DEI Deconstructed with Lily Zheng

LILY ZHENG (they/them) is a no-nonsense Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion speaker, strategist, and consultant who specializes in creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces through hands-on systemic change. A dedicated change-maker and advocate named a Forbes D&I Trailblazer, 2021 DEI Influencer, and LinkedIn Top Voice on Racial Equity, Lily's work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and NPR. Their most recent book, DEI Deconstructed, centers on accountable and effective practices to achieve DEI outcomes in organizations.

https://lilyzheng.co/home/books

Transcript

Musical Intro: 0:35

There's a whole lot of things I want to tell you about. Adventures dangerous and queer. Some you can guess and some I've only hinted at So please lend me your ear...

Narrator: 1:00

Everyone has a relationship with gender. What's your story? Hello, and welcome to Gender Stories with your host, Dr. Alex Iantaffi.

Alex Iantaffi: 1:08

Hello, and welcome to another episode of gender stories. I know that we say that I'm incredibly excited, but I am because every guest on the show is so special. And today I have the honor to be joined by Lily Zheng, who's an author and also a sought after Diversity, Equity and Inclusion speaker, strategist, and organizational consultant who specializes in systemic change, to turn positive dei intention that diversity, equity and inclusion intentions into positive dei outcomes for workplaces and everyone in them. Lily is a dedicated changemaker, an advocate named at Forbes DNI trailblazer and LinkedIn top voice in racial equity. Lily recognizes the flashy one time training sessions that work and work with organizations dedicated to the time and commitment that is needed to do Diversity, Equity and Inclusion right to undo social inequality and injustice, and create organizational cultures that are rich with collaboration, respect, resilience and innovation. Lilia has been featured in and writes for media outlets, including the New York Times and PR, Harvard Business Review, and HR executive. They are the co author of gender and ambiguity in the workplace. And second book, the ethical sell out their book dei deconstructed, which I think was forthcoming when I was contacted by it's now out, I believe and publish. It's been out for a couple of months, I know really excited, so dei deconstructed your no nonsense guide to doing the work and doing it right. In this book clearly presents a comprehensive set of solutions that hold organizations and their leaders accountable, laying out the path for anyone with any background to become a more effective dei practitioner, Ally and leader. DEI econstructed is being released last November from Berrett Koehler publishers. And then if you want more information about Lily, you can visit their website, which is in the summary of the apps. And also at the end of the episode, we'll talk more about where you can find this work. You can see why I'm so excited. Lily, you've been featured in so many outlets and you do such amazing work. Thank you for coming, and being on gender stories. I really appreciate it.

Lily Zheng: 3:36

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation today.

Alex Iantaffi: 3:40

Thank you. So let's just start with the listeners who don't know anything about the field of diversity, equity and inclusion. And I wonder if you can maybe give just a brief overview of what that means for people who have never encountered kind of dei work.

Lily Zheng: 3:59

I would say dei work is a relatively young field that tries to make organization so think about corporations, universities, nonprofits, you name it into places that are more diverse, right, so they have more representation, they are there. They're better represented by women and people of color and disabled folks, and queer and trans folks more inclusive, and that they're better respectful places to work. People there feel that they're treated fairly people feel a sense of belonging at work, and equitable in that folks are being paid fairly folks are being treated fairly, there's no discrimination, and everyone can thrive in the workplace. These three acronyms, or rather the three letters in the acronym Dei, and you may have seen many of the siblings to this this moniker, which is, you know, deiba deij, right. There's many other different acronyms but essentially, all of it speaks to this ongoing work of making organizations into better places that work for more people.

Alex Iantaffi: 5:16

And that is wonderful, and I love our ideal that sounds. And I know that there have been many critiques as well of the I work and I know as somebody who used to be an academic and employed by universities, I sat personally for many dei sessions. It were actually more traumatizing for those of us who were aware of minoritized identity somewhere in the room. And I know that especially several folks of color really criticized the framework in I feel that in some ways, you know, even the title of your book, DEI deconstructed in some way kind of addresses that to some degree. So can you talk a little bit about how you feel that DEI can work best and really live up to the beautiful vision, right of diversity, equity and inclusion, we want the result we want the vision. And yet sometimes it can feel like a DEI workshop is like a, you know, a checkbox? And employers like, oh, great, we did the DEI training check. We're good. And now we don't discriminate. And that's not how it works, right?

