Why diversity is important and still matters in 2025

Hello again everyone. This is my draft of a recent podcast and you can listen to it by clicking on this link here. I had a conversation with a good friend today about why it is important for us to have diversity in the media, so we're not just talking about people with different skin colours, nationality, ethnicity and social backgrounds but also featuring other minority groups like the LGBTQ community and those who are disabled and neurodivergent. I felt that it was important to portray all forms of minorities in the media being themselves, being allowed to express their own unique identities without feeling the urge to conform but at the same time being absolutely brilliant at what they do. Allow me to tell you a bit more about my childhood to demonstrate why this is so important l for certain people who come from a very similar social background as myself. Yes I'm about to go on about how poor and working class my family is, so brace yourselves guys!

Now my parents had very working class jobs - they were primary school teachers all their working lives, they never ever tried doing anything else. The job never evolved beyond what they did, in their first year of their working lives, they were teaching children in a primary school and they did that right until the day they finally retired. One key feature about working class jobs like that is that there is no mechanism built into the system to reward teachers who try harder to help their students, even if you go the extra mile to help your students, you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart and you're not going to paid any extra or rewarded in any way for that effort. Thus under such circumstances, all teachers were on a certain pay scale that had zero correlation to their performance. Thus a terrible teacher and a great teacher were paid exactly the same and yes, if you think that sounds totally wrong, I agree - there's something broken about a system like that but that's just the way it is for so many working class jobs. It's not just teachers I am singling out - many jobs simply don't have any kind of performance related pay. Take a bus driver for example, they don't get paid a penny more to be polite or helpful; if they do so out of the goodness of their hearts then great, but otherwise they are not incentivized to do anything more than the bare minimum. I know I have used this example in another podcast before so apologies if you have heard this story before, I was at my local supermarket when I found a product which didn't have a price on it. So I went to the nearest staff member I could find and I asked her, "excuse me, please can you tell me how much this item costs?" She looked at me like, damn why did you have to pick me, you realize I'm not paid a penny more to help you so why don't you go bother someone else. She didn't even look at the item in my hand, but she quickly looked around, spotted another member of staff and said, "can you go ask him instead?" It was just that tone of her voice when she said that, like I knew she was never going to lift a finger to help me as she so determined to do the bare minimum to get to the end of her shift, I recognize that behaviour; it reminded me of my parents and their colleagues. 

Here's an example of how this works in practice when trying to enforce certain standards for the bare minimum. In the case of my parents, the school had a rule that all teachers must wear shoes that covered the toes, so no slippers, no sandals, the toes must not be seen. They were a more relaxed about the kind of footwear, as long as the toes were not visible. In Singapore, we like to wear sandals in the hot and sticky weather - you don't need to bother with socks as well with those sandals. One day, my father had absentmindedly put on his open-toe sandals to go to work and at first, he was worried that he would be reprimanded for breaking the rules but even to his surprise, no one seemed to notice, no one seemed to care that his toes were exposed that day. He came home to brag about it to me that day, I could hear the genuine delight in his voice, all because he had managed to cheat the system and do less than the bare minimum requirement to cover his toes up at work and got away with it. But what happens when a teacher does a lot more than the bare minimum? I remember an incident when a younger female teacher at the school (let's call her Diana) showed up at work dressed nicely - Diana wore a new dress, she had a hair and make up done up nicely and my guess is that she either had a hot date with her new boyfriend after work or maybe she had lined up a job interview after work that day. Either way, my mother took huge offence at Diana daring to turn up at work looking nice - my mother lost her temper when she described the situation to my father and I. My mother described Diana as a cheap whore, a prostitute, a slut dressed up to seduce men, the way my mother described it, you'd think Diana was running around town in sexy lingerie that left nothing to the imagination but actually, she looked more like an insurance agent from the 1980s. The unwritten rule for the female teachers in that school was to do the bare minimum and for the women, that meant not bothering with make up or nice clothes, they could turn up at work looking like crap; as long as all the women kept to that agenda, they set the tone for what was considered normal and acceptable at work. But when this Diana made an effort that day, she faced the wrath of all the other teacher - oh she was mocked, ostracized, criticized and hated for daring to be different. 

