What Is Cultural Competency?

Cultural Competency Scholarship Application
How do you define cultural competency? How are diversity and inclusiveness important to the field of genetic counseling?
Many years ago, I would have defined cultural competency as the recognition of one’s own cultural influences, and how those influences intersect with the cultural influences of other people. The idea of cultural competency is a straightforward one: we cannot work well together unless we are able to understand the points of view of others. However, in practice, cultural competency is a lot messier than that. We, as humans, often fall victim to in-group favoritism and implicit biases, which are constantly working without our conscious awareness of them. Even being aware of our biases

Most everybody that I know from my genetic counseling training has an elevator speech for when they are asked to define genetic counseling, which they have used on numerous occasions. A lot of people in genetic counseling were also first introduced to the subject through personal experience with genetic counseling, or through an advisor of some kind, such as a teacher or school counselor, who was familiar with genetic counseling. As it stands today, most people are not familiar with genetic counseling, and the majority of genetic counselors reside and practice in major metropolitan areas, away from the smaller towns and rural areas of the United States. It does not help the fact that there are more negative news articles written about poor experiences with genetic counselors than there are positive stories, leading to false assumptions and ideas of what genetic counseling is. As a result, the people who find themselves interested in genetic counseling are a very homogeneous group of people, people who had the resources to have access to the idea of genetic counseling, and the interest to learn more about the field. For instance, I personally learned about genetic counseling after taking a joint Biology/Women’s Studies class called “The Biology of Reproduction”, where I was one of only a handful of male students, in a class predominantly with women. I had never heard about genetic counseling from any other class I had taken in my life, nor had I heard about it from the Health Professions office at my university, which does address other health professions such as dental hygiene, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. If genetic counseling is only being exposed to the people who would take a class such as the one I took, it is no wonder that the field suffers from a problem with diversity. The spaces where people can learn about genetic counseling are isolated to areas that