2021 DEI Plan Results

There were many more wins throughout the year, which are detailed below.

Highlights & Wins

Although every project in our DEI Plan was important, there were three major focus areas that made up the bulk of the initiatives we took on. We accomplished more than what we set out to do in each of these areas and are excited to share the additional projects we completed beyond our original goals & commitments.

Speaker & Volunteer Demographics

One of our major commitments in this plan was to collect data on the intersectional identities of our speakers to ensure that the folks we elevate to positions of influence at WIMDI accurately reflect the makeup of our community.

This project was a huge win for us. We successfully designed a framework for collecting and safeguarding this sensitive demographic information, and then we surveyed WIMDI’s 100+ speakers and volunteers, giving us a data all the way back to WIMDI’s start in 2015.

By far the biggest benefit of this project is that it has helped us to innovate around our speaker recruitment efforts – and work to meet the speaker racial representation targets we committed to starting in 2021.

We’re excited to share that we have been able to create a huge change in our speaker representation since we started this project. Since 2021, 45% of our speakers have been women of colour, in contrast to 9% before we implemented our targets.

There is more to be done in this area – our target for Women of Colour on the WIMDI stage is 53% – and we continue to work diligently to fill this gap.

Year-by-year reporting and additional demographic data about our speakers and volunteers are available here.

Accessibility

WIMDI had several initiatives in our plan related to making our community more accessible. We worked on projects to make WIMDI more accessible to everyone in our community, especially our disabled and neurodivergent community members.

Here are some results we’re particularly proud of:

WCAG-Compliant Content

This year we audited each of our content channels – website, graphics, social media, webinars, video – using WC3’s Web Accessibility Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Although we only committed to completing the audits as part of our 2021 DEI plan, we were able go beyond our original plan and implement AA-level WCAG accessibility standards in 80% of our content channels (graphics, social media, webinars, and video). This was a huge project that crossed all of WIMDI’s departments. Creating compliant design in all of these areas meant the following changes:

• New design guidelines for font sizes and colour contrast ratios
• New pastel variations of our brand colours to enable higher-contrast design
• Large-text versions of all of our downloadable PDFs on the Guides & Cheat Sheets pages
• Expanded speaker coaching program with PowerPoint design services, so we can ensure our speakers always have slide decks that meet our accessibility guidelines

This project has been an incredible success. Our new accessibility guidelines are fully integrated into WIMDI’s processes and we are committed to releasing content that meets these standards going forward.

WIMDI YouTube Channel

Launched December 2021, WIMDI’s YouTube channel was a big achievement. As part of the launch, we released back catalogue videos starting from early 2020, and we continue to release videos with each new webinar we host, creating a growing (and free!) library for our membership to enjoy.

In addition to creating an evergreen source of leadership and career content, WIMDI’s YouTube channel has helped us make our amazing webinar content more accessible in a number of key ways.

First, recording and releasing WIMDI’s webinars makes it possible for our membership to access our material, even if they aren’t able to watch our webinars live. This means that folks can get access to our speakers’ amazing content regardless of their time zone, work schedule, parenting/caregiving responsibilities, or energy level/spoons available.

Second, since we run free events, live signing or captioning of WIMDI events is currently cost prohibitive. As part of our video strategy, we created CRTC-compliant closed captions, which enable folks who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy our webinar content, albeit on a delay. Most online video captioning, which is auto-generated using AI, is inaccurate and misleading for folks who need it most. We’re proud to say that 100% of our video content is captioned by humans, and targets an accuracy rate of 100% – a huge improvement over AI-generated captions.

In addition to helping our d/Deaf and hard of hearing members, our caption project is also helpful to neurodivergent folks, as well as anyone who prefers simultaneously listening and reading.

As part of our video roll out, we also took the opportunity to turn our captions into long-form, searchable transcripts, which is helpful to members in locations with slow internet connections, as well as our members who prefer to read content rather than watch.

Additional WIMDI Accessibility Initiatives

We have implemented a few more initiatives this year to help our community be more accessible to folks. Namely, we:

• Added daytime events for folks who are unavailable in the evening
• Improved accessibility information on our event listings for folks with disabilities
• Implemented outdoor summertime events with additional COVID-19 protections for our immunocompromised and COVID-cautious members

Indigenous Inclusion & Reconciliation

As part of our commitment to improved indigenous inclusion and reconciliation at WIMDI, we created & published a land acknowledgement on our website, which can be found here. WIMDI now begins each event with a land acknowledgement – and asks each of our speakers to do the same – to help further education about our collective colonial history and the vibrant nations and societies whose lands we live and work on.

In designing our reconciliation practices, we wanted to make sure we went beyond words and made our activism concrete. We created a partnership with a local indigenous non-profit, The Pacific Association for First Nations Women (PAFNW), and collect donations for their Post Secondary Education Fund for Indigenous Women & Girls at all of our events. We have also designated our two largest events each year as paid events, with all proceeds donated to the PAFNW.

Since we implemented our donation program, we have collected and donated $1292 from our membership to the PAFNW. This donation program is an important pillar of our reconciliation program as it represents the redistribution of some of the collective financial privilege of our membership to support indigenous women.

Challenges

The biggest challenge in executing this DEI plan was volunteer turnover. Like most of us in 2021, several of our volunteers took stock of their lives and commitments and re-prioritized to create more personal time in the second year of the pandemic.

The increased volunteer turnover in 2021 meant that, despite our best efforts, we didn’t have the staff to complete all of our projects. As a result, we prioritized projects that would have the highest impact and create the most change in our community.

Projects that we weren’t able to accomplish in our plan include:

• Widening our network
• Community-source content ideas
• Adding identity-specific content to all of our resources

As we look to building our next DEI Plan, we’ll consider how to incorporate these projects alongside new initiatives.

Thank You to Volunteers

I (Holly, WIMDI's Founder & CEO) want to say that I’m grateful for – and incredibly proud of! – all the hard work our WIMDI volunteers put in to make these important initiatives successful.

While absolutely necessary and an undeniably positive contribution to our community, this DEI plan was no small undertaking. The projects in this DEI Plan required lots of internal process change for WIMDI, with several projects requiring complex coordination between several ‘departments’ of volunteers.

Our volunteers worked diligently and thoughtfully on each of these projects so we could move them forward and create a new, more inclusive and equitable base for WIMDI to operate on. Without their dedication, none of this would be possible.

WIMDI Volunteers, I am continually astonished and humbled by your willingness to lend WIMDI your time and talents. Thank you, team, for everything you do to keep the community running – and everything you did to make this DEI plan possible.