Year, and serviced also on the boards of several organisations. Jackie, Bijna, welcome. Is lovely having you here. To lay the groundwork, I was wonder if each of you would like to tell what intersectionality means to you. Jackie, would you like to go first?

- Yes. Thank you very much. I think it's exactly as how you described it. It's acknowledging that people have different identities, that we all experience the world in different ways, depending on the intersection and the nexus at which are different identity variables intersect. So those could be age, could be gender, could be class, and depending on the way they intersect, we need to see this on a spectrum. So on the one end, you have what you call white male privilege entitlement. And then on the other end, you have people who have little or no access to opportunities. So depending on where you sit on that spectrum, it determines the quality of access to opportunities.

- Thank you, Jackie. What about you, Bijna? What would be your way to see intersectionality?

- So I would agree with everything that you and Jackie have already highlighted, but for me, I think the additional piece is it's a recognition. So, and by recognition, I mean intersectionality is a recognition. That every one of us possesses more than one identity. So this is a combination of the various markers that you talked about, identity markers which could be gender, could be your... It could be where you are socially, economically, it could be your religion, your age, your cast, your ability, disability, ethnicity, all of those factors combined, they come up with a unique combination for each one of us. Then these combinations uniquely shape who we are, how we operate, and the lens we have on the world, and then therefore, how we absorb or embrace our place in the world. So the intersectional lens can actually empowers cohesively to A, understand better. If we're able to dissect, analyse, and assess the implications of each. And then secondly, put those combinations together to understand the implications of those intersectionality identities, let's say, within the workplace, within a society, within a community. And then taking it a step further, it can help us to address some of the inequalities and systems of inequalities that we're all very aware of, particularly when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So through the pandemic, this is an area that's gained a lot of traction and visibility. And I think people are a lot- It's catalysed understanding and awareness, and people are a lot more aware of these systems of inequalities. And we only have to look at Black Lives Matter or the anti-Asian violence campaigns in The States to be able to see, but it's something people are asking questions are about. And it's something that people want to understand. They want to assess, they want to be able to do something about, so it takes us right back to those unique combinations and understanding them.

- Definitely is a topic that's becoming very, very prominent now, currently. And what do you think importance of intersectionality for the future of business?

- I think it's very important, because I think you need to recognise that also your customers, right? So you're serving diverse customers, unique customers. So it's also an appreciation of how you tailor your services to your customer's needs. So from a marketing perspective, that's a no brainer. You need to tailor to their experiences, to their desires, their expectations, and all of that. But also within the organisation, it becomes important because it's important that organisations mirror the customers that they serve. So it's really about acknowledging diversity, but beyond acknowledging it, it's actually saying, "What do we do about this diversity? How do we make sure that our products speak to the diversity? How do we make sure that our staff, our management, our executives are as diverse as our customer base?" So it's really, it's business sense, really, it's economic sense.

- Thank you, Jackie. You have anything to add, Bijna?

