ERG Leader’s Guide to Gender Partnership

Is your ERG inclusive enough for allies?

As ERG leaders, we want to engage with employees across levels. The more engagement we can create, the more we can move the needle on culture change at our organizations. But according to two of our experts, men at all levels, particularly White men, often feel left out of ERG conversations, and thus do not engage as often or deeply, if at all.

At our recent enERGize virtual event, nearly all of our speakers, regardless of the subject of their particular session, mentioned that securing the buy-in of senior leaders is crucial for employee resource groups (ERGs) to thrive. And since much of the corporate world’s leadership is still made up of White men, this group of potential allies, advocates, gender partners, champions, and sponsors, is crucial to connect with.

Read on to learn why White men and other dominant culture groups are falling through the cracks and how your ERG can send the right messages.

Affinity is important, but so are allies.

Catalyst works to create resources for the betterment of ERGs because they can be invaluable to their members. When done well, ERGs can provide community, a space for grassroots organizing, and a structure for sharing resources, knowledge, and advice. ERGs are places where members can be themselves, where they look out for one another, and where they work for the collective good of the group.

But they can always do bigger and better things with the help of others:

• With an executive sponsor, an ERG can secure funding that will help members create or sustain programming and events. Executives don’t always belong to affinity groups.
• With champions, the accomplishments of the group can be mentioned in the right places at the right times. Their voices can be amplified and their impact widened.
• Advocates can devote time to you and your members. They may help you set up programs, mentor one or more of your leaders, and use whatever influence they have to represent the interests of your ERG in their business area.
• Allies at all levels of the organization can actively recruit new members and help bring in new allies. They can also begin conversations in spaces where they otherwise might not take place.

Sponsors, champions, advocates, and allies can uplift your ERG. You can do without them, but you’ll do a whole lot more with them.

Empathize with the feeling of exclusion.

We shouldn’t be surprised at the current backlash against DEI. For so long, inclusion efforts have been focused on women, LGBTQ+ communities, and people from diverse racial and ethnic groups, leaving straight White men out entirely. While some understood that their presence as allies was needed and joined DEI spaces, others felt excluded, alienated, and even vilified.

It’s an unfortunate fallacy that if efforts are put into helping some groups of people, anyone else must therefore be at a disadvantage. If members of an ERG are special, what about everyone else? Are they now less than?

And since DEI teachings include terms like “privilege” and it is generally agreed that White men have most of it, they may feel specifically not welcome in spaces meant to create safety and community for groups that have suffered historical oppression and disadvantages. They may want to get involved but it might feel wrong. Just as many women have historically felt excluded from the “boys’ club” and “frat house” cultures of workplaces dominated by men, many White men feel unsure of themselves in ERGs whose members are exclusively women or exclusively Latine or exclusively Indigenous.

Everyone knows this feeling. Ever gone to meet your significant other’s whole family for a holiday dinner or reunion? Or been the plus one at a wedding?

On an individual basis, we can feel each other’s discomfort and our empathy kicks in. We take our partner’s hand and introduce them to everyone. We sit a single person at a table with people who we think they’ll get along with.

Even if a given coworker isn’t in the best possible mindset to be an ally yet, they certainly won’t get there if they continue to feel like they’re not allowed to be part of DEI efforts or that your ERG doesn’t want their help.

Let allies know they are welcome and needed.

Brian DeMartino wouldn’t have volunteered on his own to join a women’s ERG. He didn’t know that he could or should. But when he was invited, it changed his career for the better. At Catalyst’s enERGize session “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges: ERGs as the Impetus for Gender Partnership,” DeMartino, now Global HR Operations Manager at Bechtel Corporation, told the story of how he became involved with a women’s ERG there early in his career. Though they are now known as business resource groups (BRGs) at Bechtel, at the time they were ERGs, and he was approached about becoming cochair of the newly forming Glendale, Arizona chapter of the “Women at Bechtel” ERG.

He now encourages others to explicitly invite people who don’t identify with their affinity group to join as allies. DeMartino said, “It wasn’t just a resource group focused for literally what the name implied, which is women at Bechtel, but really a group that was also meant to bring in our male allies as well, to help with some of this conversation around equity and inclusion and knowing that all of us play a role. I’m very aware sitting here today, looking at myself in the camera, that I’m not the face of diversity and inclusion from the standpoint of, I don’t meet the qualifiers of being a part of an underrepresented group. That said, everybody has a role in this conversation.”

Provide ample opportunities for allies to engage.

Speaking at enERGize, Justin Banninga, Planning Manager, Stations Work Program Management at Hydro One, gave his unique perspective as cochair of a men’s ERG called “Men as Allies.” Hydro One empowered the men in the organization to identify and act as allies to other groups. He confirms that a lot of men are still on the outside looking in at ERGs and other diversity and inclusion efforts. He gave an example: men working out in the field.

He said, “They don’t really get the messaging, right? Like, a lot of them don’t even have access to email all the time. And a lot of this stuff comes out through…email communications or big, corporate-wide telecast or online telecast.”

DeMartino offered a solution, saying, “Not everybody’s going to be able to attend every one of the lunch-and-learn programs that you have, but if you tailor them at times that are going to be accessible, again, not only from thinking about it from a geographic difference perspective but also just from being able to attend and access this material.”

Banninga added, “I think, you know, meet people where they are and try to connect them to the human stories. And I think it brings those folks, those men in the field especially, into those conversations in a way that they feel included as well. And I think you’ll find that they are doing a lot of these things anyway, because it’s the right thing to do.”

Once allies have come in, keep them steady on common ground.

Connecting people seems to be the simplest way to drive out fear of the unknown about each other. Once your ERGs have brought men into women’s groups, or White men into ERGs for different racial and ethnic groups, making them stay and engage comes down to what we all have in common. What do we all want? What can we all work toward together? What do we all struggle with? In what ways do we all need each other?

Often, that’s all any of us needs to thrive in unfamiliar territory. Banninga said, “What I encourage [men] to do is just listen to the stories of others, and listen to the stories of women that are attending these sessions with you and people from diverse backgrounds that are attending, and start to see that there are a lot of common threads outside of the more theoretical DEI language that connects you. […] We’re all human beings. We all want to be able to be ourselves in a safe place at work, a psychologically safe space.”

Moving the needle on your company’s culture takes the whole company, not just the underrepresented groups that usually make up ERG memberships. White men can be a great resource for allyship, advocacy, and gender partnership, so long as they are made to feel that they are welcome, too.

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