Dear Editor:
Alice Gannon’s piece on how change happens (In My Opinion, AR July-August 2022) is particularly valuable now when the CAS is undertaking a massive effort trying to implement its DE&I strategy. She argues that the dramatic increase in the proportion of women in the CAS, from near zero to over 30% is not due to anything that the CAS did. Gannon attributes the change in the percentage of women in the CAS to a major societal trend that saw more women entering previously male-dominated professions. And that wave is what also carried the CAS along. This point of view should at least serve to cause the CAS Board to exchange hubris for humility, by recognizing the practical limits of any initiative it champions in this area. No evidence has been advanced that any of these initiatives will yield the results the CAS DE&I policy is aimed at. Gannon’s point is sobering and invites the board to consider the limits of what it can and cannot achieve in terms of the societal change necessary to cause the change in demographics it is seeking. Wouldn’t it be sad to look in five years’ time and see that all this effort, expense and energy has produced nothing? The way the CAS is attacking this issue without recognition that it will take a much greater societal change to achieve its ambitious goals, promises a major disappointment ahead.
—Stan Khury, FCAS
