E22: The Existential Crisis is Equity for Diverse Professionals and Women

Hey everyone, welcome to Inclusion Unscripted, the live podcast here on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This week's program is about the existential crisis for Black professionals and women around equity. And so we're going to really talk today about equity. Often we talk about diversity, inclusion, equality, all of that belonging, but in today's program we're going to take a keen focus around the crisis of equity for people of color and women. And we may not think that it's an existential crisis, but it is. It's a crisis because the current state, the pandemic, where we are, the rights of women, the ability for us to show up equally is on the table. And so that is what we're talking about today. So thank you for joining us. Inclusion Unscripted, where we are not just talking about diversity and inclusion, we're living it. For me, this is an unapologetic program where we talk keenly about diversity, inclusion, women's leadership, women's rights, where we are in the state of inclusion. So that is what this show is all about. I'm happy that you're here. We are sponsored by the inclusionlearninglab.com. If you've not been to the website, please go ahead and visit. If you haven't been in a program that I've hosted before, my name is Margaret Spence, and I'm the founder and CEO of the Inclusion Learning Lab and the host of the Inclusion Unscripted podcast. We are syndicated on all of the podcasting, um, apps. You can join us live every Friday at 2 PM. Um, there's some Fridays where I have conflicts and I don't show up here for the show, but it's okay. Uh, know that I'm here in spirit and we'll share old episodes. If you want to listen to our prior episodes, you can grab it on any of the podcasting apps. So let's have an honest discussion about equity. I've talked about equity before, and I've had the equity discussion a couple times, and each time I have the equity discussion, I leave feeling that we haven't really scratched the surface enough around equity. We could talk about equality, we could talk about inclusion, We can even try to think that we're building belonging in the workplace. We can strive for having more diversity in every area within both the corporate spaces and our public spaces. The reality is diversity is who we are as human beings. Even if you're a twin, you are diverse. We are diverse. The problem is that not all shades of diversity show up at the same place at the same time, and not everyone has access to the tent the way everyone else does. But here's the thing about equity, which is why I'm talking about it today from the talent prospect, not from any other lens. I'm talking about equity from talent management, talent development, talent acquisition, talent growth, how we show up as people in the spaces that we work in, the spaces that we spend the majority of our time. That's what we're talking about. Equity is economic justice.

That's what equity is.

We have fought and we've asked for diversity. But we don't hone in enough on equity. We fight every day to say we want diverse candidates hired in our workspaces, we want diverse candidates brought into our workspaces. What we aren't asking is, what is the equity stake for the people that we're bringing in the door?

And are we sitting at the equity position, or are we sitting somewhere else? Because the issue is we are not sitting at the equity table.

We are not sitting at the equity table. See, in every organization— and I've said this a couple times and people go, wow, I've never viewed it this way— within every organization there is a profit arm and there is a cost center arm. When we ask for diversity, when we say we want diversity, when we say that, we are often asking for the cost center experience. We're asking for people to come in and work in the cost center of the organization. They can work in customer service, they can work in, um, marketing, they can work in um, you know, whatever processes the organization has. They can even work in HR because HR is a cost center to the organization. It is not a profit center.

So we will fool ourselves into thinking we're making progress because all we're asking for is more diversity.

So the organization goes out and gives us more diversity. They create programs for more diversity. They create programs to empower women. They create programs to pipeline us into a system. But the challenge is when it comes to the organization's profits, when it comes to the organization's equity, women and minorities are not at the equity table.

We are not there. And so if we want to fight for diversity and inclusion, we have to fight first for equity because we are putting this backwards. For 60 years, organizations have been grappling with diversity. Since the Civil Rights Act was passed, we've been grappling with diversity.

We've been grappling with access. We've been fighting for a seat at the table.

The challenge is this: the table that we're trying to sit at is not the one that actually cooks—

is the one that cooks the food. We're not the one that's making decision about how the food is purchased. We're not the ones deciding whether we get filet mignon or we get a ribeye.

We're not the ones deciding if we get shrimp or we get top-level caviar. We're not there. We are still fighting for the rice on the table. That's where we are. And for women, we've gotten it in our heads that all we need is an opportunity, and if we sprinkle enough women at the top And we create this visual perception about us being in the organization. Or if the organization makes their top woman the Chief Diversity Officer, then they, they think they've done something. But when the profits get divided, there's only a bunch of people at the top of that table, and we are missing.

We're not being hired into the profit roles.

