I’m The Voice Of The Vulnerable

I want to be someone who contributes to enhance people's lives. I think that the better way is not to talk about diversity and inclusiveness, but diversity and inclusiveness because everyone is diverse their own way. When you do research, do better research if you feel for the topic. The way business changes, changes society. I am the voice of the vulnerable. Finding ways to have impact and finding a purpose to guide one's life and one's career are not easy tasks. Even when there is no shortage of imperatives to act in our society. On tomorrow's our business podcast this month, our guest invites us to answer those questions in a very simple but effective way. A line who you are with what you do. His coming out was a pivotal moment in his academic career. From this point in his life, he decided to advocate for human rights and for diversities as he prefers to call this. Mateo Winkler is a professor of law and chair of the Diversity Committee at HEC Paris. As a man, a lawyer, a researcher and a teacher, he tells us how he is committed to further push the agenda on inclusiveness. In this conversation as well as in his life, he lays his feelings out on the table. This is how he intends to make change happen. You are listening to tomorrow's our business, stories of people who choose to have an impact on other's lives. So I am first of all a man, so I identify as a man. I am also a professor of law, so I am a lawyer. I am a scholar, which means a person who does research as a main job and also a teacher. As you can see, I declined my characteristics as starting from personal to professional, even if the professional part seems greater than the personal part. That is only because I love my job. I think that having an impact as a professor, as a teacher, as a researcher also enriches me personally. That is why I identify as a man first and then I decline three parts of my job. I have been a lawyer for 12 years when I was in Italy and then I switched to academia. When I was a lawyer, what inspired me was to have an impact on people, to help people taking the right decisions, mainly decisions that were compliant with the law. As a researcher, I want to help my readers, and in particular when I use my research in the classroom, to help my students to understand the law. And also, as we will be discussing, later maybe I am also an expert of diversity, equality and inclusiveness, which is DEI. As an expert of DEI, I also want the students to develop a sense of belonging to a community. I think that is the best part of my work at HEC. What inspires me, in fact, is the idea of building up a community, a network of people who get along together and are mutually inspired by each other. And I try to contribute to that. It is really what I call an academic advocacy, which means to me to be an advocate of something, of inclusiveness, of belonging, of well-being, using research and using academic work. Before embracing the academic career, Mateo served as lawyer at the bar of Milan. I remember my job as a lawyer with much fond. I love to be a lawyer. That's why my grandmother always told me, "You're going to be a lawyer," and I was moking up her and saying, "No, my God, I want you to study Greek and Latin literature." At the beginning, ancient literature, at the beginning, which would probably have made me jobless after the degree. But so I choose the law because I thought that law gives persons power. When you masterize the language of the law, you can use it as a power to convince people, to lead people's behaviors. And therefore, I thought that having power was an amazing thing, and especially when you don't use the power of violence, but use the power of words. Perhaps his grandmother's advice was key in determining Mateo's future. But here is really why he chose to engage in LGBT rights and to leverage the law in order to make the world a more inclusive place. I have two phases, which correspond to the two phases of my life. Before Yale and after Yale. Before Yale, I was kind of kid, still, even if I was 25, 26. That was in 2006. When I went to Yale, I realized that I liked men more than women. Coming out, I remember that, he was in the courtyard of the Yale Law School, and he was an amazing experience because I did it with a friend of mine who was a Republican, hyper conservative guy. I don't know why I decided to come out with such a person. He went super well. He was like super comprehensive, and he understood perfectly the situation. I must thank that moment because after that, I decided to change completely my philosophy of life. Instead of using the law as power in general, I wanted to use the law as a tool for change. I started by books about gay rights, about LGBT rights. From there, I moved to create arguments to convince people that having LGBT inclusiveness was a good thing. To do that, of course, I had a lot of readings to do, a lot of study. When I went back to Italy, I was still a lawyer, and I started writing on LGBT rights. It was extremely successful because at the time, it was 2008, no one wrote about that except a few politicians from the left wing. I thought, if I can persuade the judges and other lawyers to act on the same line as to ensure more inclusiveness in LGBT rights, that will be a mission accomplished for me. I wrote in a lot of journals. I worked in one