- Yeah, again, agree with Jackie and just kind of touching on the point around employees and within the organisation. So the World Economic Forum created a report that really looks at what intersectionality means in the workplace and how it's felt recently. And the summary is, is that the effects of intersectionality are actually very much felt in the workplace. And what the data says is that where employees who belong to two or more underrepresented categories, often experience oppression and lack of opportunity in unique ways. And they go into give examples. But ultimately, what they say is that to address this, the companies that do have the diversity and equity and inclusion programmes and are actually, you know, proactively looking at this, can take a few steps to make sure that they take intersectionality into account consciously. And they avoid some of the risks of overlooking these experiences on their employees. And I'll walk you through a couple of them quickly. So one of them was wage inequality. So that is correlated to intersectionality. And what they reported was that in 2020, let's take women from white backgrounds, they earn 81 cents in the US for every dollar a male counterpart will earn. And so when they looked into American Indian, black, African American and Hispanic women, the number was even lower. Women were earning 75 cents for every US dollar that a counterpart male earned. So the data source really speaking for itself. And what they said is, well, you know, the white women are closer to reaching gender parity by 2059. But the year for black and Hispanic women to reach gender parity is beyond 2224. I mean, that's just light years away for us. So really what they're saying is that wage inequality is seen increasingly as a correlation where there are these two dynamics of intersectionality. And then they go into other, you know, other examples where they look at people from the Bangladeshi community, they look at men with disabilities, but ultimately, if there's intersectionality, it's quite likely that there will be pay inequality. And so companies need to be conscious. The second thing they talked about was lack of professional development. So they said that research shows that in the US, for example, black women have less access to training, receive less mentorship and sponsorship and have less frequent opportunities to engage with senior leaders. And then they said that only 4% of women of colour represents C-suite leaders in the US, of which only 1% are black women. So it's really a marginalised demographic there. And again, they're sort of recommending, you know, actions for women of colour overall, but really zooming in on the fact that black women are treated differently. So again, intersectionality has a role to play there. And then that links to the next piece, right? So career performance versus career sustainability, the third piece from their research was hiring discrimination and inequalities in employment. So what they say is intersectionality absolutely affects who is on the job market and who was hired. So they conducted an air experimental study in Belgium, and found what they call a double-jeopardy problem for a Maroc and Arab woman. So she applied for a high-demanding role. Resumes were overlooked by HR, even though they were fully qualified for the role, and it's just that connotation that comes with some of the, you know, strands of intersectionality, where people from, again, underrepresented or minority groups experience ultimately some form of subconscious biassing. And so even though they may have the credibility, they may not get the opportunity. They also talked about harassment. There's a link there between particularly women from minority groups to being more harassed, not just women, but particularly women as per the data of their reports. And then finally they talked about high turnover rates, which links, I guess, to all of the proceeding for, which is that employees do face discrimination linked to intersectionality as per the data. And so if this happens and the organisation, isn't doing something consciously to address it, or to get on top of it, then they will lose people. And this is through, you know, it can be something like microaggressions. It can be something that's conscious and targeted, but ultimately it demoralises people. It creates an emotional tax within the workplace. And that further leads to people having their guards up, further discrimination, people operating in silos. And then basically it leads to, you know, different forms of bias. So companies need to address intersectionality through comprehensive diversity inclusion and in quality policies across the board to really address it head on.

- Thank you. Thank you so much.

- Joana? Sorry, Joana, maybe just to add to that, you know, there's another dimension happening on the African continent. So Africa is disproportionately the youngest continent in the world. So Africa's mean age is about 19 years old. So what we find is that young people really struggle. So age is an additional variable that may not be faced in other parts of the world. So we find on the continent that young people really struggle to be taken seriously. So you can imagine if you're a young woman working in a male dominated environment, it's extremely, extremely difficult. And I think in part it explains why Africa is really run by old men. You know? It's becoming an issue. You know, all our leaders are at least 70 years and above, and it just makes no sense on a continent that is so young. But for young people to break in is extremely challenging. And then the things that militates to keep age as such an important variable include patriarchy, power distance, and culture. So all of these work against young people to ensure that they're not part of the system and they're kept out.

- Thank you, Jackie, and follow up on that, so both of you sit on boards of several companies. And boards are usually... I was wondering, considering all these important aspects for business and for terms of customers in terms of pay, in terms of retention, in terms of talent, how would the conversations about intersectionality happening in boards? Are they happening? Are boards talking about intersectionality?

- So from my perspective, I chair the ESG committee of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, which is the second largest listed company on the Zimbabwe stock exchange. So the conversations we have at our quarterly board meetings include looking at profiles. Who are we hiring? You know, what are the statistics, how many women came through, how many were interviewed, how many eventually got the job, people with disabilities? So I think the board has got a very important role to play in ensuring that organisations are sufficiently diverse, but also keeping the executives on their toes. So board care very important oversight role, which also includes diversity and inclusion.

