---
title: "Too Black To Be White, And Too White To Be Black"
episode: 78
date: 2023-09-07
guest: "Holly Straker-Humphreys"
canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/78-too-white-to-be-black-and-too-black-to-be-white
audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-078/audio.mp3
---

# Too Black To Be White, And Too White To Be Black

Holly Straker-Humphreys reflects on growing up as a mixed-race woman in predominantly white spaces, and the long process of becoming comfortable “in the middle” of two worlds. She shares how subtle signals—especially around Afro hair, media representation, and workplace norms—shaped her sense of identity and belonging, even without overt racism. From there, the conversation widens into what inclusion looks like in practice at work. Holly talks about the importance of community, mentoring and finding managers and peers who amplify your voice, alongside the pressures that come with being “the only one in the room.” Joanne and Holly explore psychological safety, the fear of getting it wrong, and how inclusion professionals can create spaces where leaders can learn without defensiveness while still being challenged. They also critique common organisational approaches to DEI, including over-reliance on employee resource groups and token “exec sponsors” without the infrastructure, strategy, metrics and shared leadership accountability to make change stick. The episode closes with reflections on the emotional toll of inclusion work, the need for resilience and support networks, and how both personal lived experience and organisational systems have to shift if inclusion is to move beyond performative activity.

## Chapters

- 00:01:56 — Struggling with Identity: Growing up as Mixed Race
- 00:08:13 — The Psychological Effects of Subtle Hair Discrimination
- 00:12:33 — The Responsibility of a Woman of Colour in Senior Corporate Roles
- 00:18:22 — Superwoman mum inspires Holly's drive for success
- 00:26:43 — Perspective Shift: How Socioeconomic Status Changed Everything
- 00:33:41 — EDI professionals discuss limitations of common strategies
- 00:40:30 — Balancing Business Case with Personal Values in Opportunities
- 00:45:06 — Reciprocal mentoring leads to corporate inclusivity success
- 00:50:24 — Being an inclusion professional: The mental toll
- 00:56:48 — Subscribe now for future episodes of Inclusion Bites

## FAQs

### What is the role of socioeconomic status in inclusion conversations?

Socioeconomic status is a crucial factor that often gets overlooked in inclusion conversations. It can significantly impact opportunities and access to resources for individuals from marginalized backgrounds. Understanding and addressing socioeconomic disparities is essential for creating a more inclusive society.

### How can I educate myself about different experiences and perspectives?

It is crucial for everyone, regardless of their background or identity, to educate themselves about different experiences and perspectives. Listening to podcasts, reading books, following diverse voices on social media, and engaging in meaningful conversations with people from diverse backgrounds can help broaden your understanding and empathy.

### How can cancel culture impact mental health?

The noise and fear surrounding issues like cancel culture can have a significant impact on mental health. It's important to have a release valve and engage in discussions about different topics to alleviate the constant pressure and anxiety.

### How can Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) professionals be better supported?

DEI professionals should be recognized in the same way as HR professionals. DEI needs its own voice in business reports, and the industry needs better training and support to become more tactical and strategic in achieving meaningful change.

### How can diversity initiatives be effective without reinforcing negative perceptions?

Diversity initiatives can do more harm than good if not approached correctly. It is essential to implement initiatives authentically and involve the entire leadership team in advocating, modeling the right behaviors, and taking ownership for driving change within organizations.

### How can employee resource groups contribute to inclusivity?

Employee resource groups provide a safe space for people facing similar challenges to come together, find their community, and provide informal mentoring. They can help individuals feel supported and empowered while advocating for necessary changes within the workplace.

## Transcript

Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood, and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites Podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people. I simply had the conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to Jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk that's SEE Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places, so plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 78 with the title Too White to Be Black and Too Black to Be White. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Holly Straker Humphreys. Holly describes herself as an inclusion leader and when I asked Holly to describe her superpower, she said that her strange talent is for writing effective emails and complaints to companies. Her best achievement was an email to the CEO of Dyson to challenge them on how they perpetuated idealizations of Western beauty in the way they talked about their hair care products and stigmatised Afro hair as a problem. Hello, Holly, welcome to the show. Hi, Joanne. Thank

Holly Straker-Humphreys: you so much for having me. I sound like a bit of a loser, don't I? No, not at all. We've known each other

Joanne Lockwood: a few years now and I would never put you in any category like that, so, no, you're an amazing and wonderful person, so no, not at all. So holly, this episode isn't titled too White to Be Black and Too Black To Be White. Why, does that mean something to you?

