Fairness, Access, Inclusion, and Representation Strategist. Bestselling Author of Reconstructing DEI and DEI Deconstructed. They/Them. LinkedIn Top Voice on Racial Equity. Inquiries: lilyzheng.co.
United States
176K followers
500+ connections
176K followers
500+ connections
About
I help leaders build and achieve fair, accessible, inclusive, and representative organizations with expert consulting, comprehensive needfinding and data analysis, and strategy development. My clients are organizations and leaders of all kinds looking for approaches grounded in data, rooted in outcomes and effectiveness, and informed by a systemic approach to organizational problem-solving.
As a speaker and leader, you can find me advocating strongly for higher standards and accountability in human-centered work, putting cutting-edge research into practice, and upskilling practitioners and leaders alike to do the work more effectively.
Bestselling author of Reconstructing DEI: A Practitioner's Workbook (2023), DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing it Right (2022), The Ethical Sellout (2019), and Gender Ambiguity in the Workplace (2018).
Named LinkedIn Top Voice on Racial Equity in 2022, Forbes DEI Trailblazer in 2020, and HonestCulture Top DEI Influencer in 2021. See my work in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, the New York Times, and here on LinkedIn. To book me for consulting or speaking engagements, please visit my website at https://lilyzheng.co.
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Lily Zheng shared thisMore findings from the How FAIR Is Your Workplace tool, now two weeks old! Did you know that 75% of respondents scored Superficial or under, Stage 2 out of 5, on the Outcomes tenet? The Outcomes tenet tracks how well an organization can demonstrate their success at achieving important goals like fairness, access, inclusion, and representation. At high maturity, leaders use data reflecting real experiences and real outcomes as the backbone of decision-making, accountability, and progress for all within the organization. So, what does Stage 2 maturity look like on such a tenet? I've included an excerpt of Making Your Workplace FAIR, a free resource available to anyone who takes the diagnostic, to share what Stage 2 looks like and how to move out of it. From the resource: "At the Superficial stage of Outcomes maturity [...] a lot is happening, but somehow it feels like the status quo isn’t changing. While there may be new programs and initiatives being started, that activity isn’t translating into changes in what people feel and experience. Leaders may get a sense that progress is happening because they can see the visible effort and may even have some metrics to point to. However, these metrics are usually vanity metrics: they don't meaningfully reflect progress on the workplace outcomes that matter, or allow organizations to track how well they're removing real barriers. Progressing to the next maturity level requires clearly identifying the problems that might be behind gaps in experience. Shift from input/output metrics (events held, hours trained, headcounts) to outcome metrics: real indicators of whether conditions are improving. 🎯 Establish baselines that help you understand your status quo: internal benchmarks using employee engagement or survey data, and external benchmarks using industry standard data if available. 🎯 Find creative ways to collect feedback. Use surveys, targeted interviews, or anonymous feedback forms to gather input from key partners throughout the organization on what isn’t working and why. 🎯 Brainstorm ways your initiatives might fail. During the planning process for new initiatives, name one way they could backfire and how you’d plan for and detect these unintentional consequences (e.g., bias training might trigger stereotype threat). 🎯 Design a simple before/after measurement for any program or initiative. Push harder to define success beyond “people liked it.” Target a specific behavior that you want your initiative to influence and track how it changes or not. 🎯 Identify the root cause. Initiatives at the Superficial stage tend to target symptoms. To go deeper, zoom out and look to see if multiple problems or inequalities relate back to the same source." Does this sound like your organization? Consider taking the free diagnostic and exploring the companion resource for ideas you can implement today, at https://lnkd.in/gJXPWppW!
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Lily Zheng posted thisLast call for case studies for an article in a major publication! DM me or comment below BEFORE FRIDAY, 5/1 if you have a story about the following you'd like to share: 🎯 You've started collecting impact metrics (not just attendance or attendee satisfaction!) with your workplace events including L&D opportunities, ERG events, and social gatherings. 🎯 You've standardized a decision-making process like hiring, recruitment, promotions, evaluations, or office housework to become more consistent and fair. 🎯 You've organized a recurring (not one-time) event or program that brings people together who might not otherwise interact with each other, whether by demographic, function, or title. 🎯 You've built (or contracted out) a well-utilized employee feedback mechanism that you effectively use to solve organizational and interpersonal problems early on and make better decisions. Tag your colleagues if they might have stories to share! Examples can be anonymized as much or as little as you may like for the final piece; I'm hoping primarily to share effective tactics that go beyond one-time training. Excited to hear what your organization is achieving!
