Championing Diverse and Inclusive Workplaces
When I stumbled on Ishani Roy’s profile on LinkedIn, I was fascinated for many reasons. For one thing, she had transited from a deep STEM career to a thorny human behavioural domain. After all, Roy had been passionate about Applied Mathematics, and talented enough to garner a Doctorate in the field from Brown University. Followed by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Oxford, and then a research stint at GE Research.
Yet, she had abandoned a starry STEM pathway to exercise her wizardry in a terrain that rarely draws the n-dimensional thinkers. Moreover, she had founded her own enterprise mid-career, navigating her transition with an élan that most expert mathematicians can only infuse into equations. Determined to glean her formulae for various things – like how do you move from a STEM career into a people-oriented one? How do you build a successful enterprise? – I embarked on an enthralling Zoom conversation with the brilliant and self-effacing Roy. Here are some takeaways for all those founding enterprises or contemplating career transitions:
Create An Enterprise that Refracts Deeply-held Values
As the Founder of Serein, an organization that champions Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Prevention of Sexual Harassment (PoSH) among other behavioural interventions, Roy reflects on why her own outlook is inherently liberal and humanistic.
She admits straightaway to having been raised in a certain kind of privilege. Her upbringing in Calcutta was gender agnostic. Her sister and she were expected to harbour the same aspirations as her cousin brothers or other male members of the family. Moreover, as much as the women picked STEM subjects along with the arts and music, the men were equally exposed to “softer” fields. “It was never like the men go into science and the women focus on art.”
And she was surrounded by high-performing, self-reliant women. Even today, her mother and sister are entrepreneurs and business leaders. Between their two companies – one in manufacturing, the other in retail – they employ over 1000 employees.
Pursue An Academic Passion
Knowing all along that she could study any subject she chose, Ishani found herself drawn to Mathematics. Choosing, like few women do, to major in Mathematics at her undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder, she discovered her interests lay in Applied Math: “Especially to the application of Mathematics in the field of Physics.” Landing an internship at the intensely competitive Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where like at a similar center at CERN, she pursued obscure quantum particles or mysterious forces that stitched up the cosmos.
Later, during a stint with the Los Alamos National Lab, she studied tidal wave models. Just as she and her colleagues were prying into monster waves and other seismic upheavals in water bodies, the 2004 tsunami crashed across the Indian Ocean, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing others. Models like hers could enhance early warning signals for future disasters.
In the meanwhile, she completed her Master’s in Applied Mathematics, then headed to a Doctorate in the field at Brown University. At the Ivy League, where she was among a minority of female Math doctoral students, she dwelt on applications related to Astrophysics. “We were studying the early universe, with observatories that analyse radiation data and other cosmic remains to detect where they come from.”
From peering into the deep past – to about 14 billion years ago – with her Astrophysics sleuths, she switched to an equally complex and baffling site: the human body. For her postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford, she tweaked numbers and graphs to understand the spurts and spills of the heart. Working with surgeons who implanted pacemakers, she modelled possible outcomes on patients.
Eventually after 13 years abroad, she and her husband decided to move back to India, where she joined the Aerospace lab at GE Research.
Seize Insights from Personal Life Changes
When she returned to work after her maternity leave, she realized first-hand that women were subject to both implicit and explicit biases. Moreover, she observed that many women were not able to persist in technical or scientific pathways, often breaking out into administrative or general managerial roles. Besides, there was the widely bandied fact that even as the nation’s GDP was growing, female labour force participation was trending in the opposite direction. Economic progress was characterized by dismaying social backsliding.
Reflect On Your Own Epiphanies
Moreover, when reflecting on her past, Roy recalled one particular time at Los Alamos, when she was gearing up to make a presentation. The audience consisted of many brilliant physicists, including a Nobel Laureate. Apart from Ishani, there was only one other woman in the room. Like many other young adults, Roy was nervous about presenting to such an august gathering. To heighten her discomfort, they were all men.
She even slid off her contact lenses and donned a pair of glasses to appear more intellectual. The other woman jokingly observed that they were the only two people in the room who didn’t have beards. “They were not just all men, but men of a particular kind,” Roy says. Somehow this aspect seemed to spotlight the absurdity of the situation, and she was able to treat it with more light-heartedness.
She realizes that nerve-racking moments like that, when you don’t see any role models around you, can rattle women or minority scientists, often resulting in their quitting the field. But she said it was a kind of epiphany for her, because she decided to use the situation to her advantage. Rather than falling prey to imposter syndrome, she chided herself to be proud of her own diligence and abilities – the very attributes that had led her there. She gave herself an internal message at that point: “Just use your privilege and work hard.”
Decide to Be The Change
Instead of griping about the situation of women and other minorities inside organizations, Ishani wanted to drive change.
Rather than return to her erstwhile research role, she was impelled to reapply her smarts in the new space. Knowing that this was a confounding and fraught social one, wherein one would have to confront long-held assumptions about gender or any other human attribute.
Articulate A Clear Organizational Purpose
Founding Serein – which means the “fine rain at dusk” – she was determined to usher changes into Indian organizations to establish the kind of gender agnosticism that she had been raised with. Soon enough, however, she realized that she would have to tackle other dimensions of discrimination in order to cultivate meaningful inclusion.
Six months later, she was fortunate to encounter her co-founder, Chryslynn D’Costa, who was already doing some work on gender and other dimensions of bias. D’Costa possessed rich social science insights. “She brought an understanding of inclusion, not just of gender.”
Tackling forms of privilege in general, and with a thrust to build diversity and inclusion across multiple facets, Serein adopted a research-driven thrust to diversify enterprises and change human behaviour.