Holly Straker-Humphreys: Yeah, I'm turning 30 this year. Wow. Yeah, I need to get myself on board with that. And I would say it's probably only the last two, three, four years where I felt truly comfortable in being me and truly comfortable in knowing who I am, what I stand for, my identity. So I guess if we take that right back to the beginning and maybe why I wasn't comfortable. So I am mixed race. I am half white, so my dad is white British, and my mum is of Beijing descent, so from Barbados. That's where my mom's family is from. And I've grown up in North Leeds, which is a relatively affluent area in Leeds. Quite a middle class area. Attended predominantly white schools throughout my childhood. And I think, looking back, you only know what you know. Right? So I guess that was just the environment that I was used to, but there was probably always something that made me feel like, why aren't I just fitting in here? And it's not that. I had loads of great friends, I had an amazing childhood. Like, I was like serial packet nuclear family, so I could not complain about any of my experiences. I never had any particularly negative experiences around the way that I looked or my identity, it was just something inside me just didn't always click, probably, particularly when I was older. And then if you flip to more of the black side of my identity, I have a massive big Beijing Caribbean family and we have super strong family values. There's a lot of Sunday get togethers around food and it'll be a Sunday night at 06:00 and everyone's dancing in the kitchen. We have such good, positive energy in our family. Like my family is everything. But we often get comments. So me and my brother around our accents, how we speak, where we lived, like ingest from our family, we're very comical family. We'll make jokes out of each other a lot. But I guess that's where the sentiment of two white to be black and two blacks to be white came from. You just didn't quite fit in either community. And growing up and even where I am now. I think it takes you a long time when you are of mixed heritage to really understand how to be you happily in the middle and how you can appreciate and value both sides of your identity or multiple sides of your identity but still feel like you belong somewhere and find your people. So yeah, I just have a lot of memories of going to visit my white grandparents in the countryside and sitting in a countryside pub and me and my brother being the only non white people and my mum as well, and then going to visit my mum's parents in Hare Hills, which is quite an ethnically diverse area in Leeds, and just feeling, oh, this isn't quite what I'm used to. So it was just almost two worlds coming together and where do I fit in the middle of it? So, yeah, that's how I describe where that's come from. I think you described yourself

Joanne Lockwood: as feeling you have a see of privilege because of maybe your accent, because of your barely light brown skin. You feel you have benefited from some of the characteristics as well as the affluent area you grew up in. Oh, God. Yeah. I

Holly Straker-Humphreys: think I straighten my hair now. I think particularly, probably because I work in a corporate environment, it just feels better. I wish I didn't feel that way, but it does. The way that I speak doesn't sound particularly different to other people in a corporate environment. Obviously, as you mentioned, quite light skin. I've always had both my parents went to Diversity, so I've always had that kind of access and education and I guess aspiration from them as well. So there's so much this is why it's quite a strange there's a lot at play here, because if you took my life on paper, it's been wonderful, but still, that sense of belonging was missing for quite some time. So, yeah, it's a complex one because I've had brilliant childhood, amazing access to opportunities, I've been able to excel my career, but still, there was something that was always missing for me in terms of really understanding and feeling comfortable in who I was. You've mentioned your

Joanne Lockwood: hair a couple of times. What, once in your superpower about the complaint to Co Dyson, how much pressure do you feel that you're self imposing around the way your hair looks? Or is there a genuine discrimination against Afro style hair in the workplace, in society?

Holly Straker-Humphreys: Well, I guess you don't have to look far in the research to find, yes, there is, in terms of how people are treated at school, being discriminated, put in exclusion for certain natural Afro hairstyles. And then similarly at work, people have been directly discriminated against for how their hair is. But I guess for me, I am lucky to have not experienced either of those things. I guess for me it's been a lot more subtle, but I know from some research that's been done around how we experience issues around race, sometimes the subtle things can be more damaging psychologically because it's harder to pinpoint, harder to understand. It is. It all in my head? Is it just me? So, like, going back to being at school, we used to get on the bus and go to swimming with the whole class and everyone was like, oh, washing the hair after swimming. And it's like, oh, no way. Afro hair wash as a child is a two to three hour activity on a Sunday night, usually with your mum screaming, smacking you with the hairbrush. And it kind of just started to lay these little seeds around, feeling dirty or not feeling as other kids could just go in the shower, wash their hair, come out and I don't think anyone ever actually said anything not explicit, but it just started with that. And then when you lay over, kind of like skin tone and things like that, I think I just subconsciously started to build this slightly negative perception. And then you move into like at lunchtime, let's all braid our hair. And it's like, oh, no, the bubble stuck in my hair. You can't just get that brush through my hair because it will snap. It's just those little subtle things. And then I think, as I've got older, the programmes that you watch on television, the adverts that you see, you never see hair that looks like mine in a positive way. It's always all the adverts on TV are antifreeze combat. That frizz smoothen your hair. Growing up at my age, I'd never really seen anyone have hair like mine and it be really appreciated, maybe apart from Melby and the Spice Girls. Now I'm thinking back on it, and I do idolise her quite a lot. She has fab hair,

Joanne Lockwood: doesn't she? I've always been envious of her hair. And anybody with that kind of real bouncy, big Afro, e, kind of curly, is very powerful. I think movie stars with it and it's a very power cut. I

Holly Straker-Humphreys: think and I guess I could probably see that, but for the environment that I was in, it just didn't feel right. And I know when I started going to job interviews and I would always straighten my hair, I just did not feel comfortable. And this is why, I think, looking at the impact of inclusion across and how it's embedded in societal structures is so powerful, because nobody as a child was ever explicitly racist to me, said there's anything wrong with the colour of my skin. I had a brilliant childhood, like, we're surrounded by plenty of black people from my family, but still there was something that just did not make me feel proud of the way that I looked, particularly in terms of my hair, powerful. So the work you're doing now is

Joanne Lockwood: in corporate environments around the inclusion, belonging, dei, whichever acronym you prefer. Do you think your heritage, your mixed heritage and your lived experience gives you an additional superpower of insight into that environment? I think

Holly Straker-Humphreys: so, yeah. I think I have always seen myself as because I've had that kind of socioeconomic privilege, I've managed to get myself to a point in my career I actually never thought I would. And so I feel quite a heavy responsibility as a woman of colour, in quite a senior corporate role, to use my power, position, experience to uplift others who maybe just do not get that opportunity because of the networks they exist in, access to financial resources, even just general role models and aspirations. Like, the famous thing is hard to be what you can't see. I know people can feel quite uncomfortable, and rightly so, of being that token black person that's on every career site or every recruitment poster. And I get that, like, we shouldn't be there. However, I've always been quite comfortable in being that person because I know that for me, that would have made a difference, seeing someone like me. So I almost see it as a bit of a duty and responsibility, not in a negative way. I feel quite empowered by being able to do that and I do quite a lot of mentoring, specifically people from minority backgrounds. And it's a consistent theme around just not quite feeling like you fit in confidence, identity. And once you can help connect people with others like them, or just shift that mindset around, your uniqueness can be your superpower and get you to places that you thought it might hold you back. I've seen people progress massively, both in their careers, but personally, just in terms of confidence, values, understanding who they are. And I think it took me a while in my first corporate jobs to understand that my different perspective wasn't weird or wrong, it actually was really valuable. And as soon as I started to use my voice in that way, I was like, oh, wow, maybe this could get me somewhere. And the more confident I did with that, the more confident I was with that, the faster my career excelled. But I guess you've got to work to get to that point. It's not as easy to just turn up to work one day and be like, right, I'm a constant black female, let me go and take on the world and give all my ideas. I really had to find my people at work, get that kind of girl gang around me to support and empower me and uplift my voice, find managers that really truly believe me and pushed me, and find other people who looked like me to share the experiences with and keep pushing ourselves. So, yeah, there's a lot of work and you are working against systems and structures as well. We can't discount that. But I have seen people get there and it's an amazing thing and that's what drives me in my role against all the crap that we also have to deal with. Joanne, you'll know, as an inclusion specialist. Yeah, just

Joanne Lockwood: picking up a few things you said there you had to get your girl gang together to give you that confidence, to give you that boost and to sort of almost like challenge the incumbent or challenge the monoculture. And as you were saying, I thought, well, all that's there already is the boy gang, so it's not like they've done anything different. They've got their own tribe, they've got their own boy gang, their own white boy clan, and they inherently have this superpower about them because they're amplifying each other and it's just the way things have been, because that's been the incumbent culture, if you like. So you're doing no different, getting your own amplifier, supporters and mentors around you that are going to look after your needs. And I often find that it's not a fault of the privileged people who have incumbent, they're just unaware that that's how they're operating and they're not aware that people don't have the same access to the opportunity because they just see the opportunity, it's in the air they breathe. Yeah. You only know what

Holly Straker-Humphreys: you know and what your experience is, so why would you think any different? And the more I talk to

Joanne Lockwood: people in the kind of the dei space, inclusion space, you realise that most people have impostor syndrome. Most people have worry about not being good enough, whether it's around their identity, whether it's about their capability. And so what you said there is often we think about the mindset of the we call it the marginalised candidate, or the marginalised person or the minority person, whatever that terminology really means. It's kind of a crass way of describing it. But the mindset of people who aren't the default tends to be one that impostor syndrome exists, or the access to the networks that exists, the access to information doesn't exist. And it's really hard to break that down and create those support structures in organisations to empower, as you're saying, those mental programmes those fast track programmes. Those are awareness programmes. Yeah,