Lily Zheng: 6:29

Absolutely, absolutely. So I'll go ahead and start off by saying, I fully agree with that perspective. In fact, I am. I'm a frequent critic of the DEI space. And it sounds weird given that I'm an active practitioner, and I spend a lot of time doing this work. And so many of the critiques of the EI are absolutely correct, in that a lot of dei work is more about intentions than it is about outcomes. It's more about what training can we deploy? Or what nice words can we say in a speech and less about how can we actually ensure that we end discrimination that we create well being that we create these outcomes of diversity, equity and inclusion? Now, how do we actually get there now that the very cheeky answer is like, well, you should read the book. But some of the ideas in the book right, just to share more with listeners are that first, we need to recognize that the big failure of the DEI industry over the last few decades has been a failure to focus our work on outcomes. So very few folks in the DEI space, are able to say this is the future we want to create and operationalize it, they're not able to actually identify, you know, how much representation are we going for? How do we measure inclusion? How do we ensure that we create equity equity, how so for whom, in what way beyond pay equity, what other kinds of equity exist? And these foundational, fundamental questions are needed, so that we can do the very basic work of holding people accountable? Right, something that we say a lot in the corporate world is measure what matters, and nobody measures Dei. That's a problem, right? Because that means no matter how much energy you put in, at best, you're only going to be able to say, well, I felt good about that training. I don't care if you feel good about trainings, did they work? Right? Like, did they fix things. And the core argument that I want to make is we can't even start having that conversation until we can align on what it is we're trying to achieve, how we measure these things. And then also, the very common pitfalls that have made it so quite a lot of folks, especially folks who are marginalized. Just don't trustee ei work right? We've all or many of us have sat through a dei training that at best, we felt like maybe is a c plus, right in terms of quality. We've sat through trainings where people just read through long lists of do's and don'ts and trainings where people seem like they're more interested in protecting the company against legal liability than actually fixing any real issues. We've sat through trainings where facilitators will bring up really hot button issues, but not do anything to facilitate the space, which, like you mentioned, ends up oftentimes in like real harm and real trauma and not anything close to healing or reparation or, or improvement. So I think recognizing that the field time in the field of dei is just a little bit messed up needs to be step one of getting anywhere from where we currently are right, like we we have to face the music, the trainings, the one off talks, right, like this stuff isn't working. It's never worked. And we actually have a lot of data and studies from the last 30 and 40 years showing just how these things keep failing. Now, that hasn't stopped people from doing them over and over and over again. But I want through this book and my work, to put forward a different way of doing Dei, right, a way that's grounded in data, a way that's accountable, a way that's led by marginalized communities a way that rebuilds trust within companies and orgs in general, a way that leverages everybody inside of an org to work together on creating these outcomes. Yeah, so I think that's, that's the first big thing, right? Like, recognize that things aren't great. And there is a way to do it right?

Alex Iantaffi: 10:54

That is really wonderful. I love that. Could you share a little bit more about what elements can improve kind of dei trainings? Right? You talked about data, you talked about outcome and accountability. I love all of that. And like you said, step one, this kind of recognizing how, in many ways DEI has failed. And so how, you know, what is step two? You know, I know, I want people to read the book. So you don't have to give away

