DEI 3.0: Breaking Down Barriers and Disrupting Bias
Communications and DEI Strategist Dorcas Lind on her career working toward social justice, the cyclic nature of DEI, and how today’s organizations should approach disrupting bias in the workplace
Dorcas Lind is a seasoned communications strategist specializing in DEI and health equity. She is the CEO and Founder of Mezala Consulting, which works with health and hospital systems and non-profits. Dorcas also serves as a fractional executive at Syneos Health in the Corporate Affairs practice.
Dorcas works with clients on building an inclusive culture, overcoming unconscious bias, fostering allyship in the workplace, navigating team differences, nurturing a supportive environment, and valuing multiple identities.
Highlights of Dorcas’ career include serving as the inaugural Head of DEI for Montefiore Medicine/Einstein College of Medicine, convening and co-authoring DEI recommendations for racial justice in health services research for Academy Health, and serving as a communications strategist for the Ogilvy Diversity Council to ensure an inclusive and diverse “workplace of the future.”
The Continuum sat down with Dorcas to discuss how her life story influenced her career, the importance of disrupting bias, and the recent backlash against all things DEI.
Before we start talking about your career, you credit your education to one teacher you had in middle school. Can you tell us that story?
Mrs. Dietchman. I grew up in the Bronx and was raised by my grandparents, who were Puerto Rican immigrants. She came to our house one day in seventh grade and essentially told them that I had too much potential for the public school in my neighborhood. She helped us navigate the application process to some of the private schools in New York and figure out how to get scholarships. I ended up going to The Fieldston School, which was an amazing experience for me. From there, I went to Brown University for undergraduate studies, where I joined fellow students to create our own major, which we called Health & Society. Then, I got my master’s in public health at Berkley. I do feel like I owe a lot to Mrs. Dietchman; she changed the trajectory of my life.
Were you specifically looking for roles in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion after graduate school?
The roles were sparse then, but I was definitely driven by a need for work that incorporated an element of social justice.
When I was 15, I learned that my grandmother had been part of the U.S. Public Health trials in Puerto Rico, experimenting with sterilization and oral contraceptive pills. We have the birth control pill today because of studies that were done on women like her without their consent.
When she woke up after having my mom and my Tio Eddie (they were twins), she was informed that she had been sterilized and could never have any more children. Luckily, these were her third and fourth kids, so she had her family, but it was a significant assault and abuse of her rights. She was robbed of the decision of whether to make any more children. As a teenage girl, I thought this was the most horrific injustice that had been done to somebody, and it was to someone whom I loved very much.
I was fortunate to have family, educators, and a community that helped me channel that rage into what eventually became my academic pursuits and career. My interest in communication and advertising was really about using these tools as a mechanism for truth-telling, integrity, and dignity in health care.
Your first public health job was a teen pregnancy prevention project in California. How did you make the jump from that to agency life?
I was recruited by a consumer health company that made feminine hygiene products to help manage clinical trials. I was working with the scientists who were looking at different grades of cotton and managing skin tests. It wasn’t particularly intriguing or engaging to me. But then our agency partners would come in. We would talk about the educational materials that needed to be created for the product and how we should present it in ways that were engaging and culturally relevant.
I realized that this was the part of the work I was most interested in and started looking for jobs in healthcare communications agencies.
“Our humanity requires us to have bias, but it’s also our job to examine that bias and how it shows up in our behaviors and workplaces.”
You spent over a decade at various agencies, including GCI Group, Ogilvy, and Edelman. What kind of work did you do on the agency side?
Much of my work in agencies focused on clinical trial recruitment and retention across all categories of disease in the U.S. and globally. I was really engaged in understanding the patient journey in terms of how patients learn about trials and what makes them decide to participate. I was also interested in looking at the historical abuse and mistreatment of individuals in clinical trials and how we could help overcome those barriers for greater engagement and participation.
Then, I migrated over to the commercial side. One of my first big commercial efforts was to launch Nexium in the Hispanic community in the United States. It was fascinating because, in the Latino community, there wasn't a sense of a disease state for indigestion. It was considered part of life; if you ate too much or drank too much, you would feel it. Our first step had to be to get people to understand that this wasn’t just a normal part of gastrointestinal function. We needed them to know it was a problem before we offered the solution.
