How to empower differences and build a more inclusive workplace

Executive overview

Most leaders want to be inclusive but lack a concrete framework for action. Ashley Brundage, founder of Empowering Differences and a transgender woman who rose from bank teller to VP of Diversity and Inclusion in under five years, built a four-step empowerment process from lived experience.

The framework starts with you: know your own gaps before asking others to educate you. Then get to know others through research and personal stories, create access, and take deliberate action.

Hiding what makes you different is a missed opportunity — your differences are your positioning.

What empowering differences means

• Every person has differences; the framework applies to any minority attribute, not only gender identity
• "Transition" applies broadly — career, education, location, language — not only gender
• Privilege exists on a spectrum; most people have both privilege and disadvantage simultaneously
• Passing (moving through society without your difference being noticed) affects people across disability, ethnicity, and gender

Key terminology every leader should know

• Cisgender: a person whose gender identity matches the gender assigned at birth
• Passing: the degree to which a person presents in a way that conforms to societal expectations of a particular group
• Passing applies beyond gender — hidden disabilities, mixed ethnicity, and other differences all involve passing dynamics
• Misreading pronouns creates friction and productivity loss; pronoun use is an everyone issue, not only an LGBTQ+ issue

Why pronouns matter for all leaders

• A colleague named Kim (a man) benefits directly when organisations normalise pronoun sharing — he stops correcting misgendered emails
• Adding pronouns to an email signature takes three minutes and signals inclusion to every person who reads it
• When an entire Zoom call displays pronouns, it signals organisational leadership support for inclusion
• The message reaches the one person who needs it — and that impact compounds outward

Restrooms and access

• About 60% of trans people have avoided public restrooms due to fear of harassment or assault — a fact largely absent from mainstream media coverage
• Many countries already use single-occupancy or gender-neutral restrooms without incident
• Creating open-access facilities is an act of access — one of the 10 empowering actions in the framework
• Starting point: leadership must first want change, then bring in expert perspectives before redesigning spaces

The four-step empowerment process

1. Put in the work yourself — complete a self-assessment to identify where you lack knowledge or empowerment; do not burden marginalised communities to educate you (free resource: empoweringdifferences.com/self-assessment)
2. Get to know others — combine personal stories with data (e.g. the LGBTQ business economy equals $1.7 trillion, equivalent to the 10th largest economy in the world)
3. Create access — design systems, spaces, and processes that allow all people to participate fully
4. Take action — use inclusion deliberately to make people feel connected, comfortable, and productive

Moving beyond binary thinking

• Society conditions leaders to sort everything into binary categories: male/female, abled/disabled, black/white
• Hearing others' stories is the fastest route to expanding beyond either/or thinking
• Enrolling in educational empowerment courses and engaging with multiple perspectives is required, not optional
• No single person can represent every lived experience — broaden the roster of voices deliberately

Allyship and coalition

• Being an ally means using your voice to amplify others, not claiming to fully understand their experience
• Civil rights gains are interconnected: the Civil Rights Act laid groundwork for the ADA, which advanced LGBTQ+ rights
• Stronger outcomes come from coalition across all differing communities, not siloed advocacy
• Change requires leadership buy-in at the top, followed by dialogue, then external expertise