How are you promoting diversity in the workplace?
Check out today's Question of the Day.
“I think that’s very important. I think the biggest thing is the idea that a team should be diverse. And then I think you have to kind of look in your own microenvironment in terms of how you can improve diversity. Because diversity is obviously very different where I live in Philadelphia versus where I’m going to start practice in Omaha, Nebraska. So, diversity can take many different forms, walks of life, race, gender, everything. I think mostly just trying to have as diverse of a team as possible is one of the most important things as well as understanding the underlying things that you have to work against to have a diverse team, whatever they may be.”
Jared Schober, MD
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
“I’m at the university of Washington and we have a diversity and inclusion committee that meets monthly and tackles the active to-do list of how we are going to improve diversity and inclusion in our institutions: Through mentorship, through reaching out to medical students and bringing more people into the workforce and supporting people who are in it. Lots of different ways.”
Pauline Filippou, MD
Seattle, Washington
“I think that the movement now in our field is to make this a more open discussion. I think diversity in the past has been neglected by many in our field and now with the recent events in the news, we’ve done a much better job in doing implicit bias training within our own department and making this an active discussion rather than sweeping it under the rug. And I think the move forward is a positive change for us.”
Minh Pham, MD
Chicago, Illinois
“I come from Italy, so it’s a bit different because in our working place we do promote diversity because we accept people from all over the world as they’re doing fellowships but we don’t have a specific program to be honest because all of the people from the staff are chosen through a national test. So there’s not a particular way to increase it but on the other side we are always happy to host people from all over the world. There are a lot of people from South America, for example, who come to visit us. Most of the time they are from Europe because that’s a closer place. But we don’t have a particular way or particular programs to promote diversity because it’s mainly centralized around our national government.”
Luigi Nocera, MD
Milan, Italy
“I promote diversity through allowing persons from various genders to participate in the workplace. In terms of race—Black, Asian, Caucasian—it doesn’t matter. I’m from Jamaica, so the majority of us are Black, but certainly there’s diversity in terms of gender in the workplace. The majority of persons in the urology department (in Jamaica) are females. So as a female, I don’t feel discriminated against and I don’t think males feel discriminated against, either. So I think there’s good diversity when it comes down to gender.”
Loriann Renee Vaz, MBBS
Kingston, Jamaica