The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which organizes the Consumer Electronics Show — the largest and most celebrated trade show in the industry — knew it had a diversity problem.
It had been criticized widelyOpens a new window for failing to include more diverse speakers among its conference keynotes – including repeatedly announcing speaker line-ups made up exclusively of men. So, last week, it took steps to fix the problem.
In addition to hosting an event in New York devoted specifically to diversity, it also announced new investmentsOpens a new window in two venture capital firms whose founding visions are to increase inclusive entrepreneurship. The idea behind the move is to boost the number of underrepresented people leading innovative tech start-ups.
That’s a good idea. Kudos to the association.
But the problem with the strategy is the same problem recruitment managers face when hiring new talent: It’s not enough to lend support to diversity. Visibility is everything.
Why visibility matters
When the CTA was criticized for announcing all-male keynote line-ups, its responseOpens a new window  was that it couldn’t find enough women who could take on the role. That was proven false in short order, first by Twitter, which announced just a few days later that it would host a keynote speaker roster made up exclusively of women at CES, and by CTA itself, which backtracked and added two women as keynote panelists.
But there’s something else to glean from CTA’s fumble. The conference organizers probably did really put in a good faith effort to brainstorm potential keynote speakers. That they couldn’t come up with a single one doesn’t mean that qualified women don’t exist. They do, obviously, as the backtracking showed.
More likely, the explanation is that they couldn’t think of one because in the brainstorming process the most visible people come up most (and in this case, exclusively). It seems like an obvious truism, but just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear repeating: When you don’t see people, you don’t think they exist.
And that, too often, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How to increase visibility within an organization
HR has a key role to play in elevating the visibility of people from diverse backgrounds, and nowhere is this role clearer than during the recruitment process.
When building narratives about a company’s talent and choosing who to represent the company during outreach initiatives, think about the message that talent recruiters transmit. If a woman is championed as the paragon of a company’s success, that sends a strong signal about how the firm values and elevates the role of women within the company.
Internally, when HR is involved in company-wide events, it’s important to look at who is doing most of the talking and how the speaking slots are organized. (Note that it doesn’t help when members of an over-privileged group have all the key speaking roles or big-platform, big-picture sessions — and leave all the other events to underrepresented groups, even if that creates the illusion of parity in speaking time overall.)
Having diversity is great; it’s even better when people can see it.
That’s true for two reasons: It sends a clear message to diverse candidates about company values and it contributes to changing the dominant paradigm about the appearance of certain roles. Championing diverse leaders consistently creates an environment in which no one can plead ignorance about, say, keynote speaker candidates.
The candidates are there at every level. So let them be seen.