My company has several of these. They are supposed to be a way for people of a certain background to build and expand professional networks, as well as for enhancing mentoring, recruitment, and promotional opportunities for people in the group. They advertise that “anyone” can participate, however.
I don’t really have an issue with people wanting to expand their network, or look for mentoring opportunities, etc. However, something rubs me the wrong way here, and I am not sure why. I am a hetero, white, old(er) guy at the office. I try to treat everyone professionally and with the respect they’ve earned. I kind-of feel like these groups are establishing an exclusive club where I’m really not all that welcome, and don’t really have access to the networking, recruitment, etc. opportunities based on my own race, gender, sexual preference, etc. It’s not like I can ask for a club for old white guys be established at the office.
Help me sort this out. What do you all think about these?
Those types of groups are somewhat “discriminatory” by definition but that is not synonymous with bad. There are plenty of exclusive clubs around for every sort of group imaginable. It is just an extension of the ideal of freedom of assembly. As long as they don’t literally forbid anyone from joining, I don’t see a problem with special interest social groups of any sort. That includes those that are mostly focused on older white men and there are still loads of those around either by design or simple interest.
In a workplace dominated by straight white guys, they can network easily at any place other than in those groups. They can network at the office, in meetings, at lunch, at business dinners, and so on. Also probably at any alumni associations and industry group meetings. Also as you pointed out, they can network at those aimed at other groups since all are welcome. But a person who isn’t a straight white man might have a harder time networking in a group dominated by straight white men.
It’s not necessarily because of discrimination, it’s just that for example older engineer Chad just hits it off with younger engineer Wyatt because they have a lot in common in interests and background, but Chad doesn’t feel like he has as much in common with young engineer Ebony and doesn’t know how to make conversation with her. So Chad gets to know Wyatt better, and becomes friends, and is able to provide some mentor-ship and career help, but Ebony has a harder time finding someone to connect to and get guidance from without a specific networking group.
I agree. Confusion arises because certain parties have poured massive effort into convincing people that discrimination is always bad. Many people now parrot that line of thought without ever thinking about what it means.
Discrimination is the basis of almost everything that happens in a society, and we would all soon be dead without it. We discriminate against those under 21 by not letting them legally buy beer. We discriminate against high-school dropouts by not letting them become doctors or lawyers. We discriminate against wimps by not letting them become Navy Seals.
The Civil Rights act does not prohibit discrimination. That would be impossible, obviously. It prohibits discrimination on certain bases by government and businesses. Gender is one such basis. So technically, for a bar to host “Ladies’ Night” or for a conference to only allow woman business owners is illegal, and such things have been successfully targeted by lawsuits and shut down. All the more reason why we shouldn’t have anti-discrimination laws for purely private businesses. We should, of course, still have them for all government institutions and for medical and other emergency services.
Not very good examples. In both cases people can change their ways - become educated or fitter respectively - and so qualify. Young people grow older. You can’t change your skin colour or your sexuality.
Really?
I think you may have this the wrong way around: if Wyatt and Ebony are looking for mentors then it is they who need to make the extra effort, not Chad.
So long as they’re open to other people (which according to the OP they are), they’re not discriminatory.
And if Wyatt has already been taken under Chad’s wing without any effort on Wyatt’s part, that gives him a head start over Ebony. Women’s networks are a way to make that extra effort Ebony finds herself needing to come up with, merely in order to try and even the playing field again.
Thanks for the different lines of thought - this is helpful. I don’t feel discriminated against, per se, but I have yet to muster the confidence to attend one of these groups’ meetings. That is on me. I also do not know how many people not in the targeted group actually participate with them, either. I agree with the comment about a certain amount of discrimination being useful and necessary, and I think it is a positive thing that people have a way to develop, professionally. However, I think it a fools errand to try and establish a group for white men - that would be met with howls of sexism and racism. Maybe a group for people 50 and over, focusing on their unique set of challenges and requirements, would be more tolerated (I am not 50, yet!).
My company is primarily female. Anecdotally, I would say 60%-70% female. In my department most of the managers and all the directors are female, and from the other teams I work with it is the same. There is also a very large Asian contingent. However, from my viewpoint, it looks like the majority of VPs and executives are male. So, this place is not dominated by white males in any sense, until you get to the upper levels of management. And I have yet to be invited to play golf or go to lunch or dinner with anyone at that level.
