Interview with Alyssa Ordu

Hello, and welcome to the Intrepid English podcast. My name is Lorraine, and today, I have a conversation for you. My friend Alyssa is a Diversity and Inclusion Consultant in London. And when I told Alyssa that we were creating a diversity and inclusion course, in the intrepid English Academy, we had a lovely conversation about why diversity and inclusion are so important. I asked her to join me on this podcast as an expert in this field, to break down these big topics so that our English learners and the listeners of this podcast can understand a little bit about what diversity and inclusion are, why they're so important, and give you a little bit of language that you can use to increase your awareness and broaden your horizons in these essential areas.

Hello, and welcome to the Intrepid English Podcast. My name is Lorraine, and today, I have a conversation for you. My friend, Alyssa, is a Diversity and Inclusion Consultant in London. And when I told Alyssa that we were creating a Diversity and Inclusion course, for the members in our Intrepid English Academy, we had a lovely conversation about why diversity and inclusion are so important.

I asked her to join me on this podcast as an expert in this field, to break down these big topics so that our English learners and the listeners of this podcast can understand a little bit about what diversity and inclusion are, why they’re so important, and give you a little bit of language that you can use to increase your awareness and broaden your horizons in these essential areas. You can find links to all of the resources that Alyssa and I mentioned in this conversation at the bottom of this blog post.

The vocabulary in this episode is quite advanced. So I recommend reading this transcript as you listen. Make sure you write down any new words or phrases. And if you need any help or clarification, or you just want to discuss these topics further, please feel free to just send me a message in the Chatbox that you’ll find at the bottom right-hand corner of every screen on our website.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

Lorraine: Hi, Alyssa. How are you today?

Alyssa: I’m very well, thank you, Lori. How are you?

L: I’m really well, thanks. And I’m really excited to speak to you because, well, you’ve just got so much to say that I want to hear. So I’m really excited. You’re actually in a hotel room in Berlin at the moment, aren’t you?

A: Yes.

L: So why don’t you start by introducing yourself for everybody?

A: Of course. Hello. My name is Alyssa. And I’m a Diversity and Inclusion Consultant.

L: And how did you get into this job, Alyssa?

A: Good question. And I think for me to answer that it might make sense to take it, take it back a little bit before I maybe even joined the world of work. So I grew up in a vibrational home. My mum is from a small town in south Wales. And my dad is from a village in southeast Nigeria. But they met in a disco in London. So go figure. Nobody has better meeting stories than 70s parents. And they raised us, me and my two siblings around the world. So we grew up in the Philippines and in the States. And then later, Indonesia, and also in the UK. So I think I’ve always had a bit of a fascination or penchant for culture, right? For travel and learning about different people and their experiences. And something I noticed with all of these moves in this kind of ‘multi-culti’ upbringing, as it were, was that so many of our social problems are similar. Our circumstances might be different, right, our levels of access and infrastructure. But that really more connects us than separates us. And that a lot of the key things that I notice, there being collective struggles with centre around things like gender, centre around things like race. So I think I was always a little bit interested in, yeah, how people work and why we do the things we do and how those things are done to some people in different ways and, or unevenly, or unequally, if you will.  And then fast-forwarding to me being at uni, and studying psychology, in gender and international development. So obviously, the fascination with these themes continued. And then I joined the world of work. And one of my first main jobs, big jobs, I suppose, was in HR. And that was something I really, really enjoyed. Having the power to hire a broader range of people, a diverse range of people was something that I found really interesting. And from there, I did a little bit of a pivot into working in marketing and communication, but mostly in the tech sector, and within that within software companies, and something I noticed, which you may not be surprised to hear was that, in that sector, there weren’t a lot of people who look like me. I was oftentimes the only woman in the room or woman in the company, and oftentimes the only person of colour as well. And thinking, you could say intersectionally. I was experiencing both of those things at the same time, right?  So if we think about intersectionality, is how our identity or experience in one area can be compounded by our identity, or experience in another area. So I was feeling my otherness, I suppose, in relation to being a woman, but also in relation to my race, too. And those are just two of my intersections, obviously, we will have many different ones. So selfishly, the short answer is, the reason why I got into ‘diversity and inclusion’ or ‘people in culture’ or whatever this field of work is going to be called in a couple of years time is, I was really determined to change things and prove that the reason why there weren’t more people like me and in the sector and in the space wasn’t because we aren’t good enough, wasn’t because we can’t do these jobs, it was just because we faced unique barriers to entry and accessing those jobs. So that led me to pivot again, I suppose, and start doing training and designing workshops, primarily in the technology sector, but not exclusively. To help teams and help the C-suite understand, you know, what’s really getting in the way of building a truly inclusive workforce for us. And I think understanding our bias biases, plural is a really powerful way to start.

