Get to know one of our most anticipated Hiring Success 18 Europe speakers, an author and advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel, before she takes the stage next week in Berlin

The bar’s been raised higher than normal in here. Long-legged stools spindle the space between floor and bevelled plank, where Diana Kinnert rests her elbow, leaning forward to sip her lemonade.

In baggy, pineapple-patterned shorts and a floppy Pied-Piper hat, she doesn’t much stand out in this part of Berlin, a cobbled constellation of overnight oats, avocado toast, and working-holiday baristas who forbid sugar in the five-euro cold brew. Clock her on the street anywhere near this cafe, Diana’s just another urban child of the Millennial Left, looking like she’s off to her shift in a vintage clothing shop tonight, not flying to London to speak at a youth conference the next morning.

Those people, down the end of the bar there, they’d never imagine this spritely 27-year-old has worked the nerve-center of the German government, or that she holds the ear of long-serving chancellor Angela Merkel. But being underestimated has always worked in Diana’s favor. Even ten years ago, completing her bachelor’s degree in political science, no one saw her coming.

“I’d be writing all these essays and papers, but my teacher was the only one reading them,” she remembers. “I knew if I wanted an actual audience for my ideas, I had to be strategic, work from within the system. I had to join one of the mainstream political parties.”

So in 2008, the 17-year-old from the mid-sized western city of Wuppertal became a card-carrying member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Traditionally right-of-center, the party currently leading Germany’s minority government, appears, at least post-Trump, more Left, with Merkel siding with Team Trudeau and marching on with Macron. And these conflicts of CDU macro-optics are palimpsest to those inherent in Diana Kinnert.

The more you learn about her politics, her city, and herself, the more a state of contradiction seems natural, normal, even necessary. Growing up with a Polish father and Filipina mother in small-town Germany, a dualist outlook came naturally. She champions feminism, euthanasia and refugee rights. She also appears at numerous Conservative events – by far the youngest person of any party prominence – wearing a side-spun baseball cap and clothing casual if not a little unkempt, and flashing a Jesus tattoo. Yet she says she’s “never felt like I don’t belong in this party.”

In 2015, this ambitious, mixed-race Merkel Youth became the youngest-ever Bundestag chief of staff, reporting to Vice President of Parliament Peter Hintze until his death in 2016. When not fully occupied by office duties, she’d observe school tours of the Reichstag, and realized there was much to be done to engage young people – future voters – in ways that were relevant to them. Diana had a knack for bridging gaps both generational and ideological. Sometimes they overlapped, sometimes they crashed together. She’d sit in on meetings with senior party officials, all several decades her seniors, “who’d tell me they ‘wouldn’t know how to approach a gay issue, let alone a gay person, and I had to tell them, ‘Well, you’ve been sitting next to one this whole time’.”

How many progressive cred-boxes can one twenty-something check? Immigrant background/ biracial/female/feminist, and homosexual? She’s a Lefty’s dream, repping just about every group on 2018s Most Marginalized list. Those preoccupied with identity politics, political correctness, “staying in your own lane” and such, have no idea what to make of Diana Kinnert the Conservative CDU activist. 

A contradiction in point: how could a gay person have so long ago devoted themselves to a government that didn’t legalize same-sex marriage until last year?

“I know,” she says, rolling her eyes, “even hyper-Catholic countries like Mexico and Ireland solved this problem years ago.”

Her justification is, that operating from within a party, even one so long opposed to gay marriage, was the only way to affect real change. She was biding her time. Hard to tell whether this is ethical truth or easily justified hindsight.

“I’m not in those rooms of power because I’m smarter than anyone,” says Diana. “I’m there because I can reframe the message from that room to people outside, people like me.”

As such, Kinnert sees herself as a conduit, and is conscious that being vaunted for her racial background and gender identity could be taken as tokenism, a test-run on future votebanks. And having had Diana positioned out front for the CDU does fit with Merkel’s propensities to sway with the winds of whatever’s blowing at the time.

“It’s not me in particular, it’s a matter of under-representation,” she says. And Berlin seems like the right city to be wrestling with this right now. For all the talk of her city being the Coolest City on Earth, when compared with London, Toronto, or New York, of issues related to gender, diversity or multiculturalism, Berlin has a decade or more to make up for (probably a big part of why Diana has been, within her party and without, forefronted to this degree).

