Here & Now

Inequality in Wisconsin's Workplace

Frederica Freyberg:

We switch gears now to the issue of diversity in the workplace. With the state in the midst of its marketing campaign to attract and retain young talent, the question is do young people want to come or stay? And what about people of color? Is there enough of a ladder to the executive wing to attract diversity? And how diverse is it at the top? According to a 2018 survey of employers in eight counties in southern Wisconsin by the Madison Region Economic Partnership, 93% of boards of directors are white. 64% of them are men. And more than nine in ten top level executives are white, half of them male. The same survey shows the majority of companies do not have formally stated diversity and inclusion missions. Tonight as the state spends millions looking to attract young workers, we take a look at the stories of several people in Madison, including those who left over the culture of inequality, but also at businesses doing something about it. Marisa Wojcik has their stories.

Yusra Murad:

My experiences in Wisconsin have been predominantly — I don’t want to say predominantly negative, but it is the truth.

Marisa Wojcik:

For Yusra Murad, a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin, her four years in Madison were draining. Her identity as a Muslin Pakistani woman often left her being the critic in the room and having to provide the minority perspective.

Yusra Murad:

I think that’s part of the reason that I wouldn’t like to stick around in Wisconsin, because it ends up meaning that I’m explaining a lot, defending a lot, doing a lot of work that I don’t necessarily want to be doing. I want some time to sit down and write a 1,000 word column about the art that I love or write about a book that I’m reading right now that I’ve totally fallen for instead of writing about how my university left me feeling lethargic and how this state has made me want to leave the Midwest for good.

Marisa Wojcik:

She’s moving to Washington D.C. for a writing job.

Yusra Murad:

I knew I wanted to be in a city where I was surrounded by different sorts of individuals and I wanted to be in a place where I would never feel like I was the only anything in a room.

Marisa Wojcik:

While the state has spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign trying to attract young professionals from Chicago, some here ask themselves why should we stay? For Kwasi Obeng moving to Madison from Chicago was worth the opportunity to become the first Madison Common Council Chief of Staff.

Kwasi Obeng:

Part of the reason why I was brought in is having lived in two major cities, it’s helping the city maneuver the waters of figuring out how to anticipate some of the problems that these bigger cities had.

Marisa Wojcik:

Madison is in the midst of its own growth spurt. Issues like transportation, crime, affordable housing and education are all going to be impacted.

Kwasi Obeng:

Where I think the advantage is of being a person of color and working with alders, too, who are persons of color is also being sensitive to other issues that may not always be at the forefront.

Marisa Wojcik:

Obeng says he doesn’t presume to know the issues of all minority groups in the community. But he listens.

Peng Her:

City parks are set up so that there are one grill and one table, right? So for the Hmong community, we have larger families and the community gets together and it’s hard to gather at a city park because they’re all so separated.

Marisa Wojcik:

He helps the council alders gather information through research and data analysis.

Kwasi Obeng:

At the end of the day, that decision is really on them because they’re the elected officials. But what I want to do is be able to provide as much information as possible for them to make a well-informed decision.

Angela Russell:

So we know that Madison gets touted as the best place to live all the time. Whenever I see these rankings, the question that comes immediately to mind is for whom? So we know that the greatness of the city and of our community isn’t equally shared by all races.

Marisa Wojcik:

It’s an issue that Angela Russell has been studying for years. She started her work in public health but is now the Vice-President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at CUNA Mutual Group, a Madison-based financial corporation with more than 3,000 employees.

Angela Russell:

When I was studying in grad school, I was really interested in racial disparities in health. A lot of those racial disparities are driven by financial and wealth and economic disparities. Even though our CEO added inclusion as a corporate value in 2014, the rumblings and interest in diversity and inclusion started well before then. But it wasn’t until our CEO gave it executive-level report that we were able to really dive in and do the work that we’re doing today.

Marisa Wojcik:

Speaking with a group of CUNA Mutual interns, Russell asks them questions about their proposal for a company competition.

Angela Russell:

I want to see what this is all about. The forward-thinking credit union.

Marisa Wojcik:

The challenge put forth, design a credit union for non-white customers.

Intern:

What is something they’re not looking at but that they could look at?

Marisa Wojcik:

Citing that 61% of credit union member growth came from multicultural consumers in the past five years.

Angela Russell:

Who was your target audience?

Intern:

Multigenerational, multicultural consumers.

Marisa Wojcik:

Dr. Jerlando Jackson is the Director of the Wisconsin Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at UW-Madison.

Jerlando Jackson:

If we have good information and data to suggest that diverse teams create the most innovative ideas, and if being able to reach the diverse audience for which whatever it is you are producing is designed for, you absolutely cannot finish the statement and not end with we have to be more diverse.

Angela Russell:

We’re not going to be able to meet the needs of our changing consumer base across the nation if we’re not a diverse, equitable, inclusive organization. Our nation is becoming much more diverse. The needs that come with the diversity will change. So if we don’t have a diverse and inclusive workplace, we’re not going to be able to meet the changing financial needs of our customers either.

