"If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.” - John F. Kennedy

I realized early this week that it was about 38 years ago I started working full time after a series of part-time jobs that had helped me make some money starting in junior high and lasting through college. While I’ve sometimes held a second job in those 38 years, to help make ends meet, I’ve never been out of work. For that I am very grateful.

During my career, I’ve had advantages because I was a man, because I was white and, at times, because I was young. While I appreciate the opportunities I’ve had, I also recognize that the advantages I enjoyed were accompanied by disadvantages for others. I find myself thinking again today of the importance of equity, equality and diversity. I sincerely believe that we all do better when we ALL do better. A society that embraces and values the richness that diversity offers us, and that works to correct the inequality and inequity faced by members of some groups, is a society that will benefit us all.

Whether we consider gender, ethnicity, race, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, ability, or our diversity of experiences, learning styles, national origins, cultures, and opinions, I believe we need to work to make some differences matter less, and ultimately not at all, and to recognize the value of others in enriching our shared experience. We need to embrace the diversity that makes us stronger together and learn to recognize how unimportant the differences are that we still allow to divide us.

Many of the ways that we are diverse have the potential to enrich our lives and allow us to achieve more together than if we were all more similar. Some of the difference between us should matter more than they do today as we recognize how they allow us to benefit from a broader set of ideas, feelings, perspectives, and awareness. While we seek to “level the playing field” to eliminate inequality, we must also value those differences that make us better together. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tells us that, “We need societies that recognize diversity as a source of strength and not of weakness…When diverse ways of seeing and thinking come together, they spark creativity.”

We must continue to recognize diversity as a valuable engine for creativity and innovation as we build the teams that will help solve problems, and recognize opportunities, for a better shared future. Research has provided evidence that diverse teams can help create the kind of creative disruption needed for innovation. For example, data shows that firms with women in top management roles show greater “innovation intensity”, and demonstrate improved problem solving, coordination, and logical analysis. By including an effective variety of people from different backgrounds across many aspects of diversity, and ensuring these diverse voices are heard and heeded, organizations can achieve a competitive advantage and make a greater difference.

Of course, we must also take effective action to eliminate the differences that divide us. As a society, we allow some differences to matter in ways that they simply should not. When we treat another as less than, disrespecting or discounting them as  “other”, we are allowing meaningless distinctions to make a negative difference.

In the most current analysis from the World Economic Forum, the time it will take for women to achieve parity in the workforce has increased from 80 years to 117 years in 12 months. Far from recognizing the value created by including women in leadership, we are losing ground in our efforts to address inequity. This is a crisis of social injustice and a waste of knowledge, experience, and insights that we cannot afford if we are to thrive together. Among the steps we must take immediately is to ensure that women are fairly represented in succession planning for leadership positions.

The issue of equality and equity for women and girls is one that matters a great deal to me personally. At the same time, similar issues exist for many other aspects of diversity where we allow essentially meaningless differences to interfere with justice, including fair employment practices, and impair the progress we can make together. We do not offer the same kinds of educational, employment, and economic opportunities at the same frequency to all people regardless of irrelevant distinctions. We all lose as a result of these inequities.

Current research in anthropology can help us recognize some of the challenges we face as we seek to address these issues. In a recent article, anthropologist and behavioral economist Tinna Nielsen discusses research that shows “we are unable to see economic inequality, largely in part because of our environment and a tendency to cluster socially with people who are similar to us in terms of income, status or education, for example.” It isn’t that we don’t wish to address the issues of inequality, it is that we are often unable to truly confront them because we do not perceive them accurately. To me, this strengthens the argument that we need to include those from underrepresented groups in processes intended to identify and correct inequality and inequity. We need their perspectives to correct for our own blindness to the issues.

We can’t get the change we need by continuing to do things as we always have. There will be short-term economic and social accommodations required to allow systems, and people, to adjust to these changes at a practical level. It is likely that cultural change will take longer and that some transitions may require generations to be fully incorporated into our organizational, regional, and national cultures. I am convinced that the ultimate impact of our truly embracing diversity will be overwhelmingly positive for individuals, organizations, nations, and the entire human family.

For now, we will need to continue to work to embrace true diversity, and there is a great deal of work yet to be done. Given the time required to achieve the benefits of change, we have every reason to begin making the necessary changes immediately and to redouble the efforts already underway. My idealist optimism still leads me to hope that one day people will embrace diversity as naturally as they breathe, or smile, and find it absurd that anyone would be considered less than, or “other”, because of the differences that make our world family richer. That one day we will see our differences as fundamentally valuable because they are.