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Ask Jackye Clayton About Diversity – “Is White a Color?”

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Jul 8, 2013

There is a ton of information on recruiting diverse candidates.  Most articles start the same, mentioning how important it is to have a diverse culture and yadda yadda yadda and then you see those three words: “People of Color.” To get to the answer of the sarcastic question, with help from Crayola, most of us know that white is a color. But when we are talking about “people of color,” white is the color left outside of the box.

“Right now, 83 percent of the global talent pool consists of women and minorities. Also, women are increasingly outnumbering men in college graduating classes worldwide,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in a whitepaper written for Cisco.

Because race and sex is a diverse group that is “visually obvious,” those seem to be the first types of diversity candidates sought. It seems the easiest group to search for. I am happy that the diversity topic is addressed at all but could you be discriminating in the name of diversity? It is time to move beyond the obvious.

I would like to invite you to look at Bloomberg Finance. On the Bloomberg.com diversity page, their global diversity initiative detail is one of the best I have seen.

“At Bloomberg, our formula is Diversity + Inclusion = Innovation.

Bloomberg’s diverse workforce and open culture are essential to innovation, which is the key to our success. Diversity means the innumerable ways in which we are different, and inclusion means that those differences are leveraged. Simply stated, our success is driven by extreme diversity of thought.

It reads as follows:

Selected global initiatives include:

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