Who Cares About Diversity?

Honestly speaking, after working for my company for more than 9 years, “Diversity Education” or related phone calls are the ones I always ignore. Although it is mandatory for every employee to go through such a training, I normally dial into the conference call just so that my manager can check me off the list and leave me alone.

So, when I was approached by a Denver University professor from the Education Department whom asked me to give a speech about corporate diversity and organization, I was scratching my head, “Coporate Diversity?! What the heck am I going to talk about?”

Well, I have to talk about something. So I figured it would be fun to see how these Ph.D and Master students react to the real world scenario. This is the slide I put on the projector tonight in the classroom:

The votes? Gay project manager and the Japanese born sales guy got the most votes followed by the female stock broker and the one arm technical writer. Only one student voted for the white straight male slacker who shows up late at work.

The purpose of the slide is that I want to make a point:

At the end of the day, it is not about who you are. It’s about what you can do and what value you bring to the table.

We will let go of the slacker regardless of the person’s skin color. My gay project manager absolutely kicks ass, so who cares if he plays on another team. Apparently, this concept is pretty foreign to the academic world. At the end of the class, I got the sense that the black students are indeed concerned about being black. And everybody is worried about gay guy’s fate out there in the jungle. Is this a perception disconnection between the academic and corporate worlds? Maybe .

I sometimes feel that the diversity thing is way over done in Corporate America. As a young female Asian engineer who has funky mixed Chinese and southern accent, discrimination is the last thing I worry about. But on the other hand, is that because we have done such a fine job in Corporate America to teach everybody to walk on the egg shells so that an “extreme-minority” such as myself doesn’t really notice being a minority? Hmm, again, this question is too deep for my little head to think about…