All listed companies should be required to measure their progress on improving diversity but there should be no quotas for the number of women on boards, the CBI has argued.

In its submission to the review being carried out by Lord Davies on increasing female representation in the boardroom, the business group called for the UK corporate governance code to be revised to require listed companies to report on diversity on a “comply or explain basis”. This would mean companies reporting on their progress towards internally-set targets and having to explain if they fail to deliver.

Firms in sectors with many female employees would be expected to set themselves higher targets on female representation than in more male-dominated industries which would be starting from a lower base.

The CBI pointed out that an Australian scheme along these lines has already resulted in 27 per cent of new board appointments in 2010 being women, compared to just 5 per cent in 2009.

CBI president Helen Alexander said: “Although women make up half of the population and more than half of university graduates, they remain woefully under-represented at board level. We need to see more women progressing through the ranks and do more to keep them moving along the career pipeline into the top jobs. Schemes such as flexible working, mentoring and networking have helped, but making progress at the very top levels of business will require more sophisticated talent management. What is needed is cultural change, not quotas, ratios or tokenism.”

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Madrid – Arab societies often appear rigid and resistant to change to outsiders, because what they see is these countries’ ruling regimes, which mostly do resist development and change. But this image is nearly the opposite of reality in Arab societies, where enormous dynamism is opening doors to many types of change, albeit at different speeds and in complex, contradictory ways – particularly when change from below is held back from above.

Consider Arab women. The predominant image is of a passive, exotic, and veiled victim-woman who reacts to events instead of actively participating in them. She is an impersonal object of communal stereotypes that sustain cultural prejudices.

To read more…

Across the Atlantic: African Immigrants in the United States Diaspora

This book offers a fresh multidisciplinary perspective towards an understanding of African immigration to the United States diaspora, by documenting for the first time, an empirical analysis of how media and literary portrayal of the United States create impressions of America and thus the desire to migrate. It expands on how pre-departure characteristics including socialization experiences, religious traditions, and practices such as African foods, cultural festivals and African languages impact African immigrants’ adaptation and coping mechanisms amid challenges at the country of destination. It brings to the fore how African immigrants’ ethnic group identities at the country of origin determine ethnic relations and cultural integration in the society of encounter. Additionally, it explicates how the social organization of the African family influences remittance flows. Finally, the book elucidates on how Africans in Diasporas impact the reconstruction of homelands’ political identities as well as the effect of African Diaspora cyber-citizenship and cyber political activities on the conception of African national identity.

Across the Atlantic provides the reader with a rich and diverse ways of imagining African Diaspora connections and the dynamics of identity formation and cultural hybridization. It is a powerful study in tradition, migration, adaptation and social integration in our globalized world.

Dr. Raphael C. Njoku
University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

Written in clear, accessible language by both accomplished and emerging African scholars who are mostly immigrants in the United States, this book transports readers into the mindset and lives of millions of current and prospective African immigrants. It is a must-read.

Dr. Ogechi E. Anyanwu
Eastern Kentucky University
Richmond, Kentucky, USA.

The latest issue of  The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations includes:

• Exclusion and Education of Disadvantaged Young People: The Case of Turkish Disadvantaged Young People by Pinar Enneli and Ayse Kaya.
• An Integrative Approach to Developing an Intercultural Awareness Strategy in a Multicultural University by Helen E. Higson and Kai Liu.
• Diversity in the Irish Workplace – Lesbian Women’s Experience as Nurses by Mel Duffy.
• A Glass Half Full or Half Empty? A Comparison of Diversity Statements among Russell Group v. US Research Universities by Kathleen K. OMara and Elizabeth Morrish.
• Engaging with Diversity to Build Understanding: Promoting Interactions to Enhance Learning by Jeannette Walsh and Ruth Gresham.
• Competencies for Conversation: Assessment in Inclusive Education by Heather Isabel Symonds.
• Challenges in Addressing Cultural Diversity: Approaches in Sydney Schools by Nina Burridge and Andrew Chodkiewicz.

Making the Difference: The Critical Success Factors for Diversity Management by Grethe Van Geffen is now available from the On Diversity imprint.

Once upon a time organisations could work with employees who all looked like Mister Average. Their life style, values, expectations and working ways were predictable; it was easy to recruit and reward them. Managers that were able to manage Mister Average, were able to perform 90% of their business timely and effectively. However, Mister Average doesn’t exist any more. A great diversity of employees have made their entrance into the organisations of the 21st century.

Organisations find it difficult to make the change from ‘general’ management to diversity management. Where to start and what actions will show the best effect? The secret of success lies not in a scattered approach but in structural policies.

This book presents the methods and tools to work on structural policies, based on the ten critical success factors of diversity management. Readers will gain the most recent insights and find the way to set priorities and seize the opportunities that diversity offers – when it is managed well!

The latest issue of The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations includes:

• Ethnic Clusters and the Urban Planning System: The Japanese Experience by Shahed Khan and Jake Schapper.
• Gender, Traditionalism and Democratic Diversity on Taiwan by Chin Hu.
• Promoting Equality and Learning in the Workplace by Georgina Andrews, Michelle Jane Nardone and Steve Gough.
• The Conscious Gaze: Visuality as Practice in the Post-modern World by Mischa Davison and Anahit Falihi.
• Migrant Workers: Motives for Migration, Contingency of Choice and Willingness to Remain in the Host Country by Nonna Kushnirovich.
• Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Legal Discourse: Emotion Narratives in Battered Women’s Homicide Cases by Michelle VanNatta.
• Positive Action Measures Across Different Equality Grounds, Organisations and Sectors in European and Non-european Countries by Uduak Archibong, Andy Scally, Jite Eferakorho, Aliya Darr, Karl Atkin, Carol Baxter, Mark R. D. Johnson, Mark Bell, Lisa Waddington, Katrin Wladasch, Tara Bedard, Oluyinka Adejumo, Phyllis Sharps and Pat Bradshaw.
• Experiences of Using Public Space: A Sudanese Case Study in Western Australia by Pendo Mwaiteleke and Antonio Buti.