- That's great. Thank you, Jackie. What about your experience, Bijna? What are conversations about intersectionality have experienced in the boards you serve?

- So for me, it's actually something that I'm consciously working on through the boards that I serve. And that's the reason I'm serving them. So many of the boards that I support are focusing purely on the diversity equity and inclusion space to try and understand, first of all, what does good look like in an organisation? Where are some of the risks, where are some of the pitfalls, and how do we then advocate best policy, but also how do we learn from organisations across industry sectors and geographies that are doing a decent job? And really, what I found is the conversation, particularly through the pandemic for me, has been around getting people to understand, first of all, where we are, right? Which is that we live in a world, which it's almost a bit of a paradox. Because we are more connected than we've ever been as a human race today, given how technologically enabled we are. In fact, you know, the data says that more people have access to mobile phones on this planet than they do to clear sanitation and water. However, we talk, let's say for- And I'm going to talk about women, because I'm a woman, but we talk regularly about the fact that women are a minority in the C-suite regardless of industry, sector, geography. And really, there's a... I guess a discussion that's deeper that needs to be had. And so that's what I've been working on for the last two years to understand, "Well, why are we where we are? And how are we going to change that?" So if I talk about the female piece, patriarchy is one, which Jackie talked about. The other is there have been lots of things that have happened in our lifetime, which have changed the status quo. So I've, you know, my career is in financial services. And as recently as the 1980s in England, if you worked in a retail or commercial bank, and let's say you got married over the weekend, if you came in on the Monday, you were asked to attend your resignation. And that was not uncommon practise because you were a female. And the assumption was you could not possibly manage potentially having children and running your home and having a career. Whether or not you decided to have children, whether or not you had responsibilities at home, you were never consulted. It was- There is no room for you. And so we've gone through an evolution, which is certainly in my lifetime and very recent, but there are parts of the planet that are still not going through that evolution. So I can tell you that today, like any given day in 2022, 130 million girls are not permitted to be at school. Jackie talked about Africa. In Africa, there's only one teacher for every 80 students. And that's because the population is ageing, there's not enough, you know, there's not enough people that are being trained as teachers to study the emerging population of students. There's another lens, which is an economic lens. In Sudan, 73% of girls are not given permission to go to school. And in Ethiopia, two in every five girls, so 40% of girls are married off under the age of 15. So if we're living in a world where all of these things are still happening every single day, and half a billion women on the planet still cannot read, I think we're living in a global crisis. And until we address these underlying issues line by line against the different strands that we call attributes of intersectionality, the disparity is going to continue. So for me, the conversation is, you know, with all of these boards, it's around understanding, "Well, do you understand the history?" Again, let me refer to Black Lives Matter. Do we understand the history? Do we know why what happened happened in recent years? And yes, we're taking learnings and implementing policies, but what are we really doing to weave into the fabric of the culture of our organisations that history will not repeat itself on any level. Right? And so for me, it's about working with organisations to understand what good looks like, where some of the pitfalls and blind spots may be, sharing that knowledge, collaborating and saying, "Let's test and learn on an iterative basis with new policy and new measures to focus across the DNI lens and make sure it's a conscious effort that's happening." It's got to be happening 24/7, and it's not something you can do once in park, it's got to be happening every day. People have got to be having discussions every day, and you've got to create a workplace in an environment where people can genuinely bring their authentic selves to work, start to share their identities, but also where you are bringing in opportunities for people who come from non-traditional backgrounds into the workplace. So in banking, for example, I've advocated a lot over the years for, you know, the hiring at graduate level to change. So it's not just a set of universities get approached with opportunities. We look at social mobility, we look at social inclusion. We look at diversifying the mix from entry point onwards, and we invest in our new colleagues to train them in other ways beyond just the academia. So I think it's a very broad conversation, but hopefully that'll give you a bit of a lens on what these organisations are doing.

