Inclusion and diversity

I’ve been ruminating on writing about this for some time, and found Liz Garnett putting it perfectly:

inclusiveness is something that you can directly act upon. You can make choices about your rules for membership… the kinds of jokes it is socially acceptable to make in your organisation, and you can action those decisions… Diversity is about the people who aren’t yet in the room, about the choices that other people are making to not be there with you.

Her post is relevant to many contexts beyond its immediate intended audience of musicians.  With her comment “Diversity… is a performance indicator, not a goal” in mind, I will leave you with some further reading:

• Universal design refers to broad-spectrum ideas meant to produce buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to older people, people without disabilities, and people with disabilities.  Universal design emerged from slightly earlier barrier-free concepts, the broader accessibility movement, and adaptive and assistive technology and also seeks to blend aesthetics into these core considerations.
• Defining Impairment and Disability (University of Leeds): “A disabled person is a person with an impairment who experiences disability. Disability is the result of negative interactions that take place between a person with an impairment and her or his social environment. Impairment is thus part of a negative interaction, but it is not the cause of, nor does it justify, disability.”
• The social model of disability and the medical model of disability – applicable to organisational culture, i.e. is the environment hostile to underrepresented groups, or do individuals need to conform to existing culture in order to fit it (or not)?
• Design is not neutral, e.g.
• • Legal algorithms – Artificial Intelligence and the Law (BBC Law in Action series) and also racism and class politics and crime in this book review of “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil
  • Facial detection and black people – Here’s Why Facial Recognition Tech Can’t Figure Out Black People
  • Seat belts and women – The World is Designed for Men: how bias is built into our daily lives
  • How shirts are buttoned – The Curious Case of Men and Women’s Buttons
• “The evidence suggests that changing the language of job ads ‘works’: it helps to diversify the applicant pool for jobs… But in the end I think feminism does have to be about changing mindsets rather than just devising procedures to work around them.” – Debuk, One word, two words, pink words, blue words