article per month, which is like crazy compared to academic standards. All journals were looking for me. I'm talking about law journals and law reviews. They were looking for me and contacting me. We have this decision of the tribunal of Rome about gay couple who wanted to marry. I thought, can you comment on that? Even if the judges have been very conservative in that respect, I know in the last few years, there has been a huge debate with mayors marrying gay couples since the early 2000s. At the point, I thought that I was contributing. A lot of words, a lot of ink is spared in academic literature about things, but does not mean necessarily that there is contribution. I think contribution is super important. The ancient kings of Mesopotamia or Egypt that leads written statements on the paramedics, on ancient pieces, but then there was no contribution like that is just words spared in the sand. I don't want to be that. I want to be someone who contributes to life of people to improve to enhance people's lives. The fact that I've become an academic full-time scholar makes me think about how I can impact the students. Having research is abstract. When you write, you write for an abstract reader that does not exist in reality, it is just in your head. But when you enter the classroom, you see people in flesh. And then you realize that what you say can be of impact for them and can really determine their lives in more or less important ways. Having impact on people does not mean only defending a particular community. For Mateo, it is also about defending human rights. I decided to, and this was the first change that came by, to change the narrative of my research from Italy to Europe in general and globally, to have a global view. And I adopted a human rights approach to my research. It's always starting with human rights, which is something that, of course, most, a lot of nations have in common. And then, when I found my place at HEC, there was a second change. It was in 2014. There was a second change. It was because the school was very supportive in my ideas on how to study the rights, LGBT rights. And at the time, we discussed with the Deans, and the idea came out to move from LGBT to more, to a broader diversity and inclusiveness, diversity, equity and inclusiveness, or equality and inclusion, whatever you want to call it. And so, this is not just a business language, but is a language can be used in society. So, my idea is to develop a course first, and then to move with my research to land over unexplored islands. Well, they're not really unexplored, right? But they might like to use current research to push on further inclusiveness. Mateo published a research article on the South African athlete, Kesta Seminja, who was barred from the Tokyo Olympics for having a too high level of testosterone. In this article, entitled "The Uncertain Promise of Human Rights in Sports, Understanding the Kesta Seminja case," Mateo deconstructs the narratives surrounding the case to reflect its legal, sociological, and ethical implications. This research is the very example of how he contributes in his own way. So, I was inspired really by Seminja's experience and Seminja's litigation by my personal feeling that I don't think the law should make people vulnerable. I think law should make people stronger. And when you decide that a person cannot run in a sport, she's very good at just because nature, whatever nature means, gave this person above average level of testosterone. This is unfair completely. We shouldn't punish people for characteristics that have nothing to do with their willingness. They have nothing to do with their stubbornness. They have nothing to do with their own being. So, I think that it's a problem, you know, of controlling bodies in some ways. That's why I was inspired by this case. And also, I felt for Kesta Seminja really personally, because I thought she was fighting a right battle, a right judicial battle, for her right to exist in the world and to run in the female category without her testosterone being used against her. I think it's outrageous that her body, which is beautiful, inspiring, is considered not to be, because that is the real question, right? When you see Kesta Seminja, she's, oh, it's not a woman, it's a man, because she's mass-sold, she has some hair, she's tall, she's big. Women should be weak without any hair in their body and they should not have muscles and so on. So, I think that really, I like the case and I wanted to write on the case because I think it was a battle for justice, social justice and minorities justice, because I thought that punishing someone for their bodies, characters is wrong and unjust. And that was inspired me. And I was also inspired by her stubbornness in fighting against the world athletic, which is much more powerful. No, she comes from an absolutely poor family in an absolutely poor village called Lim Popo in South Africa, where if you look at Google Maps, it's just a bunch of streets crossing each other and I can really figure her as a kid playing soccer with her friends in the sand in this very sandy place. And I was thinking like, so you arrive at the very successful position as an Olympic champion and someone tells you that you're not good enough because your body does not fit the image of that we have a woman, I find this outrageous. So, it