Women have outnumbered men on college campuses around the world for the past five years, according to Unesco’s latest Global Education Digest. In Europe and North America, there are a third more women than men enrolled in university, and in a number of countries, such as Hungary and Uruguay, there are at least two female graduates for every male. Women are gaining in Master’s degree programmes, too. In American medical schools, for instance, they represent half of all students; in law school it is 47%.

And yet they remain a distinct minority at business schools. Women represent under a third of students enrolled in the schools covered in The Economist’s ranking of full-time MBA programmes, a figure that has barely changed since our first ranking in 2002 (see chart).

To read more…

Among the many distortions arising from the conceptualization of the human social world in terms of ‘race’ is the false belief this instills among lower status, historically disadvantaged ‘white’ people that they have something innate in common with all other ‘white’ people, and thus that their current disadvantage is the result of some exceptional injustice. This in contrast with the disadvantage of their non-white neighbors, which is, the reasoning goes, just in the nature of things. In the United States, ethnic difference among whites has been bleached out in the name of egalitarianism, and the only differences that are allowed to remain are the ones that are thought to be so pronounced in the phenotypes of ‘non-white’ groups that assimilation is ruled out on supposedly biological grounds. This seems a natural way of doing things for most Americans, while in fact it is anything but.

To read more…

The third issue of Volume 10 of The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations has been published.

Volume 10, Number 3 contains:

• An Emotional Conceptualization of People and Diversity: Integrating Emotional Intelligence in Human and International Relations for Social Justice by James Smith.
• The Challenges Involved in Directing a Minority Play in a Theatre Department Composed of Predominantly Eurocentric Students: A Case Study by Judith Babnich.
• Psycho-Educational Guidelines for the Use of Music in a Group Anger Management Programme for Children in Residential Care by Deirdré Krüger and Belinda de Villiers.
• Movement and Stasis: The Travellers of Trojan Eddie (1996) by Dana Och.
• A Descriptive Analysis of Risk and Resiliency within a Cohort of Preservice Teachers by Warnie James Richardson, Alicia Paolucci and Connor Richardson.
• Countering Privilege: A Pedagogy for Undermining Classism by Twila Yates Papay.
• Virtual Ethnicity: Representation and Boundary Formation on the Internet by Sandra Lopez-Rocha.

• Ethnic Clusters and the Urban Planning System: The Japanese Experience by Shahed Khan and Jake Schapper.
• Gender, Traditionalism and Democratic Diversity on Taiwan by Chin Hu.
• Promoting Equality and Learning in the Workplace by Georgina Andrews, Michelle Jane Nardone and Steve Gough.
• The Conscious Gaze: Visuality as Practice in the Post-modern World by Mischa Davison and Anahit Falihi.
• Migrant Workers: Motives for Migration, Contingency of Choice and Willingness to Remain in the Host Country by Nonna Kushnirovich.
• Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Legal Discourse: Emotion Narratives in Battered Women’s Homicide Cases by Michelle VanNatta.
• Positive Action Measures Across Different Equality Grounds, Organisations and Sectors in European and Non-european Countries by Uduak Archibong, Andy Scally, Jite Eferakorho, Aliya Darr, Karl Atkin, Carol Baxter, Mark R. D. Johnson, Mark Bell, Lisa Waddington, Katrin Wladasch, Tara Bedard, Oluyinka Adejumo, Phyllis Sharps and Pat Bradshaw.
• Experiences of Using Public Space: A Sudanese Case Study in Western Australia by Pendo Mwaiteleke and Antonio Buti.
• Exclusion and Education of Disadvantaged Young People: The Case of Turkish Disadvantaged Young People by Pinar Enneli and Ayse Kaya.
• An Integrative Approach to Developing an Intercultural Awareness Strategy in a Multicultural University by Helen E. Higson and Kai Liu.
• Diversity in the Irish Workplace – Lesbian Women’s Experience as Nurses by Mel Duffy.
• A Glass Half Full or Half Empty? A Comparison of Diversity Statements among Russell Group v. US Research Universities by Kathleen K. OMara and Elizabeth Morrish.
• Engaging with Diversity to Build Understanding: Promoting Interactions to Enhance Learning by Jeannette Walsh and Ruth Gresham.
• Competencies for Conversation: Assessment in Inclusive Education by Heather Isabel Symonds.
• Challenges in Addressing Cultural Diversity: Approaches in Sydney Schools by Nina Burridge and Andrew Chodkiewicz.

This week, a group of blind air travelers filed suit against United Airlines claiming that the airline’s digital kiosks are inaccessible to blind people.

It’s not a problem that most travelers think about: How would they get through an airport without their eyesight? But something as simple as finding out your flight’s gate can be a hassle.

Mike May, who lives in Davis, Calif., says he has to ask someone to look for flight information on the big digital boards. And checking in using the now-ubiquitous electronic kiosks is an even bigger hassle, at least at many airlines.

Read more…