How can it not know what it is?

liz

The brilliant Matthew Kirby has invited me to join him on an upcoming episode of his Honest Human Resources Podcast. I’m looking forward to our conversation about Whiteness in the workplace. In particular, we will be talking about allyship. Although the term is frequently tossed around in the diversity, equity, and inclusion context, we don’t talk transparently about what it means for professionals from minority racial and ethnic groups when white allies are difficult to come by or, worse, when an apparent ally commits an act of betrayal.

In preparing for the taping, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to me to be an ally to professionals in groups whose demographic representation in the mainstream population does not match their representation in the corporate workplace. This is what we mean by underrepresented groups. Corporate America does not reflect the makeup of the general population from a gender or racial/ethnic standpoint, especially at the senior levels.

Listening to prior episodes of the podcast, I know that I can expect Matt to ask me about how I perceive myself to be a human resource. It’s important to me that I convey just how much contempt I have for this contrived euphemism. The term “human resource” was developed as a means to soften the characterization of people and their labor as commodities. In other words, a human resource is an input of production like any other asset or tangible good. It’s 2020, and we still treat human beings as items to be bought and sold.

I am a human being, not a human resource. My labor can be compensated, but I am not a raw material to be consumed in the making of goods or services. I am a person. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, language matters. As we move forward into the great unknown of life after COVID-19 quarantine, it will be more important than ever before that we remember and place emphasis on our essential humanity. Our discourse at the moment boils down to a discussion of the economic value of human life. If this becomes our reality then we have lost what makes us human.

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Published by liz

From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.

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