Educate Yourself In the New Field
Soon after embarking on her new journey, Ishani applied herself to learning about the new field, with the same intensity deployed during her Doctorate or Post-doc studies. She burrowed deeply into academic articles and courses in the field. If she was going to meet with business leaders and convince them to change processes or policies, she intended to arm herself with data and tangible evidence of what had worked elsewhere.
Adopt a Fresh Approach
When Serein started out, DEI was relatively nascent in India. Most diversity consultants were conducting gender workshops. Serein, however, took a different approach. They asked organizations to share detailed data on demographics and performance. Then they built statistical models to understand what kind of changes were required, and predicted outcomes for various scenarios or changes. Besides shifting culture through training and workshops, they also targeted recruitment and retention strategies. Overall, they tried to bring about a lasting, more holistic shift on culture. With an emphasis on feelings of inclusion, from an employee perspective.
Target the Early Adopters
In general, they have found greater receptivity among start-ups and smaller organizations. They have worked with about 350 start-ups to date, and they are heartened that many of these enterprises, despite being small, are keen on building the right culture from inception. “If you approach it from a point of view of building a really open culture then companies are very open to hearing this.”
Build Learning and Reflection Into The Organization
So far, their experiences have been largely positive. Moreover, they make sure, as individuals and as an organization, that they are continually learning from interventions. For instance, after a workshop, they review audience questions as a team. “We deconstruct every question we get,” says Roy. The team is careful not to adopt a high-handed or all-knowing approach. They are sensitive to the fact that employees, like all human beings, emerge from different backgrounds and with different kinds of exposure. Besides, almost everyone might have implicit or subconscious biases.
Tips on Expanding Diversity From An Expert
· Bring Sensitive Topics To Attention
In general, they have found that most people want to behave in sensitized ways. In some discussions with men, they have uncovered a lack of awareness about the kinds of harassment that women are subjected to. After all, in many Indian families, such discussions are hardly kosher. “It’s very difficult for them to even fathom the depth of it,” Ishani says.
Other tricky conversations revolve around jokes. To outline a commonplace scenario, let’s say a colleague cracks an offensive joke. If you are in a minority of men or women who take offense, you might be labelled a “spoilt sport”. Or as women often are, as someone who is “too sensitive.”
Assuming that you are offended or discomfited by the joke, you might choose to pretend-laugh and move away. But this only normalizes such behaviour, making it difficult for someone else – a subordinate or peer – to express offense. “This is something we continuously encounter,” says Roy. “People are so used to being laughed at, that such jokes continue to circulate in the office or on WhatsApp.”
By bringing such instances to light, Serein fosters a necessary dialogue between various workplace actors. Mindset shifts translate to different ways of hiring or interacting with colleagues.
· Institute a Robust Internal Committee
More intense scenarios that Roy has encountered include physical assaults and rapes inside offices. “Often, we think that doesn’t happen. But it does happen.” To handle such scenarios, companies need an impartial Internal Committee in place, and one that is not beholden to anyone – including Senior Leaders, who might be perpetrators in some cases.
Violent offenses rarely get reported to the police, because complainants fear backlash on their careers. In some instances, complainants hesitate to open up even to families or parents. They are afraid their freedom to work will get snatched away. In such situations, an Internal Committee can assure employees that their career will not get affected, and that their mental health will receive necessary support. “When organizations have an empathetic and legally-trained Internal Committee, there’s a lot we can do,” says Roy.
· Critique Popular Culture
With regard to popular culture or Bollywood movies, Ishani does not observe significant progress. For instance, movies like Kabir Singh perpetuate unhealthy male stereotypes. There are still too many instances of female characters blushing at or relishing unhealthy male behaviours like stalking or being touched without consent. However, many OTT programs, and especially those that normalize mixed-race couples, or gay relationships help move the needle in the right direction.
· Drive Deeper, Sustainable Shifts
In general, for organizations to make the right shift, Roy says they need to move beyond tokenist measures. Diversity does not end with hiring one woman leader, or even with inducting a woman on the Board. Organizations ought to measure all aspects – not just the number of female hires, but the manner in which they are performing inside the organization. Are they being retained? Are they being promoted? Are such hires widespread across regional offices? Then again, diversity does not end with women. Companies ought to diversify across dimensions – like caste, class, linguistic background, regional origins, sexual orientation et al.
Serein typically engages with enterprises for the longer term. Assignments range from three months to a year or even three years, as they analyse data across attributes and make recommendations. They also conduct focus group discussions inside the organization to solidify their quantitative and qualitative findings. They formulate strategies to shift metrics – via new policies, processes, workshops and other behavioural interventions.
Advice to Founders
In general, Roy admires entrepreneurs, people who have built businesses from the ground up. Even small kirana shops win her admiration, for the kind of hard work they engender, and the manner in which small shopkeepers keep an enterprise going. “I think I really admire that kind of spirit in business,” Ishani says.
To other founders, Roy warns them not to succumb to media hype. For instance, there is a lot of pressure on start-ups to raise funds or to scale rapidly, even before products or processes are robust. Besides, old-fashioned metrics like profitability can also bring value in the long run. “There are ways of bootstrapping a company being revenue positive, building a great product and scaling thereafter.” In general, she suggests that founders build their teams and business models first without aiming to get big in a hurry.
To other women, she cautions that they don’t try to take on all roles and societal responsibilities. Delegating tasks to others – whether that be to partners or family members or household staff – can help decrease stress. They also ought to embark on difficult conversations with partners to ensure that invisible work is shared in ways that are tenable for both.
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