Holly Straker-Humphreys: completely. And what you were just talking about there brings my mum to mind, actually, who my mom is a little bit of a superpower within a superwoman within herself, and I carry some of her within me in terms of she grew up predominantly in Hair Hills, which, as I mentioned, was an ethnically diverse area. My grandparents had moved over from Barbados, so part of that generation of coming over from the Caribbean. But my mom was kind of found her way in a lot of quite white environments. So she worked in a university, she went to university, worked in a lot of corporate organisations. And she's always said she loves to be that only black woman in the room, almost to prove everything wrong, prove the status quo that I'm here and I can do this. And I think I carry that a little bit. I almost can get a little bit of a thrill of walking into a meeting room, meeting a new executive, and I'm not only a mixed race woman, but also I look quite young. I still get ID for paracetamol in the supermarket and I think that's 16. So there we go. And I've got a northern accent. My voice sounds relatively young as well, and people kind of look at me and at the start, they're not really listening. You can tell with body language and then by the end, they're like, oh, shit, she maybe knows what she's talking about. And I get a bit of a thrill from that in that prove people wrong. And I think you can take a lot of fire and drive from working against some of the systems that we have in society. So I've definitely got that from my mom. And she'll listen to this and she'll love this because she loves getting a mention. Yeah, you're so right. And

Joanne Lockwood: I think when you have a powerful voice in the room that has a different perspective, it's hard not to listen, although some people choose not to listen, but a lot of people do listen. And I hear what you're saying about being the only person in the room. I often am the only person in the room who's trans. And if I see another trans person in the room, I get a bit jealous, go, Hang on a minute, this is my space, I want to be the only person, I want to be the one kind of pathiva sort of thing. But, no, it's also from psychological safety point of view, it's really, really hard sometimes to know you're the only person in the room, know that you're going to end up having certain questions or certain conversations with people all the time. They'll want your opinion on something. Can I not be transferred one day? Do I have to talk about being a black woman all the time? Can I just not talk about being something else? There is a lot of pressure for you to be representative, isn't there? Yeah, completely. And I think there's

Holly Straker-Humphreys: also that pressure that a lot of people feel of when you are the first and only one, if you don't do an amazing job, like, have you ruined that perception of the whole community? So you carry a lot of that weight as well because we know that that's how people think, oh, we've got the first black Prime Minister, for example. If they're not great, then that changes the perception of the whole black community and whether they can do a good job of being a Prime Minister, for example. So I think you carry a lot of that weight as well, to really prove you're not just there for you, you're there for all of your people.

Joanne Lockwood: Yes, I know what you mean. I suppose I'm guilty of it. If I see somebody else who's trans or nonbinary or gender diverse, misrepresenting my view of the world, I think, hang on a minute, you don't speak for me, you're damaging my brand.

Holly Straker-Humphreys: Yeah, I get that completely, but I guess that's just how society and people, we've lumped everyone together under these labels, so that's how it plays out. So

Joanne Lockwood: I often hear from people one of the biggest barriers to inclusion is the fear of getting it wrong. Either doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, causing a microaggression inadvertent. So do you scare people by being here?

Holly Straker-Humphreys: I hope not. I think I've always had feedback and I'm only going based on this, that I can often break down some of that fear by providing people a bit of a safe space to come with challenges, perceptions, ideas and not place judgement, but help them appreciate the other perspective. So, particularly in my last role, I worked so closely with our entire extended leadership team and exact leadership team and built really close relationships with each of them to be that safe space. So if they're going on a company town hall and they don't know, should they say BAME or should they not, like I'm the place that they can come and test out those test out the ways that they should shouldn't speak their ideas, what they're thinking, how to approach things. But I completely get the fear. Like, the way that social media can come and take you down and cancel you now is wild. And I get it because people are tired, people are angry, people have been through this stuff over and over again, so I get that side of things. However, I think it's not helpful. Like, we need these people if we want to see things change, like, we have to work with them. So I always take the approach of building close relationships with these types of people to be able to understand their fears, understand what's been their life experience. Because sometimes people hold things that have happened to them that they feel are just as important as an issue around race, for example. And they haven't necessarily had the education around how some of those issues are systemic and ingrained in society. So they can't understand why that maybe holds a little more weight around a certain conversation or has more impact for an individual. So I definitely like to say that I hopefully don't make people fearful. However, I think on the flip side, in roles like ours, you also do have to be ready to make people feel a little uncomfortable. You've got to call things out, you've got to challenge them and it's quite hard to find that balance, I think. So yeah.

Joanne Lockwood: An interesting one, interestingly. Use the word perspective and I think that's really, really valuable. It's about understanding a perspective. We often want to be right. Wars and disagreements and divorces and whatever often started by the desire or the need to be right, whereas we don't spend enough time understanding why somebody thinks something or what their lived experience is. And the example I often use is we go into the voting booth with a little bit of paper and our stubby little pencil and we tick the box based on the candidate that we believe is going to be the best person. And we don't tick the same box, we all tick the box that resonates with us. And it's not that we're right or wrong, it's just that we have a perspective on why we believe that person could do the best job. And it's so important in my view, not to argue about outcomes but discuss perspectives, because we don't have to agree, but we can understand why someone thinks something. And that's a hard challenge. I'm so with

