Growing up across six countries and navigating many different schools, cultural landscapes, and languages, I noticed early that difference often created discomfort. The immediate response to differences was not curiosity; it was distance. Most people fail to engage with the unfamiliar and seem unwilling to expand rigid identity categories. My curiosity to understand “difference” and make meaning of my own experiences is what drew me to anthropology.
By working in diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firms, I wanted to understand how people experience their workplaces and help organizations close the gap between the values they espouse and the culture they build. What I did not anticipate was how my training as an anthropologist would shape the way I did that work, not just in terms of the skills I used, but in terms of how I immediately conceptualized the problems.
A core part of my work was conducting equity audits. The goal of an equity audit is to understand an organization’s culture, assess how well the culture actually reflects its stated commitment to equity and inclusion, and to offer concrete, actionable recommendations to advance the organization’s equity work. In practice, this looked like a comprehensive and rigorous research process:
- conducting meeting observations that surface decision-making processes, where power concentrates, and what goes unspoken;
- guiding one-on-one interviews that create space for staff to share experiences they cannot easily raise with their colleagues and leadership; and
- organizing focus groups that reveal how collective narratives form and what gets suppressed.
In 1972, anthropologist Laura Nader introduced the concept of “studying up,” noting that anthropologists typically study the marginalized while leaving the powerful largely unexamined. She encouraged anthropologists to turn their gaze toward institutions, corporations, and the people who run them; to ask how individuals navigate these systems, how those systems get built and by whom, and in whose interest they operate. Equity audits are, in practice, a form of studying up. You gather experiences of staff and leadership, and examine an organization’s policies and practices, power structures, decision-making frameworks, and hiring processes.
As an external consultant, I occupied the insider/outsider position. During individual staff interviews, I often noticed that staff came into these conversations with distinct sentiments: an unspoken doubt about whether their perspectives and contributions were genuinely valued, and a sense of relief at finally having the opportunity to share their experiences. Some of the questions I asked included: 1) “Are there elephants in the room that need to be acknowledged for the organization to make progress on equity?” and 2) “How comfortable is the team in having direct conversations about race?”
While these questions are sensitive, they implore interviewees to examine their own experiences and place them in the larger context of the organization, identifying the specific forces, policies, and expectations that shape their experience. Here, thinking across scale becomes essential, and where anthropological training is especially useful. For instance, when Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) staff members describe feeling unseen in their role, that experience does not exist in a vacuum. It lives at the intersection of the organization’s specific culture, the industry’s broader dynamics, and the long structural history of how race shapes whose work is recognized and how. As anthropologists, we are trained to move between the personal, interpersonal, organizational, and structural registers simultaneously.
We do not flatten experiences or “data” into something more manageable. Instead, we seek to identify and articulate complexity with precision. Importantly, we have the ability to translate insights into actionable strategies. Some of the wide-ranging recommendations I have provided organizations include:
- building a mentorship program for early career staff to improve retention
- developing a diverse talent pipeline
- updating promotions and performance review processes to integrate an employee’s contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion
- launching 360 feedback for the leadership team
- implementing term limits for Board members to promote fresh perspectives
- hiring a trainer to lead all staff and leadership trainings on navigating conflict and building a generative feedback culture
As organizations continue to grapple with building inclusive cultures, anthropology provides concrete ways to bridge the chasm between an organization’s values and what they actually practice. Anthropologists are uniquely positioned to do this because of our ability to think across scale, moving fluidly between the deeply human and structural elements that shape an individual’s experience in organizations and society at large. In doing so, we refuse to mistake surface consensus for genuine inclusion or to veil the more difficult complexities beneath it.
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