Whenever you bring up diversity, people's hearts tend to sink a little bit.
They're like, "Oh my God, I'm going to have a lecture.
I'm going to have to sit through slides like this,
with multicultural hands in the air,
people of different races holding hands, giving each other high fives,
holding each other,
maybe holding the world, holding the globe up -
When we talk about diversity,
we tend to do so
in a really unimaginative, stock-standard kind of way.
And that's because people don't really want to talk about diversity.
They don't want to talk about diversity in the workplace.
It's just a problem that needs to be solved
so that you can get on to other things.
And that's an attitude that I've kind of come across a lot
during my working life
because, I mean, I don't want to boast or anything,
but in technical terms, I'm a three-fer:
I'm brown, I'm gay, I'm female.
I'm three minorities for the price of one.
(Laughter)
So, you know, I'm the triple threat,
but I'm also the triple opportunity
because when companies hire me, they get to tick three diversity boxes.
(Laughter)
They get three times the value,
and they get someone to wheel out, to show that they're not sexist,
they're not homophobic, they're not racist.
Because everybody's worried about that, obviously.
The flip side of diversity is discrimination,
and diversity and discrimination are huge issues at the moment,
as our cities change, as the demographics of our cities change,
particularly now with the refugee crisis.
But things are changing, the face of our cities is changing,
but what's not changing is the face of power:
the people on our TVs,
the people in the big board rooms, upper management.
That's still exactly the same.
We still have institutionalized sexism.
Did you know that, in the US,
there are more guys called John that lead major companies
than women leading major companies?
(Laughter)
(Applause)
There are actually 17, compared to 7 women.
We also face institutionalized racism.
I mean, it's well documented that if you've got a foreign-sounding name,
you have a harder time getting a job.
There was a study done in Germany
that found that if you have a name that sounds German,
you're 14% more likely to be called for an interview
than if you have a name that sounds Turkish.
And I mean, probably a lot of you are thinking,
"Fourteen percent? I thought it would be a bit more than that, actually."
This all really needs to change,
and not just because it's the right thing to do,
but because it's the profitable thing to do.
There are so many studies that show
that increasing diversity in a company makes for a more successful company.
For example, racially diverse teams outperform non-diverse ones by 35%,
according to Mackenzie,
and teams where men and women are equal earn 41% more revenue.
So, here's the situation, this is where we are:
we know that the corporate world needs to change,
we know that there's a business case for changing,
and yet nothing is changing.
How do we go from talking about diversity to actually making it happen?
This is something I've been thinking about for a while,
and earlier this year, I had a kind of light-bulb moment,
and I came up with a brilliant solution.
So, I got a team together,
and we started working on building this new service,
a service that would really just change the diversity debate
and really solve the diversity problem once and for all.
So, what is this revolutionary new service?
Well, it's called Rent-A-Minority.
I like to think of it as an Uber for diversity.
(Laughter)
Because the thing is -
[Get ethics with our ethics. We have a minority for every occasion.]
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Diversity is difficult.
It takes time, it takes resources,
it takes energy.
Companies don't have that time,
they need to be getting on with what's really important.
So, what we need is something that's quick and easy:
diversity on demand.
So how does this work?
Well, if you are a minority, you can sign up on our website.
We have a strict vetting procedure
so that we ensure we only get the best minorities.
(Laughter)
You can see some of our minorities featured here.
So -
(Laughter)
(Applause)
A very popular category is the ethnically ambiguous category
because it's very, very versatile,
it can be whatever you want them to be, really.
We've got a smiling Muslim women:
"Doesn't support ISIS or your money back";
intellectual black guy -
Really, we've got a minority for every occasion.
We work with clients to find the right minority for your needs.
And our clients are very, very happy.
We've got a long testimonial section you can check out on the website.
[The best thing to happen to Indians since British colonialism.]
(Laughter)
I'm glad to see that some people got the joke here.
(Laughter)
Because it has been so successful,
we are launching an ad campaign a bit later this year in New York.
So, there may be some of you here who are still thinking,
"Okay, what is going on?
Why did TEDx invite this crazy person to our conference?
Is this a joke?"
And I've had that question a lot.
A lot, a lot of people have asked me that question.
So I even made a FAQ page and put up the answer.
And the answer is yes!
(Laughter)
It is a joke.
But a lot of people didn't realize it was a joke.
You know, I had a thousand people sign up to be minorities.
(Laughter)
I even received genuine business inquiries from big companies, that I won't name,
asking about the service.
In fact, I think I could have made a lot of money out of the company
if I'd monetized it.
It might be a missed opportunity.
So, the reason some people didn't realize it was a joke
is because Rent-A-Minority is very close, scarily close,
to the way that a lot of companies deal with the diversity question,
a very superficial approach to diversity,
that actually makes the whole issue worse,
because there are so many studies that show
that people find diversity training, enforced diversity training, awful.
