“We all have a tendency to believe we know what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes,” Leanne Caret, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said during a panel discussion at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. on October 12. “The reality is, we don’t understand.”

The “737 Max accidents that resulted in the tragic loss of 346 people, and all the families that were impacted from a customer perspective,” required rethinking “how we behave as a company and as a culture,” Caret said. And then the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, pivoting to remote work, and the killing of George Floyd, resulted in “a workforce [that] was just fed up,” she said. “Empathy, for us, really started with something very fundamental, which we call ‘seek, speak, and listen.'” Steps the company took for its workforce included policies to support working parents with childcare issues and setting up a racial equity task force, Caret said.

“We firmly believe that equity drives empathy, and then that drives engagement,” said British Robinson, president and CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. The organization has positioned itself to make the issue of literacy more prominent across the country during these times, Robinson said. “We needed the equity argument; we needed to be loud, bold, and really make statements,” she said. “Today, 130 million adults, about 54%,” read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, Robinson said. “And that affects our economy, and being a full worker, parent, and citizen.” Research released by the foundation and Gallup in September found the U.S. could be losing up to $2.2 trillion annually as a result of low adult literacy rates.

Shift from equality to equity

“When I think about the business environment and the world that I live in, we’ve tried to move the conversation from equality to equity,” said Janet Foutty, executive chair of the board at Deloitte US. Looking back, there was a focus on equality, “which means you treat everyone the same, and that was the foundation of how we thought about this conversation,” Foutty explained. But now there’s a collective understanding that “real and grounded empathetic mindset is that of equity, which is realizing that not everyone comes with the same privileges and experiences,” she said. “In the corporate environment, this mindset shift creates a much more thoughtful kind of listening, as you try to hear what people’s personal and individual experiences are.”

“I 100% agree with this shift from equality to equity,” Catherine Powell, global head of hosting at Airbnb said. “We have learned during this time that when you look at your policies and your products, you need an equitable lens.” In June 2020, the company launched Project Lighthouse in the U.S., an initiative to uncover discrimination when booking or hosting on Airbnb. Another important part of empathy is trust, Powell said. For example, Airbnb has committed to housing 20,000 Afghan refugees, which comes from “really close partnerships with our hosts,” she said. In terms of Airbnb’s business model, “trust between our guests and hosts is more important than the money exchanged,” Powell said. 

In addition to organizational empathy, there’s also societal empathy, which has been lacking, Dr. Paula Johnson, president, Wellesley College, said during the discussion. The pandemic has highlighted areas of “enormous inequity in our society, including literacy, health care, and childcare,” Johnson said. “This is the opportunity for all of us who are working in these spaces to think about our role within the organization as leaders, but also, how does that translate to the greater issue of societal empathy?” she said. 

At the onset of the pandemic, Wellesley was in the middle of a strategic planning process, “but in many ways, it was a blessing,” Johnson said. When the planning resumed there was a “new clarity” of the organization’s mission, she said. The team focused on, “What is equity? What is inclusive excellence? But also what was our role as, quite frankly, the leading women’s college?” Johnson said. “And that is beyond our walls, and it really has to do with women’s empowerment.”