Recruiting for diversity

When Mark, mySociety’s CEO, put out our recent request for new board members, he mentioned a specific goal:

There’s no getting past the fact that our current boards are entirely male. So for both roles we’d like to use this as an opportunity to redress the balance on each board, as well as add more diversity to better reflect the users of our services both in the UK and internationally.

You’ll have seen from his follow-up blog post announcing the appointments exactly how well we did in this aim.

But I wanted to explore this subject more deeply. When you explicitly state that you would welcome applications from women, what effect does it have on the gender split of those who come forward?

What difference does it make to the range of backgrounds that applicants come from, when you say that you’re hoping for more diversity?

And just what are mySociety actively doing about this aim, beyond sticking what could look very much like a token sentence into a job advert?

Well, it started off as a short blog post crunching the numbers. And then it got long.

When posts are too big for a quick skim, we put them on our Medium blog, so that’s where it ended up. Do go and have a look.

We know we haven’t cracked this one yet — indeed, we know that we barely even have the right vocabulary to talk about it — so comments are welcome.

Image: Dustin Oliver (cc-by-2.0)