Diversity, Equity & Inclusion – 2021 Plan
2021 DEI Plan
In June of 2020, WIMDI committed to creating our first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategy and WIMDI’s volunteers and I (Holly, WIMDI's Founder & CEO) set out to build a plan to make WIMDI more inclusive, equitable, and diverse.
In creating this community, I want to make space for what so many of us are hungry for at work: Somewhere that our ass-kicking, career-building, leading-the-pack selves are supported, cheered on, and developed.
Over the last five years I know we’ve been successful at building exactly that for many of our members. But I also know that isn’t the experience WIMDI offers for all of our members.
The Problems We're Addressing
At WIMDI, like at so many other women-focused groups, we haven’t done a good job of explicitly including and centering folks who are marginalized. That means all of the cool things WIMDI produces are less applicable, less accessible, and sometimes actively harmful to some of our members. There are big gaps in the effectiveness of our resources that our privilege -- and my privilege in particular -- allows us to miss, not see, and/or avoid. And those gaps at WIMDI recreate and reinforce the very dynamics of oppression we all want to undo in our workplaces.
So, while it’s true that we’ve built amazing things at WIMDI, it’s also true that WIMDI is more amazing for folks with lots of privilege than it is for our members with more marginalized identities. And that’s just not good enough. We must -- and we absolutely can -- do better.
Our diversity, equity, and inclusion audit this year, and the plan that you’re currently reading, is in direct response to that gap in the way community members with different intersecting identities experience WIMDI.
What We Want You To Know
This work is important and requires special care. It relates directly to our community members’ basic humanity and right to be treated equitably. We know that both continuing with the status quo and creating the wrong type of change creates harm for our members. We take our responsibility to care for this community seriously and want to do everything in our power to get it right.
The plan that follows is not the sum total of everything we want to shift in the community. There will be more work to follow. This is a plan for 2021 -- and it's important to know that we're committed to doing this work beyond just this year. You can expect to see a version of this for 2022, 2023, 2024, and onwards.
Now let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about the plan.
Our 2021 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Plan
Our 2021 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Plan has several Core Sections, which you can click on to learn more about (or just keep scrolling to read them all)
- Clarifying Who We Are, What We Do, and Who We're For
- Speakers: Inclusion, & Representation
- Representation in Volunteers
- Bringing in Expertise
- Accessibility
- Content that Centres All of our Identities
- Indigenous Inclusion
- Creating an Accountability Framework & Public Record
- FAQ
Clarifying Who We Are, What We Do, and Who We're For
The most obvious questions around diversity and inclusion are: Who are we including? Who is this designed to serve? We took a good hard look at these questions at WIMDI while making this plan.
We think it’s crucial that you, our community, understands exactly what WIMDI’s about and who it’s for. We never want you questioning whether WIMDI is the place for you. We want to make our implicit support of our members -- and their various intersectional identities -- explicit so you never have to wonder. We came up with two frameworks that we hope will clear this up:
WIMDI's Guiding Principles
We created a section on our website that clarifies what we do, how we do it, and the guiding principles we use to do our work. This document will help set the tone and focus for both our community and our volunteers.
Read it here
Who WIMDI is For
This new section of our website clarifies who WIMDI is for, who we aim to include, and who we centre in our content and discussions.
Read it here
Speakers: Inclusion & Representation
As I shared in my email newsletter in June of 2020, WIMDI’s speakers have been nowhere near as diverse as our community. For the first four and a half years of running this group, we failed to make sure marginalized identities were represented in the people we brought to the WIMDI stage.
