Tsu-Jae King Liu

“But diversity is not only what's important, if we don't include those people, if those people don't feel like they belong, they can't contribute to their full potential. And our teams therefore can't reach our full potential. And we have to also recognize that people come from different backgrounds and experiences so that equity is not the same as equality, right? People come from different—have different abilities and so on. If we want people to participate equally, we have to take that into account to truly achieve equity and inclusion. So at Berkeley… we have started a series of workshops to empower our engineering students, staff and faculty to be agents of change, positive change. And so what we have is engaging interactive workshops to have people practice, learn about, and practice skills for well first of all, increasing awareness of our personal biases, but how to interrupt exclusionary behaviors and how to advance equity and inclusion.”<br />

“We want to hire faculty who actually understand, have some understanding, and have some track record or plans to increase diversity and foster inclusion. Equity and inclusion. So that's the next wave. So hopefully within the next ten years, it'll be like a standard expectation of faculty to be excellent in research, education and advocates for equity and inclusion.”

“Now, in the College of Engineering… our mission really is to transform the lives of our students, to educate them to become inclusive leaders. And the research that we do is aimed to have great impact to solve society's greatest challenges. So this is what we refer to as transformative technology. And ultimately, we want to transform society to make it more equitable, fair and just so that everybody can thrive. So our mission, really, if you want to summarize it, is to educate inclusive leaders, create knowledge, equitably, all in service of a diverse society.”

“Here at Berkeley, we've developed a Corporate Diversity and Inclusion survey… that we would like to require all companies who want to hire engineering students to fill out. And this survey has three sections. The first section asks if a company tracks meaningful diversity metrics. So do you keep track of things like that management parity index? Do you keep track of the percentage of women that are hired into technical roles and the rate at which they're being promoted compared to men and the rate at which they're leaving compared to men?… A second part of the survey asks, do you have best practices such as equity, pay equity? Do you hold your managers accountable for achieving diversity goals and so on. And then the final section of this short survey asks, okay, what kind of benefits do you provide to your employees? Do you have paid vacation, parental leave, gender inclusive restrooms, things like this? So this information is going to be available to the public for each company that fills out this form.”