L: Wow, thank you for that, I have so many questions that I want to ask you.

A: Ask away!

L: One of the things that really sort of stood out to me and what you were saying there was related to the concept of barriers. And I have experienced confusion among my students about barriers because it’s a very strange area to discuss: If you are benefiting from privilege of some kind, for example, if you’re a man, or if you’re a white person, or particularly a white man, then you might not be aware of the barriers that exist for other people, because those doors are open to you. And often you’re only aware of the doors which are closed to you. But we require people with that privilege to use it to open the doors for people who do not have it. So trying to start from a very beginning position of ‘This is what a barrier is, and these are the people who traditionally have experienced these barriers and come up against them’. This is the first step, I think in explaining why diversity and inclusion is something which benefits everybody, not just the people who have traditionally been held back. But everybody because all teams are better, all departments, all companies are improved by having a diverse workforce with people from a range of backgrounds, a range of experiences, and like you said, different intersections of society. Because, let’s take, for example, gender, you know, a marketing team, which employs only white men, they are missing out massively on having a diverse team because they’re going to try and market to everybody, but they only see things through the filter of white men. So that immediately puts them at a disadvantage in their roles, right? So yeah, from the point of view, as someone who’s worked in HR, and you’ve dealt with diversity in many different kinds of companies, how would you define ‘barriers’? And how can we start to remove them for those around us who are held back by them?

A: Well, I think, in case we have any visual learners on the call, I’ll try to explain it in relation to a visual metaphor. It’s a little funny in an audio format, but here we are working across the senses. So I recently saw a cartoon, I think a couple of different artists have re-created it. But it really, really resonated with me and some people who were maybe working in this space might already be familiar with it. But I think it’s a useful reference point. And in this comic in this drawing, it lays out equality versus equity versus justice.

 class=


So when they say equality in the picture, it’s basically several people who in front of them have a wall. And beyond that wall is a game of sorts. So just imagine a ball game, say baseball, right? So in order to make the people that look different, you know, they have different abilities, different, they have different colours, they have different heights, just different forms of appearance, in order to make them on equal footing. Each one has a block placed underneath their feet. And each of those blocks for those three people is the same height. Right, so now they’ve got this fence in front of them. And they’re all standing on a block that’s the same level. But what that does, right, if we think about that, in relation to equality, or giving everybody equal access to things, which has some benefit, but it doesn’t account for things like privilege, or things like oppression. So now the tallest person who had the same size block as the smallest person, or the person in the wheelchair, can now just have an even better view of the ballgame, even though they could already see. And some of the people that have the same size blog might still not be able to see anything or might have a partial view.

So if we think about equity, instead of giving each person the same-sized block, what we would do is give them the size of block, they need to see over the wall, which might mean that the tallest person doesn’t need to block at all, it might mean that the child or the person in a wheelchair might be the largest block, just as one example. But then if we start thinking about justice, and this is the final piece of the pie in this image, that would be us taking the wall down entirely. So everybody just sees from their natural vantage point, if indeed they have the ability to see. So I think when we think about barriers, that’s kind of the approach or energy I take towards trying to understanding them; that not everybody has the same barriers. And I might not understand everybody’s barriers yet. So this is something I bring up a lot in my work. And I think some people see it as a strength, some people might see it as a weakness, and for those who feel the latter might not be people I work with. But I think I’m still on a learning journey with all of this stuff, our culture is changing so fast. I know more today than I knew yesterday, and I now know enough to think, ‘God, and there’s a hell of a lot more, I have to learn’.

So just wanted to say that what I see as barriers to entry are things that stop us from being able to do what we want to do. So thinking in the context of hiring, for example, I know that in recruitment, we can kind of there’s a bit more black and white versions of these things. But there’s so many studies showing us that even just the name you have when you apply to a company or to an organisation can influence your likelihood of being accepted. And how that changes even within different ethnic groups and nationalities. I was reading one study by the British Centre for Social Investigation, which was run a couple of years ago, within their own organisation, they sent out about like 6000, CVs for different job descriptions. And what they would do is all of the CVs would be the same. So the people applying would be, the fake people applying, will be just as fabulous, you know, going to fancy unis, or what have you. But the only thing that would change would be a name on the application. So they did this across things like gender, but also things like ethnicity. And they found that just as one of the examples, they found that people with Nigerian sounding names, or South Asian sounding names here in the UK, had to send out 60% more applications, just to get a response, not even necessarily to get a job interview. And this study wasn’t done 100 years ago, or, you know, this is recent.