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Lily Zheng posted thisSeems like every other day I talk to a corporate leader perplexed by the rates of AI resistance they're seeing in their workplace, even with rising usage rates. Talking to the workers involved makes the actual problem clear: people feel like the implicit social contract that used to govern their workplaces is breaking down. Their gripes aren't primarily with generative AI (the technology), but with how their leadership has become newly emboldened to use AI adoption as a cudgel to maximize profit regardless of the human costs. Faced with a people-LAST paradigm shift, people choose to reclaim their time. Loyalty plummets. Engagement nosedives. Leaders oversee a vicious transformation from a workplace driven by trust and collaboration to one driven by bare-minimum compliance, with every person looking out only for themselves, accepting that if they have each become disposable, they now owe their company nothing. This isn't the AI revolution people claim it is. Rather, it's the self-inflicted DEVOLUTION of people and culture with AI as the catalyst, and it's painful to watch. Preventing it requires leaders who value their people and can still think long-term enough to protect the social contract that people still expect. That social contract? 1. Good work earns you stability. Doing the job you were hired to do means you keep the job. 2. Great work earns you rewards. Exceptional performace earns you raises, promotions, status, prestige. 3. The point of work is to create value. Organizations solve problems and better enable customers and colleagues. 4. People help each other. When you're struggling, peers and managers help you figure things out. 5. The value of people is in their engagement. Well-supported people give back in the form of feedback, collaboration, innovation, volunteering, and positive brand reputation. When these things are present, people work hard. Brands are built on the backs of their workers' loyalty, their customers' trust, and generations worth of talent. Problems get caught early. New solutions are developed every day. And AI, if leveraged well, amplifies all that good! The dark contract that some leaders are rushing into reads more like: 1. Good work isn't good enough. Doing the job you were hired to do means getting laid off as cost-cutting. 2. Great work earns you immunity for one layoff. Exceptional performace becomes the new bar for "good" performance. 3. The point of work is to make profit at all costs. Organizations extract as much value from the world before cashing in. 4. Every person out for themselves. When you're struggling, people leave you behind to secure their own spot. 5. People are only as valuable as their compliance. Workers who speak up are threats to be removed. These beliefs are a formula for self-destruction. If you see them emerging in your workplace, rally the leaders who still care to correct course while you still have time.
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Lily Zheng shared thisHave you checked out the free How FAIR Is Your Workplace diagnostic tool? If you've taken it, were you curious how your scores measured up? I was! In this overview of the first week's data, we can already see some fascinating trends showing up when it comes to organizations' maturity on Outcomes Over Intentions, Systems Over Self-Help, Coalitions Over Cliques, and Win-Win Over Zero-Sum — the four tenets of the FAIR Framework. Here's what jumps out to me: 1. On all four tenets, the vast majority of respondents landed in Superficial or Emerging. This is roughly what I expected! A smaller number found themselves in Absent (Stage 1), with more in Integrated (Stage 4) and a very small number in the advanced tail of Transformative (Stage 5). 2. Win-Win, on average, is the most advanced. Win-Win was the only tenet where the majority of respondents found themselves in Emerging (Stage 3) or further. Very interesting! On the flip-side, Coalitions was the least advanced — half of the respondents scored 40/100 or under. In many workplaces, coalitions to push the work forward haven't yet been built, leading to brittle movements that can easily stall. 3. Systems had the most variation. On the other three tenets, most responses clustered under Superficial or Emerging. But Systems had the most responses in the Absent stage AND the most responses in Integrated. Some workplaces are still at the level of individual training alone. Others are already creating fairness by design in their standard operating procedures. Perhaps this tenet is the biggest differentiator! This is only one weeks' worth of data. I'm sure the patterns might change as this tool gets older. But I'm curious — what else do you see in the data? If you've taken the tool, how was your experience? And if you haven't, well, then give it a try at https://lnkd.in/gJXPWppW!