Holly Straker-Humphreys: you on that and I think one of the biggest fundamental change in my own perspective. So growing up in quite a middle class environment, I used to enjoy watching crappy things on Channel Four and Channel Five around, what are they called? Like benefits fraudsters and all of those ridiculously dramatised TV shows, obviously that then fuels your mind full of crap around perceptions around these groups of people that I maybe didn't come across in day to day life because of the environment that I was in. And then I met Jack, who is my now husband, who grew up in a completely different socioeconomic environment, so grew up in the more deprived areas of Leeds and just spending time with him, hearing his experiences about growing up. And why would a young twelve year old male smash up a bus stop with a brick? Or why would people be on benefits and not be able to get a job because their mental health is so poor, because of the poverty that they're living in. Just understanding that perspective honestly changed my life. And it was quite weird because on paper you would see Jack as a CIS straight white male and me as a woman of colour and you would assume certain things about how we might fare in society when actually it was quite the opposite. And I think socioeconomic status is like the missing piece when we talk about inclusion because it's such a big driver and it intersects across all the different demographics, but it always seems to be missing in inclusion conversations. So I know that growing up as a moody, strappy teenager, watching all of those crappy TV shows, and I'd be mouthing off on Facebook statuses about an engaging conversations about certain groups and then meeting Jack, I was like, oh my gosh, wow. And interestingly, he's had the same experience understanding the lives of middle class people. Not everyone's, I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, not everyone's a middle class who doesn't give a shit about who doesn't care about issues that he might have experienced, or just because they drive a certain car with a nice house doesn't mean they're an idiot. So it's been a really interesting experience to bring our world together and I think we are both better people because of it. And I also feel like I can do my job so much better because I personally have gone through a process of shifting and changing my perspective. So when I need to work with leaders to help them understand the experiences of women within their business and the challenges that they might face in their career and how that particular leaders actions and behaviours might be impacting, that like helping them shift that perspective. I feel like I can go about that in quite an effective way because I've personally gone through that. And even as a mixed race female, I've got a couple of hidden disabilities that I'll throw in there as well. It does not make me perfect and does not make me be able to be an advocate for all of inclusion. No matter who we are, everybody has to educate themselves because we only know our worlds and what we know. So, yeah, I think that was also quite a profound experience for me in terms of perspective.

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I completely agree that we speak through our own lens and our own privilege and our own characteristics, our own lived experience. And as a di professional, I think we both learned over the years that to know the lens through which we speak and ensure that we do the work, we put the hard graft in to understand other perspectives and don't end up with face value. And I'm a great believer in talking about cultural intelligence and it is about that lifelong learning to get perspectives of people. And, as you say, the way the media demonise the Tories as a class, or the benefits goungers, or the striking nurses, we want to sell clicks and media and we're trying to influence and the media works on divide and conquer, as does the government, I think. Exactly. It's understanding what the game of play is and choosing not to play that game and try and navigate through it. Exactly. We're just playing into the

Holly Straker-Humphreys: hands of what they want to create when actually the only people losing out are as human beings. Yeah. I mean, you really got to look at what?

Joanne Lockwood: Reality shows like I'm a Slave to Get Me Out Of Here and Love Island. They're trying to pitch you against each other and they deliberately create scenarios to create tension because there's lots of studies. If you put humans in a group, the conflict doesn't always arise. Most people will just get on with each other and you build a community. So unless you put a disruptor in there, there's no telly. It's just ten people getting on with each other, looking out for each other and having a bit of a laugh. So you've got to put Matt Hancock in the jungle to create that disruption. You got to starve people and make them fight for food in order to get their animal instincts out, because by default, they don't exist. And as a society, we would get on with each other a lot better if it wasn't being stoked by the media and sometimes by the government creating the division.

Holly Straker-Humphreys: Yeah. I always say money rules the world.

Joanne Lockwood: It does influence and power. Yeah. People wanting more of it. And even in the utopian world, there's always somebody who rules the world, isn't there, that keeps the utopia intact. What do you think the biggest challenges that organisations face? I know that when we worked together at your previous company that you had some very forward thinking ways of measuring and embedding systems and process around EDI and inclusion into the organisation. What are organisations failing to do, if you like? Now.