Jerlando Jackson:

Oftentimes if you are in an organization that invests in you, that understands what motivates you, that permits you to do the work that allows you to get up in the morning, that allows you to persevere when you’re tired, that those are the organizations that individuals can and do commit to.

Group:

2, 4, 6, 8, 10 Forward.

Marisa Wojcik:

Two Madison young professionals, Victoria Guerrero and Charielle McMullan found these qualities at Ten Forward, a small Madison tech start-up.

Victoria Guerrero:

I really love coming to work every day. I like the team. Everyone is just their own person and you’re respected.

Marisa Wojcik:

Upon graduating from UW-Madison, these two Chicago natives wanted to stay in Wisconsin.

Charielle McMullan:

Here in Madison things are a little bit more slow-paced and you can actually take time to take care and I kind of like that.

Marisa Wojcik:

But the reality of student loans hit home for these first generation college students.

Charielle McMullan:

It’s real out there. If you want to go to school, go to school. But don’t go there and get a whole lot of loans.

Marisa Wojcik:

Frustrated with their jobs and unable to pay high Madison rents, Charielle and Victoria both found their way to the Y Web Academy, a four month long coding boot camp that prepared them for careers in tech, doing the work they’re doing now at Ten Forward.

Victoria Guerrero:

That’s part of the reason why I’m in tech because as we know, like it’s a lucrative industry. There’s actual opportunity for you to move up the pay scale or even like the title scale, whatever, because of the skills, the concrete skills that you can bring to the table.

Angela Russell:

Sometimes I receive this question related to how do you create more diversity? How are you going to bring more diversity to Madison? And one of the things, the little heartburn that I get with that question is that it assumes that diversity doesn’t already exist. So we do have diversity across our state. When we’re thinking about diverse communities, how do we really highlight the diversity that exists while welcoming more diversity into our state as well?

Frederica Freyberg:

That was Marisa Wojcik reporting. Joining us tonight are two people who are working on these issues. Tania Ibarra is the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Latino Professionals Association. And Samba Baldeh is the Madison Common Council president. Thanks to both of you for being here.

Tania Ibarra, Samba Baldeh:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

I want to you ask both, in your positions, what is your role in encouraging and implementing diversity? I’ll take that question first to you, Tania.

Tania Ibarra:

Well, like the video suggested, part of me is bringing together the Latinos who because of the job or because of the lack of diversity in their companies find themselves lonely and want to leave Madison because they don’t have a community to be part of. So I was one of those people when I was initially in my career. I was the only Latina in my department. I’ve been the only Latina on floors. The only Latina in buildings. So having the community outside of your work, if you don’t have it at work, it’s tremendous for both personal and professional growth.

Frederica Freyberg:

And you help grow that community and introduce people to it?

Tania Ibarra:

Yes. The Latino Professionals Association has been — is five years old. I’m a founding member. Then I became president, now the board chair. It’s been a journey for us. But it is to bring and pull resources from our community to support each other. I think it’s less the challenges that we face as being the only people in rooms can be very hard to manage, personally, emotionally and so having a community where you can fall back on and say this happened to me at work today and you can process it and not internalize it and feel that you don’t have a place to be is very important.

Frederica Freyberg:

Samba Baldeh, as the President of the Madison Common Council, what is your role in encouraging and promoting diversity in the workplace?

Samba Baldeh:

So as president of the council, my role is obviously to identify the gaps and then be able to sit with alders and come up with solutions as to how we can address this of these things as was highlighted on the tape. Some of the issues that people complain about is lack of space. Space that basically reflect their culture and their way of life. So what I have been doing is also reaching out to department heads, you know, community development, for example, parks for community development. How can we work together and identify spaces that are suitable for people of color or minority groups. Parks, for example. The way — the fact that the city’s diverse, not only diverse in terms of people of color, but also in terms of immigrants and people of different faiths and stuff like that. So all of us live life differently. The way we use the parks for example, as was indicated by Peng on the video, how the Hmong community uses park space, for example, is different from another set of immigrant population. So my role as the President of the Council but also somebody who represent a good part of the eastern part of the city, it’s very diverse in many case, is to reach out to department heads, identify some of these challenges with them, find a way to address this through city budget, but also I work with community development to make sure that these are factored into their decision-making process in terms of financing and all that kind of stuff.

Frederica Freyberg:

In terms of the workplace, what does diversity and inclusion look like there?

Samba Baldeh:

So I think diversity, if you look at the city, they have these diversity tools that they, you know, use in terms of recruitment and all this kind of stuff. If you look at actually the composition of workforce in the city, it’s not all that diverse. The city is putting a lot of efforts in terms of diversifying the workforce but it is not. And I think diversity, in order for us to be successful or see ourselves as being a diverse community, either at the community level or at the job level, is we have to get to a level where it is cultural, that it is not something that we are working to fix, but becomes part of our daily lives. I think that is one way we can say we are really diverse. But for now, people are just using tools to help them diversify their workforce. To take that further, it got to be — it has to transcend or got to be kind of a collaboration between private and public.

