Fostering Authenticity As a Path To Increasing Inclusion -WIE ILC 2021

Speaker: Andrea (Andie) Kramer and Alton Harris are Gender Bias and Communication Experts 

Companies can obtain the true value of diversity—increased innovation, creativity, and effective problem solving—only when their employees can be authentic — able to express their distinctive personal perspectives, ideas, and insights without fear of disapproval or social ostracization.

There are two significant challenges to surmount for this to happen:

Organizationally: Leaders need to overcome the biases that too often influence advancement decisions, specifically, affinity bias —the tendency to support people in one’s own social identity group (often thought of as the “ingroup”) over people in different identity groups (“outgroups”) who may not conform your same cultural norms.

Personally: Women often create a false juxtaposition between authenticity and the concept of Impression Management (the conscious effort to positively shape the impressions other people have of them). Authenticity does not necessarily have anything to do with the way you dress, wear your hair, use makeup, or accessorize. Nor does being authentic require you to disclose your every thought and emotion. Authenticity does mean being able to express one’s unguarded, unique perspective and ideas without the pressure, subtle or otherwise, to conform to an institutional ingroup expectation of communication style or problem solving.

So how can we get here?