Holly Straker-Humphreys: I think some of my views and experiences might be quite different to what other EDI professionals might think. But if you typically look at some of the reading around what are the best things that organisations can do to embed or start a dei strategy? It's always get some employee resource groups together and get an exec sponsor. Like they're the two things that will often come up. And I think with that first one around employee resource groups, there is so much power in bringing people together who face similar challenges to have each other's back, informally mentor each other, like just finding your people, finding your community, as I've talked about. However, what I don't quite agree with is then putting it on that marginalised community to then fix the problems that they experience in the workplace for free on top of their day job. That then probably takes time away from their day job. Meaning they maybe then aren't able to perform at their best enrol and then how does that impact their career? And sometimes with limited budget as well, and also limited experience in skill and knowledge, in some of the things that are really needed to make a change, like people policy or recruitment or change management, all of those. Things. And I think we've kind of just in a lot of places, bucketed dei into this nice thing to do. And if we've got these groups and we're talking about it and we've got something that we can put on our career site or in our annual report, then that's fine. But is that really going to drive the change that we want to see? No. And with the second point I made around exec sponsors, they can have equally so much power if you've got a senior voice at the table driving this piece of work, like, you can make phenomenal change. However, what about the rest of the leadership team? Isn't it just part of every single one of their roles to be an advocate, an ally, a sponsor, be role modelling the right behaviours and actions, setting the tone for what the organisation should be? And I think it's very easy to put all the responsibility for that onto one individual, rather than how are they all taking that into their everyday teams, departments, lives, job? And are they collectively as a leadership team, talking about how dei impacts the business goals? Or is it just because we've got that one person that goes to the monthly meeting with the employee resource groups, then we're good, it's just not good enough. And you go to Joanne, you will know this. You go to so many webinars and talks and people sit and their first question they ask is, Why are we still here? Why haven't we seen any change? And it's because we're doing a rubbish job. Like we're not putting the right resource expertise, strategy metrics around what we want to see. And I think equally, if you look wider, we know that the workplace is just one piece of the inclusion jigsaw. Like we're not getting the right support from the government around, for example, shared parental leave, or looking at increasing statutory paternity pay so that we can reshift the balance around parental responsibilities and how that impacts the careers of women. Like we're not as a wider society, we say these things and we stand up and we say we care about inclusion and then our actions do the opposite. So I think it's something that every CEO would probably stand up on a town hall or they'd get asked in a slider, is it a priority? And they'd say, yes, but are they necessarily putting the infrastructure behind that to make it work and really, truly realising the benefits and potential that they could get within their organisation if they seriously address their challenges? No. So I think as a society we can do a lot better with this, but where's the appetite to do that?

Joanne Lockwood: Do you think that many organisations and I don't want to generalise as EI professionals, we should never generalise or stereotype. I'm conscious about that. Do you think that a lot of EDI professionals, staff networks end up being this sounds quite derogatory coffee and cake on a Friday. Hashtag celebrants, event organisers, bean counters. How many of this, how many of that have we got? Where are our pay gaps? They're more operational and backward looking rather than strategic and embedded as part of the business. Or how do we get past that?

Holly Straker-Humphreys: Yeah, I think what I do not want to portray here is that staff networks haven't achieved amazing things, because I know in some organisations, wow, they've really changed the game and still do. But whether it's right for them to be doing that on top of their role unpaid is my biggest bugbear here. And I think you're right. I've seen examples of places I've worked where that's what staff networks have become in terms of events and comms driven, which that absolutely has a place like. We need that awareness, we need those safe spaces for people to come together. And those events and things that people organise can sometimes be the catalyst for a lot of change. What I'm saying is we need the rest of the infrastructure to really drive the change around, applying a di lens over an entire people strategy, looking at where it fits into the business goals, picking apart all the systems and processes, having the right resource and education in place to do that. So I think they absolutely do have a place. It's just we're missing some of the other stuff that can really help drive and get us to the outcomes that we want to see.

Joanne Lockwood: So is it all about the business case or is it always about doing the right thing for people? We see these polarised debates on LinkedIn and other platforms about people who are evangelical about it's not the business case. You can't put the business case before people, other people go, no, hang on a minute, it's got to be the business case. Where do you sit on the fence on that one? Interesting one.

Holly Straker-Humphreys: I probably put myself in the middle because, like, my personal values, I am very strongly aligned in terms of people getting access to opportunities and being uplifted and organisations having a bit of responsibility to fix the problems that the world has created. So that's where I'd sit on that side. On the business case side, I don't think that should be the single driver. However, I do think there is so much opportunity that businesses are just not tapping into because they haven't got this broad perspective that actually those communities can also benefit from. So, for example, if we take accessibility, like if organisations were thinking about accessibility first, the disabled community would be benefiting more from the products and services that we get in society. So whilst, yes, you don't want money to be the only driver of why we're thinking about the business case, but as a result of that, the communities that we're trying to help can also benefit. So I don't think I'm one or the other, I think it fits quite nicely together. And that's where you mentioned at the beginning around my letter to Dyson. So I wanted to buy the Dyson air wrap. This was a couple of years ago and I was having a read, doing my research, and all of the copy was like, combat your frizzy hair. Or like, I can't remember the exact wording, but it was like, fight, fight, the frizz kind of phraseology. And I was just like, why on earth am I going to invest? Like, this hairdryer is not cheap. Why am I going to invest the hundreds of pounds in something that's, like, contradicting my identity? Like, it just doesn't make sense, it's a racist. So, like, you like but I really wanted the hairdryer, so that's why I wrote the letter, in terms of, like, just offering my perspective. And to be fair, they were great. I got invited to speak to the marketing director, they changed all of the language, so shout out to Dyson. However, it all kind of works together. Like if you're doing the right thing and bringing people into your organisation, giving them opportunities to progress their career, do great work, be innovative, give their ideas, then the business case will speak for itself. But then also that community benefits on the other side of it, because I can buy a hairdryer that really works well in terms of being able to manage my Afro hair. So, yeah, I think you'll probably find me in the middle of that. I'm with you on that. What I always say is, if you think

Joanne Lockwood: about the three dynamics compliance, I e the law, business case and the human factor. I always say if you get the human factor right, the business case and the compliance become they work. You don't have to focus on the business case, you just do the right thing for people and make sure people feel that positive experience and then the business case will fall out of that. And you can easily quantify that by discretionary effort, empty seat costs, retention. All those great things we know comes out of inclusion and belonging that we know we're going to get better from. I forget, frustrated when we see organisations where they maybe hit the maturity model on the dei curve and they still talk about diversity, we got to get more diversity. And then they start thinking about inclusion, they think about belonging, then they think about culture. I always want people to flip it on its head by saying, let's start with culture. We get the culture right, we get our brand values right, we get our employee values right, then our culture comes belonging. I feel aligned with the organisation. If I feel belonging, I'm going to feel included. If I feel included, then there's a place for me. Therefore, the diversity will naturally permeate in that environment. So I think often we see people trying to hire their way out of a diversity problem or we got to do some diverse hiring. And I say, well, going to market is the last thing you do once you've got everything else in the organisation. Otherwise all you're doing is you're bringing new fish into a dirty pond and that's what happens. They don't thrive, they just get finrot and leave. Yeah,

Holly Straker-Humphreys: completely. I know that when we worked together, Joanne, that's exactly what we were doing so we ran your journey to Conscious Inclusion workshops and powerful Allyship workshops top down from our senior leadership team along with giving them the opportunity to get a different perspective. So we did a reciprocal mentoring scheme as well that ran alongside that. So a member of our leadership team was matched with someone from a minority group in the organisation, so that the leadership team member could help uplift the person with their advice from their career and then they'd get to understand more about what life was like at the organisation from a different perspective. And doing those things got us to such a great place and you could feel the change. And then I've moved on from that particular organisation now, but now I know, as I was leaving, you started to see the shifts in percentage increases in particular demographics. And externally, I think people felt the authenticity around the change and we could clearly articulate the things that we had done. To be able to call ourselves well, I didn't think you can ever call yourself 100% inclusive, but to call ourselves an organisation, that's really working towards building an inclusive environment, so I'm so with you on that. And I think it can do so much damage because you will hire all these people from different backgrounds and if you haven't got that environment right, they'll just leave or it'll cause conflict or they won't be able to perform at their best. And then you've proved some of those perceptions right that people might have around diversity isn't actually valuable. It causes challenges and we're just doing it because we need to look good or look a certain way. So I think it can cause more damage than good if you don't go about it in the right way. Yeah, if you've read is

Joanne Lockwood: it Lily Zeng's book deconstructed? Oh,

Holly Straker-Humphreys: I need to order that brilliant. I've got it on

Joanne Lockwood: Audible and I was listening to it on the way I was driving to Manchester the other week, I had about 4 hours in a car each way. It's about a twelve hour book on Audible. And one of the things that struck me and I don't know about you, but I follow them on LinkedIn and often engage with their posts. And one of the things that they talked about was we often worry about having one of everybody, a bit like Noah's Ark. We need one of these, one of those in order to have representation. So we need to have a black person in the room to talk about, et cetera. And what they said was that it's not just about having one of everybody, it's having to trust that the people who are in the room have your back and are thinking about you. So we can't necessarily represent every permutation of intersectionality, but we can trust that the people who are having the conversations have have your back and are considering you and are thinking about you and will talk to you. If they need more information, then that's got to be some of the objective. And I think we often get too engrossed in ticking boxes and bean counting and not building trust and embedding those sort of systems. And I think that was quite sightful. I often talk about trust when we talk about employee engagement service, when we talk about data capture. That's what we can we can almost measure trust, how well people engage with us, do they believe in us? Will they communicate with us? And again, within inclusion belonging, trust is a huge element against psychological safety. Bring your whole self to work. It's about being comfortable with your peers and your colleagues, isn't it?

Holly Straker-Humphreys: Yeah, I really love that, how they've phrased that. Lily Zen is just like the ultimate on LinkedIn. Like anything they say, I'm like, yeah, take that in, write it down.

