{"id":23773,"date":"2019-12-12T22:05:16","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T22:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/?p=23773"},"modified":"2019-12-16T21:16:19","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T21:16:19","slug":"inclusive-language-audit-how-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/blog\/inclusive-language-audit-how-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Inclusive Language Audit at Rival IQ"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen we can choose between behavior that upsets some people and behavior that upsets no one, why would we choose behavior that upsets some people?\u201d<\/p>\n

Emily Triplett Lentz of Help Scout<\/a> posed this question at MozCon 2019 during her presentation on auditing your blog and website for inclusivity, and it blew me away. In this world that increasingly feels like it\u2019s falling down around our ears, it can be difficult to know where to put your energy in fighting discrimination and oppression. Does it make a bigger impact to march, or donate to nonprofits working on these issues? How do we know what to say and do to make a difference?<\/p>\n

Emily presented a simple idea: losing all the words that are discriminatory or ableist to make your company and website more welcoming and inclusive. She outlined an easy process to make this happen thanks to a few handy online tools and some dedicated time.<\/p>\n

This idea really engaged me, and I couldn\u2019t get it out of my head. I set out to understand more about what inclusivity looks like, how to audit for inclusivity at Rival IQ, and the amplifying impact seemingly small decisions around language can have on the world around us.<\/p>\n

What is inclusivity, and why does it matter?<\/h2>\n

Inclusivity is all about giving everyone a seat at the table by suspending bias and privilege to make room for all. Simple daily actions can be exclusive to marginalized communities, like holding events on upper stories of buildings without elevators or putting together panels at conferences that comprises only one gender or race.<\/p>\n

One of the most common ways we exclude\u2013and by \u201cwe\u201d I mean every last one of us\u2013is through unconscious use of language. The English language is chock full of words that are inadvertently discriminatory. A common example you\u2019ll see throughout this post is \u201ccrazy\u201d: before we dove into this work, I used this word all the time to express incredulity, or even to swap for a word that was \u201cless appropriate\u201d (like: \u201cthat\u2019s f*cked up\u201d). Every time I used that word to mark a situation that didn\u2019t go my way or was messy, I was equating those negative emotions with mental and psychiatric disabilities. That\u2019s definitely not what I was going for, but it\u2019s still hurtful to those who do experience these disabilities every day (1 in 4 adults) regardless of my intentions.<\/p>\n

Making a different word choice is a heck of a lot easier than making mental and psychiatric disabilities disappear for a quarter of the population. To Emily\u2019s question at the top of this post: if given the chance, why wouldn\u2019t we choose a word that\u2019s good for everyone in pursuit of inclusivity? Knowing that there\u2019s so much work to be done in the world before we reach parity and inclusion, why wouldn\u2019t we make these small but mighty changes in the way we speak and write?<\/p>\n

You might be wondering how this all relates to a SaaS blog and website. It\u2019s one thing to make a personal vocabulary choice, but it also makes good sense (business and otherwise) for companies to be looking at inclusive language. At Rival IQ, we keep an eagle eye on how our hundreds of web pages and blog posts convert readers to start free trials. We want to make sure we have innovative ideas, compelling copy, enticing calls-to-action, and dynamic graphics to make the case for Rival IQ. By inadvertently dropping exclusive language into that mix, we\u2019re turning potential customers (and humans who don\u2019t deserve to be discriminated against) away from what we have to offer.<\/p>\n

Of course, the benefits here go beyond our bottom line. Rival IQ\u2019s values are all about flexibility, accessibility, and putting people first, from customers to employees. It\u2019s important to us to bring every aspect of our company in line with these values, and increasing our language standards helps us do that.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another benefit to this process that really speaks to the grammar nerd in me: accuracy. Thinking more about what we say and how we say it means our speech and writing becomes more accurate. When I say, \u201cThat\u2019s so lame,\u201d I don\u2019t really mean, \u201cThat\u2019s so physically disabled.\u201d What I really mean is \u201cThat\u2019s so uncool,\u201d so I should just say that instead.<\/p>\n