We're not being hired into the equity roles, and we're not asking for equity. We're not asking for equity. See, some people understand that when you negotiate your way in the door, if you're in the right position, you get to also negotiate your exit. See, it's called the golden parachute. The CEOs come in, they can screw things up, make it bad, make it worse for everybody, and then when they're asked to leave, they leave with a parachute that they go out the door and they're totally happy with their next life and their next opportunity. The reality for us as people of color and women, we are not often at the equity table. We're not coming into the organization early enough to get equity.

If you're with a tech startup or, or in the tech space, the people who got hired at Google first, they got lots and lots of equity.

So when the stock goes up, they're happy. Many of them cashed out and walked out the door. The rest of us are relegated to be worker beavers, and we fight for this, for the tiny crumbs of rice that's left on the table. And we think that if we ask for diversity If we, if we focus in on diversity and we ask for diversity, it will create equity. The reality is equity has to be on the table with your diversity discussions.

We have to ask organizations a simple thing. What are the equity positions in the organization? All of you doing the work of diversity and inclusion, as you are out there looking at jobs and roles that you're trying to diversify, None of you are really trying to go into the room where the real decisions are being made.

We're all doing the surface stuff. We're doing the low-level surface.

We need more Black people in management.

We need more brown people in management. We need more people in this particular area of the STEM profession. We need this particular person in tech, in tech. We need this particular person in healthcare. But where is the equity table or the capitalization table within the organization? How many Black and brown people and women sit at that table? Oftentimes very few. Here's the thing. The men, the white men that have the equity don't care that we're fighting at the bottom for diversity and they will allow us to to fight at the bottom for diversity because that feels good. It doesn't threaten their position. It doesn't cause them any pain. It allows them to say, we've allocated $5 million or $10 million to diversity hiring. But the reality is my paycheck is a billion dollars, and I get to walk away with my billion dollars, and you guys get to go fight in the trenches for the, for the rice grains of, of diversifying the rice grains. Basically, that's what we're doing. And so we haven't really figured out the ask. And I've said this on a couple episodes, we haven't figured out the ask.

What are we asking organizations for?

Equity is economic foundation upon which inclusion and equality is built.

So here is an idea for all of you.

If a woman is earning 60 cents on the dollar, or 68 cents, or 70 cents on the dollar, and the men are earning 30 cents more on the dollar, a woman is now being set up to fail. A woman is being set up to fail. Her equity table is already starting 30 cents in the deficit. It's starting 30 cents in the deficit, but we are okay with that. And see, the power structure is okay with us fighting for the extra 30 cents.

The reality is we needed $1.50, we needed $1.75, we needed $2 on our $1. We didn't need to come up to parity, we needed to come up to parity and go beyond parity.

That's what equity looks like. And so all of you doing DE&I work, I can't stress this enough. If you're wanting inclusion, you have got to say, how are we dividing the pie equitable?

And who among us is going to go into the room where there's none of us at in right now, right?

Equity is the financial engine that drives diversity. If I can't pay my rent, I can't feel engaged. If I can't support my children, I can't feel focused. If all you're giving me is a salary that's already 70 cents below par, and then I have to try to figure out my life based on that 70%, what is happening, especially for diverse people and women, is that we retire poor. We retire not being able to live because we've left all of our equity on the table for the 40 years of our work life. So for 40-plus years we will spend in an organization leaving our equity on the table. And if we don't understand the— and really have a granular understanding of equity and the fight for equity, then we don't really understand the fight that we're in for sustainability. Prices will go up, laws will get passed, things will happen, but if we are not equitable in how we treat Black and brown people and women, then we are really making no progress. We are making visual window dressing progress around diversity and inclusion. So we have to say to ourselves, who is sitting at the equity table? Who is sitting at the equity table? How many people are sitting there? Who are those people that are sitting at the equity table?

Who in your organization gets to negotiate their exit with a huge salary on the other end of the exit?

It's not only the stock options, it is the equity options.

It's the division of the profits among the people in a particular room where we don't have access to.

So if we're building diversity pipelines and we're saying to ourselves, we want to have talent that is in the diversity pipeline, Then what we have to say really to ourselves is, where are the positions that have equity? Where are they located? And then we have to say, who's in those positions now? What are the skills and competencies that they have for those roles?

Now, where is the next generation of diverse people who can stand up in that room?

And the work that we need to be doing is to stand people up, not just in the pipeline of talent, but in the pipeline of equity. We have to stand people up in the pipeline of equity.

Because if we don't stand people up in the pipeline of equity, then we are doing a disservice to the next generation and the current set of people who are working every day.

