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In line with community expectations, Australian courts are taking a much harsher approach to employer’s as well as contractor’s duties to prevent workplace sexual harassment. Ex-employee of Sydney Water, Reem Yalda has had a large award of $200,000 upheld by an Appeals Court. Her photo was featured without her consent in a safety poster with the words : “Feel great – lubricate”. An outside contractor, Vitality works which had produced the poster was held liable. The Court said: “Innuendo, insinuation, implication overtone, horseplay, a hint, a wink or a nod; these are all devices capable of being deployed to sexualise conduct in ways that may be unwelcome“. Ms Yalda’s much larger claim against Sydney Water is still pending. Employers have now been given a stern warning, says Symmetra, that they need to review policies on sexual harassment particularly with reference to hostile working environments and harassment via social media, email, Zoom and the like.

A much-heralded decision of the US supreme Court last week has once again thrown the spotlight on LGBTQI rights.

The case, Fulton v Philadelphia involved the right of gay couples to foster children which a Catholic vetting agency refused to sanction. The Court upheld the agency’s limited right not to participate in a process contrary to scriptural beliefs. This decision unfortunately highlights the continued inequitable treatment of LGBTQI people which ranges from general acceptance to resentful toleration but also to outright persecution.

Oscar Wilde, the great man of letters in the 19th century was jailed for two years for sodomy. In 1952, Alan Turing whose code-breaking helped to win the war, was prosecuted for homosexual acts. Frederick Chopin, Polish hero has had his homosexual love-letters deliberately suppressed in his home country. In many African countries, homosexual acts may result in lengthy imprisonment and in Iran, the death penalty.

Symmetra urges all to remember the obligations to stand up and speak up for inalienable dignity of the LGBTQI community.

A much-heralded decision of the US supreme Court last week has once again thrown the spotlight on LGBTQI rights.

The case, Fulton v Philadelphia involved the right of gay couples to foster children which a Catholic vetting agency refused to sanction. The Court upheld the agency’s limited right not to participate in a process contrary to scriptural beliefs. This decision unfortunately highlights the continued inequitable treatment of LGBTQI people which ranges from general acceptance to resentful toleration but also to outright persecution.

Oscar Wilde, the great man of letters in the 19th century was jailed for two years for sodomy. In 1952, Alan Turing whose code-breaking helped to win the war, was prosecuted for homosexual acts. Frederick Chopin, Polish hero has had his homosexual love-letters deliberately suppressed in his home country. In many African countries, homosexual acts may result in lengthy imprisonment and in Iran, the death penalty.

Symmetra urges all to remember the obligations to stand up and speak up for inalienable dignity of the LGBTQI community.

On Tuesday, this week, the Australian Club on Macquarie Street in Sydney steadfastly refused to enter the 21st century by not admitting women as members. A specially -called vote recorded a resounding 62 per cent against admission of women and 37 per cent in favour. ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs’ are relics of the 18th century where British aristocrats sought privacy, secure in the belief that women and men of colour were both intellectually inferior and socially unwelcome.

Members of the club come from the arts, law, medicine, science, military, entertainment and business. Undoubtedly, they make decisions, almost daily, affecting the wellbeing and prospects of women.

#Symmetra wonders how they can make such decisions fairly and in good conscience when they are determined to assert white male privilege in their private club.

Humans are fallible. When making judgments or even when undertaking important decisions, we frequently haphazardly select information which suits our pre-dispositions. We easily rely on data which is inaccurate, inapposite or simply false. In the workplace, this deficiency leads to failures in business and talent management decisions.

One factor which negatively impacts our decision-making is bias. Authors Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein show however that Noise is an equally pernicious element in judgment-making. In any area where a decision does not flow from strict and absolute rules, random variability occurs. Judges, doctors, loan assessors, managers and executives reach startlingly different conclusions when supplied with exactly the same data.