We didn’t call them this back then, but essentially, we worked with micro-influencers. We engaged small groups of godmothers, or madrinas, who met with people in community settings to talk about what acid indigestion is, what causes it, and how people could get relief from it. We got their help moving away from the stereotype that this is just what happens when you eat spicy food. There are plenty of people who eat spicy food and do not get indigestion. It was a challenge of reframing and providing the right support.
You started in agencies over 20 years ago. Was anyone talking about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) when you were there?
They were, but more aligned with affirmative action and discrimination. Inclusion and belonging were less of a focus than they are today. Representation in clinical trials was already a concern, and agencies were helping their clients with multicultural marketing like the Nexium project, but internal DEI was piecemeal and decentralized at best.
Informally, a lot of people came to me—both colleagues within the agencies and clients—to tell me that they were having race or gender issues on their teams and didn’t know how to handle it. People asked for my help.
Ogilvy actually had a significant history of DEI while I was there. I sat on the DEI council, and we focused on employee resource groups (ERGs), looked at our hiring practices, and tried to apply a DEI lens to our client work for more effective activation with multicultural audiences. We looked at the language, themes, and message of our campaigns to make sure they were appropriate and culturally sensitive.
When we talk about DEI from an agency or a brand perspective, are internal DEI and diversity in marketing really the two main areas of focus?
For most brands and agencies, those are the two lanes. There is diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is typically organizationally driven. It’s about who you hire, how you onboard them, how you create a community of inclusion and belonging once people get there, who you promote, and the policies that drive equity within the organization.
And then there’s multicultural marketing which is how you engage specific communities. We used to say minority communities, but that’s not demographically accurate today. There are a couple of truly innovative agencies like WORTHi that have started to use the term underestimated communities. I like this in a marketing context because it points to the significant influence and buying potential that these communities have and reminds us that brands would be foolish not to tap into that.
In the health marketing space specifically, there is a third lane: health equity. This looks at how programs and initiatives—whether from the medical community or a pharmaceutical company—engage patients in a way that improves equity in access to care and health outcomes.
“The goal of DEI is for everyone to thrive and have the potential to contribute in relevant, meaningful, and productive ways. A fully engaged society is a healthy society.”
You started your own consulting firm called Mezala. How did you come up with that name, what is your mission, and what work are you doing with clients?
The name combines the Spanish word mezcla, meaning mix, with masala, the Hindi word for spice. It captures the essence of DEI work, which is to honor and recognize differences for a more powerful outcome. It also pays tribute to my Afro-Puerto Rican roots and my children’s Indian heritage.
Our stated mission is “To creatively, compassionately, and consistently break down barriers to a more inclusive world and create next-generation workplaces that thrive.”
My work has always been about disrupting bias. My biological father left my mother and me before I was born. He told her that he could not stay to raise me or even acknowledge me because his family would never accept a dark-skinned child. There’s a little irony there because I didn’t get the gift of melanin from my mom; my skin tone is probably closer to his. His decision not to be involved with his own child was based entirely on racial fears, prejudices, and biases.
The work that I do now is all about examining those inherent biases and helping people put a mirror on themselves to do the necessary inner work. I don’t approach it as a blame game. It's not them versus us. Our humanity requires us to have bias, but it’s also our job to examine that bias and how it shows up in our behaviors and workplaces.
My Mezala clients are primarily health care and hospital systems. I do a whole assessment of the core dimensions of difference and how difference makes up the composite of who we are both at home and at work. We start by examining our biases as individuals and then work up to looking at the team and the organization. It’s important to start from the individual level because while everybody talks about structural issues like structural racism, we sometimes forget that structures are created by humans, and it’s the humans who bring the bias. You have to start with a self-assessment in order to make change systemically.
Disrupting bias is my sweet spot, both personally and professionally, and it’s where I feel there is promise for the greatest change.
This is a challenging moment for DEI. Just a few years ago, everyone was talking about it and scrambling to make sure they were doing enough, and now a lot of companies are retreating and scared to talk about it at all. What’s going on?
