New toolkits from BIMA’s I&D Council are set to help more digital businesses take practical steps to be more inclusive.
In 2019, BIMA’s Inclusion & Diversity Report ‘The voices of our industry’ set out to do something rather different to the wealth of census-type data that already existed. It asked how a diverse group of digital employees felt. It explored their experiences. And it found that too many of them felt their career had been negatively affected by their race, gender, age or neurodiversity.
You can read the full report here.
The report was a major contribution to understanding the real shape of diversity in the digital industry and it presented a number of potential actions for employers and individuals to take. But by its nature it couldn’t address the full range of issues, nor could it provide a comprehensive checklist to address all of them.
So in the period since the report’s publication, BIMA’s Inclusion & Diversity Council has been working to create a practical, actionable series of toolkits, broken down by area – mental wellbeing, race & ethnicity, inclusive design and more – to help employers and individuals understand the issues, spot the signs of concern, and implement actions to make things better.
Lived experience
The toolkits are not about making leaders and their organisations feel guilty – that they haven’t done enough or that they’ve been getting diversity wrong. They are a practical way to deliver change in your organisation – something you may feel is particularly valuable if you don’t have the lived experience of exclusion or discrimination that some of your employees do.
As then Chair of the BIMA I&D Council, Nadya Powell, said in the report: “Do not make this change alone. If you or your team don’t have lived experience of the barrier you wish to tackle, work with an organisation, community and employees who do. We need to both make the industry inclusive and deliver this change respectfully and inclusively too.”
These toolkits help ensure you don’t need to deliver change alone, and they’ve been created by people who do have real, lived experience of the issues. We hope you find them valuable. And if you need more help, you’ll find how to get it in each toolkit.
The toolkits
Please download the toolkits here. Please note they are for members only and you will be asked to login to access the content.
If you are not a member please get in touch to discuss joining our community. Email: rachel@bima.co.uk