Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Lang

The Lang EDI Advisory Board serves as a strategic leadership and advisory group within the business school with direct reporting to the Dean of Lang. The mission of this Board is to utilize the skills and expertise of its membership to support the understanding, promotion, and enactment of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion practices within Lang.

The Board is chaired by the Assistant Dean, Strategic Partnerships and Societal Impact, and is composed of undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty.

Individuals interested in learning more about Lang’s EDI Advisory Board or about EDI at Lang can contact Lang’s Assistant Dean, Strategic Partnerships and Societal Impact, Dr. Audrey Jamal, or Lang’s EDI Coordinator, Prof. Thomas Sasso.

As individuals and as an institution, we share responsibility to respectfully and meaningfully engage in the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action report, as well as the University of Guelph’s Indigenous Initiatives Strategy, Bi-Naagwad | It Comes Into View.

To create leaders for an inclusive future, we have a responsibility to engage in building understanding and to take action to foster changes in how higher education and business are structured and conducted. Administrators, staff, faculty, students, and alumni are called upon to work towards decolonization and reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, communities, and lands.

Call to Action #92: Business and Reconciliation

We call upon the corporate sector in Canada to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a reconciliation framework and to apply its principles, norms, and standards to corporate policy and core operational activities involving Indigenous peoples and their lands and resources. This would include, but not be limited to, the following:

1. Commit to meaningful consultation, building respectful relationships, and obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples before proceeding with economic development projects.

2. Ensure that Aboriginal peoples have equitable access to jobs, training, and education opportunities in the corporate sector, and that Aboriginal communities gain long-term sustainable benefits from economic development projects.

3. Provide education for management and staff on the history of Aboriginal peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.

Diversity refers to the multitude of ways that humans experience unique individual and group characteristics and dimensions of identities, including the intersection of identities. This includes, but is not limited to, dimensions such as age, appearance, citizenship, creed, disability, education, ethnicity, family composition, gender, gender expression, gender identity, language, marital status, nationality, neurodiversity, political beliefs, race, religion, sex, sexuality, socio-economic status.

While all people experience diversity dimensions and identities, we recognize that some individuals and groups have been systemically marginalized and minoritized by virtue of their identities.

Inclusion refers to the ways in which individuals experience a sense of belonging with a larger group (e.g., in a classroom or department or at an event) and how their identities are valued for their uniqueness. A culture of inclusion is one in which individuals are respected for who they are, experience support and connection, and can succeed through fair treatment and access to opportunities.

Inclusion is a process and can be experienced at individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels.

Equity is based on the recognition that not all people have the same opportunities and that individuals do not experience the world in the same way due to broader systems of bias, discrimination, and injustice. Through equity work, systems are reviewed and reconstructed to eliminate barriers that reproduce unfair experiences and outcomes. Equity seeks to provide individualized consideration and accommodations to those who experience structural barriers and disadvantages to create an environment where everyone has the potential to succeed.

Equity is different from equality; treating everyone the same (i.e., equality) often results in some individuals receiving additional supports that they don’t need while others do not receive sufficient supports to give them the opportunity to engage or participate. Through removing barriers and providing individualized accommodations, equity creates fairer and more sustainable systems for all individuals and groups.