Airbnb inclusivity

[Anonymous]

"Here are the keys to my house. You have a room to yourself, you can come and go at your leisure, my personal life is fully on display to you, and you can join my family in our shared space whenever you wish to have company. Here's a leash if you'd like my dog to walk you to the best park."

That is the default orientation that a typical homestay host like myself offers. Not because we're trying to adhere to some notion of "inclusivity" concocted by a boardroom full of newly minted billionaire white men in San Francisco, but because we care about a humanistic tradition of hospitality that predates the corporate culture of superficial virtue-signaling by millennia.

We do this on the basis of far more trust than is even rational, considering the fact that our guests come through a listing service that deliberately withholds valuable information about the people we're letting into our homes, because it doesn't trust us to be "inclusive" on our own free will.

Apologies if this is outdated, but here is the panel of people who are trying to teach us a lesson in what it means to be inclusive:

I challenge every host to look back through the history of guests they've welcomed into their homes and find a group less diverse than this. Do these magical concepts of Inclusivity and Belonging not apply to the 67% male, overwhelmingly-white boardroom?

[Melodie-And-John0]

You are a very wise person @Ute42 !!!!   We are so lucky to have you here, Prost mien Freunde!   

[Laura2592]

@Ann72its surely something everyone should put awareness around. However the approach of "do as I say, not as a I do" is tone deaf.  The powers that be at Airbnb are on a much more public platform than any single host and they have squandered their own opportunity to hire individuals who aren't majority white and male. So it rankles a bit when they talk to all of us about how to be more "inclusive" while mulling over their  7 figure compensation packages and stock options in Silicon Valley.

(Note, I would be curious if the women in ABB executive positions are paid commensurate with their male peers. Might be interesting to do a little digging on that in the name of pay "inclusivity.")

[Ann72]

@Laura2592  Well put!  Airbnb is lucky to have passionate hosts like you and @Anonymous.

[Inna22]

@Ann72  yes, some action is better than none as long as they are filling the other seats at the table and do not think as is things are fine

@Sarah977 being a Jew from Eastern Europe I definitely never felt white however not many in the US understand it. I started writing “they” when referring to white people but changed it to “we”. There are lots of ways to discriminate and lots of groups that are being discriminated against. I am not sure it will ever fully change

[Sarah977]

@Inna22  Back in the late sixties I lived in Israel for two years, first going on a volunteer program to live on a kibbutz and work there in exchange for room and board. I can't say if things have changed in all the years since, but I was shocked and dismayed to find an attitude of discrimination there which had to do with the Israelis of European extraction looking down on those from North Africa.  The North African volunteers in my group were from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, who were basically white-skinned, and there was a young Ethiopian Jewish man who was as black as black skin can be. The attitude of the European Jews was that it was fine for them to volunteer to work on a kibbutz, or even to become an Israeli citizen, but you wouldn't want your daughter to marry one.

I sure hope that has changing in the intervening years, but as you allude to, finding another group of people to look down on seems to be pretty ingrained in the human species, and is quite the challenge to overcome.

[Inna22]

 it has not. They also think of Bukharian Jews as the lowest class and they don’t even look different. It is so said that we can’t unite even within our own “group”. 

as a side note, you have lived such an amazing life!

[Sarah977]

@Inna22  Well, it seems to me you've lived a pretty interesting life yourself.

Sad to hear that discrimination is still in evidence in Israel. I can understand how people in demographics that don't usually encounter discrimination wouldn't be aware if how awful it makes others feel, but for Israelis of European extraction, whose brothers, parents and grandparents were torn from their homes and transported to death camps to perish, could practice discrimination towards others is pretty unfathomable to me.

[Melodie-And-John0]

@Inna22 , to be perfectly frank, most of these discussions are not at all Black and White nor are the solutions,  the more we try to put folks in neat little boxes , the less we will reach true diversity.   When it comes right down to it, most resolvable divisions are socioeconomic more that ethnic, racial, gender or partnering.   The power money wields can be destructive if applied with derisive  purpose and even good money can do bad things when the benefactor really has no idea how to relate with the situation the deserving beneficiary really needs help with.   