was really enraged when I wrote this paper and I was really pursuing a goal of making people understand that this is unfair. But because the case is a sort of head scratching case, very complex, I decided to tackle it from a narrative standpoint. So, I was inspired by her personal story, which touches upon also my personal story as a vulnerable person whose body does not correspond to the image that sometimes we have of gays, we like super white teeth, muscle and everything in order. And so I felt for her. And I think feeling, when you do research, you do better research if you feel for the topic, if you really feel that you are part and you contribute. When we put our personal feelings on the table, I think it's an important move that creates trust and also help people understand the genuity of our other things we do and our research in particular. As Mateo told us a little bit before, he has developed a form of dialectic between his research and his teachings to advance the cause of diversity and inclusion, also well known under the acronym DNI. He now explains more specifically how he designed his first courses on DNI and the key role of student's feedback and input in this process. Hello, hello, so it's 1442. I think we can start. Thanks very much for being here. So the objective today is to start with the legal part of this slide course. We have an objective here today to have some fun. I started teaching at the MBA, diversity and inclusion. Indeed, it was called diversity and inclusion strategy because I thought it was sexy to have strategy in the name because like when students, they try to strategy, they think about, oh my god, this is going to be super cool. And the course was not as successful as expected because it was too much low. One of the critics that students made was too much low. Although I really tried, I made a lot of efforts to keep the law on a margin of the course that still came up from time to time as you know, it was my mind, my, my loyering mindset. So I decided to do what usually scholars do when they have to teach new subjects. They start studying. So I bought books. I printed out articles and they spent my summer and my winter. There was a few years ago studying. You know, I went to Yale also back to find, you know, new literature and to work on that. And when I came back, I had, and I think that was another change in my life. I understood that the power of networking because I met very, how can I say, promising leaders of tomorrow in some students, especially in the MBA. And they helped me a lot, finding my way to, at the end, to be an IDEI expert in particular, Louis Dommier, which I want to mention because he's a friend now and he was a MBA student at the time. And it was 2016 and we met thanks to the copper partnership office. And it was a time where the Supreme Court had of the US and introduced and recognized him as a married. So it was a very prolific time for debating on LGBT rights. So Louis came to me and said, why don't we organize a bunch of conferences on diversity? And that I thought it was a great idea because I can use what I learned from this conference to enhance my research and teaching at the same time. It was a great opportunity to see how students liked and how students acted upon certain subjects. We met Louis Dumier, the former MBA student Mateo had just mentioned. Louis has indeed played a major role in pushing the subject of diversity and inclusion on HEC campus. And even further beyond, he founded the first LGBT+ club at HEC Paris with the aim to have impact on business. And with Mateo, they both launched diversity talks in 2016, a series of conferences on business approach to diversity and inclusion. To the why I created the club, the short answer is, because it did not exist. So the question then, I guess, becomes why does an MBA or actually any program need an LGBTQ club, right? So the short answer to that one is, well, in my view, any student program needs one. The campus bug then was definitely not a home of phobic place, but it certainly wasn't a place of visible LGBTQ diversity either. So legal, which I would refer to as the undergraduate program had its own LGBTQ club for almost 20 years, I think. But their curriculum program made it very hard for them to bring stability into the club's presence on campus. So when I showed up in 2016, I quickly concluded that the LGBTQ topic was more of a hidden topic, rather than what I consider it should ultimately be, which is a non-topic. And that nuance is quite important to me, because to some extent, it's the same as what we heard in the US with a don't ask don't tell that needed to move into a model where it's just accepted as a fact. And it's all theory here, of course, because indeed, in a perfect world, no one would care what's in your pants or what your romantic life looked like. But again, we're far from being there, whether as a society or as HEC. So I thought that creating the graduate club, the graduate club of people who share these view, whether LGBTQ themselves or not, would be the right first step into normalizing the topic. The idea with the business orientation, the purpose of business, was meant to be more-- to have the core of our events and discussion topics towards professional as opposed to social. The goal behind that was basically two faults. The first one is having impact