Supporting Diversity in our Profession

Companies always do, until the cat ends up looking different than what they planned for. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I was thinking about putting together a version of that destroy the planet game again that was so easy a caveman could do it because apparently spheres can densely pack 3D space.

One of the few things I saved from the AO was the OP/instructions of one of those games - if you need it as a starting point :wink:

Once you had a near-miss, you could mathematically eliminate half the possible coordinates. I still don’t follow the arguments of why it didn’t work. In theory. In practice, forcing participants to fire 3 volleys at a time and only providing aggregate results was excessive. But that’s not the argument that’s been used against it, As I recall, I won the mini-game version of it you ran later (and there is no longer AO access to disprove it, so I’ll say that with confidence), which i’d thought would put an end to all the “can’t be done” nonsense.

I don’t recall arguments about it not working. I just recall greatly enjoying playing it. (and I had a pretty good spreadsheet set up. I think I still have it around somewhere…)

The GoA is shaping up to to be significantly better than the AO. Go openness, I love this thread.

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Including pronouns in Zoom labels/titles is now pretty common at my employer (national P&C carrier).
It was actually pushed from the top down this past June, and was pretty wildly accepted across the company.

Congratulations MH
Happy for you and wish you the best living your truth.

I have one coworker who has/is transitioned/ transitioning.
I have been happy how she has been accepted.
There was an initial conversation that was like ‘her name is now this and pronouns are now her/she’
And really everything just moved forward at work pretty much the same as before.

Congrats! And welcome back.

I hope you don’t mind what might be an overly personal question, but do you also have a transgender child, or were your posts about your child towards the end really about you? (“Asking for a friend…”)

And kudos for coming out! It must be really hard to be one of the first. I am active in a community that has recently attracted a large number of trans young adults, and in which a couple of the older adults recently came out as trans. This feels to me like the 80s felt re homosexuality: no one knows one, and then in a relatively brief span, a whole lot of gays came out.

I’m going to make a plea for keeping them optional. And come out explicitly about my muddled gender identity.

I think it’s ideal if about half the people use them, so it’s not remarkable either way. There are two types of people who are hurt by being asked their pronouns. The worse hurt is to closeted trans people, or people struggling with their identity. It’s just awkward to be forced to declare. It creates one of those lies @John.S.Mill described.

But it’s also awkward for people like me. If I were 15 I would almost certainly identify as non-binary. I certainly never felt comfortable in “all girl” spaces. My kids think I’m a transman, but I think that’s because they see the ways I don’t fit as a woman, but not the ways I wouldn’t fit as a man.

But I’ve been living as a woman in a binary world for decades. I’m comfortable in my body. I’ve birthed two children, which is a profoundly gender-affirming activity. I nursed them. And I’m too old and set in my ways to be comfortable with “they”, which still feels plural to me. (So much so that I often awkwardly use a friend’s name to avoid using either the wrong pronoun or their preferred “they”) So people call me “she”.

But as a non-gender-conforming woman, it just feels wrong to announce to the world, “Hi, the second thing you should know about me, after my name, is that I’m a woman.” Honestly, I’d rather not draw attention to that. If one of the novel gender-neutral pronouns had caught on, I’d use it. But I really don’t want to be called by a pronoun I’m not comfortable applying to others. :woman_shrugging:t4:

My real name isn’t strongly gendered, and my voice is deep enough that random strangers on the phone routinely call me “sir”, and I never correct them unless it’s someone I expect to have an ongoing relationship with. My body is strongly gendered, and in person I’m always called “ma’am”, which is also fine. But when I’ve been asked my pronouns, I’m a little flustered, and frankly uncomfortable. I don’t mind if you notice that I’m a woman, but it’s not something I want to call out and announce.

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My company has done a lot to encourage openness and D&I discussion, particularly for the LGBTQ community, and has added (and encouraged folks to use) preferred pronouns to our internal profiles and outgoing email signatures. But I have to say that this thread, reading personal stories from a few of you who I have “known” for years here, has educated me more than anything I’ve heard at work.

Thanks 'Hawk, and Lucy, and others, for sharing!

