Is Sephora Smudging Its Reputation With Its Lack Of Diversity?

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By Lisa Cox

The world’s leading beauty and makeup business, Sephora, has smeared its once flawless reputation with an ugly shade of performative inclusion. On the surface, Sephora Mississippi’s recent pledge to hire 150 staff with disabilities looks very attractive and worthy of praise. The Sephora public relations team certainly made sure there was considerable fanfare and glowing media coverage of the decision.

Sephora was digitally praised via numerous news outlets for this seemingly positive and progressive move. Yet while I must commend Sephora for their efforts to offer employment opportunities to certain members of the disability community, on closer inspection of what the job entailed, it’s clear that the effort is weak and a disappointing example of performative inclusion.

I’ve termed it performative inclusion because Sephora will employ these 150 staff only in the warehouse. It’s the lowest level job available and one which ensures that those of us with differences remain hidden away from public view.

Instead of airbrushing their advertisements, Sephora is airbrushing their visible workforce.

It would appear that decision-makers in Sephora’s US corporate office have also been sorely misled by disability stereotypes and made the assumption that people with disabilities are not capable of more than packing boxes. While this role may be ideal for some, the assumption that all disabled job-seekers don’t have the competency required for higher-level work is completely incorrect.

Performative inclusion (in this context) is when a brand or business uses and objectifies a disabled person or people in an effort to look more socially responsible and of a higher moral standard. While the inclusion of disability is rarely a bad thing, the problems begin when that particular business strategy is not thought through, is poorly executed, and is simply tokenistic.

Sephora is a perfect case study for how not to include disability in the workforce.

While performative inclusion is all about looking good in the eyes of the public and ticking the diversity box, true inclusion is about employing people with disabilities at all levels of the business, in a variety of roles.

When the Sephora move was first brought to my attention, I was thrilled. I’d only just finished writing an article about the value of the disability dollar. But upon further research, my disappointment grew.

It wasn’t difficult to find positive media coverage of Sephora’s decision, their communications department had made sure of that. High-level employees appeared on camera, puffing out their chests and congratulating themselves for offering disabled people such a wonderful opportunity in the warehouse. But where were the job opportunities in the boardroom or, heaven forbid, in customer-facing sales roles?

One silver lining in this is that the mistake is an excellent learning opportunity for other brands and businesses, including Sephora Australia, who want to be more inclusive of the disability community but aren’t quite sure how best to go about that. By fusing my professional business background and my personal experiences with acquired disabilities, it would be my pleasure to assist businesses and individuals navigate the nuances of disability inclusion.

Here are several ways that Sephora could have gone about employing people with disabilities. Or, perhaps, here are a few ways that your business can employ people with disabilities without it being tokenistic performative inclusion.

1.Hire at all levels of the business and for a variety of roles – Just like the non-disabled community, people with disabilities come with a huge variety of skills and capabilities. While the warehouse may be the perfect environment for some, so too are the finance, PR, or HR departments and many more places.

2.Include disabled talent in your advertising and marketing material – Just like customer-facing staff, including people with disabilities in your advertising, marketing, and other public communications is further evidence that you value disabled consumers and acknowledge their spending power. It also helps to normalize disability which makes sense since around 20% of our population identify as disabled.

3.Don’t make a big fuss if or when you do - If you wouldn’t send out a press release to announce the hiring of a non-disabled person, it’s probably not necessary to make a big song and dance that you’ve employed a person or people with disabilities. It shouldn’t be a big deal that a business is just doing the right thing.

4.Hire a disability consultant – Sephora could easily have avoided this huge mistake if they’d had input from a person or people within the disability community. While hiring only warehouse staff might have seemed like a great PR move to the non-disabled people at Sephora, I noted this embarrassing blunder immediately.

No doubt Sephora had the very best of intentions and genuinely thought they were doing the right thing. However, it’s a mistake many others can learn from and ensure they don’t make in the future.

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