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Lily Zheng posted thisI haven't made the "business case for inclusion" in years. What makes leaders stop and listen is when I stress the business COST of EXCLUSION. You and I, we all know the business case. It's all over the internet. It's what ChatGPT and Claude and every other LLM spit out when you ask it why diversity or inclusion are important. "Inclusion drives business performance." "Diverse teams perform better." "Psychological safety drives retention." It's what well-intentioned practitioners and advocates still repeat ad nauseum, the same old cliches that boil down to "more inclusion = more good stuff." The problem isn't that these sentiments are wrong. In fact, we have an abundance of research supporting these very ideas. But when executives are running off of adrenaline, fear, FOMO, anxiety, and manic hype rolled into one, these well-measured arguments slide right off of them. They're hearing sentiments like: "AI will radically remake the environment with new winners and losers, get on board or get destroyed." "Deregulation of labor laws means we can act with impunity, take as much as you can while we still can." "Cost-cutting and mass layoffs are in, who would say no to a stock bump?" Making the business case for inclusion in these times is like making the case for cutting back on sugar to a kid on Halloween night. You'd be in the right. But you couldn't have chosen a worse framing for the moment. Whether due to FOMO or plain old greed or any other reason, so many leaders today are barreling toward an unknown future with a short-termism that completely disregards the consequences of their decisions. They're moving fast and breaking things, with the delusional belief that someone else will clean up after them. So give them a splash of cold water to the face. "Your mass layoff decision will reduce productivity in 74% of your remaining workers and make over 50% of them start looking for new jobs immediately." "Your 'cost-cutting' efforts to eliminate healthcare and flexible working benefits will balloon your costs in the form of retraining after your workforce leaves." "Your mandatory return to office mandates will cause a 14% turnover increase, pushing your most experienced, most productive, and most loyal workers out." "Your bullish AI strategy is alienating customers, more than 80% of whom would abandon your product if you can't explain how their data moves through your systems." The standardized processes, respectful workplace norms, bias interrupters, antidiscrimination practices, trust-building, and all the work that goes into fairness, access, inclusion, and representation at work? That's what prevents the business COST of exclusion. 💡 I'll say it again: being FAIR prevents the business COST of exclusion. 💡 Let's crowdsource some more examples of this. Practitioners, what are ways you've reached the executives you work with, to ensure organizations stay human-centered and healthy?
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Lily Zheng shared thisOver the last few months, I've been building a free tool that anyone can use to evaluate their organization on the four tenets of the FAIR Framework. That tool is available today. How FAIR Is Your Workplace? Is a 16-question diagnostic tool, designed to be taken in 10 minutes or less, that will assess your organization's maturity on the four tenets of the FAIR Framework: Outcomes Over Intentions, Systems Over Self-Help, Coalitions Over Cliques, and Win-Win Over Zero-Sum. (For those of you who want more, there are 32- and 64-question comprehensive versions only available to my clients!) Based on your answers, you'll receive scores on each of these tenets, mapped to a new five-stage maturity model: 🪹 Stage 1: Absent The tenet is not being practiced, and people do not recognize its necessity. 🪞 Stage 2: Superficial People realize the tenet's importance, but their actions doesn't translate into impact. 🌱 Stage 3: Emerging The tenet is beginning to be practiced, but efforts are inconsistent or not widespread. 🔗 Stage 4: Integrated The tenet is practiced broadly and effectively in a sustainable manner. ☀️ Stage 5: Transformative The tenet is inseparable from your organizational identity and everyday practices. After exploring this tool, you'll also gain access to an exclusive new resource: a 22-page guide called Making Your Workplace FAIR. Making Your Workplace FAIR documents not only every stage of maturity for every tenet, but has actionable practices tailor-made to progress from one stage to another. Want to progress your Coalitions from Emerging to Integrated? The guide recommends that you use specific exercises to learn how to manage conflict, map who holds power within the organization, build relationships with change-makers across functions, and coalesce around shared problems and shared solutions. Every stage of every tenet has these practices, based not only on the book this framework is based on, but my own work with clients over the past decade. These resources were a labor of love for me. They're no doubt lacking some polish. But the reason why I'm sharing them for free (hopefully the diagnostic tool isn't too popular, my form limits aren't infinite!), polish or no polish, is because leaders and practitioners need tools to navigate this moment NOW. Workplaces are changing. Human-centered work in this time of AI hype and sociopolitical overwhelm is more important than ever. I can't wait to see what you'll do with them. Try out the tool below, share it with your colleagues, and let me know what you think! If you're having trouble accessing the resources, find any bugs, or want to work together to bring this assessment to your organization or implement a practice that resonates with you, don't hesitate to reach out. The work continues. Grateful to be building and leading alongside all of you. https://lnkd.in/gJXPWppW
