By Hol Thomas-Wrightson, 3 June 2024
While diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is important every day of the year, there are many days or months dedicated to remembering or celebrating those from minority groups, which offer a chance to focus inclusion efforts to specific areas. Pride month is perhaps the most easily recognised of those when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ community. This year, 55 years after the Stonewall Riots and 20 years since the establishment of LGBT+ history month in the UK, the importance of continuing to strive for equality and equity for the members of this group is as important as it has ever been.
For Pride 2024, ICA’s Hol Thomas-Wrightson (they/them) spoke to Catherine Vaughan (she/her), Partner at EY Ireland and Diversity Champion, executive sponsor of EY’s LGBTQ+ Diversity & Inclusion programme, as well as an expert in financial crime, compliance and ethics. In this first instalment, they look at the importance of fostering DEI in the compliance industry, and how organisations can work to get it right.
Thomas-Wrightson: The conversation about nurturing and supporting diversity in business, and especially in compliance, has taken off in recent years. What are your thoughts on its importance?
Vaughan: It’s hugely important, whichever strand of diversity we’re talking about, whether that’s difference of experience, education, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else. By ensuring you are including those voices and those differences of experience you start to get diversity in the solutions to the problems you are trying to solve.
However, just having stark differences of representation is only the beginning of the answer. As you rightly say, you’ve got to nurture that diversity and bring it into the conversation. Otherwise it’s diversity for the sake of diversity, and it doesn’t change anything.
With regards to compliance, there is a certain experience and view of life that minority groups have which is about fairness and equity and, when you think about the things you’re fighting for on a personal level, they’re also the things you’re fighting for from a compliance and a regulatory perspective: fairness and truth, honesty and integrity in both yourself and others. So the fit between the ethos of driving diversity and inclusion on a personal level, with the ethos of what drives compliance professionals, that’s one factor that makes people from minority backgrounds suited to the job.
Thomas-Wrightson: That point you made about ‘diversity for diversity’s sake’ is such a challenging area, isn’t it? Because, on the one hand, while we’ve heard the familiar line that ‘it shouldn’t be about diversity, it should be about getting the right person for the job’, on the other hand there has been a long history of individuals being overlooked for roles simply because they’re part of a minority group. So how do you redress the balance while ensuring that DEI efforts aren’t reduced to a box-ticking exercise?
Vaughan: This connects to this whole concept of ‘rainbow washing’ and who should get the jobs. First and foremost, it has to be on a merit basis. I totally believe in a meritocracy. If you’ve got the right person for the job, that person should get the job. The piece around the diversity and inclusion focus is, unless you broaden the pool of people that you consider eligible for a role, you will only come up with the same solutions every time.
That’s not to say the Caucasian, middle class, middle-aged man can’t still be the best person for the job; and I think some people fear that DEI is trying to take those people out of the system, out of the pool, and fill it with everyone else. That’s not what we’re doing at all. What we’re doing is saying ‘Let’s widen the pool of the people we speak to and look at. Are we potentially missing anybody because we only go to our stock standard, stereotypical, previous years’ hire?’
When we talk about rainbow washing, I do worry that some people will fall into that trap and they will say ‘Okay, 3% have to be from the LGBTQ+ community, 15% have to be women, we need some ethnic minorities, let’s tick all these boxes but still only give the top jobs to the Caucasian middle-class male’. That’s really concerning. So you really need to get to the grass roots of what you mean when you’re talking about inclusion and equity. It starts by making sure you’ve created a diverse pool to choose from, and then you look into the qualifying criteria to find the person who is right for the job as opposed to saying ‘Great, I’ve got one of you and one of you in the mix’ but still the opportunity goes to someone else, someone more ‘traditional’’.
Thomas-Wrightson: I’ve noticed that a lot of people assume that by opening up opportunities to minority groups, you’re cutting opportunities for non-minorities by the same amount. But in reality, those minority group members are just asking to be given a fighting chance.
Vaughan: You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s about making sure everyone has the same chance at reaching their potential. And you reaching your potential and aspirations may be very different to me reaching my potential and aspirations. But both of us should be given the same fighting chance to achieve our respective objectives.
People assume it’s a case of ‘We have to put you in, so I’ve got to take you out.’ No. Maybe there’s room for both of us, maybe you should take a chance and recognise that by putting two people with different experiences into close collaboration together, that combination is stronger for achieving goals.
A visible, meaningful commitment to inclusion and equity is a fine line and I worry that people approach this cynically or without a full understanding of what they’re trying to achieve for their business. For instance, if someone tells their organisation that they’d like to start an LGBTQ+ community group and the response is ‘Why would we do that? What’s in it for us?’. Or on the flipside, they might say ‘Yeah, crack on, we’d love to be known for being an LGBTQ+ friendly employer!’, but then they put nothing behind it to show it means anything more than being a social club once a year… I’d rather have nothing at all.