Cultural Bias with Tereza De Bardi and Alexis Jenkins

On Air: Podcast by Femme Palette

What assumptions do you think are made when it comes to culture, nationality or ethnicity? What can people and companies stop or start doing to help everyone feel included in the workplace? We invited Tereza De Bardi and Alexis Jenkins to get a European as well as an American opinion on this!

About the speakers:

Tereza De Bardi

Tereza is by profession a Director at Deloitte Czech Republic focused on transformations in Finance and Business Services, and co-founded the D&I Shapers, a platform which brings together organizations across Czech market to move the D&I to the next level. Her life is a diversity story itself, spending more than half of her childhood abroad in Bangladesh and Egypt, working for and with multiple international businesses both as employee or as advisor, being a woman in Consulting (still a male dominated business) and finally marrying a "foreigner", all these provide her with a precious observation field for cultural biases topic.

Alexis Jenkins

Alexis is the Founder of ANJ Consultancy a DEI firm that helps build inclusive and anti-racist workplaces and the Head of People & Culture at Dame Products. By implementing storytelling, data, and analyzing a company’s needs, she is able to use her professional and personal experience to build standards and policies for companies who are truly ready to begin the work. Alexis believes that leaving any facet of yourself at the door is a thing of the past, especially when the door is in your home. Alexis resides outside of New York City with her husband and two year old son.

Some insights from the speakers:

• We need diversity at all levels in companies
• Everyone is responsible for making a change in their surroundings
• Become an accomplice to marginalized groups
• One downside of the D&I efforts can be ‘tokenization’
• Language was the biggest barrier for D&I work at Deloitte Czech Republic
• Have regional and even local strategy for implementing D&I - no one-size-fits all approach from the HQ