Like all movements, DEI is cyclic. Before 2020, many organizations were already involved in increasing equity and diversity whether that was in their work or in their hiring. Then came this watershed moment with the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd. These issues suddenly captured the nation’s attention and certainly the attention of corporate America. Everybody raised their hands and said, “We care about social justice, we care about racial justice.” And they started to try to prove that they were working on it. Some did it well, while the efforts of others were merely performative.
I’d say there was maybe a 70-30 split: 70% of folks put up nice pictures and corporate statements that said, “We care about Black people,” but 30% said, “You know what, we have to fundamentally and systemically change the way we do business.” These people turned the lens on themselves and did a deep dive assessment of racial equity in their organizations and fields. It’s that 30% who are continuing to do the work despite the potential legal and financial risks.
There’s always a backlash against progress, so some cooling of enthusiasm is expected, but then the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in higher education. That snowballed and had a chilling effect on corporate America. Even though the decision only addressed higher education, it made leaders in other industries question whether they could continue with programming geared toward traditionally underserved groups.
It's hard to know what to do now, and a lot of organizations are paralyzed by the confusion. How do you mentor Black women entrepreneurs? How do you support promotions of Latina executives, if you can't call it that? The whole point of what happened in 2020 is that we need to disrupt racial injustice by supporting Black and Brown organizations, providing education for our communities, and infusing venture capital dollars into these communities that have historically been deprived of these opportunities. But if you can’t be explicit about why you’re doing that, how can you rectify the imbalances and inequity?
There are certainly challenges, but agencies are excellent at being creative and helping frame issues with the right language and messaging that will allow us to continue to do the necessary work.
“As for culturally diverse marketing, the business case is almost too obvious. Brands that don't embrace a multicultural lens are leaving billions of dollars on the table.”
Today, agencies are dealing with a backlash against DEI, slashed budgets, and the fear of lawsuits they or their clients might face. Do we just have to lay low and not work on DEI for a while?
Definitely not. There are still things that can be done; we just have to know how to approach it.
In 2020, the McKinsey's and Harvard Business Review voices focused on making the business case for DEI were shot down by social justice warriors who said, “Forget the business case. We don’t care if you make more money or get more customers; DEI is the morally right thing to do.” That worked at the peak of this cycle when, for a moment, there was agreement that change was needed to be good humans and bring equity and justice to the workplace.
Unfortunately, as support dips and budgets shrink, the “doing something because it’s right” argument is less persuasive. Now, we have to revisit the business case.
The shift makes me sad, but we still need to do the fundamental work of making sure that great talent who might have been overlooked gets into an organization. We still need to ensure that clients market to a diverse audience and push for market growth. We still need to develop programs and products that deliver equitable solutions for different groups.
The data is on our side. DEI leads to better business, greater returns, and more equitable institutions. We know that organizations that achieve gender and racial equity perform better on financial and innovation metrics. Organizations that understand this are staying the path.
As for culturally diverse marketing, the business case is almost too obvious. Brands that don't embrace a multicultural lens are leaving billions of dollars on the table. In terms of the numbers and the volume, the Latino community is a profoundly untapped market. You can’t even think of it as a subgroup at this point; it’s just not demographically accurate.
A lot of the backlash focuses on reverse discrimination; the idea that helping historically underrepresented racial groups is tantamount to discriminating against white people or helping women is essentially discriminating against men. How should people respond to these accusations?
Honestly, it is not wise to get into a debate about that because it becomes very ideological and bleeds into the political. I would always take it back to why we want representation. Go back to the business case. Share the data that shows the impact on employees and consumers. Focus on why inclusive organizations perform better from a business perspective, why a sense of belonging actually unleashes the best teamwork and the best individual work, and why equity can actually improve systems, products, and service delivery in any field.
The goal of DEI is for everyone to thrive and have the potential to contribute in relevant, meaningful, and productive ways. A fully engaged society is a healthy society. That’s what I’m focusing on and what we should all be working toward.
March 26, 2024
© 2024 The Continuum
