ARLINGTON, Va. – A commitment to diversity and inclusion has to be inextricably woven into the culture of an organization for that organization to realize its greatest potential, said Tiane M. Gordon, senior vice president of diversity and inclusion at AOL, Thursday during a keynote address at George Mason University’s fourth annual Workplace Diversity Conference.
Students, government officials, researchers and academics assembled in Arlington, Va., for a two-day conference hosted by George Mason University’s School of Management to discuss strategies for strengthening communication and collaboration among diversity researchers, practitioners and educators.
The conference is centered on marrying the theoretical with the practical, said conference organizer Dr. David Kravitz, a professor in the school of management at George Mason.
“Researchers and practitioners need to work together,” said Kravitz. “We have a lot to learn from each other. A number of diversity and inclusion researchers don’t really appreciate the difficulty of doing diversity and inclusion work in the field. Practitioners must also become familiar with research. If researchers talk to practitioners about particular questions that they have, we could do research that is directly applicable.”
The theme of this year’s conference is “Changing Organizational Cultures to Increase Diversity, Inclusion and Performance.”
Some organizations continue to struggle with inclusion because the culture or organizational ethos in which that institution functions is not receptive to what diversity and inclusion is, Gordon said.
“Too often organizations fail to fathom the potential impact of culture,” Gordon said. “Researchers point out that real change cannot happen unless its culture is changed first. Culture drives either the acceptance or rejection of diversity and inclusion.”
