By Umaimah Mendhro, founder of One League, aims to realize global impact by connecting global change-makers to world-class education & opportunities.
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Growing up in the throes of a life of exile in Saudi Arabia and then in rural Pakistan, without access to proper schools, I was keenly aware of the power education held in both making and breaking my future. I never questioned what I understood as one of the fundamental truths of life: education is the greatest equalizer. To achieve advancement and prosperity, one needs not much other than grit, perseverance and a good education.
As I constructed my path from home- and self-schooling to an MBA at Harvard Business School, having fought for every little win along the way, and thanks to one role model and two champions in my life, I found myself prying open what felt like the locked doors of an elite society. A society within which things were just that much easier to achieve, success and accomplishment that much more within reach. A world where each entryway always led to another—a network of power, of movers and shakers, where companies were formed, funding flowed back and forth and opportunities cycled and recycled. A beautiful place bursting with potential. But much of that potential all looked the same.
Homogenous Voices
74% of the population that attends the most competitive colleges are raised in families in the top income quartile (not middle class, not upper middle class, but top income quartile), while less than 3% come from families in the bottom income quartile, notes Fareed Zakaria in In Defense of a Liberal Education. Anthony Carnevale et al. in The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America says, “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for intergenerational reproduction of privilege.” This system filters out right upfront who gets a seat at the table.
Until recently, minorities had been largely left out of the boardroom. “Racial minorities held only about 12% of board seats with over 40% of all U.S. boards still including only white directors,” according to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. While 2021 was a record-breaking year for venture capital, according to PitchBook, with U.S. venture investment reaching $300 billion, almost double the previous year, women founders secured only 2%, Black founders secured only 1.2% and Latinx-founded companies secured only 2.1% of venture funding.
Lack Of Representation Of Global Population And Challenges
While many arguments are made for improving diversity in corporate boards, venture financing and the workplace for the sake of equity and fairness, or improved business performance (perhaps because the first reason didn’t get us all moving), I believe what we have to worry about is lack of representation of some of the most formidable challenges we face as a global society.
In today’s increasingly complex and interconnected world, we are facing some of the worst existential crises in recent history.
As noted by the Federation of American Scientists, the threats of natural disasters, severe climate change and life-threatening diseases in one part of the world can create a ripple effect across the globe while our growing inequality is exacerbated by both the global pandemic and regional and global conflict. Yet, despite these threats, we are severely unprepared to manage our global risks.
We can’t expect to solve our global challenges using the same kind of thinking we used to create them. We need to expand the sphere of solutions, the domain of ideas, the range of voices, and the seats at the table.
We need much more than a mere 1% of our population to solve some of the most complex global challenges of our time.
So what can be done?
Unlocking The Sphere Of Solutions
It’s people like you and me in positions and places of power—whether we were born into those places or benefited from a few role models or champions to get there—who can bring more seats to the table.
Could we, in our personal and professional lives, support and champion others not just by mentoring and advising them but by prying open the locked doors to opportunity?
Who can we bring to our board who doesn’t look and think like us already, and who doesn’t come from within our elite network of power? Who can we hire who represents the full breadth of our customer base, not just the customers we can already relate to?
If we benefited from a world-class institution’s education and network, a coveted venture fund’s financing and support, can we create a way in for others who would otherwise not have the same access?
Could we spend some of our social capital to bridge the path to privilege so that we can benefit from all the latent potential and talent in our global society? Because to solve humanity’s most formidable challenges and build a better future for all of us, we need a lot more than a few of us.