See, there's a fight for $15 an hour, there's a fight for unionization, there's a fight going on here in Florida where we aren't even able to have substantive diversity training because there's a law that's gonna go into effect that's gonna stop employers from having substantive diversity and inclusion training for their employees. But that's not our mission. See, we could get mired in the minutia, in the garbage bin, in these, these issues that distract us, what I call the red ball. See, the red ball gets thrown to us, and then we follow the red ball, and it jumps and jumps and jumps, and we keep following the red ball. But when we follow the red ball, we miss the real reason why we're doing the work of diversity and inclusion. The reason we're doing this work is to create equity. It is to create equity. We can have belonging, we can have inclusion, we can have equality, but if I can't pay my bills, I don't have equity. If the salary I'm getting doesn't create a, a good retirement for me, then it's not equity. If I'm underrepresented and underpaid, it's not equity. So we are fighting for things that matter, but there are things that matter more that we are not addressing. So let's talk through this a little bit. You know, hiring based on equity asks all of you to go into your organization and look at equity tracks. Not just look at empowerment tracks or uplevel.

Where are the equity tracks in your organization?

Where are they located? Who is in them? Who's in those roles? Then we have to look at underinvestment, which is the next piece. See, we underinvest in developing people of color to enter the equity rooms. We under-invest— let me say that again— we under-invest in developing people of color and women to enter the equity room. We under-invest in that. What we invest in is fixing us. We invest in fixing us because the idea that the organization needs to be fixed is so hard to wrap our brains around. So what we end up doing is giving us skills to speak more, to stand up, to ask, to negotiate. But the reality is we have to dismantle the silo that is the equity silo, the equity track. How many people are being hired in with a compensation package that is so robust that they feel so confident in their role. Some of you in HR—

and let me talk to the recruiters for a second— some of you in recruiting and talent acquisition, you get a salary band, a set of salary that you get to offer to someone, and you feel that you should talk them down to the lowest level because that makes you look good as a person coming in as a talent acquisition person.

But when you talk down my experience and you talk down my value and you put offers on the table about my pay, when you say, listen, the company gave me $150,000 to $180,000, but I think I'm only gonna spend $150,000, and you put your lips together to say to a candidate, This is all I got. This is all we have to offer you.

And the candidate says, I want $160,000 because they've done their budget. And you say $150,000.

And out of this, the candidate says, all right, I'm gonna take it. When you take away the difference in pay from me, you are annihilating my equity stake in the organization. And y'all recruiters need to stop it. That's how equity works, because if I start out at the beginning at a bad pay spot, I will never catch it up. In order for me to catch up my pay to where it should be, I've got to leave the organization in order to increase my pay. And so it becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-fulfilling prophecy is we can't retain people, they keep quitting. No, you don't want to pay them at the front door, and the 5% increase is not tenable, and so they realize their value and the only way to get paid is to leave.

That is the equity track.

That's the equity track that nobody talks about. Y'all are still fighting for diversity, but you've got systematic processes in place that is chopping away at a woman and a diverse person's equity. And you don't play the game with white men. You give them what they say they want, you pay them correctly, and they get to walk in and move up because their pay is commensurate with their experience.

See, the only game that gets played with equity is with Black and brown people and women.

And then we get to celebrate Equal Pay Day like if it's something to celebrate. I've said it once, I've said it twice. The people who can control pay equity is human resources.

Y'all recruiters, you HR people, you payroll folks, you get to control pay equity.

Your chief HR officers, you get to control pay equity. And in order for a woman to have equity, it's up to HR to start paying her right. That's the issue. See, when it comes to underfunding, now let's talk about that.

Let's talk about the equity of underfunding. I'm a woman, I'm a Black woman, I'm a Black man, I'm a Hispanic man, an Asian man in your organization, a Native, Native, um, man or woman in your organization.

You first don't give me an opportunity to be in the equity stake.

You second take away my equity opportunities by underpaying me, and you know you're underpaying me. You know that based on my resume and my education, I should be paid more. And then you put me in a non-equity track, and I happen to be happy there.

You give me belonging and inclusion as my consolation prize, and then you underfund my development, so I'm stuck in this crazy going nowhere cul-de-sac of non-opportunity. So first we don't—

we deny the equity track, then we do the underinvestment, meaning you don't give me my right pay, and then you underfund me while I'm in the door.

You underfund me so that I don't have the requirements to move up, and you get to say to me, Margaret, you're not ready yet. So, so there we have it. That's how equity works. That's how equity works.

See, equity is a financial stake, and we don't talk about the financial stake enough.

And here's why we've got to start talking about it.

Rent is too high for everybody. Number one, the expenses that landlords face is too high, so they're raising rents.