Addressing this problem will require a multi-pronged approach:
First, we’ll need to collect demographic data about our speakers’ various intersectional identities so we -- and you! -- know exactly where we’re falling short and how we can course-correct. In June, we started this conversation from a race perspective, but we actually want to look across the spectrum of identities in our community including:
- Race
- Gender
- Sexual Orientation
- Age
- Caregiving Requirements (eg: parenting)
- Ability/Disability & Neurodiversity
- Mental Health
- Size/Weight
- Immigration Status/Citizenship
- Class/Socioeconomic Status
Legally and ethically, collecting, storing, and reporting on this demographic data is complex. It includes highly sensitive information and it’s crucial that we handle this in a careful, respectful, secure, and consent-informed manner. We must make sure we dot every i and cross every t before we begin collecting and sharing information.
So, collecting and reporting on our speakers’ demographic data will require two projects going forward:
Project: Create a Framework for Collecting Speaker Demographic Data
Solve the legal & privacy issues around demographic data collection for speakers.
Deadline: End of Q2, 2021
Project: Collect Speaker Demographic Data
We will collect demographic data from our speakers going forward and report on them to the community on a yearly basis.
Reporting Timeline: Yearly, at the end of the year
We also intend to collect and report on the same data for past speakers so that we have a public historical record of our speaker representation. We will set a target date for this additional project once we have completed the two listed above.
Second, once we have collected demographic data about our speakers’ various intersectional identities, we’ll need to compare them to targets.
Project: Demographic Targets for Speakers
For 2021, WIMDI will be adopting race representation targets for our speakers as follows:
47% -- White
24% -- East Asian (Chinese, Korean, Japanese)
12% -- South Asian (East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, etc)
8% -- Southeast Asian (Filipino/a/x, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, etc)
3% -- Indigenous
2% -- Black
2% -- Latino/a/x
2% -- West Asian (Afghan, Iranian, Arab, etc)
Reporting Timeline: Yearly, at the end of the year
These targets are based on 2016 Statistics Canada data on the visible minority makeup of the Greater Vancouver Regional District, where WIMDI is headquartered.
Although we’re only creating targets and public accountability for racial representation in 2021, it’s important to note that race isn’t the only dimension across which we want to improve representation in our speaker lineup. Our goal is to match our audience for all of the dimensions we’re collecting demographic data for, but the intersecting nature of these many identities make that difficult, and targeting additional dimensions may be more complex than we can manage in our first year of this program.
In 2021, we will monitor and report across the other intersectional identities outlined above in as much detail as is legally feasible, despite not having specific targets for them. We will also evaluate in the future whether or not we can add other dimensions to our targets.
Third, we’re going to widen our network of speakers and groups that we work with. This will help us connect to as broad as possible a cross section of new speakers, ensuring that the demographics of our personal networks don’t limit who ends up on our stage. It’ll have the added effect of helping us extend our horizons for talk topics, and connect us to new potential WIMDI members.
Project: Widen Our Network
We will connect with 25 Groups in Canada and the US that focus on the intersectional identities we’ve committed to better representing at WIMDI.
Deadline:End of Year, 2021
Finally, we want to make sure that we focus, not just on speaker recruitment and selection, but also on the entire experience speakers have with us so they are fully supported across all of their identities.
Project: Intentionally Designing Our Working Relationship with Each Speaker
Create and implement a framework we can use as we work with our speakers to ensure that we actively support their intersectional identities and tailor our interactions to their needs.
Deadline: End of Q2, 2021
Relevant FAQs:
- Are these speaker targets quotas? And isn’t that a bad thing?
- Why are you only adopting targets for race (and not other intersectional identities?)
- How will you ensure speakers’ data privacy?
- What if speakers don’t want to share their demographic data?
- Are you planning to do demographic surveys of the WIMDI community members?
Just as we are doing for our speakers, we will undertake projects over the next year to understand the intersectional identity makeup of our WIMDI volunteer base. It’s important that the leadership of this group is representative of you, our members, so that we design inclusive and equitable resources from the ground up.
Our initiatives in this area will be the same as the ones for our speakers:
Project: Collect and Report on Demographic Data for Our Current and Past WIMDI Volunteer Base
We will collect demographic data from our past, present, and future volunteers and report on them to the community on a yearly basis.