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The important thing is for the straight and cis allies to come out with their support and own stories. SO I encourage them to put pronouns, since it costs them nothing. Closeted LGBT members are extremely vulnerable and paranoid when it comes to revealing almost anything about themselves. I appreciate tremendously when cis/straight people, whether layman or celebrity, come out in support especially if they have a personal connection. Chris Evans’s gay brother, Anne Hathaway’s gay brother, Ariana Grande’s gay brother, Jay-Z’s lesbian mom, etc. it makes the empathy more real and less about attention.
We need allies of gender non conforming/fluid people to come out with their own personal connections as well. This is probably already starting with the success of RuPaul’s drag race and the beauty guru community, but for the older cis/straight community still not enough exposure, if at all.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but knowing my own reservation for coming out as a gay person, I can relate but cannot imagine the magnitude of difficulty many times that of what I feel internally.

I hope we do see more presentation of nonbinary people in our daily lives as well as on media (perhaps a more relatable version of Jeffrey Starr in mainstream). But due to the lower percentage of them in the general populace, just expecting more of them to come out is going to a long road. Thus, we need allies to come out. Allies are so extremely important to the coming out process for every LGBT member.

My husband and daughter both have pronouns on their name badges. Yes, that’s absolutely helpful. And if your company allows it, and it’s easy for you, and especially if you notice that very few people have chosen to publish their pronouns, I absolutely encourage you to do so.

I don’t have any gay or trans relatives, but my son is a non-gender-conforming man. As a child he said he liked to play with the girls because they didn’t hit when they play. But he also said, “I notice that the girls all pick flower stickers, and the boys all pick truck stickers. Why is that?” That’s really hard question to answer to your 3 year old. I told him that on average, there are differences between girls and boys, and most girls prefer flowers, and most boys prefer trucks, but he should take whichever sticker he wanted. He told me he preferred truck stickers. (And he loved playing with toy trucks, I don’t think that was just peer pressure, or at least, not completely peer pressure.) But as a high school student he started wearing skirts. And when a nosy woman asked, “do you know your son is wearing skirts at high school”. I said, “yes”. And she asked “why!”, I replied, “I think he’s exploring his gender identity”.

He has since gone on to do traditionally masculine things like marrying a woman. But he certainly still has a feminine side.

I don’t remember the posts specifically — but neither of my children show any sign of being anything but cis. I did have a friend that has a child that isn’t entirely cis-gender, so the posts may have been trying to get information on how to support them. Sadly, we’ve lost touch over the years – my friend was unable to separate politics from personal, and it caused too much stress for me.

Or they may have been about me.

Thanks for sharing your story as well! I hope you are right and that over the next 5-10 years, people go from ‘I’ve never met and trans/NB person’ to it just being normal to have them in your circle of friends.

I don’t remember the posts specifically, either. And maybe I just guessed it was your child. I certainly thought when you left that it was because of trans-hostility on the site, however. And I thought it was about your child.

I expect this to be a much more supportive site than the ao was.

It didn’t help, but it wasn’t specifically about that. I dropped out of a number of communities just because I wasn’t in the greatest mental state at the time.

Um, we prefer the term “cave dweller.”

I’ll have the Roast Duck, with the mango salsa…

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There’s an attempt to have diversity training count towards professional education. Comments until today.

Send an email to 2020USQSComments@actuary.org

Sample Email:

Subject: Comment on American Academy of Actuaries US Qualification Standards

I am a [Fellow/Associate] of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. I am writing in support of the proposal that Diversity, Equity & inclusion education be considered a Professionalism topic for the purposes of US Qualification Standards, as described in this letter https://www.casact.org/cms/files/DEI_Professionalism_Memo_to_Academy.pdf submitted to the Academy from CAS President Steven Armstrong.

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Not sure I see that as a Professionalism topic. I’d fully support having DEI as its own required category with 2 hours per year minimum (and probably a cap of some kind). But don’t think this should replace the existing Professionalism reqt.

a recent NY required online harassment in the workplace training covered some of this tangentially. Like, I didn’t actually know what “binary” or “CIS” gendered meant until I took this training. probably not exactly what you’re looking for and this is just for people in NY.

Disagree. Professionalism courses talk about how to act in public as an actuary. Diversity and inclusion can be a huge part of that.

When I first started my career, we had diversity classes. One of the situation depicted was what happens if someone’s HIV status was disclosed, and a coworker feels uncomfortable about it.

Someone literally said the “gay guy” (nowhere in the skit was gay mentioned) should be asked to move.

If this came out of an actuary’s mouth in public, there should be consequences.
There are a lot of dumb people. We need to eradicate the dumb.