And we’re seeing this time and time again. So I know that some of the barriers that we face are in relation to things like or gender or names. And I think part of that comes from the fact that if we’re not accustomed to having certain people in roles, then oftentimes we’re not accustomed to supporting other people into those roles. So something you said earlier that really resonated with me around privilege was that and there’s a saying, I think it was Professor Kimmel that said this, “Privilege is invisible to those who have it”. Or the more that we have it, the less able to notice it we are those things that are just normal for us, or not a problem for us, doesn’t mean they’re not a problem for anybody else. Right? So I think that’s what we have to sort of be conscious of when we think of those barriers, but also remembering that we don’t have to look at privilege as a negative thing. I feel like I see so many memes and so many conversations of people saying like, I feel like I can’t speak up because I’m in this group  blablabla. And it’s just like we’re just running around, chasing our tails, you know, hating on each other instead of coming together to realise: divided we fall and it’s only really together that we stand. As soon as we start, like unleashing the power of using a privilege as a force for good, to me, that’s where so many exciting opportunities lie. And then things like barriers become childsplay, because the more of us that are trying to kick the ceilings down, the faster the glass will break, and we’ll see, you know, beautiful skies ahead.

L: Oh, that’s, that’s lovely and super positive. because quite often, you can really get bogged down in, in just how much work there is to do. And it can get really quite depressing, sometimes, can’t it? But I’m glad that you finish that off with a really positive note that because not that we need to sugarcoat this difficult topic at all. But you know, from, from the point of view, from our students anyway, this course came about because a couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a student who was avoiding one of his coworkers who was a trans man, because, yeah, he just, he just didn’t know what to say. And he desperately didn’t want to offend him. He didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t even know whether he could ask for this person’s pronouns. And I realised that we need to meet our students where they are. Depending on their culture, depending on the you know, the society that they live in, sometimes they’re really these, these topics are not discussed at all. And it seems quite intimidating. And there is so much to do, and there is so, so much uncertainty, and each person’s experience is different. So, you know, there are definitely opportunities, in all conversations to accidentally say something wrong, you know, and it’s quite, quite scary for a lot of people, especially in a second language. But yeah, we really want to meet them where they are, and show them that actually, by making an effort, and just generally being kind and inclusive, we can all work towards a better, more egalitarian society, which is so important when you’re working in an international company, and you’re working with people from all different backgrounds, all different experiences, you need to, you need to be at least aware of what not to say. So that you can, you can start to, you know, allow everybody to essentially do their job well, because that’s what we’re all at work to do, you know. And I just wanted to mention as well, actually, that cartoon that you described, that cartoon is actually in the course, I saw that and I was like, This is so brilliantly explained in this lovely cartoon. So yeah, we’ve actually embedded that in one of the lessons right at the beginning, actually. So thank you. That’s really cool that you, you mentioned that. You mentioned something earlier, Alyssa, which was really interesting to me, you mentioned that we all have biases, would you be able to explain or give an example of what a bias is, and why it’s actually the point is not to deny that you have a bias, but we all have them. And that by appreciating that biases are everywhere, how we can then start to move forward from how harmful they can be, would you be able to give us a bit of background about about biases and what they are?

A: Yeah, absolutely. So I think one bias that I see a lot is around things that we have in common. So one thing I’ve notice is what we kind of phrase is ‘affinity biases’. So you might say I have an affinity for a certain thing, I like a certain thing, right, or I’m in a certain group.

