Diversity

What does the word “Diversity” mean to you?

Does it mean that there is a balance of men and women, white and non-white employees in the workplace or school? Well it means a lot more than integration. In one of my classes, we discussed the meaning of Diversity and I want to write about two of those meanings, genetic and culture diversities.

If you look at Europe, Asian and the rest of the world, you will see one thing that set the United States apart from the rest of the world until recently. Take for instance my fraternal grandparents, my grandfather married a woman from the neighboring town, just like most of everyone else in the world. People usually married someone within 25 miles of their hometown; as a result, the gene pool was very limited. However, for my father that was not true, he married a woman, my mother, that was thousands of miles from his parent’s hometown. Not only that, but my mother had a diverse ethnic heritage, she was part Swiss, part German and part English. That mixing of the gene pool is what makes us such a great country, you can look at as having fresh blood. When you stay within a local region, some traits are inbred and in some regions of the world, you can identify people who are from that area just by their looks. I am not saying anything negative the rest of the world, this came about because people never traveled, if you lived in a village and you didn’t travel very far from your village. If you wanted to move somewhere else, land or a job were very hard to find in your native country, it was America that had both land and jobs as a result we truly were and are the melting pot.

When I went to college in the late 60s and early 70s, the overwhelming majority of students were white. Now it is a diverse population and I have learned so much from other cultures that they brought to school. Every year the Student Organization has a holiday party; there they let people explain their religious holidays and I found it so fascinating to learn about Hanukah, Three Kings Day, Kwanza and other traditions from around the world. We have so much to learn from others.

Diversity at work is much more than numbers. Diversity is good for business. I don’t know how many of you remember IBM back in the 60s and early 70s, but you could always spot an IBMer by their blue suite and thin blue tie. They looked like they were stamped out of a cookie cutter. Well along came this man, he had just invented a revolutionary way to compute numbers for them, and told them that he was a transsexual and he was going to transition. They couldn’t show her the door fast enough. Lynn Conway went on to become one of the great pioneers in computers and was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The process that she invented in 1965 went on to become one of the keystone inventions of the modern microprocessor. IBM also made another blunder, when the PC first came out, IBM wanted nothing to do with it. The world belonged to the mainframe computers; those behemoths that took up a whole room and IBM believe nothing would ever replace them. When two hippies back in the 70s built this little computer in their garage, IBM flipped off the idea thinking that it will never mount to anything more than being a toy. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the founders of Apple went on to become billionaires and IBM shrank to become a fraction of its glory days.

Diversity means so much more than equality in the workplace. It means a rich mix of genes, culture and a different way at looking at things.