To understand diversity, listen to the younger generations

To understand and implement diversity properly, organisations need to listen to the younger generations, according to Marcella Lazarus, managing director and founder at Growing Organisations.

She said people under the age of 30 have a lot more compassion and respect for each other.

“Listening to younger people, and taking up their ideas and following through. If you've got a young staff, you need to be doing things which will engage and keep though, because otherwise they'll go to another employer that actually does respect and do a lot more for diversity,” she warns.

Lazarus is also the Women on Boards cultural diversity committee director, which started out 15 years ago with 100 women and now boasts over 20,000 women.

While she does say that diversity is improving in leadership teams and on boards, a number of these women do not acknowledge intersectional discrimination.

 “I was surprised there was still some women members who said ‘there's no discrimination, I got my job on merit’. They were saying there was no discrimination against people from different cultural and diverse backgrounds. There's a lot of white women out there still who don't see it,” she said.

Lazarus said she has seen the best and worst of acceptance of diversity within the workplace.

She worked in multiculturalism affairs in the late 1980’s where feminism and new ideas on acceptance and diversity were flourishing. However, John Howard’s Liberal Government in the 1990’s cut the funding for multicultural affairs and suddenly these free-flowing views were seen as taboo in society.

 It got so bad that Lazarus had to take her multicultural affairs experience off her CV because no one would hire her due to her time working in that department.

“Everybody I knew worked in the sector had to take it off our CVs and say we just did something else. Because it was a no-no, and it just went into the closet for about two decades,” she said.