How 'Diversity and Inclusion' preserves inequalities in Australian Workplaces: A critique and re-imagining

The RMIT Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRIGHT) welcomes Professor Alison Pullen, for her public lecture, 'how 'Diversity and Inclusion' preserves inequalities in Australian Workplaces: A critique and re-imagining'. This will be co-hosted with the Centre for Organisations and Social Change (COSC).

Despite decades of equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws, gender equality policies, and diversity and inclusion strategies targeting organisational inequality, there has been little change in outcomes for the workforce labelled as diverse. Drawing on fieldwork in three Australian organisations, Prof. Pullen suggests the lack of progress towards equality might not just be caused by the persistence of inequality or dependent on the good intentions of organisational leaders but also linked to how equality is understood and enacted. Informed by Joan Acker's 'inequality regimes' and Herbert Marcuse's 'repressive tolerance', Professor Pullen identifies the culturally organised sets of practices, processes and structures that perpetuate inequality that fall under the banner of diversity and inclusion as 'repressive equality regimes'. She illustrates how such diversity and inclusion interventions stand in the way of progress, and concludes that this is because they repress the actual political meaning of equality from being articulated and achieved. Finally, Prof. Pullen will explore the implications of this critique, re-imagining productive approaches for research and practice.

Professor Alison Pullen is a feminist researcher in organisation studies. Using feminist philosophy and theory, she has recently written on affective solidarity and activism, feminine leadership, corporeal ethics and domestic violence. The purpose of this work is to bring about fundamental changes to pervasive gender oppressions both in organisations and society more generally. Alison was recently awarded the British Academy of Management Research Medal and inducted as Fellow of the BAM College. Alison has recently ended her term as Editor of Gender, Work and Organization and looks forward to writing more!

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