- Well, that's great. That's very helpful, Jackie and Bijna, to highlight the conversations that are happening in business today. What are the challenges that business faces and actually improve some of those issues?

- I think that the main challenge is there's no will. You know, we talk about political will. I don't know what the equivalence of that is in business. Business will, or whatever you want. Leadership, you know? I think it's just a lack of leadership. Because if you think about it, businesses are social constructs. So if they are social constructs, they can also be deconstructed. They can also be reconstructed, right? I mean, there's nothing particularly challenging about saying, "Accept women as equals," you know? As as Hillary Clinton said, "Women's rights are human rights." You know? So just the fact that we're sitting in 2022 saying, "Have more women in organisations," just sounds so bizarre, isn't it? You know, there've been all these technological advances, there's been a man on the moon, you can have meat made in a lab that's not meat. You know? We can do so much, but we just can't accept women. It just sounds so crazy. So far as I'm concerned, there is no challenge. We should just want to do it, and we don't seem to want to do it. It really is that simple.

- Bijna, do you think, is that, well, simple or use Jackie's word?

- My experience, Jackie, in some organisations has been that there hasn't been the commitment as Jackie alluded to. And I think it depends on where you are in the world. For me, look, I've lived and worked in three continents in the last decade alone. So my lens now is a little bit more broader than it perhaps would've been if I'd have done just the one or the two. What I genuinely feel today from kind of where I'm standing, is that sometimes people want to help and they want to engage and they want to make a difference, but they're not quite sure where to begin, right? So for me, that's where creating that awareness and educating people and trying to empower individuals to become what I call "career allies" in the workplace, is really, really important. So if you come from a position of some privilege, or you're not represented with a minority lens, somewhere along the lines, you probably have the power to be a stronger career ally to somebody who doesn't share that strength. Right? So for me, I'm an Indian woman from England, but quite often have been the youngest around, you know, a board room. Have been the only ethic minority, or have been the only female because financial services has traditionally been very male dominated as per the data. So those are my experiences of very, very different intersectionality lenses. And those come with treatment that perhaps, you know, a male colleague sitting next to me wouldn't have had. So taking some of those learnings, I've tried to create policy and process to help educate raise awareness, and get people to really understand through live examples that, "Did you understand? You know, when you said something, it might have made me or somebody else feel like this." And for me, it's actually that simple. I think people want to do better, but they need to understand how, because this is a very broad lens. There are so many different strands, race, ethnicity, social inclusion, gender. I mean, there is a lot of information that people who are new to this need to absorb and explore and try and understand. And I think once they have that understanding, they can do something about it. The other thing that has been quite prominent for me, particularly in the last couple of years through the pandemic has been the implication on mental health. So mental health has become clearly a pandemic within the pandemic on its own. And really the data shows that people who come from these minority backgrounds or associate with these minority lenses of intersectionality, are more likely to suffer some kind of mental health implications. And so it's critical, but undervalued and underestimated, because we don't know quite what to do about it because we're still working through intersectionality as I think, as a global, you know, community through organisations. Now, Boston University did a study and recently, and they said that the COVID era has tripled depression rates. And then the World Health Organisation came forward and said that this is the global pandemic within the pandemic. And they went ahead through the pandemic and they shared what they call a resource protocol to try and encourage countries to adopt those, to try and understand if people are coming from minority backgrounds, what types of mental health issues would they have, or challenges, and how do you support them, but only 17% of countries prioritise that. What that means is that we now today have an urgent need, not only for reform, but also for investment. Because today, 1 million US dollars of economic productivity are being lost to depression and anxiety alone. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So if we look at places like India, like Africa, even China, where we've got ethnicity, we've got, you know, we've got disparity in genders, we've got emerging young populations. There are so many layers of intersectionality that we need to address. And I think it's critical that we, you know, put mental health at the centre of that, because as these generations are coming through, as these evolutions are happening, they will need the support to be able to stand strong and also then become those career allies of the future.