Deadline: Yearly, at the end of the year
Relevant FAQs:
We recognize that, as a small team of volunteers (currently 12 and counting!), we will almost certainly never have a volunteer base that represents every single intersectional identity in our community. There just aren’t enough of us to ensure broad representation across every one of these identities, some of which are very small fractions of the population. Statistics are just not on our side with this one, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strategize around that challenge.
We commit to bringing in expertise to fill gaps in knowledge and representation on our volunteer team. This may take the form of surveys or consultations with community members of particular intersectional identities, or it may involve hiring diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants who specialize in certain identities.
Project: Explore Options to Fill Knowledge & Representation Gaps with Expertise
Once we have collected demographic data on our volunteers, we will assess the gaps in our knowledge and representation and explore options to address them from within our community or outside experts.
Deadline: End of Year, 2021
A major theme for us in this year’s plan was how accessible our resources are to our community members. We thought about accessibility in the way most of us typically do -- in terms of barriers to folks with disabilities -- but also in the wider is it possible for members from different intersectional identities to access this resource? sense.
We came up with a number of projects that we hope will create more equitable access to our resources and help all of our members be fully included:
First, we will assess the accessibility of our resources for folks who have disabilities:
Project: Conduct Accessibility Audits of All of Our Web-Based Channels
We will examine each of WIMDI’s content channels and forms -- Website, Graphics, Social Media, and Webinars -- and compare them to the latest version of WC3’s Web Accessibility Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Deadline: End of Q3, 2021
Once we have completed our audit, we will make and implement a plan to meet the standard at the AA and AAA level wherever possible within our technical, budgetary, and volunteer time constraints. We will commit to a deadline on the creation of the plan following our initial audits, once we have a better idea of the scope of work required.
Second, we will explore ways to make our events more accessible for our members who may not be able to attend evening events: parents with young children, folks on East Coast time zones, and community members who work shifts that don’t line up with our event dates and times.
Project: Explore Alternative Timing for WIMDI Events
We will trial new time slots for WIMDI events. We will offer some events at new times, while still retaining a portion of our events in the usual Thursday 5:30 pm PST time slot.
Deadline: End of Year, 2021
Third, we will make the information we communicate through our Interactive Webinar events accessible asynchronously, through video recordings. We are excited about this initiative for a number of reasons:
- It will turn our one-off events into lasting content that will be available to our members exactly when they need expert advice on an issue that’s troubling them
- It will increase the number of WIMDIs who can enjoy our events by making the information accessible at a time that works for them
- It will provide more exposure and publicity for our speakers who work so hard to produce the talks for us
- It will create a way to access the information we share at these events without the interpersonal interaction that might serve as a barrier (eg: for members with anxiety/other mental health conditions, or folks who are just plain exhausted after a long day dealing with -- ugh -- people)
Project: Make Post-Event Video Recording of Our Webinars Available
We will produce and distribute recordings of our Interactive Webinars. They will be available free of charge and easily accessible through our website.
Deadline: End of Year, 2021
Relevant FAQs:
- Will you be considering live captioning or ASL interpretation for your events?
- Will you be developing modifications to your event structure to improve accessibility for neurodiverse folks?
- Did you look at accessibility of your in-person events?
- Did you consider translating your resources into languages other than English?
- Will your webinar recordings feature closed captions?
Content That Centres All of Our Identities
One of WIMDI’s core aims is to produce resources, content, and events that are truly useful to our community members. We aspire to create things that feel tailor made for you and solve your thorny career and leadership problems. For us to do this well, we need to do a better job of creating content that fits every piece of you and supports you across all of your intersecting identities.
We have several plans in place to help us focus more specifically on including and centering the identities in our community:
First, we want to get more input from you, our community, on the resources we can create that help address challenges you have that are directly related to your intersectional identities.