This result is both unfair and unacceptable when individuals at the receiving end expect decisions not to be arbitrary or capricious. Algorithms solve some of these issues but they are not perfect. Training and implementation of appropriate techniques can help to alleviate the ills of bias and noise See Symmetra Conscious Decision Making Workshops. Leaders need to orchestrate decision making processes that counteract noise and bias. This is something that every organisation needs to seriously consider when the alternative is recurring and leads to costly poor decisions.

I’ve been in the field of diversity and inclusion (D&I) for almost 15 years now — not as long as many, but long enough to have observed some of the significant trends and changes that have happened over time. The latest trend I’ve noticed (which I welcome wholeheartedly) might sound a little odd at first:

D&I is becoming human again.

D&I has always been about people and the way we interact with each other in the workplace and society; so you would think that, by definition, it is at its very essence a very people-centric topic.

So what do I mean?

The “early days”

When I first joined the field, this humanistic or people-centric element was pretty front and centre. Inclusion was first and foremost about equity; about ensuring fair and just treatment for everyone. This was a hot topic for us, and we talked about it all the time. It was a major moment of realisation for people in our programmes – the revelation that we should be aiming for equal outcomes, not treating everyone the same.

Of course, we spoke about the business case back then, but the data wasn’t so strong at the time – it was to some extent, a principle of faith that could be adopted by business leaders based on the fact that they intrinsically believed in fairness but needed the business language to justify some of the effort and investment.

The pivot

However, in the late 2000s, the business case got a big and sudden boost.

Suddenly, there was research available in every corner: McKinsey & Co published their first Women Matter paper in 2007; Scott Page published his pivotal book “The Difference” in 2008; the late Katherine Phillips published some of her most pivotal papers on diversity and decision making in 2009. The evidence piled up and became impossible to ignore.

All of a sudden, we went from doing sessions that were largely about equity into a deep dive into this evidence, spending 1-2 hours with leaders and executives to put across a single point with undeniable certainty: diversity and inclusion is good for business.

From an innovation, revenue generation, cost-saving and productivity perspective: it’s good for business. From a customer insight, talent attraction and retention, risk and compliance perspective: it’s good for business. With data to prove it.

And this messaging worked. The 10 years since has seen dramatic growth in executive buy-in for D&I, and our company with it. It’s not because people no longer cared that it was in the interests of social justice and that it was the right thing to do, but it was much easier to pursue these noble goals under the guise of doing what is right for the company and for the shareholders. We could do well by doing good.

Something lost

Now I am not suggesting that everyone took this tack. There were still thousands of people around the world focused on dismantling sexism, racism and all other -isms in the workplace simply because they were wrong and diminished the inherent dignity of every human being – no economic justification required.

This was, and still is, something I believe in deeply myself, but this didn’t always carry water in the corporate space; it was the business case that drew the energy and investment needed from executives to make real changes that would, as a result, create fairness and inclusion.

The drawback was that we didn’t talk about equity nearly as much. By equity I mean taking steps to ensure fair outcomes for people who have faced systemic biases and historical disadvantage, so that they substantively have equal opportunity to achieve the same outcomes as people who are born with certain privileges.

This is different to equality which is the basis of most anti-discrimination legislation, which suggests that simply by not preventing anyone from accessing any opportunity, programme or job application, we are providing substantive fairness. But all the real-world evidence shows this is not the case – we all need to do much more to understand the lived experience of others and why those of us who experience certain privileges have an obligation to level the playing field for those who do not.

There were times in this last decade when I did question whether we and our clients had strayed too far off the path, that our language about D&I had become too sanitised, even if it was getting some of the desired results.

The second pivot

And then 2020 happened, a pivotal year for so many reasons: the pandemic, of course, but also another year of explosive growth in interest in D&I.

This time, however, it’s been driven by purely humanistic reasons. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is the foremost symbol of this, a global movement that recognises that it’s not enough to be ‘not racist’, we must also become anti-racist. The last few years have seen society become increasingly “woke” to the need for equity and as such the expectation being placed on businesses to respond appropriately is much, much stronger.

