Welcome to Pride Week on The Glass Hammer — we’ll be profiling successful LGBT business women all week long!
When Chris Crespo was applying for her first job out of college, professional services firms hadn’t yet taken many steps to address diversity challenges. “When I started in the industry, we didn’t talk about diversity and inclusion. They made an effort to have a woman interviewer, if you were a woman. And that was it,” she recalled.
“Now we see diversity and inclusion as part of what we do to brand ourselves as leaders in the industry in terms of meeting client needs, learning new things, and doing everything we can to be as strong as we can in this area,” she explained.
Crespo has had a lot to do with that change. In addition to working as Inclusiveness Director at Ernst & Young LLP, she was the catalyst behind the firm’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) professional network, Beyond.
“The biggest way I’ve changed over the course of my career is listening more and figuring out what it is that I don’t know. It used to be very easy for me to argue with people,” she reflected. “It’s been an important lesson for me along the way that sometimes what seems so obvious to me is not obvious to other people. I needed to learn to ask more questions and find out the reasons behind why people were seeing something differently from me.”
She continued, “There were times on the LGBT side where it was easy for me to get angry – for example, ‘why don’t we have partner benefits?’ And more often than not it was a lack of other people’s understanding. It became evident to me that there are some things other people had never thought of. The Beyond network is a good example of that. We had a women’s network, a few ethnic minority networks, and I said, ‘Why don’t we have an LGBT network?’”
“And the next thing I know, I’m leading one,” she said with a laugh. “That’s the other thing – when you ask questions, be prepared to follow up on them.”