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Lily Zheng posted thisIt's been harder for me to write, recently. If I'm being totally honest, harder to read, too. The feeling I get from these times is that we're collectively dealing with information overload on a scale that we've never experienced before. Too many articles, too many posts, too many reels, too much video, too many resources, too many tools. To my colleagues in the thick of it, I see them see-sawing between delirium and burnout just about every other day, like they're drinking from a firehose of brackish water and can't turn away. Personally, it takes me longer to process what I read and write. I sit with the articles I read and mull them over for the insights and ideas that apply to my work. I try and understand my audience, what they're thinking and feeling, and what they truly need — not what they say they want. And then I sit and write, and rewrite, and grind my teeth, and take a walk, and rewrite again, and finally have a piece I'm proud of that provides the value I think people need. It may not be a great fit for today's media ecosystem, where it feels like we're all collectively sprinting along a rickety bridge while it crumbles behind us. Today's news is outdated tomorrow. Yesterday's hot takes are today's cold leftovers. I see in people a frantic preference for timely, easily-digested slop over thoughtful discussion that requires we slow down and think, and feel the pressure to fit my work into that square hole. I do not know what comes next. I do not have five Ready-Bake practices or actionable insights to apply immediately. I do not have AI ragebait or culture war commentary or other shiny objects the algorithm will reward. But I'm still here as myself, still writing, still building, still working with leaders to put value out into the world and leave organizations a little better than I found them. To my fellow writers, leader-practitioners, and advocates doing the same, know that I see you and appreciate you in these frenetic times. May we all remember that our impact is more than our content.
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Lily Zheng posted thisWhen the Reagan administration attacked workplace affirmative action programs in the 80s, some organizations continued to see huge gains — even as training disappeared and regulation evaporated. Why? Because regulation-mandated affirmative action efforts, which simply advised businesses to "ensure equal opportunity" by race, religion, gender, and dsiability, meaningfully and semi-permanently changed business hiring practices for good. Even with less reason to comply with now-weaker regulation, gains from a more fair and inclusive "business as usual" continued to multiply! These gains were only made possible because during affirmative action, businesses: 📋 Developed smarter screening processes, like job tests. 🫱🏻🫲🏿 Built stronger referral networks through employment agencies and schools. 🧠 Employed and trained specialists with anti-discrimination expertise. And as a result, the businesses that invested in these changes actually had their share of Black employees continue to RISE even as affirmative action training and compliance efforts vanished. This historical example is instructive for every workplace in the U.S. right now with exposure to the federal government, (e.g., a federal contractor) looking to navigate uncertainty amid anti-DEI hostility. Leaders, scared of backlash, are understandably wary of bringing in new training or calling attention to their inclusion efforts. Some are letting caution turn to panic and defunding, renaming, and otherwise dismantling their legally sound and often effective initiatives to make the workplace more fair, accessible, inclusive, and representative. But most are simply allowing their efforts to stagnate. No new investment. Strict directives to keep a low profile. No leadership support. Leaders are nearly all making the same, glaring mistake right now: overlooking the fact that their remaining options for creating FAIR workplaces might actually be the most effective ones. 💡 They can redesign their internal personnel processes for greater fairness, mitigating bias and preventing discrimination. 💡They can strengthen their referral networks to ensure their pools of qualified candidates are as strong as possible. 💡They can lean on specialists to build internal problem-solving, change-making, and inclusive leadership capabilities. If they've already done these things in the past? They need only hold fast and maintain them to keep seeing wins. Remember this when you hear someone say that the only response to backlash is to hunker down and try to preserve what we had. Think braver. Think smarter. We can use this moment not only to strengthen what we've built, but to accelerate our forward momentum.