through the common interest with the largest students community. By that, I mean, the LGBTQ social gatherings would most likely appeal to an LGBTQ crowd, right? So while I assume that most students on a business call would be more interested in business topics, even with the dash of LGBTQ in them. So the second goal behind that was to create and basically spread awareness to make LGBTQ presence more normal, even beyond that HEC. Because when you look at a campus, you basically have a pool of ambassadors. And the more educated these ambassadors are on diversity topics, the larger their impact on tomorrow's business. Ultimately, the business aspect of the club was really to touch and get in touch with a broader audience. Fun, I had just mentioned the word, but I think that I see myself more as an ambassador than an activist. I am the very impatient profile. So if I wanted to be an activist, I would need to see myself spend in significantly higher proportion of my time trying to move the needle on the field every day, as opposed to integrating it in my professional and personal life. Instead, I decided to focus my time on normalization. And that's basically a longer ambition. So from there, the greatest impact I could have given my situation again, and the pathway that I have is to try and basically engraved structural habits in my day-to-day life, rather than aim for some big, loud momentum. To me, D&I is basically the guardian of the very basic, but complex equation of one human being equals one human being. So to your question of what's at stake, it's basically the balance of that equation, which basically gives D&I the challenge to find out how to factor in all variables that can disturb the balance of the equation. And that means tangible variables, such as a visible handicap, or intangible ones, such as discrimination, discrimination against communities, the extreme against gender. And this is really this balance that is at stake with D&I. Mateo told us how his students helped him become a D&I expert. As you can understand, he enriches himself as an educator and a researcher through contact with others. This is a day-to-day experience, he says. I really feel that even more than contributing, my mission is to learn. I always learn from my students when I teach. I always learn from my colleagues when I speak with them. And it's a continuous and constant and day-to-day experience for me to continue learning from everyone I interact with. And so I learn, for example, that you shouldn't teach law when you teach diversity and inclusiveness, because law is just one minimum component of the D&I dynamics, that D&I management is not limited to the workplace. But it's in society. And students, of course, are interested in the workplace, because that's where they will be in one year, in two years. But they are really interested in knowing how society could be more inclusive, not just the workplace. HEC is a great platform for inclusiveness, because we have more than 100 different nationalities on campus. And I think the way they interact or they don't interact, it depends. The way they tackle these topics of diversity and inclusiveness is a great learning experience for me, at least and for us, to understand how we can improve things in society. This is a sort of microcosmos, microgalaxy, micro-universe. If you wish, where we can make experiments and test how students behave and do things, coming from very different cultural background. This is also a challenge, but it's also a great opportunity for learning. There is this great example currently in the US where of gender pronouns, sometimes you see on LinkedIn name, and then him or like he, him, or like she, her or them, they, you know. That's when we decide how we want to be addressed. And there was this professor in this college who decided that he would have called this student with a gender that she appeared to be and not the gender she decided to be. And so she wanted to be addressed as a woman, and he continued addressing her as a man. And there was a court case. And in the US, of course, we have these very stretched, very expansive, a notion of freedom of expression. So it was labelled as freedom of expression. My point is that what's the learning that you give to your students by addressing them with the pronoun they don't want to be addressed with? What are you teaching them? That they are wrong, that they should behave in a different way. And I don't think this is good for anyone. And the, but still the case is very important, because it's a great, it gives the great chance to reflect upon current affairs in the world. Gender is just one example. We have neurodiversity, we have autism, we have aspergers, which is just a marginalized part of the experience with diversity. We are now having more and more studies on that topic, and I want our students to know that there are different types of diversities exist. So I think that the better way is not to talk about diversity and inclusiveness, but diversities and inclusiveness, because everyone is diverse their own way. I do not want to. being addressed as a woman. I want to people see me as a professional due to my working experience to my education. That's why I would rather prefer the usage of these pronouns when people are talking to me. Of course, it's I guess more than evident from my first and last