Truth.

Right?

Okay, your employees' pay is only going up 5% a year.

So let's look at this self-fulfilling prophecy. You're giving them 5%, and some of you managers— let's talk about you guys, the kiss of death for equity—

are managers. You don't fight for me. You know that you've been given a 5% range to give me pay, and you go about your business to make sure that I don't earn the 5%.

So you give me 3.9, or you give me 4%, when the 5% wasn't acceptable in any day. The cost of living is going up through the roof, but you guys are still stuck at 5%. When I entered the world of work in 1983, It was a 5% increase. This is 2022.

You are still only giving 5% increases.

So the reality is we have baked inequity into our processes. A person starts, the salary range is set the day I start.

You decide that you want to have a different pay scale 4 years later after I've been sitting there. So the new person comes in with a higher pay.

I'm still sitting there getting my 5% and I'm in happy land until I realize that Johnny sitting next to me, who I'm being asked to train, is making $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 more than I am because you raised the pay scale, but you didn't raise the pay scale for the current people sitting in your company doing the work who have been there forever doing the work. You raise the pay for to bring new people in the door. And so I have gone on to LinkedIn and I've looked at your job posting, and if you're smart enough to post the pay range, I look at it and I go, wow, that's what they're paying for that role. Guess what I'm making? Not that.

So I bone up my resume, and there's happy recruiters out there who willing to tell me quite honestly that I'm being underpaid. And so I start interviewing behind the scenes.

I'm interviewing, I'm interviewing.

The right company makes the job offer. C'est la vie. It's been great. I'm out the door. See how this inequity works?

When you set up structures of inequity, when you set up structures to divest my equity without me even agreeing to the, the vesture, right? When you set me up for that, then I have only one option.

That one option is to walk out the door.

That is my one option.

I don't have another option, right?

And then you get to say it's the Great Resignation, and you also get to try to say now It's the great retention. Let's try to retain these people. No, they all should quit on y'all. They should all quit. They should say peace.

You've been paying me and you've been underpaying me for years.

See, and until we understand this, we're gonna continue to have this cycle.

This is not the first time that people have resigned. This happened in the '80s. It happened in the '90s.

Even when we had mass unemployment, right after that we had great prosperity and people quit jobs, and we had different names for it back then, right? We had different names for it. So here's, here's a thought process. Here's the thought process: we have to understand the triggers of inequity.

We have to understand and deeply, fundamentally understand the triggers of inequity. Inequity occurs when you decide that I don't deserve the financial security that everyone else deserves. That's when it occurs. It occurs when you decide that I am not worthy of the pay that I should get.

It happens when you don't give me development access, when you don't train me, when you don't give me stretch assignments so that I can be building my resume to move up to a role that is going to pay me more. The structural inequity occurs when you say to me over and over when I've applied for a job over and over and over again, you tell me that I'm not qualified, but you go outside of the organization to hire someone who has no institutional knowledge and has not been working in the trenches for you.

That is gross underinvestment and inequity.

See, those are the things that we need to be solving. We cannot just be solving the numbers. We can't say we need more Black people, we need more brown people, we need more Hispanic people, we need more Asian people, we need more Native American people.

No.

And we need more women. No. We need more people of color who have equity stakes in organizations, who are sitting at the decision-making table, who can affect the rest of us who are sitting in the trenches doing the hard work for the organization. And being overlooked and underfunded and undervalued. That is what we need. That is what we need. We don't need more diversity training. We don't need more diversity policies. We don't need more diversity window dressing. We don't need more diversity goals. We don't need more diversity mission and vision. What we need is real actionable actions that we could see that speaks to the inequity and the inequality of our equity stake in your work environment. And until you address that, we will always be standing and begging for the rice crumbs on the table and never being able to decide if we're having a ribeye or a filet mignon. That is the reality. Until we can make the decision about what gets purchased and how much money is spent and what the profit is, then we are making really no progress. Because the window dressing of having sprinkling and black pepper and, and salt— because that's what it is when we ask for diversity only— what we're doing is taking the salt shaker and the black pepper shaker and putting them together, shaking it around, pouring it out, and saying, yep, there we go, we got it, it's all good, everything's mixed up here now. That's what we're doing when we ask for equity.

We say, nope, who owns the salt shaker and who owns the pepper shaker and whose designs is benefiting from this and who is getting the profit after we put these two things together.

That's equity.

That's equity.

I am tired of, as a woman, fighting for my core existence and my financial strength. We will not make progress as people of color if our financial strength is not solidified. We will not make progress. We will not make progress if—

we will not make progress if equity is not what we ask for, because every organization has two sides of the house: an equity side and a cost center side. A profit center side and a cost center side.