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Lily Zheng shared thisSo you're using LLMs to synthesize insights from your abundance of high-quality employee sentiment data. Neat. WHAT DATA?? I've been helping organizations understand what their workers genuinely need for a decade now. Across dozens of client workplaces I can count the ones where data synthesis was the bottleneck on one hand. No, the real problem is when you have hundreds or thousands of comments like these... "Why would I share my true thoughts when I'll be punished for doing so?" "We all know who the problem is." "Oh absolutely, everything's just fine and perfect and respectful every day." "I'd share more here, but leadership reads these. No thanks." ...attached to a survey with a whopping 30% completion rate. See the problem? It isn't that your consultants are simply taking too long to see the patterns in the data. Analysis isn't the bottleneck. TRUST is. Your people don't trust their leadership or the organization enough to share good data, and never will until they have faith that their input will change something. Uncritically analyzing the cryptic cynical information they provide, especially without the context of having talked to employees who give every answer with crossed arms and rolled eyes, will give you absolutely useless "insights." There's a reason why the experts who go into workplaces to talk to workers and identify problems specialize in so much more than pure data analysis. Most of us are big picture thinkers that combine what we learn from our 1:1 interactions with what the data is saying (or NOT saying), reading in-between the lines to figure out what problems lie under the surface. We work hard to earn workers' trust, then deliver on that trust by using their insights to push leaders to take action. We're trust workers more than data workers. Throwing LLMs at an organization where people don't trust their leadership risks digging yourself into a deeper hole, snowballing your garbage data into garbage insights into garbage decisions. It's solving the entirely wrong problem, and prematurely relying on that useless solution to claim that certain kinds of work are obsolete. When it comes to people and data, analysis is almost never the biggest obstacle to progress. Trust is the bottleneck. And you can't. Automate. Trust. Marvel meme for levity. How'd you solve the icing problem?
Lily Zheng replied to a comment
3h
Cory Cachola I don't disagree with this in broad strokes. But again, I see individual leaders as having the agency to deploy technology, not technology itself as having the agency to guarantee its impact. Lots of companies can and are using AI to accelerate the inequality we had pre-AI. But alternatives are possible, both with and without deep integration with the technology. It feels both defeatist to hand-wave and say, "bad things will happen, we have to accept them," AND naive to say, "good things will happen, wait and see," when by all accounts we're still very early in this adoption cycle. People, especially leaders, have an enormous opportunity to influence both how their organization uses this technology and who the benefits will ultimately go to.
Lily Zheng replied to a comment
4h
I think on my most cynical days I might agree with this, but not today. Technology enables people to do more with less. But it's neither inevitable nor acceptable to normalize executives and short-term profit-minded shareholders "cutting costs" by eliminating jobs, with technology as a thinly-veiled excuse. They could just as well reskill, improve the customer experience, identify new niches to expand into, and so on. Klarna used AI as a rationale to lay off their people, and their product suffered for it — costly and ultimately lowered the quality of their customer outcomes. IKEA used AI to automate the most routine, time-intensive work, and upskilled their frontline workers to offer design advice, growing profits while avoiding layoffs. Same technology. Different decisions made by leaders. Let's not lock ourselves out of this better future.
Lily Zheng commented on a post
5h
Wow, it's incredible how this relates to AI and innovation! It's not hard work and human creativity — it's a paradigm shift for value-creating machine-assisted intelligent productivity enhancement. Adopting this one neat trick allowed me to lay off 900% of my workforce in fifteen minutes! Truly the frontier of organizational efficiency and revenue enhancement for synergistic shareholder solutions, allowing for unprecendented automation at scale. This resonated deeply. This resonated sooooo deeply.
