You Have Been Included. So Why Does It Still Not Feel Like Belonging?

You have been in that room. Perhaps you were the only woman at the table, or the only non-native speaker, or the only person who had built something from scratch rather than inherited a budget. You were included — there is no question about that. Your presence was technically welcomed.

And yet something in you remained at the door.

This is not ingratitude. It is not oversensitivity. It is a precise response to a precise situation — and the academic research on inclusion has been quietly building the vocabulary to describe it for years. I want to share some of that vocabulary with you today, because I think it changes how you build your own teams, and how you lead.

The Paradox at the Heart of Most Inclusion Efforts

In the organisational literature, 'inclusion' has mainly been examined alongside 'diversity,' and there are two dominant strategies that organisations use to manage the tension between them. The first is assimilation: build a strong shared identity, downplay differences, ask everyone to cohere around the same values and goals. The second is multiculturalism: celebrate the differences, name them explicitly, treat diversity as a strategic resource.

Both sound reasonable. Both, in practice, tend to fail. And my research identifies why: they are both, at their core, paradoxes. Assimilation ignores different values. Multiculturalism suppresses majority values. Each approach excludes something essential — and therefore each approach, despite the best intentions, generates resentment, disengagement, and a ceiling on creative contribution.

What both have in common is a power dynamic that rarely gets named: inclusion, in these models, is something the powerful extend to the less powerful. It is a gift, administered from above. And the implicit price of the gift is assimilation — fitting yourself into a system of values that was not built with you in mind.

"Being tolerated is not the same as being accepted. And most 'inclusive' workplaces are still built on tolerance, even when they believe otherwise."

Tolerance Versus Acceptance: A Critical Distinction

Here is a distinction from the research that I find genuinely clarifying. In the classical sense, tolerance meant simply putting up with what is different — a low bar, but at least an honest one. In its contemporary form, however, tolerance has been upgraded: the 'tolerant' person is now expected not just to endure difference but to actively celebrate it, to perform enthusiasm for values they privately find neutral or alien. This is not liberation. It is a more sophisticated form of suppression, and it generates exactly the kind of quiet alienation you have probably felt.

Acceptance, as researchers Gebert, Buengeler, and Heinitz (2017) propose — and as I develop further in my own work — requires something different and more demanding: a genuine recognition that your own values are historically and socially constructed, not objective truths. From that place, real dialogue becomes possible. Not agreement. Not the performance of celebration. But honest encounter — where each person can voice their real perspective without requiring others to endorse it, and without being required to suppress their own.

This is what Pless and Maak (2004) describe as a culture of inclusion built on mutual enabling, trust, and integrity — a culture where both individual uniqueness and genuine belonging coexist, not as a policy achievement but as a daily relational practice.

What This Means When You Are Building a Team

As a woman entrepreneur, you are not just navigating these dynamics as a subject — you are now also creating them as a leader. The culture you build in your venture will either replicate the tolerance model or do something genuinely different.

The question to ask yourself is not: how do I get my team to buy into our values? That is the assimilation question, and it will get you compliance at best. The better question is: what kind of environment makes it genuinely safe for each person to bring their real perspective? What would it mean if the people around me were not performing alignment but actually thinking freely?

Inclusion that works is not administered from above. It moves in all directions — and it begins with the leader's willingness to be changed by the encounter, not just to manage it. That is a different kind of leadership. It is also, I would argue, a more powerful one.

Research Foundation :This essay draws on my published work on inclusive leadership, engaging with Shore et al. (2011) on belonging and uniqueness, Gebert, Buengeler & Heinitz (2017) on tolerance versus acceptance, and Pless & Maak (2004) on the ethical foundations of inclusive culture. From my chapter "From 'I' to 'We' Through 'Female' Leadership."

Building a genuinely inclusive culture in your venture is not about adding a policy — it is about redesigning the relational architecture of how people work together. If you want to think through what that looks like for your specific team and context, I work on exactly this with women founders. NavigatingTransformation@amfortas.eu                                                                                   — Dr. Eleftheria Egel, NavigatingTransformation