Questionable diversity efforts: When I look at other countries worldwide, the way they approach diversity is by hiring based on a diversity of merit lens which by itself is racially very diverse and secondly they hire based on an equity lens (to make way for those disenfranchised). In Canva I felt that white women are given priority through the equity lens and there was no equality of opportunity for racial minorities to make their mark. In a country where an homogenous immigration policy was only removed in the 70s and a right wing Murdoch media that overtly represents white people, Australia has a pretty long way to go before it even gets to parity with the racial merit based diversity of other countries like the United States or the UK. To directly move to equity based diversity without addressing why merit based diversity is not working to yield similar racial diversity is disingenuous. It creates a diversity profile that is mostly focused on diversity between white men and white women. Canva is very anti-dark skin within the company. People that are not perceived white are not given the opportunities based on their output or productivity and treated like second class citizens. Even while writing blogs or announcing achievements in public channels, if you are white there will be lots of emojis and commendations. If not, not much. This institutional racism is heavily re-inforced by both white men and white women. Calling this out tends to disrupt their world view and they get very defensive about protecting their White Australia demographic. Coworkers were extremely afraid to talk about racial inequality when it comes to the workplace. A slight disruption of their world view makes them very uncomfortable when racial inequalities are openly spoken about. This great white silence prevents any racial diversity movement from making big strides in Canva. Further questioning on racial diversity creates a big backlash and could come at a serious cost to your career so people are very afraid to talk about it. This deep entrenchment of silent culture around race creates a system that is very unsafe for minorities especially if you are perceived as non-white. Nothing will be done to improve your experience and there is no avenue to talk about it. What this ends up doing is architecting a diversity system that promotes white men and white women for higher leadership positions where the non-white minorities end up working 3 or 4 times harder to even get noticed. The result of all this is a diversity footprint that doesn’t represent the cross section of the Australian population especially at leadership levels. Very intolerant and arrogant group of people in my opinion.
Questionable promotions: The growth and development framework is a set of policies that dictates who gets a promotion. From my chats to other coworkers quite a bit of employees have been given special deals and incentives to stay, yet when I went to my manager and asked them to recognise me for a raise after delivering an insane amount of work they said “I’m being too pushy”. They were absent for the last 2 years without much repercussions and their manager was too busy to even have a word with me about career growth. Questions about career growth were met with “The raise is not too much so its not worth going up, you have to meet the expectations, it’s just a title, you can add any title you want on LinkedIn because we don’t have titles, your tone is a bit strong etc”. This was at a time when I was hitting one level above my role profile in the GDF. Meanwhile admins and project co-ordinators have been promoted to Heads overnight bypassing the GDF. All around me I’ve seen white men and white women given the golden opportunities and they were promoted quickly to group leads for contributions that were clearly lesser than mine.
Exclusionary power cliques: I’ve never felt so unwelcome in any office gathering. Canva says it seeks to add culture into the company. I’ve never felt Canva was multi-cultural. Everything from their photoshoots, to who gets the leadership positions and who hangs out together on Friday nights to who makes the big decisions are all euro-centric without a shred of multiculturalism in place. There are many inner circles of power that never allow any outsiders to be a part of their conversations. Even when I accomplished something big and posted an update about it, I never felt appreciated by my coach or their manager. People who were popular received a ton of attention when they posted an update on something small. But dark skinned minorities were never appreciated in my observation no matter how much they accomplished. One of the heads left Canva and started their own company, you could see the pictures when they opened their office there were literally 0 non-white people there. That’s how covert social exclusion works in Australia. No one is willing to talk about it, yet its extremely perverse, insiduous and exclusionary.
Microaggressions: I’ve never felt my voice was heard for all the contributions that I’d done. Some elements of leadership were openly racist and nothing was done about it. Accent discrimination is very real. A senior leader once barred someone from interviewing candidates because “their accent was too strong”. I was personally told by a co-worker that my culture is not a culture that is accepted in Australia. In all PR, photos, videos, season openers it looks like there are strict implicit rules to exclude non-white or non perceived white persons. While in the rest of the western world non white humans will be included almost to a fault to foster diversity and reduce bias, at Canva it is the complete opposite. The covert racism against dark skinned people is clearly very strong here. They expect people who are immigrants to fall into a white caricature and behave accordingly succumbing and supporting to all the narratives they espouse. Essentially to know your place as an immigrant. Many non white people code switch to Euro-white behaviours to blend in shedding their culture.
