I’ve given a lot of speeches about the evolution of technology in a lot of countries over the years. Almost always, the audience was 90% men.  At the end of almost every speech the small number of women in the audience would come up to me and say how fantastic it was to see a woman on the platform talking about technology alongside the men.  I was really shaken one day, when someone in the audience stood up and accused me of being a white person, speaking to a non-white audience, and representing a postcolonial minority. As a woman (and there are more women in the world than men, I believe) I was seeing myself as representing a majority who were not able to be in the room. Both views were valid, it’s the lens you are looking through that makes the difference.

I think we may be looking at diversity in business these days through the wrong lens.  What we need (above all in business) is diversity of thought. We have managed to create lots of proxies for these – gender, race, nationality, religion, disability, and a host of others.  All of these come from groups who absolutely have legitimate cause to level the playing field, but do they really provide diversity of thought?  Is a board diverse because it contains middle-aged, middle-class women who share backgrounds, and probably biases, with the other middle-aged, middle-class men they sit alongside?

We know that diversity of thinking improves decision making and increases innovation, so how do you get that sort of diversity?

How do we identify where we should be looking?  I’ve got some suggestions that are very different to the way we are approaching the problem at the moment.

1.  Age – this is the really big one. Boards tend to be made up of people the far side of 50, getting a mix of ages on a board will significantly improve diversity of thinking.
2.  Have a Board that has members that look like your customers. If your business is selling to mothers and children, then having an all-male board is just stupid (there are plenty of examples of this happening).  People that think like your customers add great value.
3.  Look at people from various educational and financial backgrounds. If they all went to a few top public schools then while they can be diverse genders and ethnicities, their diversity of thinking will be limited.

What are the other ideas for diversity markers, or should we just go on using what we have?