Why We Should Stop Saying “Underrepresented”
Date Posted: May 16, 2023
Posted In: News, People,
From Harvard Business Review: Remember when media outlets and academia used to refer to socially marginalized groups as “nonwhites”?
It doesn’t take a lot of social awareness to cringe at that term today.
Now, folks use the term “underrepresented” instead. It may feel like the safest option among the minefield of language and politics we all traverse, but I’d argue the term — for all its seeming inoffensiveness — is not just deeply harmful, it’s inaccurate.
Until very recently, many people in positions of power failed to admit their part in the lack of diversity among senior leadership teams in the U.S., which were (and still are) predominantly white. Some business leaders even suggested that adapting their standards to make these spaces more diverse would be the sort of compromise that overrides merit, despite what the data and science have proven.
This means that “underrepresented” has historically laid the blame at the feet of socially marginalized people, pressuring them to beat the odds in industries that have often failed to hire them. When we connect the dots between recent scholarship, studies, and the anecdotal experiences of the communities the word claims to describe, it becomes clear that “underrepresentation” is a symptom of the problem — not the problem itself.
Continuing to use “underrepresented” as a label sets everyone up to fail by shifting our focus away from the leaders, the institutions, and the systems that have the power to sustainably change the status quo. It puts the onus on the socially marginalized person, and puts all of us into the wrong problem-solving frame of mind.
As an equity-informed brand strategist and visibility expert, I’ve spent years researching, identifying, and naming all the ways our cognitive biases make it harder for marginalized folks to gain the recognition and visibility they deserve. My work leads me to believe the word “underrecognized” is a more accurate — and a more productive— alternative to the word “underrepresented.”