 class=
hustlecrew.co

And in terms of how I see this playing out, is I’ve noticed that before I sort of started working for myself, and you know, doing consulting across companies, I was doing more in house type roles. And whenever I was in interviewing rooms, I would, you know, look up the person that was going to be interviewing me (a little light stalking on LinkedIn) and kind of get a sense of them, and then maybe touch on things I know about them and build rapport quickly. But I sometimes found this a little bit tricky to do, especially if the people interviewing me, were really, really, really different from me, for example, culturally, right? Maybe they have a different accent to me. People are always pulling me up on having a funky accent probably from all of these moves or, you know, maybe they lived in a different place. Maybe they’re also a different gender, maybe they’re also a different culture. So one of the things I would often try to have an affinity with them was around school. And it occurred to me recently when I was looking through my CV that a large percentage of CEOs I’ve worked with, went to the same university as me. And I realised this isn’t a coincidence, right? I mean, London School of Economics, flashy, flashy, snobby school, it helps when you name drop it, but some of those jobs I got, because, you know, they actually those companies release their job adverts to that network. You know, oftentimes if there’s a founder that comes from a certain community or comes from a certain school or certain MBA programme, whatever it is, especially, I think, in tech, where there are some companies where, you know, everybody went to Stanford or everybody went to MIT, and it can be like, so microscopically specific. But yeah, so I realised that one or two of the jobs I had gotten were because they exclusively advertise to that network. So it wasn’t like I found the job by chance. And even for things for roles that I found outside of that network, I was always very careful to bring up the one affinity, I felt like I had in common with the interviewer or with the CEO, like, “Oh, I see, we both went to…” and I tried to like trump up some stories about my time there, even if we were there in different decades, so try to have something in common with this person who’s grown up in a life so different from mine. And I remember talking to other friends of mine, about like, what they do, and they were like, “Oh, well, I tend to have so many things in common with the people that interview me”.  And I thought about it because, of course in society, due to patriarchy, among other things, men are in a greater position of power. And particularly in our tech workforce, white men are in a greater position of power. And most people interviewing me were like that, and I wasn’t. So if we start thinking about bias in relation to these affinities, I think that can be an easy entry point for us even just reflecting on the bosses you’ve had?

L: Absolutely.

A: Did they all look like you? Or did some of them look like you even looking at your friends? The top couple of people in your WhatsApp or your whole phonebook or your LinkedIn community? Do most people there tend to look like you?

L: Absolutely.

A: Do they tend to have certain more in common with you than they don’t? And then imagine how different that experience might be for me, or somebody different from me kind of coming into your same sector, who can’t lean on those same, those same cultural norms or can’t lean on those same commonalities. So I think that for me, that’s kind of the simplest way to look at a bias. It’s not always coming from a bad place, which is funny thing to say, these are things that we, we do so naturally, that we that’s to your point, you know, about them being everywhere, we almost don’t realise that we’re that we’re doing it even just thinking about who you sit next to, on the train, do you only sit next to the darkest person, if it’s the last seat left? I mean, this is just transport. But I see it all the time people making these decisions; who do we see as being more dangerous? Who are we more likely to try to serve first in a shop, right? Who are even more comfortable with? Typically, it’s people that have something in common with us: an affinity with us, or are more like us, and that people that are less like us, we oftentimes are more likely to avoid and even dislike. So when we think about recruitment, and the way that that plays out, it most people that have hiring power, look a certain way, and spend more time with people that look like them, then it’s kind of no surprise why we have certain barriers to entry like it being harder for other people to access those jobs, when they’re kind of already being judged from the get-go. Something I’ve seen that’s kind of interesting in this space. In terms of recruitment, specifically, as there’s now a series of different pieces of tech, you can use, like platforms and programmes that some companies are embedding to strip out certain biases, so like to remove the name of candidates, so you don’t know their gender or ethnic background, you know, not asking questions about gender or things like that, stripping out things like universities, because we know that there’s also unequal access to universities, let alone elite education. But something i thought was interesting when with some of the companies I’ve worked with, who say that they’re using these techniques, and almost like proving to me like, “Hey, we’re doing the thing, like, isn’t that good?” And I thought, well, I mean, it amazes me that we have to make these solutions in the first place. And part of me was like, well, yeah, that’s, that’s good. If it’s helping you get more diversity in the door. But for me, diversity is one piece of it, right? That’s not mutually inclusive, or synonymous with inclusion, definitely not belonging. Because I wonder if we have to use systems like this, in order to, for example, hire Black women, what’s going to happen to those people when they actually enter?

L: Yes, exactly.

A: So that’s why I think we have to work on these biases, whether we’re putting a programme on top of something to try to like, funnel it out in the beginning of the pipeline, the beginning of the chain, we also have to be doing the work. And that’s learning about things like biases, learning how to understand and then utilise our privilege. Otherwise, I think we’re just going to keep coming up against the same problems.