“I think everybody has a story, but because my categories are, like, the urban person, the digital person, the young person, the lesbian person, my storytelling is even more important.”

Not just storytelling that would make a good election campaign, she means actual books –  as much as the two can be detangled when it comes to her. Most political memoirs are written by retired leaders after decades of service, but the social vacuum filled by Diana Kinnert is such that she’s already published a book, For the Future I See Black – black being the CDU party color – already in its second printing, with a follow-up commissioned and in the works.

“The second book is about technology and values, the grey areas between different narratives of young people,” she says, but beyond the buzzwords and the hashtag outrage, Diana can talk reasons and consequence behind some essential, however unsexy, political realities. No surprise to hear, even her national labor theory is non-partisan.

“Germany is strong thanks to its workers’ unions,” she says. “For centuries, everything’s been about stability. We’re risk-averse and change happens slowly. We are, in essence, a conservative country, and now our companies have to transform, thanks to globalization, digitization, etc. We’ve been winning the championship on exports. Our products are really good, but we’re not there yet with the sharing economy, and compared to markets like Hamburg, or Munich, everything in the countryside is 500 times slower.”

But she still finds links between rural supply chains and urban ideology. “All these organic fruits and vegetables that progressive urban hipsters love? They all come from farms that are owned, more often than not, by very conservative people.” Urban, rural; liberal, conservative. “You can’t separate the two.”

Diana understands it’s difficult for some to square her circle, don’t get her wrong; to confound is to bring discomfort. Given the number of “progressive” social mores we now take for granted – especially in anything-goes Berlin – it still takes time for even the least squeaky bureaucracies to catch up. In this sense, Diana Kinnert could be considered progressivist, a Trojan Horse wheeled into Fortress Europe.

“The right-wing populists, in their simple narratives, will tell you who’s guilty for this that or the other and why that’s making things difficult for you – ” she’s animated, but contained, as she sucks more air than lemonade through her straw, seeing on her lockscreen it’s time to head to the airport “ – only when we have a diverse representation in all political parties can we make politics good for everyone.”

If that’s her opening line for tomorrow’s conference, it’s as good as any.

We talk with the founder of a trans support advisory on how organizations are excluding trans applicants without even realizing it.

Though the UK’s Equality Act in 2010, preventing companies from discriminating against candidates on the basis of their gender status, trans people still face disproportionate levels of harassment, violence, unemployment, and homelessness in modern-day Britain.

A 2017 report from the non-profit Stonewall surveyed almost 900 trans and gender-nonconforming persons in the UK, revealing that half of these workers hide their LGBT+ status from employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, or worse. The same study found that one in eight trans persons reported being physically attacked by a colleague or customer in the last year, and 25 percent have experienced homelessness in their lives.

Beyond these sobering statistics, trans people face a number of subtle hurdles in the hiring process, which often inadvertently place them at a disadvantage. ID verifications, or even phone interviews contrive situations where trans applicants must explain their gender identity with virtual strangers. Needless to say, these conversations can distract from the candidate’s qualifications, and reduce their chances of being hired. To better understand the recruiting process from the perspective of trans candidates, we talk with Joanne Lockwood, founder of SEE Change Happen (SCH), a diversity and inclusion practice specializing in supporting transgender inclusion in the workplace.

Joanne founded SCH in 2017 after, what she refers to as, her “personal rebrand” a year prior, a change that involved transitioning to her true gender identity, as well as selling her 17-year-old IT Support company.

In the wake of these life events, she began searching for a new job, and became acutely aware,  as a trans woman, of her former privilege as a cis male. She found that the interview process was fraught with anxiety and disappointment. The burden of education was now on her, and it didn’t feel good. After all, she was the candidate, shouldn’t the recruiters and hiring managers be working to put her at ease? Joanne saw companies that were trying to be inclusive, but just missing the mark. Her mission became clear: she was going to help these organizations get inclusion right.

