16 APRIL 6, 2020 | ADWEEK
®Daisy Auger-
Dominguez
founder and CEO
AUGER-DOMINGUEZ
VENTURES
A
uger-Dominguez cited the late professor Walter
Stafford as one of her first mentors who, at NYU’s
Wagner Graduate School of Public Service,
helped her understand the intersection of race, class
and gender in society and who she worked with to
research the social stratification of jobs.
“Frankly, it wasn’t until I got to the workplace that
it truly hit me what that meant in these corporate
places of privilege, culture and access,” she says.
After 20 years in that corporate world, she
founded the consultancy Auger-Dominguez
Ventures in 2019 and is now focused full-time on
designing inclusive, equitable workplaces and
human-capital strategies for startups and Fortune
500 companies alike.
“For me, the entry point to this work was similar
for a lot of women and people of color—it was the
experience of feeling [and] seeing other womenand people of color marginalized, erased and cast
aside, not because of their ability, but because of
circumstance,” she says. “And I knew early on I
wanted to change that.”
Now Auger-Dominguez is writing a book about
how to dismantle existing processes and policies
that have kept so many people from achieving their
potential. But she says she’s proudest of the women
she mentors, including Joy Peña, whom she hired in
2013 to manage diversity and inclusion for Disney
ABC Television. After Auger-Dominguez left for
Google in 2015, she tried to hire Peña again, but
she was working at Electronic Arts by then. (Peña
returned to Disney as director of global diversity
and inclusion at ESPN in 2018.)
“We worked together for about three years, and
during that time I received incredible opportunities
and earned a promotion under her leadership,” Peña
says. “Essentially, however, I gained a mentor and
friend whose coaching, support and inspiration went
far beyond our years of formally working together.”
Auger-Dominguez also mentors a young Latinx
colleague at Google who recently posted on LinkedIn
about how Auger-Dominguez represented the first
time she saw herself reflected in an executive.
“She wrote ... about what it meant to her, after
years of feeling she needed to diminish who she
was,” Auger-Dominguez says. “To me, those are the
stories that remind me representation matters and
that ... beyond representation, it’s not just being one
of the executives, but engaging with people in the
organization.” —L.L.Joy Peña | director, global
diversity and inclusion | ESPN
Working alongside Auger-Dominguez,
Peña says she learned how to show up
with conviction, confidence, authenticity
and empathy. “I learned that being a
D&I leader often means speaking up
during difficult, sensitive, unpopular
and certainly complex times with truth
and empathy, particularly as a voice for
fairness and an advocate for others. I
never saw her miss a moment to do so—
both for the good of people and forward
movement of our business, ultimately
impacting people,” says Peña. “That level
of courage and commitment continues
to inspire how I show up in my work, in
society and relationships overall.”‘The entry point to this
work was seeing other
women and people of
color marginalized.’
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