name that I am a woman, but nonetheless, I don't want to be addressed in such a way. Annalia Mena is one of Mateo's students in the HEC Paris MBA program and a former president of the LGBT+ club. Probably that yes would be valuable to add that I also come from Russia. I'm Russian. Yes, probably one of the reasons why I decided to take up this role is I really wanted it to do with due to my cultural background. Where I come from, being a part of the LGBT+ community is persecuted and against the law and people who identify themselves such as Annalia Mena. That's why you talk. You organize events, you make yourself visible. You stipulate that just the community is facing these and that problems. You make social events in order to attract bigger audience to talk about the problems, the dangerous issues that LGBTQ people are facing. Normally outside campus, like the Yassam campus, it is everyone is trying to be supportive of each other, but straight people, most of the cases, do not realize the problems that LGBTQ people are facing. Not being silent, asking questions, raising up your voice and the very least this is the minimum that everyone should be doing. After her very grave statements regarding the conditions of LGBT people in Russia, we asked Annal what changes she aspires to bring back to her home country. I would try to talk about my experience, the experience of other people, what we faced, what we went through and to try to show as much as I can that people with different backgrounds and people who are just different actually contribute more to the development of communities, society and businesses. Among the podcasts that had inspired us, there is one that I would like to mention here, seen on radio hosted by John Beavan. It's season 3 was released in 2018, long before the Me Too movement, it was entitled "Men". A journey into the whole gender thing, especially sexism, misogyny and patriarchy, says John Beavan in the trailer. Back to Mateo and back in 2021, are we still in a men's world? Yes, he won the bouveau a road in 1949 that we are not born women, but we are made. And, you know, 1949, 2021, it seems like ages, in fact it's ages. And why are we still contending that there are different truths compared to this one? Why are we still contesting these ideas where women's bodies should be free from constraints, especially when political decisions that are taken about women's bodies are taken by men? I was following the elections in Italy where the left wing won practically everywhere. And, you know, the populist right just collapsed apparently. There was local elections. And one of the debate that came out of this election was where are women? Because there were female candidates, but when they voted, after the election when there was the ballot, the second ballot, they disappear. Basically, it was just men against men. And one reflection was how can we guarantee that women are present everywhere, especially when important decisions are taken. And I think that there was the research progress a lot on gender, the so-called gender studies, even if today, you know, conservatives and far-right politicians take gender studies, they moek of these gender studies. And I think they are basically BS bullshit. And they don't, they don't want to hear about that, right? So we have this constant return of topics that should have been decided once for all 50 years ago, like abortion rights, sexual harassment. There is always one topic which is the control of the bodies. And one of the body of research that they want to develop in the future is the relationship between bodies and spaces. We have women in the boardroom. And are these women out of place in a boardroom? I don't think so. Even if in finance, for example, you have underrepresentation of women in leadership position in banking and finance and hedge funds, why that? Because women are not good in maths, so they cannot make the calculations that are necessary to calculate the profits for a hedge funds client. That's because women need to take care of their kids and therefore cannot dedicate themselves completely to the career as men do. These are topics that are still discussed when, in fact, they should have been settled 50 years ago. And I think this is also the way our society works, right? Leaders, national leaders tend to hide real problems by taking back old problems as if they weren't settled yet. One example is Hungary. They, in Hungary, they made a law, two or three years ago, they changed a constitution to say that marriage is only between a man and a woman. And second, they said that people cannot change their gender and they must be with the gender for the life, with the gender they've been assigned at birth. While we all know that when you look at a baby, a newborn baby, you identify his sex or her sex. Well, there already we have already determined the gender. You see, their sex is better. We determine their sex, but we don't know anything about their gender. And so, contesting these gender studies that basically say that gender is socially determined and not biologically determined, even if I also criticize the idea that biology, I mean, the way we look at biology also matters, right? It's not just biology fixed once for all. So, the way we look at gender as biologically determined is absolutely wrong. But still, politicians look at