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From my point of view, proper diversity policies in companies must focus on the following dimensions:
First, the balance between personal and professional life, which guarantees that both men and women
maintain a proper balance between professional life, family life and of course, time for themselves.
Secondly, Female Leadership focuses on erasing the mental programming so necessary for the previous model,
as specified by Hofstede, in which women were left with some shortages,
like, for example, lack of leadership, lack of resilience or lack of negotiation skills
or limitations when it comes to negotiate the planning of their own professional careers.
The third dimension is LGBT Diversity, which focuses on the inclusion and normalization
of people with different *** orientations and identities.
We also have a fourth dimension, which is Functional Diversity, which aims to include people with disabilities.
And finally there is the cultural dimension, which is the one trying to give coherence to different cultures.
My diagnosis about how companies deal with the issue of diversity in Spain is not very optimistic.
On one side, we see that many foreign multinational companies
which do things properly in other countries, they do not do things so well here, and on the other side,
we see that each one of the dimensions comes with a set of acquired prejudices and bad habits.
As for Female Leadership, it often merges with the balance of personal and professional life,
in the falsehood that kids belong to mothers and women,
an idea that discriminates women, for one, because for a woman to become a leader
she must assume all aspects or almost all aspects of motherhood.
And also it erases the question of time for oneself, which is essential, as Soledad Nudillo explains, to the development as an individual,
and finally it discriminates men who wish to balance their family life, their personal life and their time for themselves.
On the other side, and as regards to the cultural dimension, we are still stuck with the stereotype of brand-country
and it is difficult for us to ignore these things.
From the point of view of discrimination, or functional diversity,
many companies just focus on simply conforming to legislation and getting grants,
and on earning a good corporate reputation as well.
And as for the LGBT point of view, it is something Spanish companies are not familiar with.
We still live in what Daniel Urrillo called the liberal homophobia,
which is the "don't ask, don't tell" in the US, and which here we could sum up with the sentence:
"I don't care what anybody does in their own beds".
This reduces the issue of diversity in *** orientation and identity to a mere *** matter, which is obviously there,
but there is also the question of affection, love and, of course, family.
Excellence in the management of diversity must come, unquestionably, from General Management,
from the high executive authorities, it must be transversal, which means it must be coherent in all functional areas
and all sides of the company and all the stakeholders and, of course, diversity must be seen, and that is mandatory,
as a positive advantage and not as a cost which needs to be managed. And it is possible, it is.