Unknown: 11:22

Oh, no. All of it away. I'm giving it all away. So, look. So if step one is recognizing all the ways in which the AI has failed, we can actually reverse engineer how to do it right, just from that answer, right? So gosh, there are so many examples. I can't name them all. But one of the biggest examples of a dei initiative that failed was actually undertaken by the Department of Defense in the US, right, the US military, essentially, in the 70s, and 80s. And this was one of the most expensive dei initiatives of all time, most people haven't heard about it, which is wild, because they trained nearly a million practitioners, they train so many people to engage in this work. They had an institute, they funded hundreds of hours of training for these internal practitioners that were going to go out into the military, and lead these sorts of conversations about race, these courageous conversations about difference and race and inequality and all that. It was very ambitious, especially, you know, in the 80s. And it was one of the biggest, most resounding failures of all time in Dei. Why, right? We just have to ask why. Right? Like, because most people haven't heard about this. It. You know, most people assume if you spend a bunch of money on Dei, you train tons of people, it's rigorous. It's got to work, right? So how come it failed? Well, we can look at that one example. And see just what happened. One, the practitioners used techniques that blamed and shamed their their participants, they put typically white men in hot seats and would grill them, they would say, Joe, or James or Michael or whatever, right? Like you're a racist. Let's unpack everything you do that makes you a racist. And the goal of that exercise was to get people to confront their biases and become better people, and become more self aware and grow and all of these lofty things. Now, unfortunately, we know now, what happens if you put someone in a seat and call them names is they do the exact opposite of all that. There's backlash effects, there's resentment, there's frustration, there's anger. And they usually take that out not only on the workshop facilitators, but other members of marginalized communities. And so that was big problem. Number one, the fact that these sorts of conversations exacerbated tensions rather than reducing them. And then problem two, given these backlash effects, it turns out commanders within the military started to feel like they were losing control of their workforces, that there was a lot of tension going on. And so they tried to take back control from these practitioners, and they sidelined the DEI practitioners and made them advisors. And then what ended up happening is, over time, these trainings turned into check checkbox activities, bureaucratic hassles that people had to do to fulfill some requirement each year, the content gotten more and more watered down, so that it wouldn't offend people, which did avoid backlash effects, but it also avoided any helpful effects. And the spirits of the trainings was fully diluted to the point where at some point, I believe in the 90s, the training was rolled into some broader sort of staff support training that to this day probably exists. And it was really expensive. A lot of people were trained, right, and it failed, resoundingly. Now, the reason why I bring this up, it's almost like you go into a corporation right now and you see echoes of those sorts of trainings. You see some practitioners, you know, not really understand that it's not the best idea to be putting people in positions of power into hot seats and grilling them. I'm sure it feels good. I've done it once or twice. It feels very vindicating. Not great over the long term. Oh, something also about the military. They took specific efforts to avoid measuring the impact of their training. They were forbidden from measuring the impact of their training. There was this specific directives don't measure this. I don't know what people were thinking. But we see a lot of that today. Also, right? There's this sort of naive expectation that whether or not the training works, we don't want to know, we just want to fire and forget to just throw this training out into the world and hope it does something. And overtime with the US military, what we actually found, or what researchers later found, like 10, or 20 years after the fact is that it increased disc discrimination and decreased representation, it literally had the opposite desired effect. And we're still doing the same thing in companies today. Right? So what are the takeaways? What can we do that's opposite from that? One, we need to make people feel good about D is very basic, right? blame and shame doesn't work. When you try to blame people for inequality, when you try to shame people for having certain privileges. Not only does it make them not feel great, but more importantly, it doesn't actually change their behavior. In fact, it can lead them to lash out in the exact opposite way that you want, which makes things worse for marginalized groups. Instead, right, we need to be approaching this from positive lens and giving people ways to engage in dei work, that helped them maintain a sense of dignity, and to feel a sense of pride in their work. And, and, you know, efforts. That's thing number one, too, we need to measure what we're doing, we need to make sure that when we deploy interventions, that we can track their outcomes, we know what it is they're trying to do, right? You know, you you've spent a lot of time in academia, and academics are better at this than non academics, maybe not incredible. But in certain fields, at least, there's more of a tradition of accountability of experiments of not assuming that you're going to find what you're looking for. Right? We need that same sort of rigor with the AI work, we can't just throw interventions into the void and expect that they're going to work, we need to hold ourselves and the people we work with accountable, right. And finally, you can't do any of this work with a one and done it just doesn't work. There's nothing you can do over 90 minutes that undoes the daily sort of conditioning, broken policies, processes and systems, right, deeply entrenched corporate cultures, you don't fix any of that in 60 minutes, 90 minutes or even two hours, it has to be an ongoing effort that's fully accountable, that, like I mentioned, is still positive and gives people a way to feel good. And all of this needs to come together in an initiative that is well initiative, sorry, well resourced, that is well supported, and that everyone understands its purpose for existence, right? Those are just some of the takeaways we can learn from history because we have a long history of folks doing it wrong, which I think is a rich source of learning, right? I firmly believe that history is is the greatest teacher, because even though History doesn't repeat itself, per se, it usually rhymes. And we know from what we're seeing right now that a lot of our problems are ones that have been addressed before.

