Looking discomfort in the eye: Equity assessments and accountability
Blue background with stencilled white and yellow flowers. Text says: the QuakeLab method looking discomfort in the eye, equity assessments and accountability
If you’ve been through an inclusion, equity, or diversity audit you are probably familiar with the process to some extent. Most of the audits or assessments I’ve come across in this space focus on aesthetic diversity - or rather, how many non white, straight, non- cis male people are in an organization.
Some audits go a little further and investigate how many marginalized people hold positions of leadership.
However, most if not all, audits I’ve explored focus on efforts within HR and by extension DEI functions.
This is where QuakeLab goes against the grain in a big way.
Our audits cover on average six areas: Communications + Marketing + IT, Diversity and Inclusion, Programs and Projects, Governance and Management, Finance and Accounting and Human Resources.
We go through a process of reviewing hundreds (sometimes thousands) of organizational documents and assets from these six areas with the goal of understanding what you do, how you make decisions, and where inequity is thriving. We do this by investigating your policies, procedures and ways of working using documentation as conduits that tell us who you really are. While running this document assessment, we start to form hypotheses that explore:
what your processes are,
why these processes are being used,
who is benefiting from these processes, who is not, and
who is actively being disenfranchised because of these processes
We then go through rigorous primary and secondary research to validate or correct our hypothesis. Then we go a step further and try to paint a clear picture of how a process - even one that is considered best practice, is built on a foundation of inequity that benefits a very small percentage of your ecosystem.
This whole process takes a number of weeks and can be quite time and labour intensive.
At the end of this assessment, we hand over a document that lays out the systemic challenges we have found that begin with your structure and end with the harm they cause specific segments of your population.
This is without a doubt the toughest part of our work.
It is difficult because we, a team of marginalized people, must sit with the pervasiveness of harm. It is difficult for our clients because they are faced with their harm.
There has never been a scenario where this document doesn’t cause friction between us and the organizations we work with. This is where we get requests and concerns like:
Can we soften the language?
Can we change x, y or z because we don’t want our team to feel bad or feel like they are not being compensated equally?
Can we add what we’ve done well - this document is filled just with our harms
I don’t know if we can share this with our team and board members without them reacting badly!
This does not make me feel good - can we make some changes?
You see, this document doesn’t just state the obvious like you don’t have any Black people on staff. This month’s long audit process gives us the information we need to hand over a document that outlines in detail the patterns in inequity that have formed, or are forming. This document spends very little time exploring what you are doing well because, simply, that's not our job. You know what you’re doing well, we’re here to tell you what you’re doing badly, where you’re causing harm.
For these reasons, this document is difficult to receive. But we refuse to soften it.
If you’re familiar with QuakeLab, you know that we use design thinking frameworks to build for equity. These frameworks insist that we start every process by getting intimately familiar with our challenges. This is what the assessment process is meant to do.
The document a client receives is an opportunity to sit in your challenge. This is a critical aspect of justice and accountability - sitting in your harm, knowing it, being aware of it.
This is exactly what makes this process uncomfortable.
Diversity, Inclusion and Equity work is often discussed in a way that uses blanket statements to describe the problem. DEI is positioned as if it is the problem we’re trying to solve. Non-committal, passive language like “we need to do better” or “we know we aren’t perfect” or “harm is being caused” is often used. But there is often very little in the way of specifics. It’s never articulate what we can do better, where we aren’t perfect, who is being harmed and by what/who.
This gives us all the permission to never fully investigate where we need to be held accountable or where justice must be met. It means blanket solutions can be used for those blanket problems: “We need to do better, so let’s all get anti racism training.”
It’s time organizations and the people in them hold themselves accountable by sitting in the specificity of their harm, their ancestors harm, their states harm, their communities harm.