...hope you liked that, Mr. Algorithm. Let people see my post lol.
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Lily Zheng liked thisLily Zheng liked thisColorado is on the verge of passing a new conversion therapy ban. And it's clever. Borrowing from a Republican tactic of using private right of action to get around SCOTUS rulings, now Colorado will allow survivors to sue their conversion therapists. All that is left is the full Senate passage. https://lnkd.in/gMF_CnVyNew Colorado Conversion Therapy Ban With Clever Mechanism Close To PassingNew Colorado Conversion Therapy Ban With Clever Mechanism Close To Passing
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Lily Zheng reacted on thisMore findings from the How FAIR Is Your Workplace tool, now two weeks old! Did you know that 75% of respondents scored Superficial or under, Stage 2 out of 5, on the Outcomes tenet? The Outcomes tenet tracks how well an organization can demonstrate their success at achieving important goals like fairness, access, inclusion, and representation. At high maturity, leaders use data reflecting real experiences and real outcomes as the backbone of decision-making, accountability, and progress for all within the organization. So, what does Stage 2 maturity look like on such a tenet? I've included an excerpt of Making Your Workplace FAIR, a free resource available to anyone who takes the diagnostic, to share what Stage 2 looks like and how to move out of it. From the resource: "At the Superficial stage of Outcomes maturity [...] a lot is happening, but somehow it feels like the status quo isn’t changing. While there may be new programs and initiatives being started, that activity isn’t translating into changes in what people feel and experience. Leaders may get a sense that progress is happening because they can see the visible effort and may even have some metrics to point to. However, these metrics are usually vanity metrics: they don't meaningfully reflect progress on the workplace outcomes that matter, or allow organizations to track how well they're removing real barriers. Progressing to the next maturity level requires clearly identifying the problems that might be behind gaps in experience. Shift from input/output metrics (events held, hours trained, headcounts) to outcome metrics: real indicators of whether conditions are improving. 🎯 Establish baselines that help you understand your status quo: internal benchmarks using employee engagement or survey data, and external benchmarks using industry standard data if available. 🎯 Find creative ways to collect feedback. Use surveys, targeted interviews, or anonymous feedback forms to gather input from key partners throughout the organization on what isn’t working and why. 🎯 Brainstorm ways your initiatives might fail. During the planning process for new initiatives, name one way they could backfire and how you’d plan for and detect these unintentional consequences (e.g., bias training might trigger stereotype threat). 🎯 Design a simple before/after measurement for any program or initiative. Push harder to define success beyond “people liked it.” Target a specific behavior that you want your initiative to influence and track how it changes or not. 🎯 Identify the root cause. Initiatives at the Superficial stage tend to target symptoms. To go deeper, zoom out and look to see if multiple problems or inequalities relate back to the same source." Does this sound like your organization? Consider taking the free diagnostic and exploring the companion resource for ideas you can implement today, at https://lnkd.in/gJXPWppW!
