Mohsin Zaidi is an award-winning author, commentator, and lawyer. His memoir, "A Dutiful Boy" (Penguin, 2020), received critical acclaim and was named a Book of the Year by the Guardian, GQ, and New Statesman. It also won the Lambda Literary Award. The Guardian praised it as a profound meditation on cultural contradictions and acceptance, while The Times described it as a life-saving book.
The first from his school to attend Oxford University, Mohsin qualified as a lawyer at the international firm Linklaters and is now a criminal barrister at a leading chamber in England. He has worked at a UN War Crimes tribunal in The Hague and served as a Judicial Assistant to Lord Sumption and Lord Wilson at the UK Supreme Court.
An advocate for LGBT rights, BAME representation, and social mobility, Mohsin sits on the board of Stonewall and is recognised by The Financial Times as a top future LGBT leader. He regularly comments on Sky News and writes for CNN Style, The i Newspaper, Bustle, Mr Porter, and Newsweek. Recently, he was listed in The Lawyer Magazine Hot 100 and named a trailblazer by Attitude magazine.
In this session, Mohsin Zaidi addresses the stigma around mental health within ethnic minority communities. He draws a parallel between this and a cultural stigma around discussing mental well-being in the workplace. Through very personal and, at times, harrowing tales, Mohsin articulates the case for honesty in personal identity within yourself but also at work and amongst colleagues.
The single most pressing issue of diversity facing society and businesses is the one to which we give the least attention. While measures of equity on race, gender, and sexuality move in the right direction, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Through personal experience of growing up in a council house and going to a school ridden with gang violence (a school from which he became the person to go to Oxford University), Mohsin Zaidi addresses the issue of class bias and discusses what we can do about it.
None of us are just one thing, and Mohsin Zaidi is the personification of an intersectional life. On race, Mohsin has the facts and figures to back up the experiences of ethnic minorities we so often hear about in the news. On class, he speaks candidly about the difference between the world he came from and the world he now lives in. On sexuality, he describes the struggle to accept yourself in the face of cultural stigma. But the strength in his experience lies in the intersectional tale it tells.
Through eye opening stories in a professional and personal context, Mohsin Zaidi explains how diverse representation in key roles doesn’t just demonstrate a commitment to being an inclusive organisation but adds value to it.
In this Q&A around the critically acclaimed memoir ‘A Dutiful Boy’, Mohsin Zaidi draws on all the strands he writes and speaks on.