The final case for why you should think more about inclusive language: it\u2019s easy. Really. Let\u2019s jump into how to make this happen at your company.<\/p>\n

How to conduct your own inclusive language audit<\/h2>\n

Step 1: Gather buy-in from the whole office<\/h3>\n

There\u2019s no point in doing all this work to ax exclusive language from your website only to hear it constantly around the office, so it was important to decide as a company whether or not this was a priority. From meetings with leadership to an all-staff presentation, there was plenty of time to ask questions and understand more about the project before we decided as a company to take the leap.<\/p>\n

Easing into inclusivity also left time for 1:1 conversations where we could ask questions to try to understand why we shouldn\u2019t use words we\u2019ve been using our whole lives. These organic conversations were less intimidating than raising a hand in an all-staff meeting and were really important for getting everyone on board with the audit.<\/p>\n

Step 2: Create your (initial) list of words to eradicate<\/h3>\n

Via a lot of online research, asking smart people who have already begun this work, and anonymously crowdsourcing suggestions from Rivalers, we came up with a list of about 25 words we wanted to commit to avoiding.<\/p>\n

\"Sample

We created a quick Google Form so Rivalers could submit suggestions anonymously.<\/p><\/div>\n

By sourcing these words from the full company, this went from a Blair project to an everyone project, because we all had some skin in the game.<\/p>\n

You can see the full list of exclusive and discriminatory words<\/a> we\u2019ve committed to avoiding on our blog.<\/p>\n

Step 3: Talk it through before you take the plunge<\/h3>\n

Before I set myself loose on our blog and website, there was one final step: holding a forum so people could ask additional questions and talk through the implications of this project. Another full team conversation was important to have after we created our initial list so people knew exactly what they were committing to.<\/p>\n

This conversation was a chance for me to clarify a few of the suggestions that had been submitted that I didn\u2019t understand (still learning!). We also talked through the really<\/i> common words on our list like \u201cguys\u201d and \u201ccrazy,\u201d which we all say often around the office and at home. Can we really commit to these, or should we put them off until we get more comfortable avoiding words? (We opted to do our best.)<\/p>\n

One of the most important things we covered in this conversation was about consequences for saying or writing the words on our list. How do we create accountability without shame or policing? The last thing we wanted was a swear jar or a designated member of the office charged with going through everyone\u2019s written and verbal speech because we wanted the audit to be about learning instead of failing. We opted instead to try our darndest and to check in a few months down the line to see how things were going. Are we doing a good job? Do we need to look at a different system of accountability so we can do better against our goal of avoiding these words?<\/p>\n

Step 4: Use an SEO spider to crawl your site and blog<\/h3>\n

We used SEO spider Screaming Frog<\/a> to crawl our blog and website for every time one of these words showed up. We quickly learned the importance of exact match (or, if you\u2019re feeling nerdy, well-written regular expressions): without these precise queries, \u201cblame\u201d and \u201cflame\u201d turned up when all we really wanted was to find instances of \u201clame\u201d \ud83e\udd13. After refining our search a few times, we had a spreadsheet with links to about 250 instances of discriminatory language.<\/p>\n

\"Sample

Custom search in Screaming Frog made finding ableist language a snap.<\/p><\/div>\n

Step 5: Replace all mentions of ableist language<\/h3>\n

I spent a full day clicking into every link that our crawl found and removing or swapping out ableist language for something more accurate and inclusive. (This project perfectly coincided with a Rival IQ Hack Day<\/a>, where the whole company stops what they\u2019re doing to work on a work project they really care about.)<\/p>\n

\"A

An example of using the \u201cfind\u201d command to locate specific instances of exclusive language on our site.<\/p><\/div>\n

Was it time-consuming? Sure. But it felt great to knock out so many in one day, and in addition to inclusivity, I found a few unexpected upsides along the way.<\/p>\n