Alex Iantaffi: 18:43

Absolutely, thank you so much for that, that was so informative, especially as somebody as an academic who has sat through a lot of those tick boxes. Exercise, I was like, that sounds so much better, I can imagine how much deeper and more meaningful the work would be also, if it's ongoing, if there is accountability, if it's outcome focused, like you said, and, and you mentioned, you know, cisgender, heterosexual white man at one point, you know, being put in the hot seat and being shamed and, and in a way, for better or for worse, corporations. And definitely academia is still full of cisgender heterosexual white men. And so how can this work? kind of help? Those folks who, in some ways are at the pinnacle of privilege to leverage their privilege and power for change? Are there specific strategies that work better than others to kind of engage? Why cisgender men because in some way, there's almost like this defensiveness or kind of rejection of di work straight away. From some, you know, of course, not all, no solution or category is a monolith. But are there ways that work better to kind of kind of bring in those cis white men and help them leverage their power for good for one of a better word?

Unknown: 20:08

Yeah. So the first thing I would recommend is, you need to make sure that they understand the problem in the same way that you do. Because if they don't perceive that there is a problem, and you do this conversation of well, how do we engage you to problem solve is already lost before you've started, right? And this is often one of the big challenges. You can We talk with a lot of very well intentioned leaders who will say there are no problems in this company stop trying to make problems where there are none or our institution is a great place of learning and inclusion. And everything I've seen has been really positive. So I don't believe that I need to do anything extra, I'm already, you know, doing my best. And so you need to start with building that same sort of shared understanding, right? Essentially, you need to make sure that their perception of reality aligns with yours. And there are lots of ways you can do that the sort of traditional sense is to share stories about your experiences to help them build empathy, that's been done forever, that will continue to be done forever, it's not ineffective. And there are other ways to go about it as well. I personally prefer data and and gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, and breaking that down by race, gender, demographics in general. Usually, for corporations, I will look at race, gender, abilities, sexuality, religion, and then also factors like tenure, department, seniority, and so on and so forth, and say, Where are their inequalities in this organization? Right, like, where are things not working? Where do people have a disparate experience, and the data, the quant data shows us exactly what's happening. And the qualitative data illustrates those patterns with stories. So maybe we'll see in the quant data that there's a belonging gap between queer and trans employees, and cisgender heterosexual employees in that, let's say 95% of cisgender. Heterosexual employees feel like they belong at the institution, while only 45% of queer and trans employees feel that same level of belonging. And let's say you even have the data to localize it to let's talk about a university setting to localize it within Undergraduate Student Affairs staff, right, maybe that's where the problem is most exacerbated. So Well, now you have a really compelling story. And if you have good qualitative data, you can dive into those experiences, maybe there's a story from like a Queer Student Affairs staff member that talks about being discriminated against or harmful jokes, or policies that aren't working, you use all of these things to say, well, this is what we're working with. You can't really argue with this. Because you see, there's so much data in the aggregate that's showing these very clear themes. And that doesn't tell you exactly how to solve it. But that tells you what it is you're working with. Now, leaders don't get the excuse of, well, there's nothing going wrong, because you have this shared reality. Once you start from there, it's actually relatively easy, because then you just give leaders a way to feel good about fixing it. And that's, that's the part that a lot of folks get stuck on. I think oftentimes we conceptualize of cisgender, heterosexual white men or, you know, privileged groups in general, as being the target of our initiatives, rather than being the drivers of our initiatives. And that breeds resentment, right? Like if Alex, I said, I'm here to fix you, you're the problem, you're not going to take it well, right? Even if the data shows that people like you are the problem, right? Like, it doesn't go over? Well, instead of we say, Wow, this is a real challenge. As a member of this group, I really want to work with you to see what we can do to make this experience better for everyone. Right, I want you to take the lead, I want you to get the credit, right, like, let's, let's make everyone feel good about making these things feel better. I want you to help drive it, let's do this together, and build on all of the things that you know, all the things that I know to fix these problems, that framing is very different, because it gives people away to now, immediately after seeing data that is that is not great, right? Like you feel bad, you feel a sense of loss, you feel, you know, a threat to your sense of self. So you immediately follow that up with something positive, you say, like, this is something really good. Let me give you an opportunity to like help lead the change, so that that threat is immediately replaced with this sense of pride. I can fix things, I can make it better. I can work on behalf of my org to make everyone have a good experience. Right? Just just psychologically, right? Like that makes such a huge difference and getting people engaged and getting people involved. And I don't see too many people doing it, right. But this positivistic approach to the work isn't just you know, me being soft on white men. It's It's me, you know, relying on all the research we have about what motivates behavior change, which overwhelmingly, right is treating people like adults and making people feel good about engaging in what you want them to engage in. It's very simple. Well, actually,

