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I'm Admiral Maura Dollymore I'm the medical officer, the doctor for the Coast Guard and
my question is to the panel is this because I think you are very unique and very accomplished.
As we believe in diversity one of the beliefs we have going forward with diversity in all
of our endeavors, is that diversity brings something unique and added value to all our
organizations, and I thought that might be an interesting question posed to you. How
do you see that? What are unique attributes that diversity, whether it be gender diversity,
ethnic diversity, religious diversity, however we want to look at it. What are those unique
attributes from your experience that you all bring to your organizations? I just wrote
a paper about this, because one of the challenges to try to change the narrative, the dominate
narrative of women can't do this, what are women going to do for the military, how are
we going to improve or increase, what are we going to add? A brilliant young Swedish
Army Officer said, "you need to stop talking about diversity and start talking about effectiveness.
This isn't about equal opportunity this about enhancing the effectiveness your military.
And he said there are a number of studies, so I reached back to these studies and I took
a look at of them. Diversity studies, in fact, there's a whole website called Diversity Inc,
and it talks about a diverse group are better decision making bodies, and they are better
decision making bodies because they bring a range of perspective. And it's interesting
because, there's diversity studies and there's collective intelligence studies. Collective
intelligence studies are being done right now at MIT. Collective intelligence studies
were initially done in order to figure out how people collaborate better on the web,
but what they found when they ran these groups through these set of diverse tasks was that
groups, it was not unexpected, they didn't know that they would see this. Groups that
included more women were collectively more intelligent then groups with few or no women
present. They don't know why, they have done further studies trying to figure out what
it is that women bring to groups that causes the groups to be smarter. Collectively smarter.
And they think it has to do with a two components. One has to do with communications. When there
are more women in a group communication patterns are more generally spread amongst the group,
so there are more people, there's not one or two people dominating the communications
within the group. The second thing is that they think there's a component of what they
call emotional intelligence and that women seem to be better able to understand the emotional
vibes or situations and respond appropriately to those in groups. So more diverse groups
are collectively intelligent and they make better decisions over a wide range of decision
making, policy making aspects. So I think those are, we would be my answer to that question.
I actually thought the Colonel worked in my office, which was a really great answer. Those
are basically all of the points I was going to cover. A lot of the times we talk about
diversity, we talk about diversity of thought. And that's one of the things these days we
are looking at because you can have someone, a room full of people who look the same, but
if they grew up in different parts of, in the U.S. or the world, they went to different
schools. It's that diversity of thought and I want people to also think about diversity
is not necessarily when I see you or it's about race or gender, whether you have a disability
or not. As we have been redefined and re-looking at what diversity means, we are also saying
it's diversity and inclusion. We talk about diversity is what you bring to the table.
Inclusion is how you use it. So a lot of the times we say the word diversity, we're really
talking about diversity and inclusion because I can bring a room full of people in, but
if I'm not including them, if I'm not engaging them, if I'm not taking what they say and
hearing them, I'm going to get the same result. We at OPM, we developed something we call
New IQ. You talk about Old IQ is about individual intelligence. This is now about inclusive
intelligence. This is about team intelligence. That's a concept we are rolling out to all
of the agencies. And it goes to all the points that you said. So thank you. I don't know
is there any one out here from the private sector in the audience? They couldn't get
on the facility. At some point in your lives or in your families you will enter the private
sector and diversity hits the bottom line, so let me give you a different perspective.
I work for a 2.5 billion dollar company in revenue and diversity hits the bottom line.
If you don't have a diverse work force then you're not catering to your customers who
are absolutely diverse in todays world. You are going to lose, so not only is it important
for all of the reasons these wonderful women said, when you go to the private sector, it's
important to what ever company you go to, they're trying to make money for there bottom
line. The people that don't get it, don't get it, and it will eventually show on the
bottom line. So think about that when you go to your next carriers.