Frederica Freyberg:

Tania, in your mind what does diversity in the workplace look like?

Tania Ibarra:

So I think in Madison in terms of the workforce in Madison, in terms of the race, inclusion and equity initiatives, it’s very early stages of maturity. I believe the companies that are leading the way in terms of diversity, inclusion and equity in Madison are the companies that have global or national reaches. So for example, American Family has a national reach and you can see the leadership team putting behind a lot of resources behind those initiatives. But local companies who do not have national or global reach — and I’m very fortunate because I’ve worked for global-reaching companies like currently I work for Spectrum Brands so we’re a global company. So diversity has a completely different meaning within Spectrum than it does in Madison. I think the difficult part with addressing workforce matters in Madison from a diverse, inclusion perspective is more than 50% of the workforce works in smaller, medium-sized companies which do not have the resources to address these issues or do not have the budgets behind the training and the understanding and all the effort that it takes to make a cultural change.

Frederica Freyberg:

So is it about resources or is it a combination of resources and interest in doing that?

Tania Ibarra:

I think it’s both, right? So I also as part of the Latino Professionals Association — when we launched the Latino Professionals Association, the Latino community’s one of the minority populations that gets a lot of highlight because we are the fastest growing. We are the larger minority in Wisconsin. When it comes to the young professionals, we’re the largest minority to attract and very educated as well when it comes to percentages. And companies initiated to reach out to us, from my perspective, my experience is companies are learning. One of the things that I did because it’s not about attracting Latinos. It’s about companies being organizations where Latinos can thrive. Because just recruiting and saying I want diversity is not really going to do much. It really has to be about who we are as an organization and who do we want to be part of that and how are we preparing for the next generation of the workforce.

Frederica Freyberg:

It’s not just about checking the boxes. But we wanted at this point to take a listen to something that one of the people we interviewed in the field said about inclusion.

Angela Russell:

Well, there’s this definition of inclusion that I really like and it says inclusion is not asking someone to conform to the cultural and social norms of the majority.

Frederica Freyberg:

So how real is that, her definition of inclusion, not asking minority individuals to conform to the majority?

Samba Baldeh:

So I think one of the challenges of diversity also, apart from attracting talent, is keeping them. And so that, you know, is tied to what she just said. You know, it’s not enough to bring the talent here. We have to go forward and make sure that those people identify with the community and be able to make friends and be able to get spaces where they can socialize. So diversity in itself means a lot other things apart from just, you know, having people of different colors or backgrounds or something, but also how well do they connect to their communities and things like that.

Frederica Freyberg:

How key, in your minds, is fostering opportunities for positions of leadership and executive level positions?

Tania Ibarra:

I built on that. One of the things I built on inclusion is the way I started working on diversity, inclusion and equity theme, because I really didn’t have — I didn’t grow up here. I came here for college. So I didn’t have these concepts embedded in my experience. But when I really became real was about when I received the question, do I bring myself to work? So to build on Angela’s question, it’s like being inclusive means that people can be themselves at work. We know there’s norms we have to adjust to and live by and majority rules that we have to live by. But when you wake up and you go to work and you don’t feel yourself, you can’t contribute 100% or you can’t be innovative. So that’s the part about being inclusive, where cultures don’t really understand how they’re inhibiting that growth.

Frederica Freyberg:

And how do we get there? How does the workplace, a diverse workplace of all manner of people get to the place where people like you feel like you can be you?

Samba Baldeh:

So I think one way we can get there is like I said, it’s got to be a culture. Everybody got to feel like I am not different from you just because of the way we look and be comfortable to talk to each other. How do we get I think basically is training. Everybody, I think, should be able to take basic training on diversity and what that means in terms of working together. You see people complain about working at a place for tens of years or sometimes very long time without making friends outside of their own creed or color or something like that. So I think companies got to do more. It’s not just enough to attract talent and have these documents to say we have diversity and inclusion initiatives and stuff like that. But how deep do you go to make cultural changes? And the only way — one way to do that is to train people. Let them be comfortable around others. Let them try and make friends with others. I think that’s one way. Like I said, it got to be cultural to an extent that we don’t feel the difference. We just see each other as colleague and coworkers and people of the same neighborhood.

Frederica Freyberg:

Tania, with just about a half minute left, final word on these thoughts.

Tania Ibarra:

I would say that my dad always said that companies, organizations don’t make people. People make the company or organization. In terms of making the changes, it’s about the individual commitments to be different and become aware of these issues. And that’s where — that’s why I work a lot on unconscious bias, because I think it’s about the leaders and managers and organization pointing out where those unconscious biases are.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Tania and Samba, thank you very much for this conversation.

Tania Ibarra, Samba Baldeh:

Thank you for having us.

Frederica Freyberg:

That is all for tonight’s program. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a great weekend.