Diversity is not always visible, but its impact is. This was the key takeaway from the panel discussing ‘Launching new Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives’ which sought to address the meaningful progress of DE&I across fixed income markets, with a view to diversifying skillsets, attracting new talent and boosting performance.
“A really nice analogy I’ve heard said before about diversity and inclusion, is that diversity is being invited to the party, and inclusion is receiving an invitation to dance,” said Katharine Furber, global head of emerging markets product at Bloomberg.
“Inclusion is for all of us but it is also all of our collective responsibility. I don’t think that diversity and inclusion is about corporate policies and quotas. It’s about the individual and collective responsibility that we take on as leaders, as heads of desks to create change in our teams.”
Starting to build a team by removing unconscious biases during the assessment and hiring process can allow a leaders to bring the most talented people forward and remove the limits of more elitist assumptions, observed Sanaa Clausse–Ben Abdelhadi, senior director and head of business development, at the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA). “[Avoid] having any information about the demographics of the person, and really focus on their skills and experience,” she said. “We can even go beyond that. First of all, it’s important to actually set your criteria before you start assessing. So you’re not biasing yourself. Go beyond the degree, go beyond the university, because you can have very good talent that didn’t go to university, because they couldn’t afford it. If we hire the Ivy League and top universities and business schools, we actually have rich kids of people who could afford that education.”
Furber added, “One of the best things that my boss said to me when I started to lead the team was don’t hire in your own image. He meant, make sure that you’re building a team of varied experiences mindset approach, so that you have a really rich mix of individuals collaborating towards setting the same goals.”
Working with the current state of the industry’s diversity and moving towards a greater level of diversity would require a very active process, added Lana Staufer, head of credit trading EMEA, at DWS, not only in expanding the pool but in avoiding the pitfall of surface level diversity. “I like to think about diversity of thought and diversity of experience rather than diversity of physical appearance of people,” she said. “That can enrich the team and should be the goal for the industry. The problem is that we are at a stage where we have to pull up talent from a group that is not diverse. We have to work from a micro perspective to expand that pool in the next couple of years, to create wider pools of talent where we can then extract really the best talent regardless of peoples’ background or physical appearance.”
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