Anyone at other medium and large companies have these groups? How about in non-US countries - is this a thing overseas?
People join specific fraternities and soritories because of the connections these groups provide. If you aren’t a member of these groups, too bad.
The same with alumni organizations.
A network built around race, gender, or nationality is no different. If you want access into a black or Latino professional network, befriend some black and Latino folks. But that means also letting them into your network–which means if a job opportunity comes up, you don’t share the announcement only with your closest drinking and fishing buddies. Which is what generally happens. As long as people reserve “hook ups” for friends–friends who are almost always from the same racial and cultural group–there will always be a need for minority professional organizations.
Exactly, it’s more possible that Wyatt can stumble into a mentorship just by being able to talk about football and fishing to Chad, but Ebony has to make the extra effort.
Of course this isn’t the case universally, there will be some straight white guys who aren’t good at talking with people and won’t be able to build a network easily, and there are some women and minorities who are great at networking with anyone, or are able to find the commonalities with the white guys in charge and make those connections. But in general straight white guys will have a head start in connecting with the straight white guys in charge.
Also, if Chad is someone in charge, maybe he should be making an extra effort to connect with the Ebonys of the company. Diversity of culture and ideas generally helps a company, unless their target market is only straight white guys.
If the company is 60-70% female, but dominated by men at the top levels of management, there’s some disconnect going on. Maybe most women at the company aren’t interested in rising to upper management, maybe they’d received signals that it was and will continue to be a good old boys club and there wasn’t any point in trying to break in, maybe some have tried to rise but haven’t been allowed, maybe the men at the highest levels knew and trusted some of the men at the second highest levels and chose them to rise up to the top. I don’t know your company and I don’t know how it was, but I’m guessing it’s not just that women weren’t interested.
And of course being a white straight male isn’t an automatic ticket to the top. It’s not like the top execs are just going to randomly pull you out of your office to go to lunch with them because you look like them. But if you tried to network with some VPs at a Christmas party, or tried to get a second to talk with upper upper management after a meeting, you might have an easier chance than a black woman or gay Hispanic man or any number of other employees.
But when I was a student, I participated in various “minority” groups. One was focused on black aquatic estuarine/marine ecologists. We met a couple of tmes in conjunction with a larger annual meeting. I don’t know if the group still exists.
It was cool to know that there were other people in my field who belong to my particular culture, who I could hit up for advice or help without them automatically assuming something negative about my qualifications (“She’s just another Affirmative Action beneficiery asking for yet another hand-out, not like my friend Chad who just needs someone to scratch his back so that one day he’ll be able to scratch mine.”) Although I have lost contact with the folks in that group, I know where a couple of them work and what they’ve been up to professionally. It’s nice knowing I can shoot someone an email without having to include a huge introduction just so I can ask about, say, a job opening in their department or whether they know anyone who’d be willing to serve on an expert panel.
The truth is that I have to work extra hard to get this kind of connection when I’m working with contacts acquired through a general professional organization where the membership doesn’t necessarily care about improving diversity. And on the other extreme, sometimes when you’re the lone black person trying to network in the room, you have to deal with people who only see you in terms of “diversity” rather than just another scientist. I remember giving a talk at a meeting years ago, and how this guy flagged me down afterwards to chit-chat. I thought we were going to talk shop. He wanted to talk to me about ways his department could diversify its student body. Being able to network in an environment where you don’t stick out like a sore thumb (at least culturally) means you don’t have to worry about being reminded of your “sore thumbness”.
I don’t think it’s feasible for someone who is not a member of the RGSN-based group to join, since much of the focus of the group will explicitly be on shared experiences that exclude this outsider. It’s not like a group which happens to be largely of one type, where the discussions will naturally be biased towards the majority of the group but not deliberately so.
It’s been my eperience that a new supervisor tends to immediately glom onto whomever in the group they have the best rapport with. Understandably. But this often results in bosses establshing confidences among the employees that resemble them the most.
