Cultural Competency + the Workplace

Speaking While Female: Adam Geant and Sheryl Sandberg On Why Women Stay Quiet at Work:  "Male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings. As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right."

Defining Cultural Competence: A Practical Framework for Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health and Health Care is a government-funded study which found that "[d]emographic changes anticipated over the next decade magnify the importance of addressing racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care. A framework of organizational, structural, and clinical cultural competence interventions can facilitate the elimination of these disparities and improve care for all Americans."  The study found "[s]ociocultural barriers to care... at the organizational (leadership/workforce), structural (processes of care), and clinical (providerpatient encounter) levels. A framework of cultural competence interventions— including minority recruitment into the health professions, development of interpreter services and language-appropriate health educational materials, and provider education on cross-cultural issues—emerged to categorize strategies to address racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care"