See, here's how you know the difference.

Let me give you a little, a little, just a little window. Here's how you know the difference.

The men who have bad behavior around hiring diverse candidates, who are the ones that bring the income and revenue into the organization, who remain untouched year over year over year over year, are sitting at the equity table. And those of us who are fighting to make that manager or leader accept diversity in their business units, the ones that are fighting for that, we are actually fighting for the crumbs of the table. Because the reality is, because this individual is the equity earner within the organization, they get to have bad behavior.

They get to refuse to take the 5 slates of diverse candidates that you present to them. They get to not have women on their team.

They get to not empower women. That's the difference.

Because when you have equity and when you're bringing equity to the table, the organization doesn't want to touch you. They let you behave badly on purpose, and they give a million reasons why they can't do anything about John or Tom or Harry. Because they're the ones bringing in the revenue. And so the rest of us who are the worker beavers, who are the rice grains, get to sit and suffer while Johnny and Harry and Tom get to behave badly. And then you, Miss Diversity Director, Mr. Diversity Person, you get to run around handing out more data to the organization about why they're not diverse. And at the end of the day, nobody really advances. That's how equity gets dysfunctional in an organization, because equity is what's stopping us from having true power. And the people who are currently in power utilizing their privilege recognize that if I keep them fighting for diversity, they'll never get to touch our equity. And so we fight for diversity. We come up with great programs around belonging, and we say, oh my God, we gotta engage our employees. No, you need to pay them. You need to pay your Black and brown people and your women so that we have equity in our own lives. Because if you're not willing to give us a track to the equity table, then I want to be able to create my own track in my own savings account for my own equity and my own financial security. And you can't ask employees to live on the breadline and expect them to come up to work every day and do your work in happiness. Somewhere in the mid-'90s, we started this psychotic process of saying pay doesn't matter, employees love to be engaged, they want to be engaged.

Bullshit.

They want to be paid. And recruiters, if you're recruiting people and leaving my equity on the table because you think it's a joke, stop it. Because that is the beginning of the inequity. It starts the day you hire me into the organization. Inequity starts at the door.

One of the reasons why I am running my own company is a simple thing.

Let me give you guys this story. I was leading a department.

I got my paycheck. The paycheck came in an envelope.

It was not a paycheck, it was actually a pay stub.

I hadn't opened them because I get the same amount every, every month.

I didn't open them, but I had to open them because I was refinancing my house and the bank wanted 5 pay stubs. And I opened up the envelope and I got the pay stub of another person on my team who was doing the same work. And she was making $40,000 more than me, $38,000 and some change more than me, and I was giving her direction. And when I went to my manager and asked him about it, he said to me, oh yes, we changed the pay structure. See, I left that company, I went to another one, but the same time I incorporated my current company. Because I wasn't going to allow anybody to sit in my equity stake. And so I've been in the valley of consulting for 23 years because of that. See, but here's the thing, not everybody has the fortitude to walk out the door in that manner. I'm fighting so that you all understand that we must pay people equitable that we must make sure that pay equity is, is a thing. Pay equity is not a day to be celebrated. It's a day you hire me, that you hire me correctly. It's a day you promote me, you pay me appropriately.

It's a day you invest in me so that I'm ready for promotion. It's the investment in giving me the promotion so that my pay increases.

And if you're not willing to do all of that, then you are perpetuating the inequity for women, for people of color, for Black and brown people. And then you get to sit in your privilege and tell us that we need to work harder. No, we don't need to work harder. You need to pay us appropriately so that we can work and live at the same time. So that is this week's Inclusion Unscripted. So thank you all for joining me.

I am here almost every Friday.

Inclusion Unscripted is sponsored by the Inclusion Learning Lab. We have just launched our community for DE&I leaders. And within the community, we are supporting diversity and inclusion leaders and people managers to be empowered to do the work of diversity inclusion at a different level. We cannot continue to do it at the level we're doing it. And so the Inclusion Learning Lab community we launched yesterday, the community's live. Visit our website, inclusionlearninglab.com. Www.margaretspence.com/community, and you will get information about the community on the website. So join me again next week, and I'm so happy that you were able to join. And if you miss this, um, we're on the podcast apps and we're on video replay on YouTube and LinkedIn. Have a wonderful weekend. For all the mothers out there, happy Mother's Day. Take care, everyone. And have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.

You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound. And when I fall, you tied a rope to me. You're blessing me every day. I was down with an illusion like a