Decency, Curiosity, and DEIB with Dr. Enya Doyle

In this episode, host Tessa Misiaszek talks with Dr. Enya Doyle, an inclusion and anti-harassment consultant based in London, about her approach to DEI consulting work. 

Dr. Doyle holds a PhD in gender diversity from her research on barriers facing women in music. She discusses the importance of curiosity and decency in creating inclusive workplaces. They explore timely topics like addressing unconscious bias, overcoming systemic gender barriers, and the crucial role of allies in promoting change. 

Dr. Doyle shares practical advice addressing measuring DEI impact, overcoming complacency, and leaving shame behind to move initiatives forward. 

This thoughtful discussion provides perspectives on building cultures of belonging for all from an expert at the forefront of DEI issues in the UK and globally!

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And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!

Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!

Transcript

Laura Hamill: 0:06

Welcome back for another episode of the happy at work podcast, with Laura, Tessa and Michael. Each week we have thoughtful conversations with leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work.

Michael McCarthy: 0:22

Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show

Tessa Misiaszek: 0:39

Welcome to the happy at work podcast. This is Tessa Misiaszek. And I am so excited to be joined today by Dr. Enya Doyle, who is a consultant, I believe on the other side of the pond, you're located in the UK whereabouts in London, and London, wonderful to have you join us today. So just as a way to kind of kick us off, I'd love to hear more about your work your career and kind of, you know, what has been your journey up until now?

Dr. Enya Doyle: 1:11

Sure. So I am an inclusion and anti harassment consultant. In the UK, I did a PhD, which I finished during the pandemic that was on barriers to inclusion on gender diversity and music. So that's a really obvious place that's kind of systems started functioning bear in that way. I consulted a little bit. And then I also had an in house director of inclusion role for a couple of years. So I've been consulting full time with businesses all over the world for about a year, which has been great.

Tessa Misiaszek: 1:48

Excellent. Well, I mean, I want to dive in a little bit more to that story, because I've done a lot of work over the course of my career and the DEI space as well. So we'd love just to hear from you in particular, what's your approach to thinking about dei in the workplace? And I'm actually really curious to kind of get your take on what's happening to today in North America, dei is becoming this very politically divisive topic. Personally, I think completely unnecessarily, but I would love to kind of hear more about how do you work with organizations around dei topics? And then what are kind of what's your take on what's happening today?

Dr. Enya Doyle: 2:31

Sure. I think one of the reasons that we've got into a position of divisiveness is because it feels really hard. It feels really complex, it feels almost alienating for a lot of people. And I think there's an element of we're just not on the same page with a lot of things. That's how we got here. We were all doing different things, that kind of diversity of thought, diversity of opinion. So I definitely think that's probably the core of the problems. And I think the answer to that is at the core of what I do, which is that if we boil it down, there are kind of two main things. If we were more curious, we would be in a lot less bother. If we were able to be curious if we were unable to be curious. And we actually pursued curiosity about other people about ourselves, then that would be great. And then the other fundamental is just being decent. Like, it's not that you have to know absolutely everything about absolutely everyone and absolutely every culture. But being a decent person can go such a long way. Like you do not have to be absolutely amazing at all of this, but we can do a whole lot better of being decent. And that does rule in most of the population by the lads in North America, whether that's in England, we're all ruled in, if we can just kind of stick to decency and curiosity. Now, that's obviously fast, very simplistic way of putting it. But ultimately, I think if you can hold your hand to that one, if you can say, Okay, let's do decency and curiosity. And then we can add on things like accountability, we can add on things like transparency and communication, which I think are all key reasons why we don't get here the lack of transparency of okay, if that person gets an opportunity, does that mean that I don't get one or does that mean that that's happening? If I'm going to be part of a workplace investigation, does that mean that you're not going to tell me x or I'm gonna get sacked or it's all going to be really horrible lack of transparency then comes into it, but if we can be disciplined, curious, then we can probably avoid those things in the first place.

Tessa Misiaszek: 4:48

Excellent. And you know, in my experience, doing DEI work, I really started my career in healthcare and did a lot of work around cultural competency, which training healthcare providers to being culturally competent. And really, it started with having a sense of curiosity rather than learning a profile of a certain race or ethnicity and what their health beliefs might be based on the race or ethnicity. It's really about lead with curiosity and learn about the health belief model from the person themselves, because they will have had so much influence different influences in their life that would would shape the way they think about healthcare just in a very specific example. But of course, you're up against other things like subconscious bias and systemic bias. And, you know, I loved that you talked about your PhD being around gender in particular, and diversity. So we'd love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts as it relates to systemic and subconscious bias, and how does that present? And what is some of the work that you do with organizations to help try to mitigate the risks associated with that?

