Subtle stories to biases – Dorothy Dalton [Interview]

About Dorothy Dalton

Dorothy Dalton is the founder and CEO of 3Plus International Limited. Her intensity towards workplace diversity accelerated when she saw her daughter going through the same phase as she had gone through during her early years. Dorothy is a global talent management strategist, she is an influencer who focuses on the inclusivity in workplaces when it comes to a diverse workforce. She’s a career consulting and training coach, focusing on bias conscious recruitment, helping organizations to attract and retain top talent, an established blogger who has also published a guidebook on ‘How to build an inclusive workplace’ and has released many ebooks.

Aishwarya Jain

We have the pleasure of welcoming Dorothy today to our interview series. I am Aishwarya Jain from the peopleHum team. Before we begin, just a quick introduction of peopleHum. peopleHum is an end-to-end, one-view, integrated human capital management automation platform, the winner of the 2019 global Codie Award for HCM that is specifically built for crafted employee experiences and the future of work with AI and automation technologies. We run the peopleHum blog and video channel which receives upwards of 200,000 visitors a year and publish around 2 interviews with well-known names globally, every month.

Aishwarya

Welcome, Dorothy we are thrilled to have you.

Dorothy

Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Aishwarya

Thank you for your time.

The first question I have for you is if you can tell us something about your interesting work as an international talent management strategist?

Dorothy

I think the thing that I like best about it is the variety. So I enjoy supporting organizations to reach diversity inclusion targets, particularly focusing on gender balance. I mean, that’s my particular area of interest. I enjoy the training elements, the coaching elements, and obviously because I work in recruitment, its pattern doing really.

It means that I work with a lot of really great clients internationally, different industrial sectors in financing, in the not for profit area and I’m also, as you mentioned, doing some writing for the European Commission. I’ve also got a guidebook being published in May with the European Commission on how to combat sexism in the workplace. So that was really exciting. I did that last year. So the thing I enjoy about it most is the variety and working with people to achieve measurable goals.

Aishwarya

I see. That’s wonderful. It must have been a wondrous journey for you from where you’ve come from.

And now where you are. So you know, what is it according to you that a diverse workforce and an inclusive workplace needs, you know, in terms of improving efficiency and returns for an organization?

Dorothy

Well, I mean, truthfully, it’s not according to me, I think you’re probably aware that a lot of major organizations such as the World Economic Forum, European Commission, World Bank, Deloitte, McKinsey, Bain, all the big names have done extensive research on the value of benefits of having a gender-balanced workplace and a diverse and inclusive workplace and the results are very compelling, right? I think McKinsey shows that a diverse workplace shows 35% return on ROI.

You’ve got research from Deloitte where they see increases in retention, engagement, decision making, creativity, reduction in absenteeism, and reduction in the Six Sigmas. So the results are very compelling. What isn’t being looked at truthfully is a. the lack of progress and b. what can we do about that?

I think that as you can see, I’m a lady with a certain age. I honestly thought by the time I reached my age, it would be a done deal and I have a daughter who graduated, she’s a lawyer. One of the reasons I started focusing on this more intensely was because my daughter was going through the exact same things that I did when she graduated as I graduated and I had her when I was 30.

So what we’re doing is we’re not taking the steps forward that we need to. I think it’s really important that we focused our efforts on finding what the barriers are and what the blockages are trying to work on that. “And I think a lot of organisations – they’re starting to work on unconscious bias and the belief that, workplace ecosystems hold us back. ”

“And I think a lot of organisations – they’re starting to work on unconscious bias and the belief that, workplace ecosystems hold us back. ”

Aishwarya

What do you think is the reason? What is the stemming reason for such bias? Why are our workplaces biased like this?

Dorothy

Our workplaces are biased because our cultures are biased and I mean this is a theme of basically a lot of the training that I do in talking to organizations, about any sort of discrimination or sexism or harassment and any sort of discrimination in the workplace. You can’t expect people to live their lives the way we do and then all of a sudden come into the workplace and all of that is gone. Right?

So we’re bombarded with adverts of women scantily dressed or that were showing them cleaning the house. There’s a great advert from P&G I think from India showing a woman showing her son how to use the laundry machine. “So it’s about the way we raise our kids. It’s about the movies we watch, and the books that we read. “

“So it’s about the way we raise our kids. It’s about the movies we watch, and the books that we read. “

There was a study from a university in Copenhagen, that had a robot read 3.5 million books, and men were judged by their achievements and their values. How did women feature do you think?

Aishwarya

I don’t know! I can’t imagine.

Dorothy

By their appearances! So 3.5 million books men were the heroes. If you look at movies, right? Any movie, this is a particular favorite of mine, even the little mermaid. Do you know the movie, The Little Mermaid? Even she is not the leading lady in their own movie. The male parts get much greater speaking parts. “Women only get about 33% of leading roles and speaking both in movies internationally. “

“Women only get about 33% of leading roles and speaking both in movies internationally. “

So I think that we’ve been bombarded every day by these subtle messages and biases, which we can’t leave behind in the workplace. There’s a great book by Caroline Criado-Perez, which was the business book of last year 2019 & it’s called The invisible Women and I don’t work for her, I’m recommending it because it’s a good book and she talks about the hidden biases and data.

So even if you drive a car, if you go for the Coronavirus medical test, they’re using different data for women. It’s quite interesting because, apparently, more men are dying more from Coronavirus than women & they are not drilling down into why it’s that.