- Thank you. And considering all this challenge that we're highlighting, and thank you for bringing the issue of mental health, Bijna, what can business do to embrace intersectionality? What actions would you advise business to take to improve intersectionality?

- So I think first of all, for me, it's about recognising individual identities, understanding that piece. I talk about education and awareness. It's about understanding what intersectionality means, just breaking it down. And then those different sub dimensions that we talk about, actually having a definition of those, so that you can start to relate. For me, it's not just men versus women. You could be gender neutral, you could be LGBTQ, it's a lot more broader than it was in terms of understanding, you know, 15, 20, 25 years ago. Then it's saying, "Okay, so if we take a male or a female and we apply an added lens, what could that mean?" I mean, some males may argue that they are being positively discriminated against, and women may argue the same, but it depends on where in the world you are, and who you are talking to. So it's really about saying, "Okay, what is the status quo? What is the starting point? Where do we have opportunities to understand experiences that are not positive? And then how do we go about in terms of measuring what those experiences actually translate into?" So do they translate into people that are leaving from minority backgrounds? Do they translate into microaggressions becoming the norm in the culture of our organisation? Once you start to assess that, I think you need to then capture the data, and then you need to use that data to create some insights and say, "Okay, these are the things that we need to address and then implement tangible, measurable actions." So you could say, for example, "Right, I'm going to roll out microaggressions training to everyone in my organisation week by week so that people understand what it looks and feels like. And I'm going to ask people who may have experienced microaggressions to come forward and share their stories, so that other people around them can start to be more mindful, but also so that they can start to call each other out." And I think when you do that, that takes me to the third step, which is this then creates a culture of acknowledgement and understanding. Those barriers that we talk about, they start to break down, people start to develop respect and understanding. And I think when people understand, the labels go away. When the labels go away, the biases go away. And so when the biases disappear, you get a more cohesive and accepting work culture, which is embracing intersectionality, but then it's also becoming in its own right, an advocate and a place for diversity of thought where diversity of thought, diversity of background is welcomed. And I think once you have that, the leaders need to continue to implement measure and enforce this kind of behaviour through the value systems. And it just, then for me, it becomes, you know, becomes the natural fabric of the culture of the organisation. You keep educating people, you keep sharing examples, you keep fostering that open culture. And I think, you know, ultimately- And I know it sounds like a lot of steps, but ultimately, I've seen this work. And I've seen where organisations have done this, albeit through trial and error, really succeed and bring in cohesive workplaces. And I think organisations that haven't communicated to employees, or haven't given them an opportunity to talk about how they can support them through diversity and belonging avenues, then have sort of tended to struggle and have had seen those challenges of people from, let's say, minority backgrounds, leaving, a higher attrition, you know, microaggressions existing and being accepted. So I think based on my experiences of organisations that I've worked with and implementation, those are the five or six steps that I think everyone can try and see some value from.

- Thank you. Jackie, what would you like to add, please?

- Yes. Yes. I was actually just gonna add that, you know, I really don't think we should leave it to Goodwill to change the world, you know? Because there are certain gatekeepers and the systems currently work well for them, right? So they're not just gonna wake up and say, "Let's let more black women in," for example, you know? So you can't rely on Goodwill to change the world. So I really think we need more targets that are enforced, that are monitored, that are policed, and enforced. I really believe that that's the way to go. And I know a lot of people have got issues with quotas, that you end up with people just being hired in order to tick boxes. But I think it's a start. I really believe that. And I think it's really progressive what Nasdaq has done to stipulate a certain percentage of women who are sit on boards, if not you get delisted, you know? So it needs to become a listed requirement. We seeing that increasingly more, even on the continent. And I think also what Iceland has done to enforce equal pay for equal work, I think that is really progressive. So I really believe that as much as Bijna talks about we need progressive companies, I think companies must also be forced to comply.

- Jackie, Bijna, thank you so much for such interesting conversation, such wealth of knowledge, information, and guidance for organisations, that has been very helpful. Thank you so much.