Dr. Enya Doyle: 5:56

I think one of the one of the fundamentals and training that I deliver is that I'm no better than, than any of you I often say at the start, okay, who's had who's not this training before? Who's had unconscious bias training before? who's done it? And by night, lots of people have been laying it out before. I'm like, Okay, who feels like they have biases? And I'm like, Well, if you've had this trend, and your answer should be made, like all of your hunch should be going up. And you'll be saying me, and yet Lo, we still have loads of people been like, no, no, not me. I'm not biased. I'm perfect. I'm so perfect. I've read all the books, and I no longer have biases, I'm not biased. And I think that's probably where a lot of the work that I do comes into this of like, the curiosity of can I be better? They're reflecting on how they made that decision in a silo? Have I made that decision on my own? Have I consulted the people that it's going to impact upon in terms of that decision, whether that's to do with minoritized religions or races or whether that's just because I'm not going to be affected by the outcome of this workplace decision. And maybe I should talk to the people that it's going to impact. But starting from the kind of interpersonal, I think we've we've kind of come to a place where we're now like interpersonal, and structural are two different things. And once it's definitely true, that they are different systems were created by people. Systems are created by people who have biases, and systems are perpetuated by people who have biases. So yes, we can definitely look at systems and structures. But we need to start with the fact that systems don't just magic out of the sky one day, and right themselves. So I definitely, definitely spend a lot of time with my clients talking about AI systems weren't created by people who were perfect, and you are not perfect, either. So you are perpetuating systems that are not perfect. But definitely, definitely think it's a really important and continuously important part of the conversation. I think people are asking to stop talking about biases, like we've almost talked about that too much. Like, we haven't talked about it enough, we're gonna still continue to talk about it.

Tessa Misiaszek: 8:10

And can you talk a little bit about your research around gender in particular, this is a topic that I spent quite a bit of time looking at what are some of the barriers for the advancement of women in the workplace.

Dr. Enya Doyle: 8:24

So I think when it comes to gender and bias, one of the most telling things about biases is home many women have absolutely no idea what is going on in their own bodies. Whether it's to do with menstruation or whether it's to do with perimenopause and life after menopause. How much of that we don't know how much of it we're not enabled to know whether it was at school or whether it's no and deliver training on menopause or deliver training on menstruation when I've done it recently with my friends just been like this is the sort of stuff that I'm that I'm delivering on do you know these things? And they're like one like, I thought that was normal. And you are well educated rate, like really sensitive women who knew a lot about your body men like yeah, okay, this is where biases come in. Because we assume that we know everything about being a woman because we happen to be a woman. Now. That's not true. That's not how this works. But we're led to believe that we know everything and therefore we create all of these kinds of apologies for ourselves then assign laws just the way it is. It's supposed to be painful. Nope, it's not. Oh, it's supposed to be like that. No, I don't think it is. Oh, I'm not supposed to talk about it. Also not true. My PhD, fell into kind of four chapters, one of them the first part was about the church and the systems of the church. It was about music and choral music and the Anglican Church. And then the chapters afterwards. One of them was about tradition and how I tradition operators, this kind of stuff All in factor and how it's used as a synonym for history, and how it's like, okay, well, we've always done things this way. So that's why we're going to continue to do things this way. So that's definitely a very key part of like, how we understand where women should be, and how we've understood their erasure from places that they have been in previously, but to say, Oh, they're the first were like, they're not the first or first stages to go long before you were born. First. I think that's definitely really interesting. When we have all of these conversations around women who are breaking new ground to blight, I think that grind was probably broken decades ago. So maybe we should Google that. Then you've got things like I would take up space and and the ideals around, I would take up space where we should be, whether you should bring your own chair, create new tables, all of that kind of conversation. And then even just the way that we the way that we walk, the way that we talk, the way that we apologize, the kind of subjective language that we use, and not committing, and then not being able to be angry and not being able to be emotional, and emotional, therefore meaning week, as women one session our second week about emotions, and everyone has them. So tell me what you actually want to say because it's probably sexist, which is always absolutely iconic. And then the the kind of third part, the final chapter of my thesis was why women and habit leadership, I would talk about leadership, and who can be a leader and what type of leader you have to be in order to thrive, how long women stay in leadership in comparison to men, and that kind of barrier to so I think they're all kind of massive, massive issues. And I think we don't talk about them enough in terms of how they also intersect with other identities and how we can definitely learn a lot from kind of Gender Wars or gender inequality, particularly as it means sex inequality, across other factors across other identities, there's a lot to be learned. And also, Kimberly Crenshaw said they intersected she said that in 1989, and she was true.