Alex Iantaffi: 25:35

Oh, absolutely, as you were talking, I was, you know, as a trauma therapist, I was like, Oh, it makes complete sense, you want to be in that place, you know, if we buy into Steven Porges theories of ventral vagal connection, where we feel safe and connected to other humans, because shame

Unknown: 25:51

when I haven't thought about that since college connections,

Alex Iantaffi: 25:56

right? Like, I mean, it sounds to me, like, that's what you're describing, bring people into that place of like, where, you know, we're in this together, and we're going to solve this problem. And rather than putting them in the hot seat and shaming them, which makes people hide our shutdown, you know, then you get the fight flight or freeze or fun, right? People are gonna fight you, they're gonna check out and dissociate and just be there in body but not in mind. Or, you know, or they're gonna kind of fawn over the minority.

Unknown: 26:26

So they say all the right things, right, because they don't want to be attacked. Right, but they don't actually do anything that could get them any attention. They don't put in any real effort. That's really, that's really,

Alex Iantaffi: 26:37

yeah. So I love what you just described, it is very different than kind of the approaches that I've seen that kind of applied in the past. I noticed also that, you know, before when you were talking about the Department of Defense issue, you know, you said how, when DEI is not done correctly, it can actually exacerbate division, it can create more problems, more division, more tensions. And so how can we talk about our positionality our social identities, you know, like the way we're racialized, gendered, plast, sexuality abilities, citizenship, all those things that you mentioned, as well, in a way that is authentic, that is connected? And it's not just performative? Right? Because, you know, I'm assuming that the outcome we want is not performative. Allyship that can we want is true equity and inclusion. So, yeah, how can we talk about our different positionality in a way that's conducive to that authenticity and connection and change?