Project: Community-Sourcing Content Ideas
This year we want to do more community crowdsourcing of ideas for the resources we produce for you. We commit to using the fun #WIMDIasks section of our events to ask for your suggestions, run talk topic ideas past you, and get tips on amazing speakers you’d like to see on the WIMDI stage.
Deadline: Ongoing throughout 2021
Second, we want to weave more identity-specific examples, challenges, and questions into all of our content -- not just content that’s narrowly tailored around specific identities.
Project: Add Identity-Specific Content to All of Our Resources
We commit to looking at each of the resources and talks that we produce through the lenses of our community’s intersectional identities and analyzing the applicability of our examples and solutions to make sure they fit, are actionable, and don’t leave important stuff out.
Deadline: Ongoing throughout 2021
Third, we recognize that we are targeting a broad range of intersectional identities, all with specific concerns, needs, barriers, and strengths. There’s a lot we need to get right. We are also in the unique position of not just creating our own content, but helping speakers produce content that resonates with our audience and meets our inclusivity standards.
To that end, we’re going to create a resource for us to use internally and with speakers that will help ensure we’re as inclusive as possible.
Project: Create a WIMDI Inclusivity Assessment List
Produce a document that covers all the details of the notes we want to hit with our content: Inclusive language, solutions that work for all of our intersectional identities, and identity representation in questions and examples.
Deadline: End of Q2, 2021
Once it’s produced, we will use this document throughout the process of engaging with speakers to help tailor our content to as many of us as possible. This document will also form part of our internal review for other content we produce: social media posts, newsletters, etc.
WIMDI operates on stolen, unceded indigenous land in Canada, but we have not done anything to acknowledge this truth or dismantle the colonial culture, attitudes, and practices that have created serious harm to our local indigenous communities.
Addressing and atoning for the historical and current injustice indigenous peoples face is a vast undertaking that requires learning, unlearning, and action from all of us. WIMDI is beginning our work in this area this year.
Project: Create & Implement an Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
WIMDI will create and use an appropriate Indigenous Land Acknowledgement for use on our website and at our events as a first step towards addressing our responsibility to indigenous nations. We will research ways to add depth and meaning to our land acknowledgement so it is not a ‘box ticking’ exercise. We commit to educating our community and showing respect for the nations whose land we live and work on through land acknowledgements.
Deadline: End of Year, 2021
It is important to note that this does not represent the sum total of the work we want to do around including our indigenous members, or towards addressing our collective responsibility in dismantling colonialism. It is only a first step.
Relevant FAQs:
- Will you be creating relationships with local indigenous nations and non-profits?
- What will you do to ensure that land acknowledgements aren’t a ‘box ticking’ exercise for WIMDI?
- Will you be incorporating or considering indigenous ways of teaching and learning into WIMDI’s resources?
Creating an Accountability Framework & Public Record
We want to make sure we are transparent and accountable to you, our community members on our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion plan progress -- past, present, and future.
Making WIMDI more inclusive will be a continuous work in progress, and that means it’s important for us to monitor and report on how we’re doing at achieving our objectives, share new plans as we make them, and keep historical records of what we’ve done.
Our accountability framework with the community has three parts, as follows:
First, we’ll make progress reports available publicly on our website so that you can monitor our progress on the promises we’re making here.
Project: Annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan Reporting
We commit to reporting our progress publicly on a yearly basis so you can see our progress on the items we’ve committed to changing.
Frequency: Yearly
Second, we’ll refresh our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan on a regular basis to ensure we continue to move forward with our goals.
Project: Refreshing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan
We’ll revisit our plan annually and communicate the new plan, projects, metrics, and deadlines to our community.
Frequency: Yearly
Finally, it’s important that we share historical data so we don’t hide the parts of our history where we haven’t lived up to our standards. We want to own our mistakes while working to fix them.
Project: Retain Historical Annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Data
As time goes on, we’ll make sure our previous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion plans and progress reports are easily accessible on our website. We’ll also report certain statistics -- for example Speaker & Volunteer Demographic Data -- cumulatively since WIMDI’s founding.
