Inclusiveness intentions, actions and results.

The carbon offset scams

I don’t live in the USA. However, one of the shows I watch on YouTube quite often is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. I admire the level of journalism coupled with humour to pass on some very interesting points and ideas. A few months ago I saw a video about carbon offsetting. If you don’t know what this is then let me explain shortly. You know how companies try to make their operations zero carbon emissions. They use that goal to advertise their good corporate image. Some of them cannot immediately reduce their emissions in practice. Instead, they pay some other companies who commit to negating their emissions footprint. So these companies would supposedly plant trees, operate carbon extraction plants etc.. In theory, it’s all very nice but what some of these companies end up doing is actually a scam. There is no specific mechanism or standard to measure the impact of carbon reduction measures. As a result, they are free to interpret them however they like. Suffice it to say that when you see a company stating that we offset our emissions, be sceptical about it.

Lately, I see often in milongas, statements along the lines of “we are against discrimination based on gender, religion, colour etc.”. I never really paid much attention. I found this a nice gesture. But recently I started questioning whether this is true or just a statement. Is it like the CO2 offset to improve an organiser’s public image? Or is it actually true?

WCAG and evaluating accessibility

When I was working as a researcher in the accessibility domain one of the evergreen topics was standardisation and validation. W3C groups focused on creating and updating standards. W3C is the organisation that produces standards for the web. Those groups dealt explicitly with guidelines on making websites accessible. One of the most prominent set of guidelines was called WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and was about web pages. Those guidelines were a mix of hard technical guidelines (e.g. an image must have a text description in the code known as alt text), and “softer” ones like that the destination of a link must be clear (e.g. a link with a text read more doesn’t clarify what is this note if you read it in isolation)

For the hard technical guidelines, there are tools where you can submit your page, and a program will automatically check them and give you a list of violations. For the other ones, the developer would need to know, check manually and confirm that they follow them. To this extent, no one could trust the person who built a site to say it’s okay. Therefore, several companies emerged to audit websites according to the guidelines.

In Tango, I often hear people saying things like “we created a safe space” etc. and I always have this question. What do we mean by “safe space”? Is there a set of guidelines to verify that place X is indeed a safe space? Can someone check this out and verify it? If anyone has a hard definition and set of practical rules please share them. I am really interested to see this. In the meantime, I believe that for most of us, if we were asked the question, we would give many different answers. Sometimes, these answers would even conflict with each other.

Statements vs Actions

Taking this analogy and comparison one step further, I can tell you it required some serious effort to make a website accessible. Moreover, the effort in many cases required some very nuanced discussions and decisions. I mean, if you want a site that is truly accessible, you need to consider many different possibilities. The problem becomes really complex. Research and the whole web technologies community come together. Stakeholders from all sides discuss and agree on certain ideas and principles to make it happen. This is why this problem still gets a lot of discussion. Because every new technology out there brings new challenges for certain groups of users. The key takeaway from all this is that creating an accessible website requires significant effort. This effort is crucial both in the construction phase and in the operational and maintenance phases. An effort that needs to be visible with tangible outcomes.

So I wonder. When an organiser says that they created a safe space or that they don’t tolerate discrimination etc. what actions do they take? What is the tangible outcome? Is it possible to be assessed? and if yes… how? 

In short, stating that you are inclusive is just the beginning. Being inclusive and staying inclusive is a process. This process requires continuous effort and this effort needs to be visible to whoever comes in. If the effort is visible, then people can trust that the statement reflects reality. That the statement is not just a publicity action. Up to this point, I have never seen something except the statement that we do not tolerate X Y Z. So I still wonder. Is this enough? Are we sure this is true? How?

Biases

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I accept and I understand that all organisers who use such signs have good intentions. But is intention enough to ensure inclusiveness? I mean the web developer can tell you that they checked and made the site as accessible as they could. But what if they didn’t know how to fix XYZ problem and left it there? Or what if the solution they provided skips or violates a rule they misinterpreted? They still had all good intentions but the result is inaccessible.

Think about the survivorship bias for example. This is when we focus only on the successes (or survivors) and ignore the failures (or those that didn’t make it) and leads to distorted conclusions. The classical story that explains it, is when during World War II, the U.S. military wanted to reinforce aircraft to reduce losses. Analysts studied returning planes and noted bullet holes concentrated in certain areas. They initially thought these were the weakest points that needed reinforcement. However, Abraham Wald, a statistician, pointed out that they were only examining planes that survived. The planes that were hit in other areas (like the engine or cockpit) never returned. They had been shot down. This led to reinforcing the areas with fewer bullet holes and improving survival rates.

So let’s say you organise a milonga in a city where the average age of dancers is around 40. However, in your milonga, the average age is 25 to 30. You can say that your milonga is inclusive. But is that true? Why doesn’t the older part of the community come to your milonga? Or let’s say that you organise a milonga where the average years of experience of the dancers is 5 years (for the sake of simplicity, I will take this as an indicator of level). Meanwhile, the total average of the community is 3 years. Why are the less experienced dancers not coming to your milonga? Is there maybe a discrimination factor? Do they maybe feel excluded when they visit it?

If you as an organiser never visit other milongas in your community, you won’t see what happens out there. It’s easy to miss those details. It’s easy to think you are organising the best milonga in town. You may strive to make your milonga inclusive for your guests. However, this doesn’t mean it is inclusive for the whole community. How do you know that you are not excluding parts of the community from your milonga? Biases are part of human nature and organisers are humans. So, no matter how good an organiser’s intentions are, they must always keep an open eye. Especially to the community they serve.

Numbers instead of intentions

So how can you as an organiser make your actions visible? How can you show with actions instead of just putting on a sign? How can you demonstrate that you walk the walk and not only talk the talk? How can you make sure that your biases do not get in the way?

I have written in the past about data, distance and biases. The solution I would suggest here is pretty much the same.  Put on the researcher hat and ask questions. Make questionnaires, provide ways for anonymous feedback, gather data, compare with averages in your community, study, analyse and conclude. This is the first step. If your milonga is okay, you can create your own stats sign instead of the typical no discrimination sign. These are some examples of statements that a sign like that would contain.

Our milonga has an average age of visitors x.

The distribution of students across different schools is shown here (show a diagram).

The distribution of years of experience looks like this (another diagram).

Let the number speak for you. Let the number prove your inclusiveness.

If your numbers and your distributions don’t show a normal distribution ask yourself how you can fix it. If you take specific actions state them. We did so and so because the age distribution of dancers showed discrimination against older dancers. I would love to see such signs. They would certainly be better than generic statements that might not mean anything more than just good intentions.

…and remember…

Inclusiveness is not a one-time action. It is a permanent struggle and process. That means that you will need to always update your data and your results. This will prove that you are still inclusive. Show that you really put your money where your mouth is.

Let’s see!

Are you up for this?

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango is the story of a girl who moves to Buenos Aires hoping to find a better life. However, she ends up being excluded by the higher society class. Eventually, she marries a wannabe thug. Sometimes, higher classes know that they are exclusive and want to remain so. The issue is with classes or groups that are exclusive but portray themselves as inclusive. Groups that think that good intentions are enough.

So how about you? Did you ever experience such a dissonance between intentions and real experience in a milonga? If you are an organiser what practical actions do you take in the direction of inclusion? How do you measure your results? Are you sure that you are not biased? Let me know…

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