Unknown: 27:41

That? That's a great question. And I think it goes back to so so let's, let's talk about how not to do it first, and then I'll use that to transition to how we actually talk about it effectively. There's been a lot of interest in the last few years in making these identity related conversations more explicit. And it's been empowering for a lot of people, right? There's this new wave of talking about race explicitly of talking about disability, religion, sexuality explicitly, especially for, you know, folks who are from his historically disadvantaged communities, right. Getting to talk about their identities has been enormously empowering. And we actually have some really interesting research from the 2000s. On the multiculturalism movement. If you remember, around the time, there was this huge fad, if you will, to really focus on like the flags and the food and like cultural celebrations, they're a little less popular now. Think Thank you. No, thank goodness, but it was all about celebrating identity. But here's the thing, it wasn't about celebrating everyone's identity. It was about making space for marginalized employees to take pride in their own identities and celebrate them, which was great. And the big downfall of those initiatives was that they still made no space to talk about masculinity. They made no spaces to talk about whiteness, they made no spaces to talk about being cisgender and heterosexual. And so all of these privileged identities, which we know from lots of research, right, one of the benefits, but also the curses of having privileges, never needing to name it. All these groups didn't have a way to talk about their identities. And so paradoxically, they felt a sense of exclusion. Right? There's events for everyone except for me. And that sense of exclusion eventually bred contempt, and that contempt eventually bred backlash. And then well, you know, that was the end of that. Now, I think there's something to take away from that though, right? Like, we shouldn't just take away like, oh, you know, the white men ruined it for everyone again, instead, we need to take a different approach to this work that says identity is critical, and everyone has one. And when we talk about identity, we need to do so in a way that recognizes that we're not playing oppression Olympics here. We're genuinely trying to understand how our positionality our unique positionality impacts who we are, impacts how we navigate systems and gives us insight into building better ones. This is one of the biggest problems I see with identity related con conversations. Its identity for the sake of of ending up Higher or lower on this oppression Olympics, you know, poll, right? Like it's, it's absolutely the wrong way to think about it saying like, Well, I'm a queer, trans, non binary neurodivergent person of color. So I check all these marginalized boxes, right? But unfortunately, I'm like I grew up upper middle class. So I don't have that marginalization. And then maybe someone else is like, Oh, well, I have all the same identities as you, but I'm poor. So I'm more marginalized, meaning you should listen to me more, right? And it turns into this really weird. I mean, you know, oppression Olympics, right, this weird competition to say, whose voice actually matters. And those conversations are toxic, they get in the way of doing anything they make people who have more privileged identities feel horrible, right. And they get in the way of movement building and real change. So instead, you know, we need to move towards a place where yes, we talk openly about our identities, but also our privileged ones. We also talk about, you know, all of the experiences we had that were not marginalized, but not for this weird abstract, like, let's just share everything about ourselves, but specifically for a purpose. And that purpose should be at least in a workplace setting, helping to understand how our current workplace impacts all of us, so that we can understand how to build a better one, right? Not identity disclosure, for its own sake. But for the sake of making better organizations, that needs to be the way we do it. So I'm not out here, listing 20 identities to seem cool. I'm here listing my identities, because those identities intersect in a way that gives me a really interesting experience in a workplace, those identities, let me analyze, let's say you know how certain policies impact certain groups of people, or how certain processes might leave certain groups of people out, so that we can design better. And if we can move towards this new perspective of identity as a tool for us to understand the world around us, rather than just a way for us to measure how good or bad we are, which I think is extremely unproductive, then we can make more space for everybody to have a place in that conversation. Right? We can make it so I don't know, a cisgender, heterosexual white man can say I'm cisgender, heterosexual and white, and not feel any sense of shame from that. And just say, because of these identities, this is how I perceive the organization. And then someone else can say, well, that's really interesting, because I don't see it that way. As a person with very different identities, this is how I perceive the organization. And then maybe they can say, Wow, those are very different experiences. How is it that our existing processes or policies or culture or strategy can lend itself to, to two different experiences? How do we reconcile that? How do we do better? How can we design better? That's the role that identity should have in these conversations.

Alex Iantaffi: 33:37

I love that it's so much more relational, right? Because I've been at this meeting where everybody's like, almost like reciting their identity, weird. It is weird, you know, you go around, and then I'm like, Oh, my God, did I remember all my identities? Right? You know, and also, it's like, then there isn't always the

Unknown: 33:57

so what? Right? Yeah, what do you do with it?

Alex Iantaffi: 34:01

And there isn't always that awareness that goes with it. Okay, so now we've listed all our identities, but then we never, we don't talk about it, right? We don't reflect on how that impacts the dynamic in the group or what's happening. So this is so much more complex, but relational, right, in some ways,

Lily Zheng: 34:20

right? And, you know, if I could go so far as to say, I think this is the vision of why it is people started talking about identity in the first place, but we didn't focus enough on that. And over time, the act of disclosure became everything, right, like people forgotten why it is we need to disclose identity and just turn it into some weird game of listing all of our identities on a on a piece of paper, right, like, and, and stripped all the power out of him. And if anything, right, like, it even became toxic, right? It came to a place where like, well if you don't share your identities, and we judge you or if you have more privileged identities than we judge you and it all goes back to this you know, horrible mess of blame and shame and and, you know, social comparison and I don't know, right, like it's, it's not good for people. It's not good for organizations. And, frankly, it's not effective and the DEI spade is for helping people move on and build better and and do better.

Alex Iantaffi: 35:23

Oh, absolutely. It's definitely not conducive to change. In my experience. It's almost like a confession here. Here are all my identities and now have been a good ally because of you Let's settle this thing. So right, yes, that doesn't change anything. Well, given that this is gender stories, let's get into gender a little bit more. And I hope it's okay to get a little bit more personal. And you know, I know your pronouns, but I don't know your identities. But I'm curious about are your gender impacts the work that you do and what kind of challenges and opportunities you've encountered because of your gender. And of course, when we talk about gender, we can never separate it from all the other aspects of our identities, right? Whether you know, our, our class, their sexuality, how we are racialized. So when I say gender, I also say all those other things that kind of are impossible to separate in some ways.

