Why Chemistry is the Perfect Analogy for Identity
I spent about two and a half years of college as a chemistry major. I also failed every chemistry class I took.
That probably isn’t the story you’d expect from someone who eventually built an entire approach to DEI around chemistry. I think of it like the Michael Jordan story. He didn’t make his high school basketball team, then went on to be one of the greatest basketball players ever!
When I created the Table of Diversity in 2015, I didn’t consider myself a chemistry expert and I still don’t. Over the years, chemistry became the foundation of my work for a few reasons:
It’s a concept we all understand and use in our day-to-day lives. It’s a shared experience that we all are familiar with to some extent.
There are some powerful parallels between chemistry and identity. Elements can exist individually or in combination, and their interactions and environments influence what happens.
DEI strategy becomes a science with processes and methodologies, instead of checklists and best practices.
Chemistry gives us permission to experiment, explore, and discover. There’s a childlike fun to chemistry.
Combined this makes the Table of Diversity (the tool) and Identity Chemistry (the framework) a powerful ecosystem for going from DEI programs to practicing DEI.
Most of us recognize the periodic table of elements. We learned at least some chemistry in school, even if we don’t remember much of it now. We use chemistry every day without necessarily thinking about it. We know that H2O at room temperature is water. When water freezes, it turns into ice. When water gets really hot, it becomes steam! We talk about pressure, energy, stability, and catalysts. We even use some of that language in everyday life, school, and work. Someone can be ‘under pressure,’ an organization can be ‘unstable,’ a person can be a ‘catalyst for change,’ and, of course, we’ve all heard that pressure makes diamonds.
You don’t have to be a chemist to understand what those things mean.
As a person with a background in instructional design and I/O psychology, that familiarity is important to me because one of the challenges with DEI is that it can feel like we’re asking people to learn an entirely new language and an entirely new way of understanding the world. There are new terms, new frameworks, new concepts, and often a lot of information about different identities to absorb. For some people, that can create curiosity. For others, it can create distance or defensiveness before they have even had an opportunity to engage with the underlying ideas.
I didn’t want the language to be the barrier to productive, sustainable, and meaningful action. Instead of starting with something completely unfamiliar, and oftentimes very theoretical, I started with something people already knew and asked, 'What if we applied this way of thinking to identity?’
That’s where chemistry became much more than a visual theme for the Table of Diversity.
Chemistry gives us a familiar starting point
The periodic table of elements works because it organizes something complex into something we can see, work with, dissect, and expand. The elements have different properties, they interact with one another, and those interactions can produce different results depending on the conditions. The periodic table is perfect for beginners who are studying chemistry for the first time, and it’s a trusted tool for chemists who are the experts. The periodic table invites everyone to participate in a way that makes sense to them.
The same is true for the Table of Diversity.
Every person has Identity Elements. Those elements interact with each other, shape our experience, and influence how we show up in the world. Just as chemical reactions and compounds can be influenced by their surrounding conditions, our experiences and expressions of identity are influenced by the environments around us.
Chemistry gives us a structure, language, and understanding for thinking about relationships, interactions, conditions, and systems, and those are all important when we’re trying to understand identity.
Chemistry helps us think about the environment, too!
The other reason this analogy works so well is that chemistry isn’t only about the element. It’s also about what happens to an element under different conditions.
Water behaves differently when the temperature changes. A reaction can be affected by its surrounding conditions. Pressure is important. The presence or absence of another substance matters. Change the conditions, and you can change what happens.
The same is true for the environments people operate in.
If we want to understand someone’s experience at work, at school, or in a community, knowing something about that person’s identities is only part of the picture. We also have to look at the environment around them. What are the formal rules? What are the informal expectations? What resources are available? Who has access to opportunities? What happens when someone speaks up? What happens when something goes wrong? How does the environment respond?
Those conditions can influence what people experience and how they respond.
This is why I don’t think of DEI as simply learning information about different groups of people. Information matters, but practice requires us to look at the system in which people are having their experiences.
Chemistry gives us a natural language for doing that. We can talk about conditions, reactions, equilibrium, activation energy, catalysts, and systems. Those concepts give us useful ways to examine what makes change easier or harder and what might need to shift for a different outcome to occur.
And that leads to another important part of the connection: chemistry doesn’t just give us metaphors for DEI. It influences how we practice it.
Chemistry gives us permission to be joyful.
Think back to a chemistry classroom. You may not remember every formula you learned, but you probably remember some of the experiences: the experiments, safety demonstrations, he moments when something changed color, bubbled, fizzed, burned, exploded, or produced a result you didn’t expect. There was something exciting about putting two things together and seeing what happened.
There was discovery.
There was curiosity.
There was sometimes a little bit of ‘let’s see what happens!’
That feeling is something I want to bring into DEI.
So much of our experience with DEI can be serious, somber, and heavy, and there are very real reasons for that. We can’t talk honestly about identity and systems without sometimes talking about difficult experiences, inequity, exclusion, discrimination, and harm. Those conversations matter.
But they can’t be the entirety of the practice.
There should also be room for curiosity, discovery, surprise, creativity, experimentation, connection, and joy! That’s one of the things I love about experiments as a metaphor for DEI. An experiment isn’t necessarily about proving that you were right. It’s about finding something out. You make an observation, ask a question, try something, and learn from what happens. That creates a very different energy.
And I think we need more of it.
DEI can hold difficult truths while still making room for delight. It can ask us to examine systems while also inviting us to discover something new about ourselves and other people. It can challenge us without making every interaction feel like a test we are terrified of failing.
From metaphor to methodology
When I say Identity Chemistry, I mean that literally and figuratively.
The literal part is the chemistry. I draw from a scientific discipline that already has established ways of thinking about elements, compounds, interactions, systems, conditions, and change. I’m not trying to reinvent those concepts. I’m interested in what happens when we apply them to a different subject.
The figurative part is the way science approaches learning.
Science gives us permission to be curious. We can ask a question without already knowing the answer. We can develop a hypothesis, gather information, try something, observe what happens, and use what we learn to inform what we do next.
That mindset has significant implications for DEI.
I’m not trying to make DEI more complicated
This might seem counterintuitive. If I use terms like Identity Elements, Identity Compounds, activation energy, catalysts, and equilibrium, aren’t I just creating another vocabulary for people to learn?
The difference is that I’m not asking people to learn these concepts simply for the sake of knowing them. I’m using familiar concepts to help people understand something that may feel less familiar.
My goal isn’t to make DEI sound more academic or to make people feel like they need to become experts before they can participate. In fact, I’m trying to do the opposite. I want to lower the barrier to engagement by connecting DEI to things people already recognize. We’ve built an entire system on this!
I failed chemistry classes for two and a half years, but chemistry still gave me something incredibly valuable: a way to see patterns.
The Table of Diversity and Identity Chemistry are how we make those patterns visible, taking something people already recognize and using it to help us understand something that affects every single one of us.
We don’t necessarily need an entirely new way to understand DEI. Sometimes we need to recognize that we already understand more than we think we do- and then learn how to apply that understanding in a new context.
And maybe we can have a little fun while we’re figuring it out.