Bureaucracy enemy of diversity

Bureaucracy is the enemy of diversity is what I wrote in a publication for a government organisation one day. The editor thought that this sentence was way too much and I had to change it in something like ‘bureaucracy can under some circumstances be unfavorable for diversity‘; a sentence that is not really strong or meaningful.

Bureaucracy is all to often about ‘treating everybody the same way’. Moreover, bureaucracy has created systems that reduce the human factor and increase the power of rules and regulations. This can be an advantage for people who are ‘average’, which is an every day smaller number of people. For people who are different – an increasing number – rules and regulations work out frustrating and can really prevent that they get what they need or what they are entitled to.

Just a few examples from every day life (more complex examples do exist but will make this blog too long):
– in salary systems, for a long time it was impossible for married women in the Netherlands to have their own name, tradition being the adoptation of the husbands’ name and systems sticking with that tradition even sometimes nowadays; and how do you think this works out for gay marriages…
– diagnoses are often made according to checklists: this means that highly intelligent children can be diagnosed with autism or ADHD because the checklist mentions similar criteria – instead of a potential top talent, children become ”students with a problem’…
– everybody knows that a company’s success largely depends on the entrepreneur that runs it; however, following the crisis the banks look for security on paper / in business plans. They now tend to ignore the human factor in business and good entrepreneurs who were not involved in the crisis actually have problems to find funding for their business…

I never said that bureaucracy can be avoided, but in our work we deal with this truth every day, that it is the enemy of diversity indeed!

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