I remember how painful and cringeworthy it was a few years ago, when my boss was hired. It didn’t matter what the fire was that needed putting out. He’d always point to the same guy to do it. Didn’t matter that the guy was not the one assigned to those fires. Didn’t matter that the guy lacked the expertise to handle those fires. Didn’t matter that the people best equipped to put out those fires were right under the boss’s nose, screaming “pick me!” No, he could only see Jason–his old drinking fratboy-humor having buddy.
It was frustrating. But eventually my boss expanded his “circle of trust”, probably because Jason didn’t take advantage of the situation (which he easily could have).
In Spain the whole “mentoring” thing is viewed as an Americanada: one of those weird things that are done only by Americans or by monkey-dos who think anything is cool as long as Americans do it. In general we’re a lot less likely to have formal clubs or organizations than you guys. That doesn’t mean we don’t get together by specific groups, but we’re more likely to call it a “girls’ night out” (where all the ‘girls’ involved are coworkers) than a “womens empowerment group” (as one of my American companies called it). What you guys call a “convention” and advertise formally is often something we’d call a quedada (meetup, multi-people date) and organize by word of mouth; stuff that we talk about at the [del]water cooler[/del] coffee machine in two sentences required formal meetings every time I’ve had an American manager (asking for vacation, for example).
But whenever I’ve been involved in activities that had a “target group”, involvement from out of target people has been highly valued so long as it’s interested and polite. This is true whether the activity was formally organized (those American groups; courses for work retraining; nerdy cons) or not, and whether the target was intended or not (the Cooking Club at my American uni wasn’t Hispanics-only, but we only got a Non-Hispanic once and she was brought over by her Hispanic roommate to talk about something else; in fact, the roomie brought enough pizza for everybody). These are people from outside “our” bubble, they bring a different perspective - whether they’re thinking inside or outside the box, their box is different.
I am against it in general. Such groups already exist informally in any ethnically diverse workplace and they start giving each other unfair leg ups. I have been the beneficiary of this as well. What happens is that lets say you have a group of 5 guys called Guatum, Gauruv, Sanath, Ajay and Rajesh. Rajesh is a senior manager who is quite close to the Managing Director, Anatoly. He introduces these guys to Anatoly, who gets impressed and sends work, plum assignments and meetings their way. These guys are highly qualified and do well. Trouble is that you have guys like Don, Chen, Ali and Ricardo who are just as able, who initally miss out because they don’t have the direct line to the boss and later because they don’t have the experience; an experience they lack since they never got the chance to put their case forward.
Yeah, I guess that is the source of my mild irritation. Whenever a group forms to help each other get a “leg up” then in a sense there has to be someone else that they are stepping over. In my case the company is fully endorsing these groups, even assigning one of the executives as a sponsor.
It makes more sense when you think about it from an organizational perspective rather than focusing on the benefits to individuals.
Companies want to hire the best of the best, whoever they may be. But hiring managers tend to look to the same familiar places and to their own networks, which means they miss a lot of potential talent. Diversity groups help recruiters to tap in to broader networks and to recruiting events that might have never occurred to them. They also help HR tailor recruiting messages in a way that appeals to specific groups, increasing the chances of attracting top talent.
Companies do best when their employees grow professionally. People from smaller minority groups may have trouble connecting with people who understand their particular concerns. Diversity groups help people find each other in large organizations, and make sure people aren’t left out of PD opportunities.
Companies do best when people stay with the company. But some groups have issues that may be easy to address, but may be niche enough that they wouldn’t otherwise make HR’s radar. Diversity groups help advocate for small changes (breastfeeding rooms, adoption benefits, transgender friendly policies, student loan benefits, etc.) that can make a big difference in employee satisfaction and retention.
In other words, these groups are less about helping anyone get a “leg up” and more about helping the company make sure it finds and keeps the best people.
I help lead an employee resource group (ERG) at a large corporation, and have helped many other Fortune 100 companies set up their own LGBT ERGs. I’ve never seen one that was discriminatory in that a straight, white, cisgender person would ever be discouraged from joining or participating. I mean, the ERG does have a mission statement, so if someone joins and wants to constantly talk about fishing or about GAAP practices in the office, we’re going to ask them to stay on topic.
There are probably some people who convince themselves that this is true. In reality, it’s mostly about CYA by the companies worried about PR and lawsuits, about getting/giving a leg up by the participants.