Lily Zheng: 36:17

Yeah, absolutely. But focusing on gender primarily, I think my answer to this question has changed over the years, which I guess is not super uncommon for trans people, I am trans. But I would say given that I transitioned really early, and spent most of my professional career as a trans women, I think, most of my experiences having my gender impact my work was was at the beginning of my career as a trans woman or trans feminine person, I think, I spent a lot of time thinking about my gender expression, and my gender presentation and all sorts of things from how I talked to how I related to people. Like I think I spent a lot more effort to like pitch my voice. Right, I was performing gender a lot more in that way. And I would say that I was impacted by a lot of the societal expectations around women, right? Which certainly trans women face as well. I think it's complicated, because I'm also East Asian, right. And there are additional prescriptive stereotypes about East Asians, right, being docile or quiet or soft spoken, or referential or whatnot. And I'm sure it comes across. But that's, that's not exactly my personality. I'm pretty out there. I will say what I want to say so early on in my career, I think there were some people who, given how I looked and presented were like, Oh, I was expecting you to be a lot more soft spoken. Like, you're kind of in my face. And I'm like, Yeah, I guess I am. However, I think that's changed a lot in the last few years. Namely, in that I don't identify as a trans woman these these days, I, you know, I, right now, I would probably identify as like a non binary trans femme, maybe the terms change all the time. And sometimes my sense of gender changes all the time, too. But it's been weird, because since changing my my pronouns, and changing how I identify, I would say I'm treated a little differently than I used to be. And I think it's just that no one knows how to classify me in terms of gender, so they just don't try. Which I feel bad for saying, but it's kind of nice. Like, I don't feel like I get judged by masculine stereotypes. And I also feel like I don't get judged by feminine stereotypes. So I don't know whether it's because I lucked out into some magic secret sweetspot of gender and race and whatnot. But um, yeah, I don't have too many experiences in the last few years, where I feel like I was really judged on the basis of my gender. And I can certainly hypothesize why Right? Like, I think, maybe like, like, I'm still visually Asian, right. And, in general, there are stereotypes that say that Asians, you know, are typically not as outspoken. So, maybe the fact that I am outspoken, sort of makes that a novelty. And maybe, like, breaks people's brains or something, right. But Asians are also seen as non threatening, and me being a agentic and confidence, which, you know, that behavior would probably be seen as threatening, if it was from, let's say, you know, like a black man, for example, because of my positionality, I can get away with being competent. And, and sometimes I would say, a little aggressive with with how I talk, and not be seen as as threatening, right? So maybe, maybe it's some something like that. But it's really hard to sort of fit yourself in as a person into all of these theories about race and gender and whatnot. The simple answer I can give is, it doesn't seem like I am treated negatively on the basis of my race and gender these days. Part of that is I've taken some personal efforts to to disambiguate myself from being seen in like hyper gendered ways, both in terms of like, how I talk about myself and how I relate to the work that I do, but also just Like how I've tried to position my career, because I used to, when I was a trans fam, and identify this one, I used to do trans inclusion trainings. And like a lot of trans people who did trans inclusion trainings, I lead with my own story, right? Like that was how I connected with people. So, you know, to frame it very crudely, I go into a room and cry in front of a bunch of sis people all the time about my experience of gender. And I'm lucky enough and I have on purpose, trying to no longer do that. Like, I hate that, like, I don't like going into a room and performing my trauma. Like now people bring me into a room because they want the best DEI strategist around and I think I'm that right? Like, I've tried really hard to specialize in a direction that doesn't require that I perform my trauma. And as a result, it's not that my identity doesn't impact my work. But I lead primarily with my ideas and my thought leadership and the work that I do, rather than, you know, I fit all of these boxes, and I check all of these boxes and all that, right, like I've tried to move away from it.

Alex Iantaffi: 41:40

I love that because I think that it can be so easy to get caught up into that having to perform our stories or our trauma, when we do inclusion trainings. And I think personally, as somebody who also sometimes does consultancy and training, have moved away from that to in a very much actually start from asking people to think about their own gender, which sometimes sets them back a little bit because I'm like, Oh, we thought we brought you in to talk about that, or people that were there were trans.

Lily Zheng: 42:11

The Trans people are the ones who have gender, we don't right.