Tessa Misiaszek: 12:15

Absolutely. And in the work that we've done this past year, looking at that one particular topic and how perimenopause, menopause impacts women at work, it's been really fascinating to see the reactions that we get from men and women around this particular topic. Of course, you can go through menopause, you will go through menopause, if you're born with a uterus, so not to say that it's specifically tied to a gender identity, but But certainly, men who have experienced their wives going through it have been incredibly empathic and really have seen this as a topic that they want to help promote and generate the awareness of it. And because they have seen women in their lives kind of go through it. And it's this sense of ally ship right of of these men saying no, like, I know, my voice is needed at the table to help raise the level of awareness. So what is the role of allies and the work that you do? Especially if you're dealing with a lot of issues within a workplace, if you're trying to create an inclusive culture, what roles would allies play in that?

Dr. Enya Doyle: 13:28

I think ally ship when it comes to the workplace is, again, kind of going back to the start, it's often meant to feel really complex. It's a very, like loaded word. It's like almost one of the inclusion words. And I'm like, Okay, we'll come back to your hesitance in a minute. But ultimately, allyship is, is very simple to kind of connect it to what you were just saying around men and their wives or men, or siblings or whoever. I worked with a school recently, and there was a 1516 year old boy who was like, are we going to talk about endometriosis? And I was like, love that. Yeah, we are going to talk about endometriosis. And I was like, why are you asking about endometriosis? And he said my girlfriend has endometriosis was like this fascinating that, that you only know about that because your girlfriend has an and I love that you want us to talk about it and love that you're talking about that. But that in and of itself is an act of observation. Because in that room, there's no guarantee that the other 15-16 year old boys have ever heard of it, or know that it's going to be relevant to them in the future in whatever way. And that was a really obvious and key act of allyship. It doesn't have to be really complex. One of the fundamentals of my consultancy work is that there's always more than one way to act. There's always more than one way to do things. And lots of people will be like Oh allyship is Protesting ally ship is being really loud in a meeting room allyship is saying That's racist that homophobic that's whatever I'm like that is that is allyship but if that doesn't feel comfortable to you I'm gonna ship is also asking your friends who had their hair touched by a random or are they okay? Like are you good? Do you do need something from me educating yourself as a key active allyship, he can go in and listening to podcasts like this one, listening to watching TED talks, reading books, or acts of allyship. If that's your thing, learning about the information that you was admitted from your life. That's a really key act, because you can probably bring that in somewhere, you can tell somebody that you've heard of endometriosis, tick tock accounts, great social media, you can educate yourself lots of fake news out there, as we know. So definitely check if our spawn is a good starting point. There are lots of experts on there who can follow, learn things. So educators and amazing one, there's obviously loads of things that you can do that allies can do. But you don't have to then call yourself an ally, you don't have to say that you're an ally. In order to be one, I think that's a really key thing. It doesn't have to be this public standoff. It doesn't have to be a declaration in your Instagram bio. It doesn't have to be in your email signature at work. Your actions will tell you the tale I often use the phrase with, again, with younger people, but I've also used it recently with adults is that if you're an ally, the only thing that you can do is nothing. That's the only no option. That's the only absolutely don't do nothing. You can act beforehand to prevent something you can act while something is happening. And you can act afterwards, the only no option is nothing.

Tessa Misiaszek: 16:56

So with organizations that might be might espouse through their values through their mission through their kind of vision or goals, that they are an inclusive workplace that they really do value these these dei principles and equity, inclusion and so forth. But don't operationalize those values adequately, that don't that are pretty stagnant in their current efforts that haven't actually really been able to measure any level of impact or success that they have. Are there certain recommendations that you would have for organizations around how to perhaps, you know, get a movement going, or even if it's someone who's not in a quote unquote, di role, but sees this as a really important imperative, even to business growth, how can they get something going with their organization? And how would you suggest that they measure the impact?