It’s too early, but apparently men are more likely to be smokers, they’re suggesting perhaps that estrogen helps combat the virus, but also because women are doing a lot of the housework, we are always washing clothes, washing dishes, washing kids so maybe just overall our general hygiene is better, we’re surrounded by these things.

It is not gonna be any different in the workplace. We bring our whole selves to work. We don’t leave a bit of it at home. Does that make sense?

Aishwarya

But do you think it’s also important to call it out when you see something like that? How important is that?

Dorothy

I think it’s very difficult to manage & certainly when I worked with organizations, originally what we started doing was empowering women. We talked about empowering women & basically, changing women to fit into a male coded workplace and that clearly isn’t working. “So what we need to do now is we need to educate everybody about these biases. “

“So what we need to do now is we need to educate everybody about these biases. “

I think you have to do it without judgment. They’re there for a reason. You can’t make them go away.

I get my kind of mad when I see things, you know, eliminate unconscious bias, eradicate all of these things. You can’t do it. You can only learn to manage that. And the best way to manage it is in a constructive environment. Because if you educate one demographic and they start calling out bias then the group that feels threatened is gonna push back and that’s what we’re seeing.

I think it was research from Deloitte that showed that the biggest group of resistance is the middle manager because they’re the ones that are caught between, you know, the leadership on board which was saying, OK, we’re going to be more diverse we are going to be more inclusive and the people on the ground who are pushing back, so I think it’s about educating people, getting them to understand that these biases are going on and then introducing processes and systems to remind people how to do that and then calling it out at the same time.

So you’ve got three pillars –

Leadership commitment.

Process change.

Individual behavior change.

Changing individual behavior is really hard because we don’t like change, right? Nobody likes to change. If you have a leadership commitment without getting the middle managers on board, you’ve got a problem. If you’ve got people pushing for change from the bottom, the leadership has got a problem and you have the tail wagging the job. So it has to be the whole organization commitment and what also happens is people think that you come in and you do like, a two-hour lunch to learn and you talk about unconscious biases.

Okay, We’re done. It’s fixed. No, that doesn’t work. “It’s going to be ongoing, you know, you’ve got to have check-ins, you’ve got to have nudges in your system, you’ve got to have people trained to call it out, as you say, in a way that is constructive.

“It’s going to be ongoing, you know, you’ve got to have check-ins, you’ve got to have nudges in your system, you’ve got to have people trained to call it out, as you say, in a way that is constructive.”

So it doesn’t cause tension, because in my experience, most, I mean there are some people who are deliberately antagonistically discriminatory but for the most part, particularly for gender bias, most people do not know they’re doing it, it’s so ingrained in ourselves and our cultures, they don’t know they’re doing it, so it can be called out in a way that is constructive. There are people who, intend to bully and harass and that’s very separate.

Aishwarya

Right, so it is primarily an awareness issue. People are not aware of this, and then it becomes important to make them aware of it and then through regular sessions or training, it would be important for organizations to understand this mindset because I think it’s also a mindset problem, right?

People have certain notions about women and then they stick to that & that’s a huge problem. So do you think that all the time you’ve seen a change in your lifetime? Have you seen a change in people from becoming unaware of becoming aware of such issues?

Dorothy

Not as much as I would like. I mean, my first job was in the Steel industry where we were three female trainees out of 150, so I mean, we were the quota. So three women with a quota and we had experienced in the workplace where, I don’t know if I can say this on an Indian podcast, but men will put their hands on your bum every day.

They would send you up on gantries and platforms and look up your skirts. You know, all of these sorts of things. “I think as we’ve seen with the #MeToo movement in certain sectors, that sort of crass behavior is still going on. “

“I think as we’ve seen with the #MeToo movement in certain sectors, that sort of crass behavior is still going on. “

I think that there are some sectors that are more aware, okay? But I think in others there is a massive resistance to change. It is changing slowly and the fact that Harvey Weinstein is in jail. I mean, that’s a massive step forward. But whether or not that will be a deterrent to the leaders that they have to change. I just hope, I just hope it moves now at a much faster pace.

Aishwarya

Absolutely, I hope for that too, really you know, being a female myself. I do really hope that this scenario changes.

And, you know, with the recent outbreak of the virus, do you think our way of thinking will change, or, you know, will there be a change in the way we work and we see things?

Dorothy

My answer is this – I would have hoped so. You know, I think this is the universe speaking if you like. I think its message to self, that “We need to change the way we’re doing things, the qualities we value, the way we reward people, the way we live our lives.

“We need to change the way we’re doing things, the qualities we value, the way we reward people, the way we live our lives.“

I hope that there is long term change, but I think we are still sore after the financial crisis that it was, you know, there was this moment of horror which lasted a year or however and then, little by little, it has gone back to business as usual. So I am hoping about anything that when we have emerged from this, that leaders will sit down together and say, okay – what are we gonna change? And what do we need to do differently?

And I hope that HR will play an important role in this and I hope that tech will play an important role in this because I think that is something that’s come out of this crisis is how we can change with tech. How helpful it is and how we can use it for our benefits. So that’s what I’m hoping for.

Aishwarya

Yeah, let’s talk a little about, you know, the tech part of it.

So being digital-savvy yourself, can you help us understand how important of a role will technology and digital make in the inclusive workplace of the future?

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