I’m a privileged, old white guy who won the ovary lottery. My child of immigrant, first generation to college father got advanced degrees. Consequently, I was able to grow up in the right ZIP code and take advantage of the opportunities afforded to me by sheer dumb luck. As a result, I wound up being an academic surgeon and worked at the same place for 40 years until I retired as an emeritus professor to pursue my next encore side gig, including working with several non-profits that sit at the intersection of sick care, higher education, biomedical and clinical entrepreneurship and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Like everyone else though, regardless of status, there was a lot of life collateral damage along the way.

Increasingly, my story has become a rare one. A more common commentary is getting multiple degrees with big student debt, jumping from job, or side gig or career to job or side gig or career, no retirement savings and living in your parent’s house. Just ask your Lyft driver who’s moving back in with mom and dad. Younger people are also more likely to be lonely.

Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.

I pursued these adjacent careers because, in part, after 40 years of taking care of 20 patients a day, I increasingly felt I was treating the societal and systemic symptoms and not the disease. They are wicked problems indeed with no simple single bullets.

The disease- opportunity, income,healthcare and education inequality- has become epidemic and all the statistics show it.

As one of the haves, I’m trying to set an example for the other haves and show why and how diversity, entrepreneurship and sick care are wicked problems requiring inter-system solutions and why it is in the best interests of old white guys like me to solve them.

Here’s are 3 reasons:

THERE ARE COMPELLING BUSINESS REASONS TO DO IT

Four key arguments make the case for diversity, equity, and inclusion:

• The moral or social justice case asserts that each person has value to contribute, and that we must address barriers and historical factors that have led to unfair conditions for marginalized populations. For example, racial equity refers to what a genuinely non-racist society would look like, where the distribution of society’s benefits and burdens would not be skewed by race, and individuals would be no more or less likely to experience them due to the color of their skin. From a moral perspective, nonprofits are created to improve society and as such they should be diverse, inclusive, and equitable.
• The economic case is based on the idea that organizations and countries that tap into diverse talent pools are stronger and more efficient. Economists see discrimination as economic inefficiency – the result of a systematic misallocation of human resources. In fact, the Center For American Progress finds that workplace discrimination against employees based on race, gender or sexual orientation costs businesses an estimated $64 billion annually. That amount represents the annual estimated cost of losing and replacing more than 2 million American workers who leave their jobs each year due to unfairness and discrimination. In this argument, organizations should become more diverse and inclusive because it makes economic sense to leverage the talent pools of different populations.
• The market case states that organizations will better serve their customers if they reflect the diversity of their market base. A dramatic demographic shift is under way in the U.S., which will be majority non-white around 2043 according to the Census Bureau. In the private sector, companies such as Deloitte recognize the buying power of minority populations and highlight that diversity is critical to growing market share and bottom line. In the nonprofit sector, clients are our customers, and they want to see themselves represented in the organizations that serve them. Donors are also customers, and organizations and their clients can benefit from the resources of different groups. What’s more, organizations with diverse leadership are more likely to understand the needs of a diverse client base.
• The results case is that diverse teams lead to better outputs. Scott Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, uses mathematical modeling and case studies to show how diversity leads to increased productivity. His research found that diverse groups of problem solvers outperform the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. Diverse nonprofit organizations, and the diversity of perspectives within them, will lead to better solutions to social problems.

SICK CARE CANNOT BE TRANSFORMED INTO HEALTHCARE WITHOUT ADDRESSING THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF ADVERSE OUTCOMES

I’ve worked for many years in “safety net” hospitals-city and county hospitals, university hospitals that take care of a disproportionate share of poor patients, VA patients who are homeless, and native American facilities located on reservations with a culture of poverty. In most instances, health success has little of nothing to do with what goes on in the examining room. Instead, the psycho-social and behavioral health context usually is a predictor of treatment success or failure. In most instances, doctors are ill-prepared to deal with those issues and live at the epicenter of medicine, the legal system, medical sociology and a very dysfunctional mental and behavioral health pseudo-system.

UNHEALTHY STUDENTS MAKE POOR LEARNERS

Here is how education affects health and the price we, as a society, are paying by ignoring the long term consequences.

Most diversity and inclusion conferences are filled with the faces of a demographic that does not reflect the faces back at the office. Most of the people in the corner offices , like in IT, financial services, law and medicine, are older white guys like me.

While demographic diversity is important, psychographic diversity is equally important when it comes to creating high performance teams.

Plus, Pew asked a nationally representative sample of white men with jobs in science, technology, math and engineering (or STEM) fields whether they thought their gender made it harder for them to succeed. Of the 14 percent who said yes, more than one in 10 said they had been affected by reverse discrimination.

Women in medicine burn out more than men. Solutions will need to address personal, professional cultural, organizational and systemic issues.

The agenda for change should be at multiple levels:

1. Personal to build resilience and action plan to confront examples of sexism, e.g. not participating in manels that are not diverse, academic glass ceilings, board representation, etc

2. Organizational to remove sexism and stereotypes through transparent policies and procedures and outcome metrics and future of work issues (job sharing, gig economy, changes in the structure of pensions and benefits, etc)

3. Medical professional cultural to recognize the differences in female physician practice styles and unique accomodations that need to be made for family and child care giving and maternity issues. particularly in medical specialties like general surgery, orthopedics and others that have female under representation.

https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profiles/these-medical-specialties-have-biggest-gender-imbalances

4. Systemic to remove administrivia and non-essential care giving tasks and reimbursement rules that discriminate against specialties with high female participation

Changing that will mean those with the power will have to give it up in order to get more power. As a recent diversity and inclusion keynoter noted, be a go giver, not a go getter. Be the solution, not the problem.