It makes a lot of white men feel very resentful.
It actually increases prejudice
because a lot of people suddenly think, you know,
that if you're someone like me,
you've suddenly got an escalator to the top,
everything's stacked up for you.
The thing is it's really not
because what we're not doing
is we are not getting rid of institutional inequality,
we're not getting rid of the barriers
that stop companies from becoming more equal.
All we're doing is this very surface-level tokenism.
That means that if you are someone like me,
every time you do have a success,
people are very quick to attribute it to tokenism or to diversity schemes,
or, "You only got that because you are a woman,"
or, "Because you're brown."
And I actually got a lot of people writing in to me
and saying how they've felt that reflected their own experience.
There's a section of the website now with people's stories and anecdotes in it.
And the thing is, you know, sometimes people do get jobs because of tokenism.
That doesn't help anyone.
There was this one woman who wrote in to me,
and she said that she had recently taken a role at a business consulting firm.
It was previosuly occupied by a smiley Asian woman,
a very sort of ambiguously Asian woman.
She left, they hired her.
She was the only person of color in the company,
and it was clear that she'd just taken that one slot of "ethnically ambiguous."
Again, it doesn't help anyone. It makes the situation so much worse.
So, Rent-A-Minority was a fake solution to a very real problem.
What's the real solution?
Well, I've got bad news and I've got good news.
The bad news is that there is no quick solution,
there's no silver bullet.
It takes time; it takes effort.
However, the good news is that diversity is a serious issue,
but we don't need to take it so seriously.
One of the reasons I set up Rent-A-Minority was because I think
that one of the things holding us back is that nobody talks about it
because they don't want to be seen as racist or sexist,
they don't want to step on people's toes,
that this sort of inability to talk about it properly
actually contributes to the problem.
So, I think we shouldn't be afraid to find humor in the situation,
because as Mark Twain said,
the human race has only one really effective weapon,
and that's laughter.
The other good news is that all of us can be doing small things
that louder up to big changes.
And by "all of us," I do mean all of us.
Diversity isn't something that HR fixes.
It's something that everyone is responsible for
and everybody should be doing something about.
So, what can you do?
Well, if you're in HR or you're responsible for recruiting,
you might want to think about ways that you can reduce your unconscious bias.
In the 1970s,
symphony orchestras were all white men,
and they thought, "Let's do something about this."
So, they set up blind auditions
where musicians actually auditioned behind a screen,
so you couldn't see if it was a woman or the color of their skin.
They found
that it actually brought the number of women getting accepted into orchestras up
from between 25% to 46%,
depending on the study.
A company called GapJumpers
has now started to take this idea of blind auditions
and apply it to the corporate world.
So instead of looking through people's CVs to find candidates,
you can assign them challenges anonymously.
And what they found
is that they've got 60% more minority applicants selected for interviews
as compared to CV screenings,
and they've got 125% more women selected compared to CV screenings.
So suddenly, that question of,
"Oh, we couldn't find the best candidate, it's all about the best candidate,
we just can't find them,"
it's started to sound a bit false because they are all out there.
That is, unconscious bias is getting in the way.
Another thing everyone can do is just say something.
If nobody says anything, nothing changes.
So, if you are in a room, in a meeting, in a company,
and it's all just the same sort of persons sitting around the table,
go and talk to your manager, you know.
Talk about it, make a comment.
You don't want to be in a company that's like that.
Another thing we can all be doing is just finding ways to prove again and again
that diversity is beneficial, that is does have a positive effect,
it's not just political correctness.
That, by the way, isn't the mathematical proof for diversity.
I'm not sure there is one.
But we can all be doing these experiments and finding ways to prove it.
For example, in London, in the advertising industry,
a group of five creative directors got together
and they initiated this thing called The Great British Diversity Experiment.
And what they did was they got 120 people from different backgrounds,
they put them in teams, they got them to solve a live brief
and they had researchers ethnographically studying them
to see how they interacted compared to if it was a homogeneous group.
And they found that, yes, being in a diverse group -
and this is common sense -
it makes you more creative.
Because you get so many more different perspectives,
you connect the dots in different ways.
And they issued a report at the end of this
and they said, you know, diversity is the new Darwinism.
And this is absolutely right.
The world is changing whether you like it or not,
and companies have to evolve or go extinct.
And tokenism is not evolving.
Finally, what I'd really urge
is that we just get rid of the word "diversity" altogether
because the thing about diversity
is that it assumes that there is a nucleus of normal:
it's pro straight, white men called John.
Everyone else is "diverse."
That's so patently wrong.
The world has changed so much and will continue to,
and diversity now is the new normal.
Thank you.
(Applause)