Leadership Forum: Behavioural Approaches to Diversity

Dolly Chugh

Associate Professor, Management and Organizations, Stern School of Business, New York University; author, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias (HarperBusiness, 2018)

ONE CONCEPT THAT I DISCUSS in my work is ‘ordinary privilege’. Think about an aspect of your identity that you rarely have to think about. For example, as a straight woman, I can go for months without ever thinking about that, because I am not discriminated against or put in danger due to homophobia and bigotry. I chat freely about my husband at work, my medical benefits are never in question, and being legally married was never something I had to fight for.

That part of your identity is what I call ordinary privilege, and we can extrapolate this to different contexts. It could be that you are a native speaker of the language spoken in your environment; that you’re white in an environment where that is the norm; or that you are physically able to do things that some people aren’t. I can list a dozen aspects of my identity that I never have to think about; as well as others — like my religion, skin colour and gender — that I do need to think about often, both in my community and workplace.

Here’s an analogy that I learned from the work of racial justice educator : When I go jogging,