The Guardian as a company encourages all employees to be guided by The Scott Trust’s set of values, enshrined in an article written by CP Scott, the paper’s former editor and owner. These values are stated as: honesty; integrity; courage; fairness; and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. Whilst written nearly 100 years ago these values are just as relevant today as they always have been, and are a strong motivator for those who work at the Guardian.
A strong desire to ‘live our values’ has been one of the reasons that the Guardian digital team have had a Diversity & Inclusion group for around two years. This group was started by individuals working in digital who were interested in improving diversity in the team. Each person in the group has a different reason for being involved: from wanting to be a role model to encourage women into in tech; to improving our hiring to make our department (and thus our products) more diverse; to helping to make our work environment more inclusive. Overarching all of this is the strong sense of fairness that stems from the Values outlined above.
Made up of around 20 regular attendees from across our Digital team, we have a broad cross section of participants - from engineers and UX researchers to product owners, security specialists and admin staff. We have all levels of staff involved, from the newest and most junior members, to senior managers.
We meet every two weeks to discuss, as a group, what initiatives seem sensible to pursue. After a few years of pursuing our own individual initiatives, we realised that working collectively we could make more of an impact across a variety of initiatives.
Some of the things we did in 2016
We teamed up with Code First: Girls to run our first community course - a beginners’ web development course - with volunteers from the Guardian, here in our offices. Code First: Girls aims to inspire young women into tech and in particular those that have not come from conventional engineering backgrounds. CF:G’s aim fits well with our mission to have a more diverse engineering team and we’re really happy to support them. We’ve found that working with established organisations results in being able to make an impact more quickly. The fact that we could slot into an existing framework allowed us to get up and running and giving back to the community quickly and effectively.
We also found that we could engage additional communities on this topic by holding a number of one off events in our offices. We held a screening of the film “Code: debugging the gender gap”, and hosted a debate about demystifying routes into tech which were well attended and sociable. We ran them as networking events where attendees could meet others passionate about the topic with providing a side-benefit of being a recruitment vehicle for us. .
For the second year in a row we hosted an event in the Guardian to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. This year we invited 50 London schoolgirls, who were interested in computer science at school, to spend a day with our team. We had coding and UX workshops, discussions, and a tour of the department. The girls got to meet inspiring women role models and find out about roles in tech.
We ran a community outreach programme - which took the form of a week long coding course which we ran in the summer holidays. It was aimed at young people in the local community who had limited access to technology.
As well as focusing our energy externally, we looked internally at how we could improve inclusion. Amongst other things, we identified that our flexible working policies weren’t prominent enough in our job descriptions (nor to new starters when they arrived) so we fixed that, making sure that our policies were on all of our job descriptions and that they could be found internally easily. We started trying to introduce informal unconscious bias training - firstly by encouraging teams to watch Facebook’s unconscious bias training video - but then by commissioning an external agency to come and give the whole department training which may now be rolled out to the wider company. And we continued to work closely with our Education Centre who do a brilliant job promoting both Guardian journalism and the way we deliver our journalism digitally. We find that there is an increasing crossover between the work that they, and we, do. We got a group of hiring managers together to map out our hiring practices and work out what different managers did well and what we could learn from one another.
One final lesson we’ve learned is the power of allowing this to be a part of people’s job. This effort started organically by people who cared about this topic and essentially volunteered their own time. Like any effort to affect change, sometimes improvements don’t come quickly enough - especially when people don’t really have time dedicated to it. Allowing (and encouraging) individuals the time and space to work on diversity and inclusion initiatives as part of their job, rather than as an added extra, improves the efficacy of these efforts and gives our staff the clear message in no uncertain terms that these values are endorsed and embraced by our team.