April 2, 2025
🍂🌷☘Sharing knowledge around the respectful collection, analysis and critical interpretation data ensures that we understand what the data may be saying.
🔥Data can help get to the truth of the matter. Data can change lives. Data can impact decision making. Data (quantitative and qualitative) can help us understand the human experience. It can also help us to address inequity and exclusion in all its forms.
🔥Data collection, cleaning, analysis, insights, actions takes years of work, and I’m usually asked to come in and help when there’s a tricky situation, when things don’t make sense. With experience you can see patterns. You can pick out anomalies in a sea of data. You get a sense how an error or inaccuracy can impact a whole system. How is the data connected?
🤷Before collecting data, do we need to do racial equity work to build cultural safety? The prefer not to answer responses in culture survey results may indicate an absence of work in certain areas, or a lack of trust. I also wonder what gives me the right to ask for personal diversity data? Story telling is another way to understand the human experience.
🧮There’s knowing your DEI data and then there’s knowing your DEI data.
💿Platforms such as Diversity Atlas have data bases with over 8000 cultural heritages and ancestries and 11,000 religions and world views. It takes 5 or 17 categories in cultural diversity to a whole new level. It’s complicated, but it’s not impossible. The possibilities are endless.
🔬Having worked as analytical chemist, data literacy, accuracy and trouble shooting was drummed into me early. Understanding what your data is saying can ensure that there is effective interventions and targeted actions. These form part of every gender equity or DEI plan that I have developed. And it also means that crude targets are not developed.
🍰You can put recipes out there but you still got to know how to cook. So with that in mind, I have listed some ingredients below, something I recommend for DEI and HR professionals to explore before you undertake analysis of your workforce profile or gender equity audit data. and I’m happy to help you through it. It’s not an exhaustive list but points out to some of the complications, challenges and traps to avoid. I was part of a steering committee in 2017-2018 that helped to establish gender audit data for collection.
🧁Don’t always rely on the recipes that are given, but be curious and experiment and interrogate and question the methodology, what is missing? Don’t over cook it! Don’t get boxed in. Think outside the box. What is going to work best for your organisation? What’s going to make everyone feel included? What trends can I see? What is going to drive your performance?
These are the conversations I have regularly with my data reporting and gender pay gap specialist colleagues.
🍃Always happy to have a chat about diversity equity inclusion data
Checklist of data challenges. Please use by all means but please acknowledge the work.