that, especially in this case of Hungary, because declaring war on transgender population is to create an enemy. And politicians need enemies to continue cultivating their ambitions of power and success. And of course, crushing a minority is the easiest thing you can do. And then, tire, you know, also there was this law last year in Hungary about gay people, not to be anything relating to homosexuality cannot be showed in advertisements and anywhere where kids are present. And this is a joke, really, if it wasn't a real law, it would have been a joke because it's as if we become gay when we turn 18. But it's a lie, because always teenagers know very well whether they're straight or gay or trans and we are harming them by depriving them of images they can relate to. I remember when I was in high school, I was in a Catholic high school and I looked around and was no one like me. And there was no role model, there were no singers coming out, there were just singers singing about stories of two guys but not in a very. expressive way because Danny would have been ruined their career. So coming back to these examples, we have a bunch of research, a solid research, demonstrating that gender is not biologically determined. And then we have politicians that mow of it and think this is not serious. And they take biology because biology is easier to comprehend by the lay person. You say, OK, men, women, why should we have a third gender? My god, what is that? This is outrageous. And so simple messages that destroy and interworks of research just because these people want to fulfill their political ambitions and ambitions of power. And the way it's done is outrageous. And it shouldn't happen, of course. But coming back to the relationship with women's body, bodies, and spaces, I think what's interesting, we see this dynamic recently with the LGBT free zone that have been declared in Poland and in some of the Eastern European countries. And with the response that the European Parliament gave to it to say, we are a LGBT freedom zone. So there is also this opposition between freedom and populist politics. And now some Polish towns are coming back to their steps and they are accepting funds because basically the European Commission used their fundings to say, if you are an LGBT free zone, we are not going to give you funds. And so because these cities need funds, they say, OK, we'll come back to be an LGBT inclusive area. So we see these dynamics, right? How can we react to this perverse political moves? First, by debunking the myth that these are absolute truths. And we do that by studying it, by creating, by collecting data, by doing some empirical research to find how people behave, how inclusive is probably better reached in very local environments than in absolute and in national environments as well. And so on. So the importance of research is crucial to find weaknesses in this rhetorical discourse of populism, which is very harmful. We wanted to ask Mateo about the last topic that we hadn't yet discussed. And one, which is also at the core of his work and concerns, diversity in business. What does it mean for a company to be inclusive? Why should they be? I think it's a double-side process. So at some point, business considered that diversity was a value to promote. And inclusiveness was a mission to promote more diversity. So it's like a circle that if you have a lot of diversity among your employees, then you promote inclusiveness to make sure that this diversity does not disrupt in conflicts and you don't lose talents. But at the same time, by enhancing inclusiveness, you also attract more diverse talents. So your pool of diverse employees is larger, gets larger, and larger. And so I think the good thing for business is that they have understood that being inclusive is not just a matter of law and compliance, but it's a good management technique to make sure that your firm is profitable. Now, let me be very clear. I don't like the argument of profitability because it seems that we are treated as machines. And once the profit goes down, then the argument for the case for diversity and inclusiveness is gone. So I think that because we spend more than half, maybe two thirds of our life at work, we need to be inclusive at work because we need workers to feel that they belong even when they go to work. And that makes their lives better. There are a lot of studies showing that the well-being of employees is better in places where they feel included, where there are LGBT employees groups, where managers are transparent, and there is transparency of decisions, and there is really very interesting research on that topic. Another thing we can say is that the way business changes changes society. Our societies are diverse by definition. Diversity can be disrupted by, for example, the populist discourse of us against them. And therefore inclusiveness can help diversity to flourish and to represent a great opportunity of learning and of change of people. You were listening to Tomorrow Is Our Business, a monthly podcast brought to you by HEC Paris. Rate and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to know more about how we aim to have impact on business and on society, join us on our website, hec.edu or on our social media @hcparis. You can also gain insights from our research by listening to Knowledge@HEC Podcast.