To me, Diversity is about who we are – how many people with unique or under-represented characteristics do we have as a company, as a region, as a city. But Inclusion is about how we feel, and this is a much more individual thing. If people aren’t happy at work, they won’t want to stay in that environment or job, regardless of whether they fall into any of the under-represented groups, so feeling included is vital for everybody.
I am a non-white woman, but those factors have never been an issue; I’ve never felt I’ve been treated differently because of my gender or ethnicity.
However, I have felt excluded many times because of my disability. For people who know me, I know I don’t look disabled but many disabilities are invisible, including many mental health conditions, such as depression, which I have been living with for nearly 20 years. Most of the time it’s managed well with medication and there is little or no effect on my day-to-day life. But from time to time I get a difficult day, or week or even much longer if it’s a more serious episode. That makes it hard to cope with life properly, and at work in particular things get much more difficult. It affects my concentration, memory, motivation, and ability to interact with others. I start to doubt myself, lose self-confidence and can be irritable or tearful. I come across very differently to what people are used to.
Whilst my managers have been good at working with me when things get bad, others around me often struggle to cope with what they see and what they think they know. I have felt left out of things if people think I can’t manage, I’ve felt excluded from my own team – people I know well and work with daily. I’ve felt like I’m not trusted or valued and people find it hard to talk to me, so I’ve often been left out of general conversations as well as specific work ones. It’s demotivating, very bad for self-esteem and self-doubt which are both already at rock bottom and it’s incredibly isolating and very, very lonely.
I don’t imagine any of my colleagues would ever intentionally make me feel this way and I know that some of my feelings of exclusion come from my irrational interpretation of their behaviour, caused by the way depression can alter my thinking. But I also know that some of my exclusion is a result of colleagues’ actual behaviour, which stems from ignorance, uncertainty and unconscious bias. But the fact that it is unconscious is why it’s more important that people learn about their colleagues and what they could be going through; learn about how they are making unconscious choices about their behaviour and start to recognise that and do things differently when dealing with difficult or unknown situations.
One of my hopes for this Inclusion Week is to raise awareness, promote, encourage and share initiatives which raise awareness of unconscious exclusion; and that we can increase conversations about people’s own experiences so we can all learn from them.
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