In work environments like that, there is a huge sense of conformity, there is peer pressure to fall in line and be just like everyone else. Don't get me wrong, it is a double edged sword. On one hand, people in this situation do derive some kind of comfort, a sense of belonging knowing that they have found a community of people who behave just like them, dress just like them, work just like them and they have a lot in common with this community. But this is a sense of belonging based on conforming which leaves no room at all for an individual to be different as Diana found out. So imagine how my mother reacted when she found out that her son is gay and how I am always going to be different from everyone else - she freaked out, she wanted me to stay in the closet and get into a sham marriage, even have kids just to conform to societal norms. Of course, I said to her, no way, I'm going to be me, I'm going to be fabulous, successful and happy and most of all, I hate the idea of conforming. Now did my mother set out to wreck my life and make me miserable? I don't think so, but when conforming is all she ever knew all her life, she can only prescribe a solution that she is familiar with and the poor woman has never ever been shown an alternative to that - this herd mentality, this feeling of a sense of belonging based on conformity was all she was ever taught, all she has ever known and thus that was the only solution she could offer me. I rejected that because thankfully, I'm a lot more educated and intelligent than my mother and I am aware of better alternatives to this kind of working class herd mentality that defined their adult lives. 

There are two areas of my life that my parents never ever experienced personally - firstly, I am not just a gymnast, but a former three-time national champion who has tasted victory in the sport. Secondly, I have built a very successful career in sales. There are two elements that these two experiences share in common; you can be as different and unique as you want as an individual as only your results matter. So if you can perform the routine that win the gold medals at the competition or if you can sell more than anyone else in the office, you can wear whatever you want to work and none of that matters. Wear open toe sandals, wear a three piece pinstripe suit, none of that matters as long as your results are better than anyone else. You earn the respect of your peers by being better than them, rather than being just like them - you're encouraged to compete, to be better than everyone else rather than conform to exactly what they are doing. If you are only a mediocre gymnast or a mediocre sales person, you will never become the champion, you'll be seen as a lazy slacker who isn't working hard enough - such is the stark difference between the environment where I grew up and the environment where my parents have spent their entire working lives. So, allow me compare and contrast two stories. 

Sometime in the early 1990s, the ministry of education in Singapore decided to spend a lot of money investing in new teaching materials for the teachers to use in the primary schools. Clearly somebody at the ministry of education had assumed that the teachers would be delighted to receive these brand new shiny teaching aids to make their lessons more interesting. But oh no, the truth couldn't have been more different, the teachers at my parents' school sighed and asked, "is it compulsory that we use these new teaching aids? Do we have to use them or not? Will you check if we used these new teaching aids?" The answer was no, there wasn't any kind of scheme to check what the teachers did with them. What did my parents do then? They put the box of teaching aids in the boot of the car and promptly forgot about it, until the day I helped them unload the groceries from the car after a trip to the supermarket. They were like, oh yeah, play with those if you want, we're never going to touch those. So out of curiosity, I took that box into the house and had a look at it, there was nothing wrong with it - they would have been very useful to any teacher but of course, my parents were only ever interested in doing the bare minimum. So one day, they found out that one of the teachers used these new teaching aids they were given and of course it was Diana again (remember, that's the younger teacher who incurred the wrath of the older teachers when she showed up at work in a nice dress). Once again, accusations were leveled at Diana - she is doing this to make the rest of us look bad! None of us used any of it, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we teach our lessons but now Diana is trying to make it look as if she have all done something wrong. That woman is trying to make enemies in this school! Contrast this to when I first started using my French and Spanish language skills to sell to clients in those markets, you see - I was working in the British company where most of the people were monolingual Brits who were only able to speak English and nothing else. So when I first started using my language skills to penetrate brand new markets, the boss responded by praising me for taking that bold step and used my example to encourage others to think outside the box to improve their sales performance. Whilst my parents felt threatened by Diana who always worked harder and tried harder than the other teachers, my colleagues actually had a genuine sense of admiration for me, since I was being inventive, creative and coming up with brand new ways to achieve the results I wanted. There was no reward for conforming, no, we were instead encouraged to innovate and be original. 