Deadline: End of Year, 2021
Feedback
This is a plan built for you, our community. We want to hear what you think and we want to make sure this works for you. We welcome any thoughts, feedback, or concerns you want to share with us. You can find a (optionally anonymous) feedback form here.
General
The reasons for prioritizing these things as an organization are clear: As a community that is firmly on the side of creating more opportunity for groups who are marginalized in male-dominated industries, it’s important that we live up to our side of the deal.
Simply put: If we want the world out there to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, we have to fight for the very same things internally. There’s no time like the present to start, so it was time to roll up our sleeves.
Over the past several months, my volunteers and I have taken a look at every part of what we do in WIMDI -- from our events, to our website, to our sponsorship relationships...heck, even our graphics -- and asked ourselves these questions:
- How can we make every part of WIMDI more diverse, inclusive, and equitable?
- What barriers exist to full participation within every part of WIMDI and how can we eliminate them?
- How can we make sure we’re accurately representing our community (and all the identities it contains)?
- How can we make sure we’re best serving the needs of our community across every intersectional identity they have?
Our intention was to get as many ideas and options on the table as possible, sourced from our volunteers.
No, not in depth.
First, I wanted to be able to dive into the details of WIMDI behind the scenes. It was important to me that we examined our processes in every section of WIMDI in a way that would be difficult if we had done broad community consultation.
Second, and most importantly, I wanted to be conscious about minimizing the emotional labour burden we would be placing on members of our community.
An essential part of anti-racism work, and of all anti-oppression work, is doing our homework and not expecting folks with less privilege to teach us (requiring emotional labour from them).
We started this brainstorm as a volunteer-first exercise because we knew there were a lot of improvements we could identify on our own, and we believed it was our duty to avoid adding to the emotional labour burden of our members who experience the most marginalization, especially during the police brutality crisis, protests, and increased Black Lives Matter conversations throughout the summer.
This isn’t a perfect approach. We know that getting direct feedback from you in the community is a crucial piece of improving WIMDI’s diversity and inclusion. And we want to make sure that ask comes once we’ve done our homework, so that we reduce the emotional labour burden on all of you.
Making this plan, it was clear from the beginning that we’d have hundreds of improvements to make, and a tiny volunteer base to actually make them all happen. We also knew that we were just building the first year of this plan -- 2021 -- so not everything we wanted to do would be achievable in that timeframe.
So we had to do some prioritization.
First, we prioritized creating tangible impact over feel-good PR builders and vague promises to ‘learn more’. As much as possible, we aimed for things that have concrete results, deadlines, and clear accountabilities to you, our community members.
Then, we thought about which problems were most important to solve. This was tougher because there is no right or easy way to prioritize the needs of some groups over others. In general, we tried to prioritize initiatives that reduced structural exclusion -- barriers that make it impossible for someone to participate in WIMDI -- for this year’s plan.
Finally, we looked at the time and financial investment required for each idea to determine how possible each option was for us to implement over the next year. We thought about how these new diversity and inclusion-specific projects would fit into our existing projects -- many of which will also make WIMDI more accessible and inclusive -- and made sure we picked options that helped us give our community the biggest impact with the hours and money we had available.
This is an excellent question and one we asked ourselves many times as we created this plan.
Our plan didn’t end up having initiatives that target only Black folks because many of the projects we adopted to address inclusion and equity for our Black members also help people with other intersectional identities. Therefore, we chose to define and pursue these projects broadly.
We recognize that there’s a risk that defining these projects so broadly could mean the specific concerns of the Black community ends up less of a focus than we’d like. Over the course of the next year, we’ll pay special attention to Black inclusion and equity internally as a key indicator of our progress on the plan.
We plan to treat our targets as quotas -- basically minimum requirements -- and we don't think that's a bad thing. Let’s talk about why.