L: Yeah. 100%! There’s so much to comment about that there. Thank you so much, Alyssa for that really, really clear explanation and and way of approaching it which isn’t so, so shameful because quite often we hear about biases in in a shameful way because many, many are. But for example, I want to bring up two recent examples that I’ve encountered. So one of the TED talks that we have embedded in the course, is by a wonderful woman who, who deals with biases. She’s a very accomplished Black woman. And she was explaining a story where she was on an aeroplane, and travelling to an opportunity to be a keynote speaker about biases. And the aeroplane hit some turbulence. And the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker. And it was a woman saying, “Not to worry, we’ve hit some turbulence, and we’ll be going through it soon”. And this lady, the TED talker, she said that her initial reaction was, “Oh, my God, it’s a woman, I hope she can drive”. She wanted to just start her TED Talk with that because she wanted to show that it was, it was innate, in so many of us, we have these biases. And the first, the first step in the journey is to recognise that and to recognise that we all have them, and then to try and move past them as well. But earlier on, you mentioned intersectionality. So for for those people who who aren’t aware of that, we’ve got a section in the course about intersectionality. But to boil it down to its its most basic kind of form, it’s the understanding that we are all parts of many different communities. Well, you know, most of us are working with people from a range of different cultures, and, you know, nationalities, languages, sexual orientations, religions, you know, races, genders, the list goes on. And the the knowledge that we are members of different communities. As the world is opening up, and we’re becoming more of a sort of Global Village, this is this is such an essential thing to to recognise. until the point at which it doesn’t have to be an issue anymore. Until the point at which people are welcomed and people belonging in any space, no matter what the communities they come from, or they they identify as, this really is important.

And I wanted to quickly bring up the intersectionality between… so we’ve talked about race and gender, especially in tech fields, but to your point about finding an affinity with your interviewers based on having been to the London School of Economics, I saw a wonderful post on LinkedIn a few days ago, where the the poster said, we are doing ourselves an injustice if we don’t talk about socio economic background. So for those of you who don’t know, at the beginning of this year, we had our first black Secretary of State here in Britain. And this is this was a moment of celebration. Wonderful, that’s great. But dig a little deeper. And this particular person had been to Cambridge and Oxford, he had a scholarship, a Kennedy scholarship at Harvard, he went to Eton, like so many of the conservative MPs that we have in our cabinet. And there has to be a moment where you acknowledge that this particular person has done great things in order to get to where he is. And it’s a shame that it’s only he’s only the first Black Secretary of State here in Britain, especially considering our history of multiculturalism. But, you know, he’s still benefited from a lot of privilege. His his parents were extremely wealthy / are extremely wealthy; I’m not sure if they’re still alive. And he, he has been surrounded by money and people with money. While we need to celebrate this milestone, and you know, it’s a long time coming. It’s important to recognise that he still does benefit from privilege. And socio economic background is something that isn’t talked about that much, mainly because it’s, you know, it’s such a… it’s interesting how it’s such a goal for so many of us to have social mobility and to improve the quality of their lives, yet, there’s so much shame that comes along with you know, coming from an underprivileged background.

So dropping those barriers is so important, giving access to education giving access to energy. You know, that’s, that’s something which is really far behind in a lot of areas of the world. These fields are all combined, they’re all interconnected. So dipping your toe in a little bit seems quite scary to begin with. But once you actually start to figure out that everything is connected, the issues with climate change are connected to issues with racism and gender inequality. You know, COVID-19, is connected to so many other issues. So this is there’s no one in the in the world that is not touched, even indirectly, by these issues. And that’s why it’s so important to just start to learn, and to feel, especially with Intrepid English, that wherever you are on the journey, even if you’re right at the beginning, the important thing is that you are trying to learn. And Intrepid English is a judgement free place where you can move forward with your understanding. And it’s incredibly satisfying and incredibly fulfilling when you realise that these big topics, they’re just a conversation away from having a little bit of understanding about them, essentially.

A: Absolutely. Just a conversation away from a little bit of understanding. Yeah, I love that.

L: Going right back to the beginning, where you talk to us about where you come from being in a biracial household, your family comes from different continents. I’d love to know about that. And how specifically have languages informed who you are now in your identity

A: Sure! Well, at home, we were just a typical Anglophone home. My dad never spoke to me in his language, which, now that I’m older, and hopefully a little bit wiser, I feel like is a great, great shame. And my mom did speak to me and her language. So she’s South Walian, and a lot of us don’t necessarily speak Welsh, so nor does she and nor does our family over there. So yeah, we were always just speaking English at home. But I think because of the environments they raised us in like, namely, like our access to travel, like our mobility in that way, and living in different countries, I was always around a lot of different languages. Part of it was access. But when I hear people talking in different languages, like my ears, almost li