Under the skin

Much like the mermaid and the unicorn, the business case for diversity is a mythical creature. The search for this BCD is an exercise in futility. Many of the arguments that have been put up may be well meaning but are not necessarily well thought through, often lacking data and sometimes even logic. Let’s take one: “the need for our workforce to reflect our customers”. I can understand why this would be an objective for organisations, but what if our customers are mostly white and male? Furthermore, the aim may be laudable, but what if we decided to call it “race matching”? It doesn’t sound quite so innocuous now, does it?