This article is actually in favour of anti-discrimination policies. This is about frustrations around poor implementations.
Anti-discrimination policies are like degrees from fake universities: they look good on paper but you wouldn’t want people’s lives to depend on just that.
I have three observations to share:
- People don’t believe in discrimination they don’t experience
- Stated differently, the obstacles that they can’t experience aren’t seen as discriminatory
- Thus the removal of these barriers is deemed unfair, an imposition, and divisive
These beliefs define the lens through which anti-discrimination policies are conceived and implemented. Hence anti-discrimination policies are in virtually every organization and yet little has changed for women or other disproportionately underrepresented groups.
One factor I think is that these policies are about accountability in theory, but in practice are tools to absolve organizations of responsibility. They get introduced in discussions about discrimination as a conversational book end, rather than in their absence creating the space for uncomfortable self-reflection. They often require victims to act as agents of organizational change, which is worse than having no such requirements.
That’s not to say that i think all such policies are worthless. When paired with a lot of unpopular work distributed across the organization, things change. But what I’ve observed is that organisations almost never want to put in that work. They leave it at producing a document and some token gestures. There’s little desire to break some eggs and to be accountable over outcomes.
So then these policies end up being great sounding statements with no real actions to back them. There’s another word to describe documents like that: bullshit.