Today I was putting together a presentation that I’m delivering tomorrow (at way too early in the morning – who schedules 7:30am meetings? Wind turbine technicians, that’s who).
Anyway, I was poaching photos off the internet for my slides, and here was my shopping list:
- Someone driving a car
- Someone working on machinery while ticking things off on a clipboard
- Someone pulling electronics to pieces or maybe doing electrical testing
Here’s the sort of screen which comes up in your search results if you search for “someone driving a car”:
My other search results were similar. Where the women at? I was scared to see what kind of misogynistic nonsense might turn up with a search like “woman driving a car”, but it turned out ok.
In the end I got the reasonable photo diversity I was looking for by just going a bit further with my search terms to get beyond the default “white guy” filter. The search terms that I used in the end went something like this:
- “woman driving with a cup of coffee”
- “working on machinery with a clipboard”
- “woman electrical fault finding”
Putting a bit of diversity and inclusion into your content isn’t difficult, you just have to be aware that it’s something worth doing, and try to be aware of your own biases. Here’s that slide:
