First outlined and defined by Dr. Kimberley Crenshaw in her 1989 paper, ‘Intersectionality’ was originally used to describe and explain the experience of Black women. However, it has evolved since then and is now often used to describe a myriad of intersecting and marginalised identities.

Dr. Crenshaw highlighted, and gave name to, what many Black women had been voicing for some time during the civil rights and feminist movements in the 1950s-60s, which was that anti-racist movements centred around Black men, and feminist movements centred around White women, leaving no space for the unique and compounding experience of Black women. Dr. Crenshaw emphasised that the oppression experienced by Black women was not only that of being a woman and that of being Black, but a unique oppression that is greater than the sum of the two individual identities separately.

We can consider this to be the case for many marginalised people from a range of experiences such as those who are disabled, are part of the LGBTQ+ community, practice faiths which are marginalised, and more.

Intersectionality is then about addressing all systems of oppression which support one another simultaneously and negatively impact people. These systems of oppression cannot be dismantled brick by brick, you have to pull the whole building down. To achieve this, we need to start with the people facing the most barriers and oppression and support them in reaching equality. Through this, we obtain equality for all.

Why is intersectionality important?

Intersectionality is an important concept to understand and have awareness of because, we as individuals, are not one dimensional. We can’t be put into a neat box and checked off. We have many layers to our identities, and those layers can present various barriers.

When you don’t take an intersectional approach, but rather an issue-by-issue approach, what you are effectively asking people to do, is leave part of themselves behind. This erasure only compounds the marginalisation faced by those with an intersectional experience of the world.

If we truly want to have equality and equity for all, an intersectional approach is the only way to ensure we support those facing the most oppression and that no one is left behind in social progress and social justice.

How does intersectionality impact the workplace?

Intersectionality impacts how inclusive your organisation is, how safe individuals feel bringing their full selves to work and how as employers you get the best from your employees.

Lack of intersectional approaches to inclusion can show up in many ways in the workplace, e.g. wage disparity, lack of diverse representation at leadership level, lack of workplace opportunities and progression for marginalised employees, employee burnout and high staff turnover, and among many more.

Without taking an intersectional approach to inclusion, initiatives can have the opposite effect, isolating people further – e.g. If a work initiative is aimed at improving the opportunities for LGBTQ+ staff but doesn’t take into consideration the barriers facing LGBTQ+ staff who are also people of colour, or are also disabled, or both, then this can leave those employees feeling even more on the fringes and unable to express all parts of their identity and needs freely and safely. This emotional burden of not feeling seen, heard or safe, can create a toxic environment resulting exhaustion.

A helpful example to showcase how intersectionality can impact us in the workplace is to look at the hourly wage of different groups of people. In the UK in 2017, it was found that compared with White men graduates, Black men took home 17% less wages per hour, and White women took home 7% less per hour for the same work. However, Black women then took home 9% less than the White women – therefore, their take home pay was less because they were women, but then was even further compounded by the fact that they were Black.

How we can embed intersectional practices in our workplaces

If we want people to be able to bring their whole and authentic selves to work, it’s important to ensure that individuals are safe in all facets of their being. It’s about taking a holistic and agile person-centred approach to inclusion in the workplace so that all individuals and identities have space to be held; not a one size fits all strategy.

There are a variety of ways to support an intersectional approach to inclusion in the workplace, a few may be:

Training and employee engagement

Provide employee and leadership training in intersectionality and its importance to raise awareness and understanding. You could also consider introducing allies or diversity champions programmes to engage with the wider team. Provide training regularly will embed intersectionality into company culture and to allow organic growth of understanding of intersectional practices in the workplace.

Diversity data

Collecting useful and accurate diversity data relies on the organisation creating a space where employees feeling safe enough to share their data. This can be helped by leadership demonstrating their commitment to an inclusion strategy. Our diversity monitoring form guidance is a member’s factsheet that has been created to support organisations in designing questions which support gathering accurate data, with inclusion at the forefront.

Once you collect diversity data, use an effective data dashboard where you can analyse data from multiple angles and really understand your employees and the barriers which they are faced with. Then using this data to make informed decisions about inclusion initiatives or policies in your organisation. Ask employees for feedback on these initiatives and policies and consistently review this data to ensure you are meeting your goals.

Representative leadership

Having a diverse group of leaders who represent people from different backgrounds will allow your employees to feel seen in the organisation and to see a potential pathway for them to progress. It will demonstrate your commitment to diversity and inclusion and potentially allow conversation about different identities to take place.

Hiring practices

Take a look at your hiring practices – do your hiring practices take into consideration the various barriers individuals might be facing and account for this in the selection process? Incorporating intersectionality into your hiring will allow you to attract the best people for your organisation with a variety of experiences and knowledge.

Listening and creating safe spaces

Look to creating safe spaces for individuals to voice their experiences and challenges. If you have staff resource groups, networks, or affinity groups – are they intersectional? Are different voices represented? If not, perhaps look to encouraging collaboration among groups, or creating cross group opportunities. Centre marginalised voices in these spaces, as those who have faced barriers are the most likely to have solutions to those barriers.

Additionally, ensure there is a zero-tolerance policy of bias, discrimination or bullying of any kind.

How Inclusive Employers help you learn more about intersectionality in the workplace

• Use our Intersectionality factsheet
• Our Inclusion Survey Tool can help quantify organisational progress towards inclusion
• Attend our webinar Intersectionality in the Workplace
• Read our blog A Quick Guide to Inclusive Recruitment which discusses inclusive recruitment, the numerous business benefits it provides, and how to ensure you have it when recruiting
• Contact your account manager who can provide support, consultancy, and training options 
• Find out about how we can run an allyship programme in your organisation

The post What is intersectionality and why is it important in the workplace? appeared first on Inclusive Employers.

We have a (maybe not so) surprising lack of data on non-binary people in the UK, but in the US, mental health non-profit, The Trevor Project estimated last year that over a quarter of LGBTQ+ youth identify as non-binary, with an extra 20% questioning whether they might be non-binary. That leaves only 54% of LGBTQ+ youth categorically identifying within the binary.

Keep reading to learn more about what it means to identify as non-binary, and how to support the non-binary community.

What does it mean to identify as non-binary?

Non-binary is an identity embraced by some people who do not identify exclusively as a man or a woman.

Non-binary people may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between or as falling completely outside of these categories.

So being non-binary simply means sitting outside of the socially constructed norms of being male or female.

Binary itself is a term we’ve been using for years in different contexts but in all cases suggests an absolute of “must be one thing or the other.” A lot of our workforces might have grown up with the concept of binary code – it’s been taught in schools in the UK for over 40 years and it’s written entirely in 0s and 1s.

This might be a great way to start engaging with people on the topic of binary and non-binary. Binary is a set of two choices that in some social constructs everyone must fit into (including the UK legal system).

In coding, we’re talking about a 0 or a 1. But we know outside of coding context these numbers aren’t as simple as that.

We know 0.5 exists between these two numbers. We know 0.25 and 0.75 exist between them too. 0.0225, 0.7755…. I could go on… literally forever.

Why? Because from a purely mathematical perspective, there’s an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1 – never mind the numbers beyond 0 and 1.

We seem to have got to grips with this concept as a society, heck, we start teaching kids about decimals in school between the ages of 8 and 9 – so understanding that every single person on the planet might identify slightly differently from someone else should be a piece of cake…

Understanding the challenges of coming out as non-binary

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. We do live in a world where everything has been gendered in the binary for so long, that it’s become systemic.

Even though we might have started to see a shift in the last couple of decades jobs are still heavily gendered. Clothes are still gendered. Language is still gendered. Even colours!

Growing up in a world where you’re constantly forced to choose “Am I this, or that?” when you feel you belong to both or neither, adds a lot of stress that those who do identify in the binary don’t often have to deal with.

On top of that, there’s also the fact that they might not be sure how you’ll react as colleagues. They may be used to seeing LGBTQ+-phobic language regularly in their social media feeds (transphobic tweets are shared every 8 minutes in the UK and the USA).

They may have had bad coming-out experiences in the past and don’t want to go through it again. They might feel apprehensive because of legal or societal issues we’re experiencing at the moment.

There’s the ever-awful conversation of bathrooms and who should be using which. Did you know that only 2% of employers have gender neutral toilets?

As well as great stress and anxiety, the energy and effort that goes into someone hiding who they really are might also lead to a loss of enthusiasm, job satisfaction and an increase in the likelihood of them leaving.

In fact, 50% of agender, non-binary and genderfluid workers have left a job due to an unwelcoming environment.

How to support your employees coming out as non-binary at work

Non-binary employees should have appropriate support in the workplace, no matter the stage of their journey.

Take a look below at how you can do this.

Use inclusive language

When it comes to inclusive language in the non-binary space, the most important point is moving away from those gendered phrases. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen” can become “good morning everyone.”

Policies and processes that use he/she can be changed to they so easily. Making sure we don’t misgender people, or if we do, correcting ourselves there and then.

Raise awareness

Awareness raising initiatives are great when they’re done right. However, we need to make sure that we’re not just continuously preaching to the choir.

Think about ways you can engage in awareness raising that’s going to reach those that might not usually get involved in inclusion and diversity initiatives.

Undergo inclusion training

There’s plenty of inclusion training on this topic. At Inclusive Employers, we offer sessions on Gender Identity, Trans Inclusion, and LGBTQ+ History but we can tailor this training to specific teams and groups as well – HR, Recruitment, Line Managers – ensuring that this training is not only about awareness raising and educating, but it’s also relevant.

Add pronouns to your email signatures

Adding pronouns to your email signatures, your Zoom logins, is a powerful way to show allyship. If you happen to be someone that was assigned male at birth, still identifies as a man and has never had any question about how they identify, you might think “well it’s obvious, everyone knows I’m a he/him.”

Let’s use that power to show that actually, this is a safe place for everyone to share their pronouns no matter who they are.

Offer support

Make sure those that identify as non-binary not only know there’s support for them within the organisation but know how to access it as well. This doesn’t just have to be formal support, this could just be your everyday casual chats, or 1:1s too.

How Inclusive Employers can help with supporting non-binary employees

As mentioned above, Inclusive Employers can offer training on a wide range of topics, in webinars or entirely bespoke workshops and training programmes for specific teams.

We also have some great resources on our website, including blogs on Trans Day of Remembrance, Why we Use Pronouns and A Quick Guide to Allyship.

Our podcast on non-binary experiences in the workplace with guest Ali Hannon is also on our website or free to download on your preferred podcast provider.

If you’re a member, get in touch with your account manager. If you’re not yet a member and want to learn more about non-binary inclusion, contact us today to see how we can help.

The post How to support your employees coming out as non-binary appeared first on Inclusive Employers.