The Hope Gap is a collaborative paper we developed in collaboration with business leaders, and DEI practitioners across sectors to address the gap between the promise of social acceptance we know is possible, and the reality of what we are experiencing in our lifetimes.
The report focuses on three critical sectors that shape the societal norms, values, and narratives that influence our expectations and desires for the future. These are business at large, marketing and advertising, and the media.Â
Below is preview from our chapter on businesses. You can download the report here.
Imagine you’re a manager who has been focusing on building a product development team for the last six months to power the organisation’s next innovation bet. The company doesn’t have to work on its employer value proposition and brand, because word of mouth is speaking for itself. This is a company which genuinely values the texture and breadth of perspectives and backgrounds that people can bring -- so accessing talent from the widest available pool is no issue. People want to come and be part of it.Â
When they arrive on the team, respect is automatic. You know this because your team tells you through the engagement survey. You can see it in meetings too – questions are abundant, people feel free to challenge perspectives in a considerate way, and there is an atmosphere of fun and care, as well as performance orientation. As a manager, this gives you joy and fulfilment; you’re building a brilliant team that rallies around the goal, works collaboratively to create, and constructively challenges each other to achieve optimal results.Â
There is so much cultural intelligence in the team that it feels easy to get along - conversations about a weekend stag do, a henna party, caring responsibilities, and the upkeep of braids are all commonplace. Everyone feels the rewards of working this way: the team, who are building friendships as well as colleague-ship. Customers, who are experiencing high-quality product innovation. Your organisation, whose leaders know that high engagement and inclusion leads to better performance, greater innovation, and distinctiveness in the market.
Just how far away are we from this world?Â
The impact of business on social acceptance is immense. Whether it’s a start-up or an FTSE company, they are where we spend the majority of our time, shaping the products and the markets we buy from and lobbying governments for legislative change. They have the power to influence policies and practices that mean new fathers can take a meaningful amount of parental leave, or restrict hybrid working practices that end up being punitive to people with caring responsibilities. They have the capital to invest in and design products, whether these are smartphones with better accessibility features or batteries that require rare minerals and the use of child labour to be profitable. Furthermore, they have the lobbying power to push for better protections for safeguarding children on social media, or for loosening the definitions of free speech.
However, our hope for what business could do is not new. It’s the same, straightforward thing unions, activists, networks, colleagues, and leaders have been asking for for decades: create and maintain equity in power, pay, and opportunity for all colleagues, from facilities to the apprentices and grads to the middle managers to the board members. Ensure the workforce is intentionally representative, whether that is of the national or local population. Make conversations about embedding equity a standard part of ordinary meetings and product design processes rather than being an afterthought or ‘nice to have.’Â
Ultimately, putting good practice into actual practice is not a ‘commitment’; it could be the norm, and expected as part of good organisational leadership. So let’s look at the current state of business when it comes to driving social progress.
Businesses as incubators of inclusive culturesÂ
We often point to the somewhat nebulous concept of ‘an inclusive culture’ as a crucial factor in social acceptance, both in terms of how colleagues in a business are treated and in terms of the kinds of outputs businesses create. However, diversity, equity and inclusion (more commonly referred to as DEI) are hugely process-driven. There are hard and fast rules, grounded in behavioural science and project management.
Almost all of these are straightforward, such as:Â
Having consistent processes that bake DEI considerations in as early and regularly as possible. This means really thinking about the outcomes we are trying to achieve, considering who will be positively impacted and who could be left behind. This could be about who we attract with a job description, the internal policies we write, or a product or service that we develop.Â
Testing our thinking and assumptions with a diverse set of stakeholders–and making the time to meaningfully consider and incorporate their feedback.Â
Planning sufficiently so that we have time to think and debate, as biases are more prone to kick in when work moves quickly.Â
However, The Hope Gap for businesses is simple. We know what we should be doing– we’re just not doing it.Â
Take a commonplace example where business leadership and HR continue to make a choice that is at odds with equity: asking women who have been sexually harassed at work to sign an NDA as they leave.Â
There is only one reason to do this. It’s to protect the harasser–usually a man, who is quietly allowed to slip out the door with his pension and bonus intact– and the reputation of the company. The equitable thing to do would be to fire the harasser, reinforcing a zero-tolerance approach that companies so often have on paper but rarely seem to put into practice.Â
Sadly, we don’t need to look very far to find examples. In 2024 alone, there were a multitude of cases exposing the uses of NDAs for this sinister purpose. It was also the year that the UK government refused to ban the use of NDAs in all harassment cases in the financial services sector.Â
Here’s another measurable example that gets more boardroom airtime: pay gap reporting, whether this is on gender, ethnicity, disability, or another characteristic. There are some tried and tested interventions to close these kinds of gaps, reinforced by reputable bodies such as the UN, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and multiple national governments. And yet no FTSE100 companies have managed to achieve gender pay parity. Instead, the focus is on reporting, which follows a predictable format: why the company hasn’t managed to improve over the past year, downfaced comms about wanting to do better, reaffirming a ‘commitment’ to change.Â
Here’s a question: instead of letting pay gap reporting fall into a corporate comms black hole, what would happen if companies focused their energy, effort, and resources on actually implementing equitable pay methodologies? Or implementing any of the other tried and tested interventions that result in actual impact?
Here’s the answer: we’d start to close The Hope Gap
We'd see businesses that iarenot just ‘committed’ to DEI, but is actively driving social acceptance at a time when polarisation is on the up.Â
You can download the full report, which includes co-created solutions with ED&I practitioners across industries, here.
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