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Lily Zheng reacted on thisI recently had the opportunity to moderate a fireside chat with MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Emilio J Castilla on a question that matters deeply to those working toward more equitable workplaces: what does it actually mean to be meritocratic? And what does it take to close the gap between good intentions and real impact? At our event (hosted by the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab), Emilio offered a precise definition: a meritocracy advances and rewards individuals based on their abilities, talents, and efforts — not their class, wealth, origins, or demographics. Two conditions are fundamental: 1️⃣ 💡 Equal *opportunity* must be actively guaranteed 2️⃣ 💡 Evaluation and reward must be based solely on merit, with proactive systems to surface and address bias and favoritism. When organizations skip these conditions, they aren't practicing true meritocracy. They're practicing something that meets only part of the definition — and often can't see the difference. Emilio's research underscores the importance: when meritocracy was explicitly emphasized, women with identical performance ratings received lower bonuses than their male counterparts. The declared commitment to fairness paradoxically relaxed the evaluators' vigilance that fairness requires. Denise Lohrey Gammal of Amazon described using data to nudge managers toward better developmental conversations — ensuring every person on a team receives the attention and investment that good talent development requires, not just the most visible ones. Dino Anderson of Articulate shared a case study from a previous role — a company that had etched its meritocratic values into its campus walls, measured everything, and yet whose data revealed it would take eighteen years before a woman would reach managing director. They couldn't see what the data eventually made undeniable. True meritocracy requires more than good intentions. It requires the courage to look closely at our systems — to surface the biases, favoritism, and homophily that quietly shape who gets opportunities and who doesn't. And then to act on what we find. As Castilla puts it: "Meritocracy doesn't run on autopilot." Please read the full article and share with others. #Meritocracy #GenderEquity #WorkplaceInclusion #Leadership #OrganizationalCultureLily Zheng reacted on thisWhat does it actually mean to be meritocratic? Many organizations invoke meritocracy with good intentions. But as MIT Sloan Professor Emilio J Castilla argued at our recent Lab event, the problem isn't the idea—it's how rarely it's clearly defined. This can lead to emphasizing some aspects—usually the part about rewarding the best—while overlooking the part that requires doing the hard structural work to make it possible. Castilla's definition is precise: a meritocracy advances and rewards individuals based on their abilities, talents, and efforts—not their class, wealth, origins, or demographics. Two conditions are fundamental. 💡 First, equal opportunity must be actively guaranteed—not assumed. 💡 Second, evaluation and reward must be based solely on merit, with proactive systems to weed out bias and favoritism. When organizations skip these conditions, they aren't practicing true meritocracy. They're practicing something that meets only part of the definition. And here's the paradox: believing you're meritocratic may make you less so. In research conducted with Stephen Benard, Castilla found that when meritocracy was explicitly emphasized, women with identical performance ratings received lower bonuses than their male counterparts. The declared commitment to fairness paradoxically relaxed the vigilance that fairness requires, like a kind of moral credentialing. ⭐ The solution? Shift from managing people to managing opportunity. ⭐ At every stage of the employee lifecycle — hiring, onboarding, development, performance reviews, promotion — ask whether the organization is actively creating conditions where everyone has a real chance to demonstrate their abilities. As Castilla puts it: "Meritocracy doesn't run on autopilot." Two practitioners brought this to life. Denise Lohrey Gammal of Amazon described using data to nudge managers toward better developmental conversations — not to replace human judgment, but to ensure every person on a team receives the attention and investment that good talent development requires. Dino Anderson of Articulate shared a striking case study: a company that had etched meritocratic values into its campus walls, yet whose data revealed it would take eighteen years before a woman would reach managing director. Measuring isn't enough. Acting on what the data reveals is what closes the gap between intention and impact. Organizational transparency and accountability are not optional features of a meritocratic system. They are its operating conditions. This event was organized in service of the Lab's commitment to bridge the gap between research and practice. Read the full article and learn more about Emilio Castilla's book, "The Meritocracy Paradox." Photo credit: Liyah Ernest. #Meritocracy #GenderEquity #WorkplaceInclusion #Leadership #OrganizationalCultureWhat Does It Actually Mean to Be Meritocratic? And How Can We Define It To Include All?What Does It Actually Mean to Be Meritocratic? And How Can We Define It To Include All?
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Named in 10 Diversity And Inclusion Trailblazers You Need To Get Familiar With
Forbes
Named in Forbes 10 Diversity And Inclusion Trailblazers You Need To Get Familiar With, by Janice Gassam, Senior Contributor, D&I.
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2018 President’s Award for Excellence Through Diversity
Stanford University
Zheng was honored “for raising the visibility of issues critical to LGBTQ+, transgender and gender-diverse communities at Stanford through her activism and advocacy.” She was commended “for creating impactful understanding and cultural change among students, faculty and staff through her work as a prominent columnist for The Stanford Daily.” The citation honored Zheng “for developing informational resources to support the trans community at Stanford, including the creation of the 2017…
Zheng was honored “for raising the visibility of issues critical to LGBTQ+, transgender and gender-diverse communities at Stanford through her activism and advocacy.” She was commended “for creating impactful understanding and cultural change among students, faculty and staff through her work as a prominent columnist for The Stanford Daily.” The citation honored Zheng “for developing informational resources to support the trans community at Stanford, including the creation of the 2017 Unofficial Guide to Trans Resources at Stanford.” She was also commended “for inspiring collaboration between student communities and university leaders in addressing issues of social justice and institutional change.”
