Writers, Marketers, Event Organizers — We Can Do More to Support Diversity
Ellen Chisa wrote a post recently on why there aren’t more women in tech. Her premise is this: diverse groups of people are diverse from the beginning, a point she backs up with data from Product Hunt and her own experience building a community.
One of the most common responses to diversity challenges is, “It’s not a priority right now, but we’ll get to it soon!” Chisa’s post points out the glaring flaw with this logic: it’s in the early days of your company, team, or community where you are forming the DNA. If you fail to solve for diversity on day one, you may have missed your chance. Chisa writes:
We’ll save ourselves a lot of work if we do a better job of thinking about diversity from the beginning. It needs to be something we think about in our first ten community members (or first ten hires). Given how quickly things in tech change, this might be higher impact than fixing the current behemoths. If you’re starting a group, please try to think about this from the beginning.
And here is where we get to marketers, writers, and event organizers — all content creators really. It’s marketing that chooses what stories get told on the company blog, what faces appear on the homepage, what influencers get retweeted, and who gets a speaking spot on-stage. And the people that are chosen to represent a company sends a powerful message about who a company sees as its ideal customer, employee, and partner.
Let’s look at the example of two brands that offer shaving products.
Bevel, on the left, is a Walker & Company brand, a brand that states on its homepage, “Our purpose is to make health and beauty simple for people of color.” For its male shaving kit, Bevel uses a picture of an African American man. On the right we have Dollar Shave club, recently acquired by Unilever. Dollar Shave Club makes no claim about who its product is for, but its choice of images does the job.
Content creators are not HR. We are not hiring managers. We are not in the c-suite — but there is so much content creators can do to change cultural perceptions about what success looks like and who “belongs.”
This is my call to the people in my field to do better. We can do so much more to support diversity. Here are my ideas on how, please share your own in the comments.
Do the easy stuff
Let’s start with the basics. These things should be expected all all content creators.
Expand your sphere of influencers.
Familiarize yourself with non-white, non-male experts in your space. If you work in SaaS and only know white male SaaS experts, get out of the echo chamber and go find who else is out there. If you work in manufacturing, and can only point to white, male thought leaders, fix this.
Pay attention to the photos and illustrations you choose for your post.
The images you choose communicates so much about what your company thinks success looks like — choose a variety of ages and races. When you use pictures of women, make sure they aren’t always listening to a man talk (you’ll start to see it now if you haven’t noticed it before). Show women of color in leadership roles, show 35+ people working as individual contributors, show women working in sales. This is your subtle opportunity to bust peoples’ stereotypes, use it!
And yes, sometimes this will mean paying for it. Free stock photos have a tendency to skew white. Twenty20 is the best stock photo site I’ve found when it comes to diversity.
Stop publishing and promoting non-diverse roundups.
If your speaker-up lineup is all white men, go find some new speakers. If you’ve only quoted white men in your blog post, don’t hit publish. If your roundup only features articles by men, don’t hit send. If all your “experts” are white, trust me, you’re missing some experts. We all need to stop writing these pieces and stop promoting them.
Watch your pronouns
All c-level people aren’t men; all secretaries, nurses, and assistants aren’t women; all Type A people aren’t men; all thoughtful, empathetic people aren’t women. Make a point to use an even mix of pronouns that don’t conform to the stereotypes we often have about gender.
Do the harder stuff
Ok, now we’re ready to flex some muscle….
Call out laziness on this front.
When you see a homogenous speaker lineup or expert post, call it out. All Male Panels does a wonderful job of doing this for events (see below), but this responsibility is on all of us. When a co-worker is about to publish a post featuring only men, remind them. Before you hit share on that post only featuring white experts, pause, think about the message you’re supporting — send the blog owner a note.
Actively surface non-majority voices.
Before contributing a quote from one of your executives, ask who else is in the lineup. If the lineup is all white men, make a few suggestions. Build Twitter lists that are actually representative of the people in your field and industry, make it a point to share and promote their work. This will take a little more effort than just retweeting the same five people everyone else retweets, but we can handle it.
Update your personas.
It is embarrassing how many companies’ personas feature only white people. This sends a clear message to your team about who your buyer is and who matters in your space. Fix this. You’ll also notice that sales people and technical roles like software developer personas are consistently portrayed as men. We can do better.
Do the painful stuff
Now we get to the heart of the matter — if you really want to promote diverse voices, it means actually sacrificing something. Privilege is just that, a privilege, a benefit, a bonus. Is it something you are willing to give up? If so, read on…
Create content that matches peoples’ different needs.
Most content on the web is created on the assumption that someone is 20 years old with perfect vision.
- Use big, high-contrast fonts so eyes at all ages can read it.
- Provide an audio version for dyslexics…or people who would rather “read” your post on a job than at their desk.
- Have you noticed that more and more online video is created with captions? Great for the hearing impaired.
There is so much we can do to make our content accessible to a broader range of people. And technology is making it cheaper and easier to do just that. Yes, it still takes extra effort on our part, but we can do it.
Give up your spot.
When someone calls you to once again have your white male CEO on-stage, ask your CEO if he’s ok with you suggesting a non-majority speaker in his place (even if it means recommending someone who isn’t at your company). When someone calls you for an interview, suggest one of the less-promoted voices that you’ve been following.
Pay up.
One of the sad realities of publishing is that for ever 1 female voice there will be about 8 male voices. And for every 1 person of color writing online you’ll find 20 white people. Why is this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because women still do more housework and are just too busy to write that thought leadership piece, maybe it’s because both women and people of color deal with greater criticism and harassment online — meaning writing a blog post comes with a higher emotional tax. Whatever the reason, if you’re the editor of a blog or organizing a speaker lineup — you will likely need to pay money to get a diverse lineup of contributors.
Let’s do this
Content creators hold a surprising amount of power when it comes to subtly shifting the stereotypes and biases people hold. Let’s use that power for good.
Let’s push ourselves to find new, untold stories; represent humanity in its full range of diversity; and give our platform to people who are often left off the main stage.