Joanne Lockwood: She can be a bit Shelty, so I often have to philtre the sheltiness sometimes and often a lecture. But yeah, the message they put out is always helpful, always insightful. I'd advocate anyone follow them if they're on LinkedIn who want to find out more. And I don't often recommend books, but I have it on the shelf behind me and I have it on Audible as well, so I bought it twice. Again. Go back to LinkedIn. This is where I often get the temperature gauge and the thermometer of the world. A lot of di practitioners are tired, they're exhausted, they're working, advanced, but they feel this onslaught of walking through treacle every day. Do you feel that? How do we overcome that? How do we inspire di practitioners? Just brush it off and carry on? I definitely

Holly Straker-Humphreys: feel that and I think you cannot escape it. Either because you log off from work and then you'll put on the news, or there'll be something in a WhatsApp group chat. Because we have so much access to information now, things are being shared so much more, which is a positive thing, but also can be so mentally draining, you physically cannot escape it. And my husband Jack is a family lawyer, he works in care, so kids that have social services involvement. So, like, our dinner table chat is very heavy and you almost see the cycle of what the families he works with, experience and how that plays out in terms of what I see in the working world. So it's everywhere. So, yeah, I definitely feel that. One thing that I will always treasure is a couple of colleagues that I worked with in my previous role. We have a WhatsApp chat called tired and Oppressed. And that's like our little safe space to run or to get advice, because some of the decisions that you have to make in our role, like, they're heavy, they're people's lives, and you could go one way or another. And even as an inclusion professional, I worry about being cancelled, like saying the wrong thing, so that's like my little safe space with a couple of colleagues and then I really have to proactively manage my mental health and how I take care of myself in terms of giving myself space to decompress from some of this. And I think as well, because you're working on it, you're living it, but also, if you're part of a minority group, it's you and your life as well. You experience these things day to day anyway, so it's coming at you from all angles. So I will watch a lot of crappy reality TV after work, just as an escapism. Like, you've got to find your escape or go for a long walk with my dog and just listen to music, or you've just got to have those self care strategies in place because it's a lot, it really is. And you can find yourself in the middle of a spectrum of people who are like the world's two PC. I just want to come to work, do my work and go home. This is ridiculous. Right through to our leadership team should have a black woman, someone who has additional accessibility needs, someone who it should be 50 50 gender split. Like, this isn't good enough. What are you doing? So you're getting attacked from both sides. So it is absolutely a lot. And you've got to be quite resilient in this role, I think. Resilient, but still carry empathy, still be able to challenge. There's so many skills that I've had to learn and develop quite quickly and I think you need a good network of people around you to help you do that, because it is a lot. It is. And that's one

Joanne Lockwood: of the reasons I liked in these podcasts, is you share lots of perspectives with lots of different people around a topic you care passionately around, and it allows you to listen to other people's challenges as well, and other people's perspectives. And it means that it's not just me, everybody else is going through this as well. And it is easy, as you say, that it's too easy to take on your own characteristic and as a champion and then be thwarted by it, be ground down by it. And sometimes you have to have that pressure cooker release valve that says, let it go, I can't fix this and I need to turn the dial. The noise, if you looked at what's going on in the papers at the moment around trans people, it would just push your mental health away. So you got to attenuate it and talk about something else. So, yeah, it is exhausting. I think we also probably need to do as a society or a business community is to recognise Dei professionals in the same way we recognise HR professionals. Maybe maybe the professionalism still hasn't matured yet around. We don't have a body like the CIPD. I'm not saying the CIPD is perfect, but we don't have a dei is different in HR. I don't think it should report to HR or be part of HR. I think we can all have debates about whether talent acquisition, branding, marketing, HR all have this, as you say, cross directorate, Di impact. So Di needs to have its own voice and should be in everyone's report, like health and safety and risk. It should be in everyone's report. And I think we need to help professionalise the industry or the business community and give people support because it's still quite new, it's probably less than ten years old, really. In many cases. A lot of people get into it like they get into recruiting because there was a vacancy and they got it. And I think we better training, better support and move it on from being, as I said earlier, just parties and hashtags. It needs to be more tactical and strategic. That's my soapbox. We've talked for hours over the years and this has been another fascinating conversation to dive a little bit deeper into your own perspective. So how can people get hold of you? If you'd like people to get hold of you, that is. Yeah, I know. That is fine. So

Holly Straker-Humphreys: you can find me on LinkedIn. Holly Streker Humphreys. I'm not a tweeter or anything like that. In fact, that is one of the things that I came off to save my mental health, because it's just way too much. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll be happy to chat to anyone, whether it's just someone who else who works in this industry, I think it's always good to build our network, someone who's thinking about getting into the industry or someone who maybe completely disagrees with everything that I've said. Good perspective. Yeah,

Joanne Lockwood: I completely agree. It's great to be challenged and keep you on your toes. I completely agree. But that's fantastic. And I know we're connected and share insights from time to time as well. So. Thank you, Holly. Also, thank you to you, the listeners, for tuning in, for listening to the end. Thank you. I really appreciate that. If you're not already subscribed, please do subscribe on all the major platforms to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. . I try and release them weekly where I can tell your friends, tell your colleagues, please do share the love. I have a number of other exciting guests lined up that I'm sure you'd be equally inspired by over the next few weeks, months and hopefully year is. Of course, if you think you would like to come on the show inspire people. I'd love to hear from you as I would welcome any comments, feedback and suggestions you may have on how I can improve. So, finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It has been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye bye.