Marjolein Dennissen

131 Discussion This quote pinpoints four important implications of my study for practice: working for equality as a Herculean task (or a crusade), attention needed on organizational practices (and changing the organizational environment), the power of being organized as a bottom-up collective, and the acknowledgment that other organizational stakeholders must be involved in order to work successfully toward organizational equality. Crusades and organizational processes First of all, diversity networks, policy makers, and diversity practitioners should abandon the idea that diversity management is an easy task that is only geared toward numerical representation in management ranks. Diversity management requires more than hoisting rainbow flags on company buildings and diversity-clubs organizing guerilla-gardening workshops. In order to truly come to more equal and inclusive organizations, organizational practices and taken-for-granted norms have to be addressed. The first step in this process is to foster the knowledge and awareness of the role of power in organizations. Sharing insights from the state-of-the-art research could be a starting point. For example, in a course on gender in organizations, I gave a lecture about informal organizational processes that contribute to inequality in organizations. I highlighted the role of humor and how seemingly innocent jokes can be detrimental for equality and serve to perpetuate the status quo. A member of the LGBT network was present as guest speaker and complemented the theoretical perspective with a personal story about how homophobic jokes at work kept him in the closet for many years. This combination of theoretical knowledge with the lived experiences of employees can make clear how organizational practices possibly sustain inequality and exclusion. In addition, the network member also noted how the lecture made him realize that in his own organization, the diversity officer was not appointed because of his comprehensive knowledge about the topic of diversity. He reckoned that a presentation about these inequality-producing organizational processes would be useful to open up discussion with several organizational stakeholders (e.g., diversity officers, managers) about more effective diversity management. In this lecture, I also used my three-level framework to emphasize that organizational equality is more than individual career advancement alone. As such, my three-level framework can be used as an assessment tool for practitioners, policy makers and diversity networks to address multiple levels of organizational equality . The framework would enable practitioners and policy makers to make more informed choices in their design and implementation of diversity management. Moreover, it would allow practitioners to explicitly interrogate the current diversity management practices. For instance, do diversity trainings in the organization focus on “fixing” individuals or do they also address the implicit and taken-for-granted organizational norms? In a similar way, diversity networks can use the framework to assess on which level they can possibly contribute to organizational equality. For example, how do the events they intend to organize address organizational practices of inclusion?