During my first year as a law firm associate (1972), we had two female summer associates for the first time. By summer’s end it was clear that the women had out- performed the other two men law students. And, the word was out: the firm would make only two offers of permanent employment. I naturally assumed the two women, being more qualified, would get those offers.
When I pointed this out to one of our corporate partners, he responded, matter-of-factly, “We can’t give them both offers.”
Checking my rising anger, I countered. “I don’t understand. We had only a few women in my law school class, but the number is going up fast and will be half of incoming classes in no time. What if our competing law firms hire the best law students regardless of whether they are women? Wouldn’t our quality suffer and we’ll fall behind?”
I had him.
As he paused, I drove home another point. “And, what about your three daughters? If they go to law school, do you want them to lose out on getting law firm jobs just because they are women?”
Almost thirty years later, I returned to the firm – interrupting my business career – to manage the business department. That corporate partner, now in his late 60’s and contemplating retirement, confided that he was transitioning some of his biggest clients to one of the firm’s best younger partners, a woman whom he had mentored.
As my story illustrates, discrimination may be countered by economic and personal arguments. Educating people to discrimination’s negative societal effects is important too. In many cases, it’s against the law. Most important, as Lyndon Johnson argued when engineering passage of the Voting Rights Act, it is morally wrong.
Leaders must make the case for diversity and inclusion, use their influence to make it a priority and persuade others to back a plan of action to achieve it. Incentives to spur action, enlisting champions and spreading the initiative to all organizational levels help too.
Inspired leaders lead by personal example. A retired executive friend ran a $1 billion nonprofit health system. In discussions with minority vendors in the surrounding community, he discovered they couldn’t meet the system’s purchasing conditions because the financing they needed to invest in new resources to meet the system’s demand was not available to them. Unwilling to let that be a roadblock, he persuaded the system’s principal bank to lend money to the minority vendors with the system’s backing. The vendors invested the funds as planned, they got the contracts and they performed well.