People often get concerned about targets, quotas, and affirmative action in the workplaces, worrying that these things may result in hiring or promotions based on things other than merit.
The concern is often that the target could unfairly disadvantage qualified people and/or advantage less qualified people who are then hired or promoted ‘just to meet the target’. Basically, they’re worried the target inserts bias into the selection process.
Some also worry this is unfair to the people who do meet the targets because it creates an uphill battle against the impression that they got the job only (or primarily) because of the target.
We’re not worried about any of these things with our targets. Here’s why:
- There are some important pieces in the narrative above that need unpacking and debunking, namely the concepts of merit, qualified, and bias. Watch this video for an explanation of how these concerns about adding bias through targets actually increase the chances of hiring less qualified people.
- WIMDI’s context is totally different than a workplace, where people’s ability to gain access to employment is effectively a human rights issue. Being a speaker for WIMDI isn’t a right that must be distributed evenly and without any bias; it’s a privilege to be given a position of influence on the WIMDI stage.
- We have the obligation to distribute that privilege in a way that creates the kind of society we want to see: One that is diverse and gives opportunity to folks who aren’t the default choice in our heavily biased society.
- Crafting our speaker lineup this way doesn’t result in a loss of great speakers, it results in a gain of great speakers because it opens our eyes to unique perspectives that don’t get enough air time. There are more than enough talented folks out there for us. We are calling on ourselves to find all of the fascinating and game-changing speakers and topics these folks have to offer.
This is a great question, because we don’t want to create a system wherein some identities are privileged over others. In the long term, we’d like to commit to targets across as many intersectional identities as possible, but we have some concerns around implementation.
One of the great challenges around intersectional identities, especially ones that are rare in the overall population, is that when you layer them with other rare identities, you can end up in sticky situations. It can easily get very needle-in-a-haystack, where hardly any real people have all of the identities you’re looking for (or at least the right combination over the 12 events we put on each year). We didn’t want to make promises to you that we couldn’t keep.
There’s a sweet spot that we’ll find between committing to more targets and having enough flexibility to be able to really meet them. For now, we’re starting with targets on race, with the full knowledge that we’ll continue experimenting over time with more intersectional identity targets until we find the sweet spot.
We are looking into the exact details of this as part of the first phase of this project and we will share our plans with you when we have more information. However we want to make it clear that we will do everything legally required, plus everything in our power to make sure the data we collect is kept secure.
Speakers who aren’t comfortable or interested in sharing their demographic data with us will be able to opt out of sharing it.
Not at this time.
When we’ve done surveys in the past, they have had poor response rates (under 3% of the community responded), even with lots of effort on our part to encourage participation. The data generated with such low response rates is so far from statistically valid that we can’t draw useful conclusions from it. Given our limited time and volunteer capacity, we feel that there are other projects that offer more value.
At this time, to ensure the success of the other projects described here, we are not committing to a formal process for improving the experience of volunteer inclusion. We do recognize its importance, however, and we will revisit this as a goal for 2022 and beyond.
We will be looking at this as part of our accessibility audit.
We agree this is important, but will not be focusing on this specifically this year. We will revisit this as a goal for 2022 and beyond.
We have decided to postpone accessibility planning for our in-person events during COVID-19, but we will add this to our list if and when we are able to meet in person again.
Yes. This is something we’d love to be able to do in the future, but we decided not to take it on in 2021 due to volunteer capacity. If you can assist with translation into French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, or any other language, please get in touch because we would love to have your help when we are able to start this project.
Yes. They are included in our plan to widen our network by creating relationships with groups focused on the intersectional identities we want to be more inclusive of in WIMDI.
This is still an area of active planning for us. We have several ideas on our list and we look forward to sharing them when we can present them as part of our full land acknowledgement plan later this year.
This is not an explicit part of our plan for this year, but it is an area we’re excited to learn more about as we deepen our knowledge in this area. This is an opportunity we’re keeping an eye on for future plans.