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#1 Most Influential Undergraduate in Campus Politics
Stanford Politico Journal
"Lily describes her activism as having shifted from only making noise to making institutional change. In an interview with Stanford Politics, she laments that much of the work of her fellow activists so often “makes a bang and then fizzles out,” referencing, as an example, the Stanford 68 bridge protest on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2015. She says her own burnout helped her realize that activist efforts on campus can’t be completely student-run and driven. Whereas previously, Lily seemed to…
"Lily describes her activism as having shifted from only making noise to making institutional change. In an interview with Stanford Politics, she laments that much of the work of her fellow activists so often “makes a bang and then fizzles out,” referencing, as an example, the Stanford 68 bridge protest on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2015. She says her own burnout helped her realize that activist efforts on campus can’t be completely student-run and driven. Whereas previously, Lily seemed to serve as a “bridge” between student activists and the greater Stanford community, this year she sought to become a “bridge” between student activists and the university administration, and, in many ways, she succeeded. The efforts she’s made, which she describes as “translation work,” have mostly involved engaging and communicating with administrators, faculty and staff. After reading a campus climate report Lily wrote in December 2016 for the incoming university provost, Persis Drell reached out to Lily, and they have since developed a working relationship that seemingly culminated in a day-long workshop event that brought together students, alumni, staff and administrators to shed light on university organization and governance, as well as to promote collaboration. Also this year, in keeping with her focus on leaving a mark, as a student staff member for the Weiland Health Initiative, a joint project to support the health of all Stanford students of all gender and sexual identities, Lily took the initiative to create four informational brochures (“Coming Out,” “Best Practices for Trans-Inclusivity for Staff and Faculty,” “Intimate Partner Violence & Sexual Assault” and “The 2017 Unofficial Guide to Trans Resources at Stanford”) that have become mandatory reading for all 8,000+ staff and faculty members as part of their bi-annual training."
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2017 Award of Excellence
Stanford University
Presented to graduating seniors nominated by Stanford staff, faculty, coaches, advisors, resident fellows and senior administrators in recognition of their dedication to Stanford University and contributions to the Stanford community.
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2017 James W. Lyons Award for Service
Stanford University
In recognition of exceptional service and contributions above the normal level of dedication, in areas or situations of extraordinary need, that result in substantial positive change both on and off campus.
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2017 Outstanding Achievement Award
Stanford Alumni Association
In recognition of exemplary undergraduate leadership and volunteer activities that have made a significant or unique impact on the Stanford community, awarded to up to three members of the graduating class.
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2017 Woman of Impact
Stanford Women in Business
In recognition of undergraduate women who impact Stanford University and represent outstanding women in their field.
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President's Award for Excellence through Diversity
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, President of Stanford University
Awarded to the Diversity and First-Generation Office In recognition of our work to create a diverse and inclusive campus, foster excellence through strong leadership and push Stanford as a community to continuously improve and better itself.
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Feature in New York Times
The New York Times
An editorial I submitted to the New York Times' "Transgender Today" collection was featured, alongside the stories and experiences of dozens of other transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/storywall/transgender-today/stories/lily-zheng -
2015 Top 10 Politico
Stanford Political Journal
Ranked as one of Stanford's top ten most influential undergraduate political figures by the Stanford Political Journal, in recognition of my op-ed writing in the Stanford Daily, sexual education and advocacy with student group Kardinal Kink, and social justice advocacy for transgender inclusivity on campus.
http://stanfordpolitics.com/2015/05/2015politicos/ -
2015 Chappell Lougee Scholarship
Undergraduate Advising and Research, Stanford University
Awarded a stipend to pursue an immersive, summer-long project in Creative Writing, to begin work on a novel on my experiences growing up as an LGBT Asian-American youth.
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