And it’s not just race – this energy has infused all aspects of intersectional diversity, from gender identity to cultural background. Executive leaders are once again standing up en masse to say: We will do this regardless of the business case because it is simply the right thing to do.

In 2021, I have heard CFOs stand up and say: “The numbers don’t matter”; the Global Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Benchmarks, which we contribute to, were renamed to add “Equity” into the title; and multiple clients have remarked how significantly the conversation has changed.

So what now?

Our programmes – while still backed by strong empirical science and a compelling commercial basis – are now being infused with anti-racism and anti-sexism skills-building and this is being wholeheartedly embraced by all participants.

The business case is still there. Let’s be honest, many people still need it and major investment is still required – but Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is very much more human today than it has been for a while.

The federal budget delivered last night may well mark an important ideological and psychological shift in the attitude towards women in the parliament and other power centres in Australia. Unlike past years when platitudes have been the order of the day and lip-service has been paid to the rights, interests and apprehensions to the female part of the population, we now see some real and worthwhile movement.

These include: $ 1.7billion over 5 years for childcare; $ 535m for women’s and girl’s health; $ 261m for family, sexual and domestic violence services; $ 129m for women’s legal centres over 4 years. The government has been stung by the ferocity of the reaction to their ham handed response to stories of sexual violence in high places. They understand that in the post- #MeToo world there is a political price to be paid in defending male assumptions of impunity. Apart from this, one hopes also that there is recognition that to promote long-term sustainable growth, Australia must unleash the economic potential of its women.

Time will tell whether the budget was an aberration or a turning point for the women of Australia.

How to get the balance between home and office working right? And how to encourage team cohesion, inclusivity and idea-sharing when employees are scattered in different locations? This is the conundrum now facing employers across the globe. By and large, employees do not want a return to five days a week in a central common location, citing better efficiency working without distractions and less time wasted in commuting-but not all employers are convinced.

Amazon and Goldman Sachs are expecting their teams to return to “an office-centric culture” https://hubs.li/H0MQpWZ0. Nevertheless, many employees now regard work from home as essential and therefore a workplace right. But as Harvard Professor, Amy Edmondson asserts “…sorting out future work arrangements… will require managers to rethink and expand one of the strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness: psychological safety https://hubs.li/H0MQqkN0.

Symmetra has been impressed to see how many executives and managers in its global clients have taken these ideas to heart and are assiduously striving to reinforce psychological safety in all areas of team interaction as remote working has become the norm.

The murder of African-American, George Floyd by a white policeman (now proven) has re-ignited a long-simmering debate in the USA about the systemic and institutional features of racism. President Biden said: “…we can and must do more to reduce the likelihood that a tragedy like this will never happen again”. More broadly, issues of systemic discrimination, harassment and violence extend far beyond the borders of America and include attributes such as gender, sexual orientation and disability apart from race.

A UK government report which concluded that the system “…is not rigged” against people of colour has been furiously denounced as a whitewash by ethnic minorities in that country as well as a UN group of experts. In reality, there are no pat answers or simplistic solutions to dealing with institutional and systemic hazards and barriers faced by diverse groups. But governments and organisations must grasp the nettle.

In Australia, the government, in not accepting the recommendation of the AHRC to make employers pro-actively responsible for reducing workplace harassment has ignored the core element to systemically transform a functionally ineffective legal regime. We must do better.

Christine Holgate is but the latest female victim of the wretched, toxic masculine culture which pervades many of Australia’s political, corporate and sporting institutions. Her tale forcefully related to a Senate committee exposure once again of a culture where male power-plays exact a fearful toll on women: in Christine’s case causing her to contemplate suicide. Women at work are simply not afforded rights which men take for granted.

While the government has been at pains to point out that allegations are not proof of wrongdoing and everyone has right to due process, these principles went out the window in the case of Ms Holgate. Precisely what political machinations lie behind her dismissal is hard to tell, but the suggestions of impropriety which were flimsy to start with have been shown to be baseless.

Much work needs to be done to repair a male culture which ranges from the feckless to the malign, starting in our schools and filtering up into all our workplaces.