Alex Iantaffi: 42:14

Now you're asking me all those questions about gender, which maybe I've thought about or not, and I'm a little uncomfortable, but also now we're all there's something that couldn't access as well, right now, it's not this other reading experience. And so yeah, there was, as you were talking, I was resonating with some of the things you were saying which and I feel like I could go on forever and in this conversation, but I want to be respectful of your time. So is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would really like to share with the gender stories, listeners, about either your book or dei work in general, or really anything that you want to share with the listeners?

Lily Zheng: 42:56

Oh, man, but there's so much. I really liked what you had to say earlier about asking people their personal relationship to gender, in a lot of ways that actually mirrors some approaches that I take with helping, let's say, men, or you know, folks with other privileged identities, grapple with those identities in the workplace. And I frequently will lead a conversation that essentially says men like, I'd love if you could teach us about gender. And they often pause, like, you know, they were nominated for something, they have no expertise. And they're just like, Well, my wife knows a lot about gender. I don't know anything about gender, right? I remember I was talking to an executive who says, Well, I thought I knew a lot about the workplace. For example, I don't know anything about gender. But I know a lot about the workplace and how promotions work. But my wife has been telling me about her experience of gender, and how maybe the workplace isn't what I thought it was given that her experiences are so different from mine. And I push back against this person, and I said, Look, your wife understands gender and knows how to work how the workplace functions for people of her gender. And you also understand gender, you know, how the workplace functions for people of your gender. And this is something difficult, it's that, you know, I mentioned this about privilege earlier, it's a it's a double bladed sword, right? Like, you don't think too often about how your privilege is itself. A unique experience, right, like masculinity is a unique experience, and being able to unpack exactly how you being a man, are you being white, or you being upper class? Are you being non disabled, or cisgender, or, or heterosexual? How all that affected your experience, not in any good or bad way, just how it you know, impacted your experience is enormously powerful, because it gives you insight into the world around you. I tell everyone, everyone's own experiences your own positionality gives you a valuable but incomplete insight into the world. valuable but incomplete, right? Everyone is valuable. Everyone's experiences are valuable, but no one's experiences are perfectly representative of everything. This is why we need to be talking together not to you know, determine who's worthy or not or who's a good person or a bad person. But so we can put together all of these disparate pieces of the puzzle and get a clearer understanding of the world around us. Right, it reminds me of this teaching concept called Jigsaw learning, where you give a roomful of students different parts of the problem, and different information they need, and say, figure it out. And students will start by themselves and say, there's something wrong here, I can't figure it out. Right. And that's by design, it forces them to come together and share ideas and share information, and put all of these parts together so that they can figure out the problem, I would say gender, and identity in general, is exactly the same, right? You need to have everyone coming together with their experiences so that you can accurately understand the state of the organization or the state of the department or the team or the world even, right. So you can work together and problem solve. And I like thinking about it in this way. Because it gives people especially people with privileged identities are really valuable place in this work. It doesn't center them. In fact, it doesn't center anyone. Right? It says simply, we need everyone here to be able to do this work effectively.

Alex Iantaffi: 46:47

Yeah, I love that. Well, any centers, the work, the outcome, right, the outcome is equity. Its inclusion, like, and I love that. I feel like I could say so much more, but I'm gonna take a deep breath and control my desire to have this conversation for the next three hours. And instead, I'm gonna ask you, if people want to find your book, or more about your work, or even want to book you for training, like how can they get in touch with you where they can find out more about the wonderful work that you do?

Lily Zheng: 47:21

Yeah, well, you can find me on my website at lilyzheng.com. And we can probably put that information in the summary. And you can follow my work most easily on LinkedIn. Just search me Lily Zheng. And yeah, there's a lot there. I post multiple times a week, I put everything I do up on LinkedIn. So those are your best two places to learn more about me and engage with my content. And I love getting messages and DMS from folks, so please reach out.

Alex Iantaffi: 47:51

That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Lily, for coming to gender stories today. I really appreciate everything you've shared. And maybe we'll just have to have a part two for all the other pieces of the conversation. We then get to today.

Lily Zheng: 48:04

Perhaps perhaps, yeah, maybe you so much for having me

Alex Iantaffi: 48:08

when the next book is out. Well, thank you so much for coming today. Thanks. And dear listeners as ever, thank you for supporting gender stories. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please share away and by Lily's Book DEI deconstructed and check out their work. Thank you so much.