Workplace Discrimination Essay

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Whether we acknowledge it or not, I think that we all, to some extent, subconsciously judge others by what they look like, where they come from, or how they act. I believe that any kind of discrimination is morally wrong, and I am not trying to justify it by any means. However, I think there is a part of each of us that clouds our judgment and makes things like race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation impact our overall perception of how we see others. In the podcast that we were given to listen to, CEO Alex Blumberg of a new startup company called Gimlet, spoke with his only three non-white employees out of twenty-seven totally about diversity in the workplace and their different working experiences. The podcasts went on to address openness …show more content…

Tokenism, on the other hand, is hiring one person of color and stopping there because the organization thinks that that is enough diversity for the workplace. The example that Blumberg’s employee Britney, an African-American woman, spoke about was from when she worked at her previous employer. They had asked her if she would like to have her picture on the company website which they were in the process of redoing. She said, “I knew why, do you know what I’m saying like I knew why it’s because there weren’t enough people of color, no like black people on the executive team to make the website look diverse enough for somebody might wanna work there, and yeah so they just stuck me, there was no reason for me to be on that website, there was no reason for me to be on that website, but I was there.” I think that this lesson of targeting versus tokenism is one of the biggest takeaways I can take from this podcast into my career in the future. First of all, I think that if both can be avoided all together, that is the ideal situation. People should be open to working with everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion, but if diversification needs to happen, then a company should look for well qualified candidates who will actually make a contribution to the company and not just be a picture on the website as a symbol of “diversity” for the

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