The one reason why everybody should be an inclusion advocate.
Expectation setting for this article: If you are an experienced thinker in the diversity & inclusion topic, this article might be to basic for you. This article takes care of basic inclusive thinking and finding reasons, why everyone should assume responsibility when it comes to inclusion in their daily life. As the topic of D&I (diversity & inclusion) is beyond huge, you are probably getting some new thoughts, though, or may find some interesting discussion starters in it, that could help you on your efforts to make our society more inclusive.
You may have come across people asking this question loud or you feel they ask between the lines: Why should I care for a marginal group of people, that are not making an impact on my (sales|reach|community|audience|work force)?
While I hear this I already start to shake my head, not wanting to listen to this short-sighted justifications based on business performance indicators, extra costs of inclusive designs, market researches and already achieved diversity goals in their teams. I want to laugh out loud, but don’t, because I know my counterpart would only mirror my doing and the discussion would develop to a dead-end road.
Being in the constant search for a more empathic approach to this discussion I stumbled upon this philosophic concept from John Rawls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls) on morality: The “veil of ignorance” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance). It’s particularly helpful if you discuss with people with a high amount of passion for their work. As you would expect to meet in the tech industry wherever you go. In brief, the concept explains, that if you are put behind a veil that doesn’t let you see your position in a society, you strive to create the fairest possible society for all of it’s members, as you yourself could be the worst-off. You wouldn’t want to suffer from being on the lowest level. As the worst-off members have rarely self-inflicted their situation, this model applies perfectly to inclusivity. Should your attributes put an extra load to your shoulders to compensate for?
If I was in the position of being a member of that marginalized group, would I resign to the fact, that my chances are lower than those of the privileged group within that community?
While this is only the starting point, we need to dig deeper to convince someone of the power of diversity.
An awesome model to explain the consequences of inclusive design comes from the design team at Microsoft, my employer (so I might be a bit biased, I guess. But other companies probably have similar approaches and the reason why I chose Microsoft is, that I have the resources at hand.). In the Inclusive Manual at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/inclusive it is explained also by numbers how many people benefit from inclusive design, that have no permanent disability. For the US, and these are the only statistics I can currently refer to, and the situation of designing inclusive for the permanent disability to use one of your upper extremities, is annually around 26'000. Might not make sense or give a business justification to design your product to featuring one-handed use. But when you look at people with a temporary disability, like a broken arm or hand, carpal tunnel syndrome or similar, the number increases to 13 million a year! For every single person with a permanent disability to use one of their arm of hand, there’s 500 others in a similar but temporary condition. Even more impressive is the perspective if you include also people with a situational disability, not being able to make use of a functional upper extremity, as it is under different use, for example holding a newborn. The numbers of benefitting people increases by another 8 million to a total of more than 21 million people and a factor of 807. This is just one aspect and one example. Knowing Marketing quite well, this example has a good chance of being picked as the most impressive one. But pick a permanent disability by yourself and see, how people with other forms of temporary or situational disability benefit. Imagine people with a hearing disability. This might be the most powerful example, even more powerful than the one given above. When we start to caption videos, not only those few with hearing aids (or people not having a cochlea implant or other means of improving their capacity of hearing) benefit, but every single person watching the video in a loud surrounding, in an environment that doesn’t allow for speaker audio, say public transport and you don’t have your headphones handy, as it might just be a link you got sent via instant messenger services, and people that speak and understand the language used in the video only to a certain extent. The impact is immense.
The next time you are invited to contribute to designing a product or program, or if your manager asks you to have a look at job applicants for a position on your team, please take a moment to think about the power of diversity. The average, the middle path that could look like everyone would be ok with it in the end, might not be the best option. It might even be, that it is the worst. I’ve recently stumbled upon a chapter in a fantastic book (Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, https://www.amazon.com/Technically-Wrong-Sexist-Algorithms-Threats/dp/0393634639) definitely worth reading. It tells the story of the re-design of the cockpit in the US Air Force jets in the 50’s (e.g. https://blog.fullstory.com/see-beyond-the-average/#.laqud570b, but there are others if you google). They tried to find the ideal cockpit, that would fit each one of the 4000 pilots best. And they did this by measuring certain body sizes like torso, arms, legs etc. on this large sample set. After using the data for the re-design and building this new improved version, experienced pilots crashed jets. In flight. The researcher, Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels, found out by revalidating this data, that the new cockpit designed to fit the average pilot would fit: no one. Not a single pilot had the perfect work environment in this new cockpit. The Air Force, based on the findings of Lt. Daniels, made the decision of designing for a large variety of body sizes, and made the cockpit and instruments adjustable. That came for sure at a price. But one that had to be paid, unless you wanted to have a solution that was useless for all people. Think about that when it comes to your services and products. You might need to make investments now. But the pool of people, your true fortune, be it customers or work force, will grow and benefit in unimaginable dimensions.
And, by the way, it makes you a better person as well.
