26 / Rotman Management Spring 20 19
Leadership Forum:
Behavioural
Approaches
to Diversity
Two of the Rotman School’s leading research institutes — the Institute
for Gender and the Economy (GATE) and Behavioural Economics
in Action at Rotman (BEAR) — recently hosted the world’s leading
thinkers on diversity and inclusion. Following are some highlights from
Behavioural Approaches to Diversity — aka the BAD Conference.
compiled by Karen Christensen
PORTRAITSBYDELPHI
NELEEDolly Chugh
Associate Professor, Management
and Organizations, Stern School of Business,
New York University; author, The Person
You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias
(HarperBusiness, 2018)ONE CONCEPT THAT I DISCUSS in my work is ‘ordinary privilege’.
Think about an aspect of your identity that you rarely have to think
about. For example, as a straight woman, I can go for months
without ever thinking about that, because I am not discriminated
against or put in danger due to homophobia and bigotry. I chat
freely about my husband at work, my medical benefits are never
in question, and being legally married was never something I had
to fight for.
That part of your identity is what I call ordinary privilege,
and we can extrapolate this to different contexts. It could be that
you are a native speaker of the language spoken in your envi-
ronment; that you’re white in an environment where that is the