LEAPS Employer Toolkit: Preventing Workplace Sexual Harassment

Hei-ock Kim

With the LEAPS-SH Toolkit, you will be able to operationalize:
● Prevention: Proactive measures cultivate and sustain safe and respectful ecosystems, and can prevent harassment from occurring in the first place.
● Effective Response: Clear reporting procedures combined with trauma-informed support to victims can resolve incidents more successfully and prevent further damage to your organization.
● Sustainable transformation: Understanding power dynamics and their systemic impacts empowers leaders with a strong foundation to not only direct change but sustain it.

Borrowed from Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

What the Bluegrass State Can Teach Us About Increasing Access to Child Care

Hei-ock Kim

Center for the Study of Child Care Employment October 26, 2023 By Anna Powell and Annie Dade Kentucky made headlines recently for increasing access to early care and education (ECE): a unique strategy helps parents who work in ECE programs access subsidies for their own child care needs. Last year, Kentucky enacted a change in the state subsidy system, the …

How to Measure the Success of Anti-Harassment Training Programs for Women in Tech?

Hei-ock Kim

Post-training surveys measure women in tech’s anti-harassment program success by assessing workplace comfort and response confidence before and after. Other metrics include changes in knowledge, attitudes, reporting rates, behavioral shifts, turnover rates, legal actions, and employee engagement. Success indicators also involve high training participation, improved equity audit results, and insights from focus groups or interviews, portraying a comprehensive understanding of …

New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work

Sophie Bierly

Every day there are more headlines about the challenges of workforce diversity. A focus on diversity often means a focus on hiring, and even with substantial investments of time and money, it takes years to turn the tide for companies with thousands of employees. But there is a way to make change happen faster. Companies can capitalize on the diversity they already have by including more diverse employees in business decisions at all levels.

From Mastery to Accountability: Cultural Humility as an Alternative to Cultural Competence

Sophie Bierly

Cultural competency has been a long held ideal for social work educators and practitioners. However, definitions and approaches to cultural competency vary widely depending on worldview, discipline, and practice context. Within social work and beyond, cultural competency has been challenged for its failure to account for the structural forces that shape individuals’ experiences and opportunities. In contrast, the concept ofcultural humility takes into account the fluidity of culture and challenges both individuals and institutions to address inequalities. This article takes a critical look at cultural competence as a concept, examining its explicit and implicit assumptions, and the impact these assumptions have on practitioners. It suggests that cultural humility may offer social work an alternative framework as it acknowledges power differentials between provider and client and challenges institutional-level barriers. The authors advocate a move from a focus on mastery in understanding ‘others’ to a framework that requires personal accountability in challenging institutional barriers that impact marginalized communities. Cultural humility, while a promising concept, has not been fully explored in social work. Therefore, the authors present a conceptual model of cultural competency along with strategic questions for providers and organizations to integrate into social work practice and education.

Critical Mass: What Happens When Women Start to Rule the World – led by Jay Newton-Small

Sophie Bierly

In sociology, political science and economics studies abound on when the presence of women begins to have an impact. Almost across the board, if there’s less than 20% representation outcomes don’t change. Either the women don’t speak up or the men don’t hear them. But somewhere between 20% and 30% and something called critical mass is attained and suddenly women’s voices are heard. Whether it’s on a Navy ship, in the Senate or on a corporate board, groups function better with diversity. Mixed workforces that have reached critical mass have shown a host of positive outcomes: police shoot and engage in violence less, companies have to restate their earnings less and banks take less risk. Women make up 46% of the workforce, but more than two-thirds of those on minimum wage are women. But, increasingly, women are breaking into management level roles, especially in government jobs. The public sector has leapt frogged ahead of the private sector in recent years and all three branches of the government are approaching critical mass at the same time. In this study group, I’ll examine how women govern, manage, command and lead differently than men and what it means for our future workforce.

Report Card on the Diversity of California’s Legal Profession

Hei-ock Kim

Having a diverse legal profession positively impacts the administration
of justice, ensures fairness, and promotes the rule of law. The mandate
to promote a diverse and inclusive legal profession is central to the State
Bar’s mission of public protection. The State Bar advances this aspect of its
mission in part by collecting, analyzing, and presenting data on California’s
licensed attorneys through an annual attorney census. This first annual
report card uses census data to provide a clear picture of the state of the
profession from a diversity and inclusion standpoint.
As the report card reflects, the profession has become increasingly
diverse in recent decades, with newly licensed attorneys better reflecting
California’s rich and varied demographics. However, much work remains.
The analyses below highlight areas of the legal profession where the
greatest opportunities for improvement exist. A Call to Action follows to
encourage employers and attorneys to influence and advance an inclusive
workplace that supports a more diverse workforce.