You forgot to acknowledge my innate diversity..leadership lessons in diversity

By Shahzia Noorally

A five minute read

By any stretch of the imagination, I am a privileged human. I grew up in Canada, a country chock full of opportunities for those with ambition and the sheer will to succeed. I may have grown up in a working class home, with immigrant parents who often times struggled to keep things financially afloat for my brother and I, but they instilled in us the value of education so much so that post-secondary was never not an option. I dutifully went to school, completed a Masters level education and found myself accidentally stumbling upon a career in recruitment that I’ve been blessed to excel through.

I’m now in a leadership position, at a Director level for an organization I love and one that I’ve feel incredibly blessed to be a part of. But it feels often like an accidental happenstance ending up at this level. I know I work incredibly hard. I know what I have to say is important, because it's different. I know that my personal beliefs on disrupting the traditional recruitment processes to bring more humanity into the experience for all involved is well heard. I know my passion speaks for itself. But I look around and I don’t see myself represented very often, if at all in the leaders in my world.

I see the elevation of female leaders as a priority in a meaningful way and have for many years in my corporate experiences. I see that organizations I have worked for in my career have gotten the memo on advancing women, but what I rarely see is a focus on inclusion that represents the many layers that make up true diversity. What I rarely see is the acknowledgment that perhaps we haven’t gotten it quite right, yet. We don’t have to intellectualize the data to see with our own eyes that our organizations are filled with good intentions to advance women, but rarely are they filled with a lens on diversity of thought. Truth be told diversity efforts shouldn’t just stop at advancing white women and the question that begs to be asked is why do so many women of color stop rising in the ranks? Is it because we cannot be what we cannot see? Why do women like myself have to feel so alone because there are no role models, no intentional efforts to acknowledge that perhaps our ways of showing up in the world are incredibly different? No recognition that being a visible minority female comes with it ways in which we navigate the world that might hold us back.

Trust me, I am as Canadian as they get but much of it has been by design. I may have grown up in a household with immigrant Pakistani-Muslim parents and was raised with extreme intentional effort to connect and engage my cultural roots in all parts of my life. I was educated on my roots, I was immersed in my roots in the walls of my home and within my religious community. But, I was also the kid who febreezed my clothes when going to my retail job to remove the Pakistani cooking smells out. I was the kid who hated that her Pakistani father drove a taxi cab, feeling like he exemplified every negative stereotype of my people that I loathed. I remember my moment of truth of being different, vividly recalling the moment of being called a Paki on the playground in elementary school, that moment of “you’re not one of us” hitting me like a ton of bricks. I always thanked my lucky stars that I had a birthday close enough to Christmas that afforded me the opportunity to never have to tell anyone my Muslim family didn’t actually celebrate Christmas, having gifts to speak of that wouldn’t give away how non-Canadian I really was. Fast forward to my late thirties and my corporate world life and it still shows up. I have a name that’s often butchered, my race walks into the room before I do and I’ve learned to assimilate in such a way that most people I work with don’t know I’m Muslim and don’t have a clue of the things I do on a daily basis to just fit in. I feel incredibly alone as one of the few female visible minority senior leaders in my organization, even amongst the most progressive of workplaces with the best of intentions and amongst the most mindful of leaders and co-workers, I feel like an outsider.

But I’m also lucky in that I also grew up in a household and in a community where women had voices and where education was of paramount importance. I have a mother that has an advanced education but whose experiences in Canada outside our household didn’t encourage her courageousness to move past her imposter syndrome, so I work hard everyday to do better than she was able to do. I truly believe that much of the success that I have seen has come from a sense of boldness that many of the women of color counterparts haven’t been afforded. It’s complicated and the issue is often rooted in seeing ourselves and the ways in which we navigate the world acknowledged and the space created for us to be our diverse and multifaceted selves.

I know I’m not alone when I say I hate being relegated to special interest groups and not being represented or acknowledged or a space opened up for me at the table. I find it incredibly difficult to see leaders consistently hiring in their own likeness and I’m committed to speaking to ways in which we can all hire for true diversity of thought and all ensure those with diverse experiences and voices have intentional acknowledgement of their uniqueness and the opportunity to advance in the same way we intentionally advance white women. Each of us comes with a unique lens on how we see the world and I am committed to speaking to how we enable and celebrate that in the workplace.

I hope this series over the next few months will spark conversation on how we can all show up differently when it comes to attracting, recruiting and advancing women of color in the workplace and that the conversation will in turn support true inclusion and a push towards celebrating diversity of thought, in all its forms. I speak from my own experiences which don’t encompass all the lived experiences of my diverse colleagues and my diverse counterparts, but I hope it resonates in such a way that there is acknowledgement and concerted action towards real change in all our organizations. It starts by acknowledging our innate diversity and being leaders in our own right to be the change we want to see. I hope you’ll join me in the conversation.