The surprising solution to workplace diversity | Arwa Mahdawi | TEDxHamburg

Arwa Mahdawi talks about diversity in the workplace.

Arwa Mahdawi is the founder and Chief Minority Officer of rentaminority.com, a revolutionary new service offering diversity on demand. The site has gained worldwide attention and been covered by the likes of the BBC, Le Monde, the Huffington Post, NPR, and the Atlantic. Arwa is also a partner at cummins&partners, an independent creative agency with offices in Australia and New York. She is a regular speaker at advertising/tech/media conferences, so if you need a minority last minute, give her a call. Arwa is also a freelance writer and writes regularly for the Guardian on issues including marketing, technology, cryptocurrency, and lesbians. Frequent comments on her articles include “Was someone really paid to write this?” and “This comment was removed by a moderator.”

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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)