Do you want to achieve diversity, inclusion, and equity in 2023? Embrace impossible goals
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What if Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela or Florence Nightingale had set for SMART goals?
Happy New Year 2023! I wish this year brings you professional and personal success.
This post is inspired by a great conversation I had with my lovely mother-in-law this morning. She’s a fantastic woman that — as myself — is ambitious. Unlike myself, she didn’t have the support of her parents to attend university or to do any other kind of studies after secondary school. But her brother did have that opportunity. The reason? He’s a man, she’s a woman.
The same happened to my grandmother, an extremely brilliant woman. Her only brother was sent to pursue further studies after he finished school. Neither my grandmother nor any of her 3 sisters were given that opportunity.
Until this point, hopefully, none of this surprises you no matter where you live in the world.
So what made that conversation relevant? My mother-in-law told me that believes that things will continue to improve steadily for women in the next years and that they cannot be speeded up.
When I reiterated that I don’t want things to improve “steadily” for women and people of underrepresented groups but that I want them to improve “dramatically”, she reminded me of all the progress achieved for women’s rights since she was young. As proof, she compared what happened to her professional ambitions with her great expectations for the professional future of her 10-year-old granddaughter — who happens to be my goddaughter.
She also conveyed to me that she believed that I was being unreasonable. After all, it has taken centuries to get where we are now regarding women rights.
I used two arguments to support that (a) we need to upend the status quo now, (b) that it’s possible to deliver that change in an extremely short time.
Why we need to upend the status quo now
My mother-in-law told that whilst none of the two of us would see equality in our lifetime, my goddaughter would because
- She’s intelligent.