by Katherine Miller

Created on: April 20, 2009   Last Updated: April 23, 2009

Maybe we should ask what does diversity mean in your workforce? And what promise exactly is it suppose to be living up to?

Diversity is as dependent on the area in which you live as to how it is implemented into your workforce.

Diversity does not naturally mean a multi-cultural display of ethnic and cultural background in the workplace, it can simply mean a diverse balance of age, background and belief, yet when we talk about diversity in the workforce, most people are naturally drawn to differences in color and race more than anything else.

Diversity challenges our minds to establish an acceptable approach to any differences to our own beliefs, not to the visual aspect of what society expects diversity to be.

In the workforce so many companies strive to create an acceptable level of diversity that they may overlook the qualities of someone more qualified because they are looking for an actual percentage of their workforce to be from a particular sector of the community, be it race, sex, ethnicity, beliefs, education or physical attributes. Every employer will state that they are not gender biased, even when it is under lyingly accepted that this will be the case in some areas of employment. Employers strive their hardest to be outwardly diverse but in reality set themselves up to the contrary by instilling particular rules and regulations that they say relate to the entire workforce, but if you checked into all comparisons you find many loopholes.

Yes this keeps the courts busy, but mostly cases brought against employers because of diversity issues, are usually very difficult to establish and create effective conclusions to because the issue is based on perception. Unless you can find specific cases were possibly say the general population of a town is 50% black and 50% white, yet an employers ratio is 80% white, 20% black, and they can not establish equality based on gender, race and education, then the employer may have an issue.

You would think that simplistic issues such as this would have passed with time, but the fact remains that there are still many companies and more specific people out there that do not embrace diversity, and even more disturbing is that some of the companies and people making these decisions are not held accountable, nor do they understand that what they do affects everyone around them.

As the world grows closer everyday, especially with the increased activity of the world wide web, it will become an increasing focus to embrace diversity, even when so many are shying away from it. Diversity for many means integration and that is a topic that creates cultural wars, sets friends against friends and countries clamoring for power. Do not underestimate how far diversity is embedded in a successful future for everyone, being successful in the workplace is only the beginning.

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