You know you lack diversity when…
Here is a handy checklist to measure your team diversity by the output it produces. The more checks a company/product/event gets on this list, the worst it’s regarding diversity.
- Events are scheduled to start at 8 AM, exactly at school drop-off hours.
- Events are planned for the middle of February or middle of April, during schools mid-Winter Break or Spring Break weeks.
- All iconography represent only men or only women.
- No one bothered to test the app/site on a low-end Android smartphone since everyone has an iPhone 6S or 7.
- The text is in dark gray on top of a light gray background, because no one thought about people who can’t afford a good monitor or have a 7-year old low-end laptop.
- The UI uses 8pt font as the default, and 7pt in light gray for the informational content under the field inputs, after all, no one needs glasses on the team.
- The copy says “him” for power roles, but “her” for lesser roles (e.g. “Enter your assistant name and email. She can update it later.”)
- The on-boarding forces you to enter both parents name, or select a female and a male parent to continue, even though some people might have just one parent or two parents of the same gender.
- The only currency symbol allowed is $, and the only date format is mm/dd/yy independent of device or OS preferences.
- The minimum full name field size is eight characters because someone felt there are no smaller names than “John Lee” and the maximum is twenty. Same thing for city name with more than twenty characters, like “Dissen am Teutoburger Wald” or “Santa Rita do Passa Quatro.”
- The address field requires “State” for any country you select.
- All the content explaining how to use the product is written around sports metaphors. So are the content of the presentations during team meetings. Extra point if it’s primarily sports metaphors of US-only sports, like American Football and Baseball*, or elite sports, like Polo, Golf or Sailing.
- The month of December is represented with a snowflake, and August with a thermometer in red.
*Yes, baseball is played in more than one country, but it still is unknown to 80% percent of the world’s population. Yes, American Football is also played in another place, and even though it can be more popular worldwide, the metaphors still unknown (unaccessible).
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