My work has a program where we invite a small group of selected companies, from all over the world to participate, and a new coworker of mine was in charge of running the program for the next year. I told him about a lack of diversity specifically with women’s participation in past years and said that it should be something that we really work on. Lo and behold after he plans a program for six months only 1 of the companies were women owned of 10 participating groups.
So when we were reviewing updates to the website, all the pictures were of men and I pointed it out and he said yeah that’s something we wanna work out on, in the next year, and I want to scream I told you about this problem last year! You knew it was going to be a thing! Then he went on to say I should help next year so it is better! He had plenty of opportunities to do it himself and he was 100% aware of the issue.
The program itself is related to healthcare, which is already under funding women so to work for an organization that says they value diversity and then watch as nothing gets done is so frustrating and I want to do all I can to help, but I wish there were more men taking ownership as well.
TLDR;Male coworker was informed of lack of women in the space, chose to ignore it, and then make it my problem.
Comments
Lol at the downvote you got.
It’s very true. Women are ‘responsible’ for fixing diversity issues. Men get a pass because that responsibility is on women. And then when women pick up the torch and try and make a change… they are ignored… and the cycle starts all over again.
Agree!
I was thinking the other day that male celebrities in Hollywood who want to support women, need to have a line in their contracts stating that the female lead in the project needs to be guaranteed the same salary.
Can’t spell disappointment without men.
He just assumed the male lead companies would send their token female sr executives.
At this point I’m no longer surprised, men prove time and time again that they don’t care about women
>he said yeah that’s something we wanna work out on, in the next year
And he will say the same thing next year and the year after that.
The framing of it as “something we want to work on” is a dead giveaway. He wants the credit for being supportive of representation in his words without the accountability of actually cultivating representation in his actions.
He isn’t even saying “this is something we are working on”, because saying you are working on it invites questions about what work, exactly, is being done. Instead, he gets to just keep treating it as a nice-to-have that the company is vaguely supportive of but makes no actual effort to improve on.
Who decides which companies participates? Is it his sole decision?
Why not come up with a list and provide it to the organizers, or volunteer to be more involved?
Sometimes you need to dismantle the excuses.