Visualizing the Ugly Truth: We Are Far from Achieving Diversity
How to Measure and Visualize Diversity
Diversity remains a crucial driver of business development. And there is no need to convince anyone that it is a competitive advantage.
Diversity is vital for creating inclusive and innovative environments. Measuring and visualizing diversity helps identify representation gaps and areas for improvement. This enables organizations to address inequities and foster equal opportunities, leading to greater inclusivity and enhanced creativity and productivity.
Many companies track it and have KPIs for diversity. However, there are a number of problems in this area.
First of all, it is still far from equality. or example, if the ratio of men to women is close to parity, only 26% of leadership positions are held by women.
Secondly, companies focus on diversity as a primary indicator, which is often a symptom rather than the root problem. In the pursuit of average equality, it turns out that the issue of representativeness persists, with the true majority often not represented.
Leadership positions are still predominantly held by white men. Additionally, there is a need to consider relevance and irrelevance.
And we still haven’t considered factors like age and sexual orientation!
Event and community diversity
So, let’s dig deeper into the topic of professional diversity.
On the one hand, I am a member of the professional community of the DVS and I am also the organizer of my own small community MYDS. From this position, what can I say?
In a community, events reflect its essence. Events not only reflect but should ideally drive change. Events shape communities. And you can try to observe the transformation of communities.
Exactly how they move towards diversity through a more measurable object, like an event. And using events as an example, I…Subjectively assessed the event and observed problems. Sign, so as not to, God forbid, be accused of lack of diversity…
Let’s blame myself!
Therefore, in my article I will criticize myself, firstly, for arrogance, because when I began organizing the Make Your Data Speak Conference, I thought I would definitely address diversity, and I was proud of this effort. But after analyzing and measuring, I became convinced that I was not doing so well.
The indexes I’ve developed to assess the diversity of my events reveal inconvenient truths about diversity issues in professional communities and business events.
Let’s try to measure!
To assess the representativeness of the experts, I surveyed speakers at our conferences, judges at the Make Your Data Speak Dataviz Award, and conducted polls among the audience over the past two years.
While in 2023 our conference was quite diverse, by 2024, as it gained more recognition and popularity, things quickly shifted.
I created what’s called the “White Man Index,” which shows how much white men dominate the selected groups. For this parameter, I compare the level of diversity among Speakers, Judges, and Event Participants.
While this index indicates an imbalance, it doesn’t provide a clear understanding of specific areas that need attention. Therefore, I analyzed the data separately by gender and race/ethnicity. Here’s what the results show.
Gender:
It certainly gives us something to think about, doesn’t it?
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Race/ethnicity:
The results were surprising but appeared balanced upon review.
Data / Viz balance
I wanted to avoid personal bias from the start, ensuring that as a BI dashboard specialist, I didn’t favor my own field over creatives. That’s why I decided to calculate a balance index between data and design.
This is the Data/Viz balance — who leans more toward data and who toward visualization. Ideally, it should be 50/50, and any deviation towards DATA or VIZ is undesirable. In other words, the more it deviates towards either DATA or VIZ, the worse it is.
But while I was trying to achieve a 50/50 balance on this issue, I ended up further from audience representativeness!
In or Out Position
Another important factor is the balance between freelancers and corporate employees.
This perspective to consider is the position of our speakers. There’s a fundamental difference depending on whether you work within a company, especially a large corporation, or whether you’re an independent entrepreneur or freelancer providing services to them.
These are completely different positions. As a consultant or freelancer, it’s much easier for you to tell a client they’re wrong, point out mistakes, and dictate best practices, compared to when it’s your boss. In my experience, many of the right things we read about in books and hear at conferences, unfortunately, we can’t directly say to our stakeholders.
Because we could be fired. And I wanted to factor in this element as part of a balanced perspective as well.
Where are you from, darling?
Then, noticing a skew in participant countries, I added regional data as well. Take a look at the results! For this parameter, I compare the level of diversity among Speakers, Judges, and Event Participants.
While we aimed to make the conference more diverse by gathering speakers and judges from around the world, the number of participants from Europe surprisingly dominated. This may have been influenced by the conference’s time zone or our limited ability to promote the event globally.
I even tried to make the index more complex by adding the distinction of being “European” to the “White Man” category! But this left me even more puzzled…
And what?
So what should we do? How do we stay diverse and remain engaging and interesting to all professional circles? The answer is simple — if you want to stay in place, you have to run very fast! We need to track diversity metrics — and these can be very different indicators, depending on the aspects we want to balance.
Of course, I’d love to create a magical and universal dashboard that can help any community or event stay balanced and up-to-date! And of course, I’ll give it a try! I’ll share my attempts with you first!
Diversity is a journey, and every voice matters. Share your experiences, tools, or strategies for promoting diversity in your own community or organization. How are you addressing these challenges? Join the conversation by commenting below or connecting with me on LinkedIn. Together, we can drive meaningful change and create a more inclusive environment for everyone.
Let’s collaborate and make a difference!