Dr. Enya Doyle: 17:55

The first thing that I often say to people is that today's the day that you leave shame at the door? I think shame stops a lot of organizations from either moving forward on things like commitments that they made and 2020 for example, it's certainly not I see a lot of like, we made a nun, a commitment to be anti racist back in 2020. And we haven't really done anything since 2021. Okay, thank you for telling me can you know, leave your shame at the door? I often quote I was born in 1994, which is also the year that the pivotal film The Lion King came out. And in that film, Rafiki says, Oh, yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it. And once that is a children's film, absolutely, it is my favorite film. And I think that phrase, you can either run from it or learn from it. That's where we have to start. If you're stuck, if you're not sure where to begin, then take what you've currently got benchmarking, today's say to benchmark where you currently are, get people get your policies, get whatever data you currently have about the people in your company, and start there. Separate oil recruitment from retention of your colleagues separate those immediately. They are connected, they are obviously connected, but they are two very different things. And often, if you don't separate them out, you'll end up doing both badly. So definitely separate them out. And I think the they're kind of existential advice is to remember that it's a why you're not creating systems that sit in a silo, you're not collecting data so that you've collected then you need to be doing stuff, implementing systems implementing policies that affect people that affect the people who were in front of you that affect their wellbeing, their happiness, their ability to turn up and do the work that you've hired them to do. Well, so remembering that this is about people, the systems and the data are really important, but they have to impact on people. Um, I think the other thing that tends to kind of go unsaid and lots of conversations around inclusion, because it tends to be so existential a lot of the time is that loads of this is really practical. Number one, most companies, when they start, I don't have a budget. And that sounds really simple. But if you do not have a ring fenced budget for inclusion, you're going absolutely nowhere, you will, you will be able to run yourself into burnout very quickly. But you will not be able to get anywhere with it. So if you haven't got a budget, get a budget. If you haven't gone external kind of auditors, you would never dream of running your finance team without people auditing your practices. You shouldn't be doing this in a silo on your own, get someone to audit, and then definitely remain vigilant to complacency. I think a lot of the systems that we've created in companies, the complacency around us at work, and have we regretted it. Yeah, we've probably regretted it. Was it fine? Yeah, lots of its Amber, some of its red and hasn't moved in four years. And the green stuff, we think internally is green. We've never asked anyone from outside and the new people will, frankly, they're too new to be telling us whether or not it's good. So I think definitely, I would say there are lots of practical things you can do, but existentially definitely remember your why and leave your shame at the door. I think that's such excellent advice. And it's interesting, just, you know, kind of thinking about it from the budget perspective, because, again, there's this practical side of business, right. And oftentimes, you can tell what a business cares about or an organization cares about, because they put their money into it, they invest in it. And it's interesting, because we've been working on a study where we've been looking at what's been the level of investment that companies have made, and dei practices and so forth. And it's really quite telling, even by industry to see the linkages between the level of investment into di positions, or to really even think about how am I integrating these principles into the operations of our, of our organization, or of our company or of our business strategy. And seeing that in certain industries, where there's a lot of innovation, r&d, and a lot of these things happening, you see this greater level of investment, because that diversity of perspective is so important, versus other industries that might be more stagnant. Do you find that to be the case, where those companies that do have perhaps more innovative business strategies, or perhaps even an r&d type function, do you see them making more of an investment in dia or at least starting to correlate the importance of building a diverse workforce and so forth, creating an inclusive environment, having that psychological safety, to be more innovative as a culture? I'd say largely that that is true. I think one of the, one of the places that I really struggle with it is that I'm a musician, kind of, to my core, and I have a lot of friends that are in the the arts, and there's obviously, there's a lot of the kind of, we present, and we perform, and we we provide this very clear, like desire for the world to be a better place through the things that we create. But when it comes to the budgets that they have, they're very, very, very little money to go around. And they often then use, they're like, We are so existentially brilliant at this one thing as a, as an excuse almost to get rid of. And that doesn't tie in with the whole premise. And so there, there's some times that kind of like, you see the tech giants and you see finance, and you see the corporate world and like we've spent so much money on inclusion, and we spend so much money on people and we spend so much money on wellbeing. Fun, you know, the people in our companies are burnt out, and they hate their jobs, and they want to quit and they're jumping ship at faster rates. And then you've got the Arts where there's no money to do anything, and increasingly less and less money to do everything. But there's that core decency and that core and a curiosity and that core desire to make the world a better place. And I often spend a lot of my time in the art saying, well, it doesn't have to be just the one budget. You can you can make sure that every team is responsible for it. You don't have to do it in the corporate way. You don't have to innovate in that way. Every team can have responsibility for a portion and part of their budget too. And there are 1000 ways if ally ship is there more than one way to act, then your budget can be excellent, excellent.

Tessa Misiaszek: 24:51

No, I think that's really important. And my son is in the arts as well. He's a he's actually a student at NYU at Tisch. So you it's it's such an it's such an important aspect that I agree with you gets it's kind of the first thing that gets cut. When it comes to kind of the practicality of of life and business growth and education and we kind of see it across the board yet. It really is what does spur this sense of creativity, innovation? And is really I think the way we're gonna map towards the future, especially in this artificial intelligence. Yeah, for sure. Heading into so. But any of this was an amazing conversation. I can't believe how quickly the time went. But really appreciate your time, your insights. And you know, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Dr. Enya Doyle: 25:49

They can find me on LinkedIn, Dr. Enya Doyle and I'll be happy to.

Tessa Misiaszek: 25:54

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time today.

Michael McCarthy: 26:00

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe to the happier work podcast and leave us a review with your thoughts. Are

Tessa Misiaszek: 26:11

you interested in speaking on a future episode or want to collaborate with us? Let us know you can send us an email at admin at happy at work podcast.com

Laura Hamill: 26:22

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