Ep. 181: Kristen Donnelly - The Never-Ending Journey of DE&I

Connect with Kristen:
http://bit.ly/ARDigest
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristendonnellyphd/


Full Episode Transcript:
Neha: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host
Neha Lagoo Ratnakar, and we are now starting episode 181 of our
series. Today's guest is Dr. Kristen Donnelly. Kristen is a
celebrated TEDx speaker and founder, and one of The Good Doctors
of Abbey Research. Join Kristen and my co-host Adam, as they talk
about her work as an empathy educator and how companies and
leaders can become more inclusive. So keep listening as a
handover with the mic to Adam.
 
Adam: (00:47)
So Kristen, as we get started, I think it would be best for us to
define some terms that our listeners may think they understand,
but you know, they really may not. Things like diversity,
oppression, equality, equity, tolerance, and privilege. These are
all terms that we hear in the media a lot. And I think people,
they think they understand what they mean, but maybe you can help
us by level setting.
 
Kristen: (01:08)
I would love to break that down. So in order to do that though,
allow me to kind of set the stage a little bit if you wouldn't
mind. Of course. So one of the first things to understand is that
the world is set up for some people to be the default definition
of human and all around the world, infrastructure, laws,
education systems, inventions are all unless, you know, otherwise
determined, honestly set up with the default idea that humans
will be male. They'll be probably middle to upper middle class.
They'll be fully able bodied. Most likely they're gonna be white.
They're gonna be cisgendered. Which means that their gender
identity matches the sex their body was born with. They're going
to be heterosexual and their life goals are going to include
things like a mortgage and a partnership and children. Generally,
that's the default.
 
Kristen: (02:10)
So when we make working hour laws, we assume that it's a man with
a partner at home. When we make cell phones, the only hands that
Apple ever tests cell phones on are male hands. When we talk
about, you know, what we should pay people. When we talk about
how quickly you can pay back your student loans. When we talk
about lots of things, whether we realize it or not, we are
assuming that the people we are talking about is that category I
just defined. So anyway, in which you line up with any of those
categories, if you're a male, if you're white, if you're able
bodied, if you're middle to upper middle class, if your BMI is
socially acceptable, if you're cisgendered, if you're
heterosexual, generally, what that means is that you have
privilege. Privilege means the system is designed to work for you
because you were what they had in mind.
 
Kristen: (03:07)
When they designed the system, there is no shame or judgment or
moral imperative that comes with that. There is just, the system
is designed to work for you. If you're thinking the, and you're
like, that's not true, cuz blah, blah, blah. It's probably cuz
you've never seen the system because the system is designed to
work for you. So then where oppression comes in is any way in
which you don't line up with those systems, the degrees of
oppression and privilege vary from category to culture and
everything else. The other important piece to understand in this
conversation is the phrase, "intersectionality".
Intersectionality is a term coined by Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw back
in the 1980s, she's a legal scholar. And now she's known often
for being one of the four thinkers in critical race theory, which
is not what we are teaching children in school.
 
Kristen: (03:59)
I will just simply say that here. It's I have a PhD in sociology
and I didn't learn critical race theory. So I promise that fifth
graders are learning something a little bit different, but
Kimberly Crenshaw came up with intersectionality to acknowledge
the fact that while all women are oppressed on some level black
women experience oppression at a more significant level than
white women do. And essentially what it has come to real mean as
social scientists is that we are all a lot of things at once. I
am not just a woman. You are not just a whatever you are. I am
not just white. I am not just middle class. I'm not just
educated. I am all of these things and they come together in very
specific ways. It's kind of like the back of a cross stitch.
We're all kind of, we're all just a lot of things to make up who
we are in the front of the cross stitch.
 
Kristen: (04:49)
Every society has different priorities in terms of which of those
threads are privileged and not. I say all the time, like, you
know, we, we can add in othering and normal as well for the
phrases of privileged and oppressed. If you're normal in your
society, you are privileged. If you are othered, you are
oppressed in some way, but again, your mileage may vary. Degrees
vary here. I have oppression as a woman, for sure. I don't have
the same level of oppression in the United States as I would have
in Saudi Arabia. But that doesn't mean that I don't have
oppression in the US. So the, so there's that. So there's
privilege there's intersection, there's othering, there's
oppression. All of that. What I like to say is that meaning that
everybody is all those things all at once. Actually means that
we're all diverse creatures as it is.
 
Kristen: (05:45)
So none of us are one thing which means that you can't create
diversity within your organization or your family or your social
circle because everyone is already diverse. What you need to do
instead is create inclusivity. And inclusivity is the decision to
let everybody show up on their own terms and not determine the
shorthand for who they are. And we get that shorthand through
using tolerance and tolerance is simply saying you are alive
because I cannot kill you. That's it. Tolerance is drilling
everybody down to the easiest, common denominator that we can see
when we look at them and putting them in categories that are easy
for us to interact with it denies people, their personhood and
their complications. It allows us to say, well, I can't ever know
that person, cuz they voted for someone different than me. I
can't ever know that person because they're gay. I can't ever
know that person because they're evil. And instead if we
eliminate tolerance, which is one of my life missions and we
understand that everybody's already a diverse person in front of
you, you're diverse, I'm diverse. We're all diverse heyo. What
we're actually trying is create inclusivity. Then we can have the
hard conversations about how to do that. But let's eliminate the
myth that tolerance gets us anywhere.
 
Adam: (07:12)
Wow. So you've covered a lot of things and I wanted to kind of
circle back to where you started, where you were talking about
the ideal human, right? Mm-hmm, so if you don't meet that
criteria, you become an other.
 
Kristen: (07:24)
In some way.
 
Adam: (07:25)
In some way, right? So a lot of times when we get separated and
we try to find others who have been othered, who are othered like
us and we come together because we wanna feel comfortable with
somebody who's been othered as well.
 
Kristen: (07:37)
Absolutely.
 
Adam: (07:38)
But is that so bad that we do that?
 
Kristen: (07:41)
No, if that's, if it's the end goal and you stay in that group,
maybe.
 
Adam: (07:46)
Okay.
 
Kristen: (07:46)
Or if you all pretend that the only thing you are is that thing
you got othered for. Then I think it gets limiting. That is a
weird ...