I'd like you to think about what it was like for me back in the early 1990s as a teenager growing up, I was looking on at the way my parents picked fights with Diana at work and my parents showing me, this is what working life is like, you have to conform, you have to fit in, you have to be like everyone else in the office or else they will not accept you. They have seen how people like Diana have been relentlessly bullied and ostracized and they didn't want the same to happen to me. But of course, I chose a totally different approach by putting myself in an environment where I will be rewarded for my excellent performances and problem solving skills, rather than my ability to conform. Let's face it, in the words of a dear friend I spoke to recently, I am a loud, gay queen, I stand out, I'm different but I am also extremely intelligent and brilliant at what I do and people will love me for being brilliant rather than because I somehow am like everyone else. The way I see it, I'm very grateful that I have a choice in the matter because it is not easy to pick a career path where you have to face intense competition every single day at work to sell more than others. Would someone like my parents thrive in such a work environment? No, their first instinct would be to follow the herd, do what everyone else is doing and try to get away with doing the bare minimum. That would in a best case scenario lead to a fairly mediocre performance but usually people who behave like that leave sales altogether and go become primary school teachers. No, it would be like forcing a round peg into a square hole. So it is true that my parents have picked a career path that suited their character, but when they tried to force me down the same path despite the fact that it was so wrong for me, that's when we need more positive role models in the media to show these young people that there is another way, a better way - they don't have to follow in their parents' footsteps, they can do things differently. This was part of the reason why I had rejected what my parents told me to do and forged my own path in life. I'd like you to think about what it was like for me as a young person way back in the 1990s - we didn't have the internet as we know it then, I could only try to use my limited access to books, some magazines, TV programmes, movies, newspapers and other forms of media available to me in Singapore then to try to create some kind of cogent picture of an alternative to what my parents' view of the world was. 

So my question for you is this: if a working class kid in Singapore could figure all this out without the internet back in the 1990s, why do we need to spoon feed the younger generation with positive role models then when they can simply do a google search for a positive role model of their choice? You might also argue that we should never ever wait for someone to do something else first before allowing ourselves permission to believe that can do the same. So if no one else in your family has ever gone to university, you shouldn't use that as an excuse to not even try to go down that path if that's what you want. Not even trying just because no one else in your family has ever done so almost sounds like a feeble excuse in this case. My reply to that is that I am not pretending that positive role models will change the world, but they will benefit some people whose parents are simply not in a position to help their children. It is clear that whilst my working class parents were ignorant and misinformed, they didn't set out to deliberately sabotage my career and future at all. Rather, they were working with what limited information they had which unfortunately meant that they were giving me really bad advice and thus in those circumstances, it would've been really useful for someone like me to have access to as many alternative point of views as possible in order to explore alternatives to what my parents were teaching me. We're not starting with a blank slate here for these rather unlucky kids - let me make it clear what the scale of the challenge is here! These kids don't have a blank slate but their slates are full of misinformation, misleading lies and half-truths and what is the source of all this bullshit? Their parents, who with the best of intentions, end up totally misleading their own children. So in order to stand a chance in telling the kid, "you need to ignore all that fake news on your slate and look for a better plan", we need to fill the media with positive role models that will really give these kids the kind of information that they need. This is why I believe we owe it to these kids to help them out, at least offer them the right information about their options in life and then they can make an informed decision at that point. They need to see that there are career paths where you do not need to conform, you can be yourself and people will only judge you on what value you can add to the company, what else you can bring to the table ot help the team. As a young gay man growing up in Singapore, that would have been such an encouraging message for me to balance out all the nonsense and rubbish my parents were telling me about how I must conform. So what do you think? Thank you so much for reading.