I know for a fact, my 50 years of laboring to earn a living shadows so many others hard working working peoples that have lots of different shades of pigmentation light and dark, i have the healed bones, scars, bruises and groans to prove it, none of which came from sky diving, hiking the Himalayas  or skiing in the Rockies.   Farm labor shovelings bovine waste and moving heavy feed, military service digging ditches and trenches, apprenticeships where my only benefits were to come back again tomorrow and see how that goes.   Inna, your a hard working human too, not a white, not a Jew, too many things general about both of those that have nothing to do with who you are.  You don't deserve to be stamped anything but that awesome person that has worked so hard to support her family doing legal and necessary things like Inn Keeping.   

The wide paintbrushes all _____ people are painted with and giant nets anyone who is a certain color is caught up in needs to end and now before the circular shooting gallery kills everyone that could be part of the solutions we need sooner not later.    "Judge me by my works and deeds not my skin color", thats the least any of us should expect, no matter what our colors are.  Stay well, JR

[Anonymous]

@Melodie-And-John0  I don't personally feel that discrimination is all just about racism, nor that racism is fundamentally about skin color. But when the language coming out of press releases like this focuses overwhelmingly heavily on the visible attributes of race, it becomes more relevant than it ought to be that the group people delivering this message appear to be very racially, generationally, and culturally homogeneous compared to the enormously diverse planet of people receiving it.  

While the talk of inclusivity and belonging tends to target hosts' personal biases as the cause of the problems, Airbnb has often overlooked the biases that happen to be baked into its product. The Search features, for example, have made some improvements but still work much better for urban listings than rural ones, perhaps in part because they're all designed by an inner-city team. The persistence of the very unpopular Location rating often disadvantages hosts in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, while hosts with expensive luxury listings have access to platforming that traditional hosts don't. Large property managers with dozens of listings are prioritized over small-time hosts, and now account for as much as 1/3 of listings, even while Airbnb's lobbyists push the narrative that hosts are just regular people trying to make ends meet. 

Perhaps the HAB can get a message through the fuzz every now and then, but if they've been tasked with creating a "Belonging Committee" (which sounds like an after-school program for troubled teens) I have to wonder if anyone up there is actually going to listen.

[Melodie-And-John0]

So True @Anonymous , DAISNAID, "Do as I say not as I do" looks exactly like the snapshot in this moment of time you took of Airbnb's  BoD!   That might be reasonable in some places like the podunk school system I grew up in that only had one minority family in the whole school district (I think they have 2 now) or Nuuk Greenland but that's probably not a good excuse or look for Brian, Nate and company.   For a company that has certainly hit the bigtime, they are still thinking and looking way too small.  

Your noticements of listing disparities are also noteworthy, why wouldn't they have a button in the search widget that allows someone to purposely look for a Rural stay like the Ski out,  Lake Access or beachfront options?   I suspect many people are not as enamored with crowds at this covid time as they might have been a year ago.  Even the stupid search zone map zoom settings usually puts us as outlier under the "search as I move the map flag" even though my listing shows as #1 in the search.

It would behoove them to focus on core small business lodging strategy (not just the biggies), CS functionality (just make it work again please?) and making sure their party friggen blocker does what its supposed to do and doesnt just block actually qualified guests with actually qualified hosts like it seems to be doing to my listings randomly.   Just my 2 cents, stay well, JR

[Anonymous]

@Melodie-And-John0  Totally agree with you there. It's super easy to find an Airbnb in precisely the inner-city neighborhood you'd like to stay in, but if you're looking for a getaway more for its environmental features than its precise location or household amenities, the search simply doesn't work. 

As @Sarah977  pointed out, the choices they make in their top-level hires say a lot about the company they want to become. If you want to keep a tight inner circle comprised entirely of blue-chip corporate insiders, inclusivity is not the name of the game, and nor is specialized expertise.

[Melodie-And-John0]

@Anonymous, at least the could get Shaq and Tina Turner right?   Im guessing they would spice up their meetings a little bit!   Instead, we get Joe Namath types (nothing wrong with Joe but really, 10 different commercials a year??????)  

[Anonymous]

@Melodie-And-John0   Ha! Put Oprah in charge of "hosting," she's been doing that for decades.

[Melodie-And-John0]

Tru words @Anonymous !   I thinks she has her hands full with a Royal pain in the arse (or two) at the moment.  

[Fred13]

    Tribalism is a natural instinct of human nature, to the extend that no sooner a tribe is formed, in time sub-groups will inevitably start to form. What drives it is man's preference for self-determination, especially those that are inner-directed vs. other-directed. 

   (See The Lonely Crowd by David Reisman. Fascinating work).