Since then, Joanne has been an outspoken advocate for trans inclusion, sharing her personal story in the hopes that her upbeat candor will pave the way for an improved trans candidate experience. Register now for the chance to see Joanne speak at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco. and read on to learn what #metoo means now, how far we’ve come since the 1990s, and what real value alignment should look like.

You say you often find yourself leaning against an open door. If that’s the case, then why are impactful diversity and inclusion measures so hard to implement?

If I go up to a random person and say, “I’m trans, do you have a problem?” Most often they will say, “No, that’s great”. But will they give me the job? Likely not.

Just because they don’t actively disapprove of me doesn’t mean they will give me an opportunity. I think employers, no matter how cool they are, tend to go for the easy hire. They just want the corporate fit who will hit the ground running.

Employers often think that a trans hire will cause a level of disruption. Maybe they don’t feel ready. Even if it’s in their corporate values to be inclusive, if they haven’t educated their entire employee base on things like trans and gender-diverse language, it becomes hard to place trans hire where there isn’t one already.

An important fact to acknowledge is that many companies, especially large ones like banks, already have trans employees, some may be out and some may not be. So revamping your diversity and inclusion systems by not hiring people you think will rock that boat is a poor strategy.

You’ve mentioned before that value alignment throughout a company can be challenging, can you explain why?

Many companies use subcontractors, and often these subcontractors aren’t fully trained on the values of the company. I’ve seen incidences where security guards have chased someone out of a store for using the “wrong” dressing room, or a person is denied entry to their place of work because the gender on their ID doesn’t match their presenting gender.

Traditionally, company values are a statement on the website, but in today’s world they need to be more, and it’s a lot of work to keep everyone aligned.

What does authenticity at the workplace look like?

There’s a need to do the job. There’s a need to be professional. Not everybody can be authentic to the nth degree. You can’t be your party self at work, for example. However, your work self still needs to be you. It’s a problem if you feel you have to hide fundamental parts of your identity. You should be able to participate in all the normal office small talk of hobbies, lifestyle, and family. It’s about creating a place where people can have a successful work life.

How is social media affecting the way we address social issues?

The #metoo campaign stands up against workplace harassment, bullying, and blackmail. Before, there was a culture where whistleblowers would face retaliation or termination. Now, largely because of social media, people can’t be shut down and muscled out so quietly.

Think of it like this: a single snowflake hits the ground and disappears, but many snowflakes together create an avalanche of allies, support, and belief, the power of which can break down barriers.

What can employers do to get on board?

I think employers have awoken to the fact that people want to enjoy their work.

People need to know they can voice concerns out loud or anonymously without retaliation. Make sure there is a clear path for people to do so, and let it be known that they will be taken seriously.

Something simple everyone can do is realize that what is funny to you may not be funny to everyone. Practice empathy, and if you get called out apologize sincerely and move on.

Is there a downside to social media as a tool for social debate?

Often we can be too quick to shut down debate. If someone says something you don’t like then they are blocked, deleted, and ignored. This self-partitioning widens the void between the different perspectives. The gray area where people listen to each other is disappearing.

We become keyboard warriors without thinking much of the person on the other side. It’s easy to turn into a bully online. Again, it’s about being a good citizen, using our voice productively and constructively.

1992 was dubbed the year of the woman – Four female senators were elected including Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill’s testimony opened up the conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace, and the Oscars chose ‘Year of the Woman’ as their theme. At the time there seemed to be real momentum towards addressing the discrimination women face in the workplace, but somehow the movement petered out. What is different now with movements like #metoo and #timesup?

The nineties were pre-internet ubiquity and pre social media. It was very hard to be more than one snowflake. It was easy to be closed down. Now, someone can create a hashtag, make a Youtube video, or turn to Twitter and amass an avalanche very quickly. What would have been brushed under the carpet now has the potential to go viral.

Can you give us your top piece of advice for companies looking to be more inclusive to trans applicants and employees?

I think an easy win is shifting the way your organization communicates with the outside world. Review your value statements, make sure they are explicit, and add them to your careers site. Next, look at your job ads, review them for gendered language, and post them to sites where community groups you want to reach will see them. Lastly, use diverse imagery on your social media so you aren’t just representing one type of person. It’s all part of an aspirational message that is inviting and attractive to candidates, regardless of gender.